Chapter Text
Years and years past
Project Argentum.
Those were the two words resonating endlessly through James Ironwood’s mind as he stood in a lone Manta flying low over the desolate tundra of Solitas. Somewhere amidst this glimmering snow, there laid a superweapon.
That was the only thing which could explain the urgency in Pietro Polendina’s tone when he’d implored Ironwood over the phone to come see the situation as soon as possible.
Ironwood had departed without hesitation. After everything revealed in the past week, it was impossible to say what might be hidden in the personal laboratory of Arthur Watts. The man had chosen to climb into a Paladin and walk out into the tundra in the middle of a blizzard to his death, rather than face justice for his newly revealed crimes. And soon Atlas was discovering that one of the kingdom’s brightest minds led a life filled with deep and sinister secrets. Ironwood and Polendina were doing their best to piece together the mysteries he’d left behind.
All that brought Ironwood to this moment, watching a dark blot in the distance grow larger, resolving itself into a dark gray slab of a building set against the slope of a mountain. It was the only sign of life for miles amidst the vast landscape. An ideal place for hiding a secret that could change the world.
Soon the Manta was touching down in a whirlwind of kicked-up snow. When Ironwood felt the jolt of the landing gear meeting the ground, he stepped out into a wall of frigid white. Raising his hand to shield himself against the wave of stinging ice blowing into his face, it was a long moment before he could make out anything. A familiar clanking noise was the first sign of someone else. A few seconds later, an outline of a short man clad heavily in winter gear and seated in a mechnochair appeared, and Pietro Polendina emerged from the flying snow.
He raised his snow goggles, revealing friendly eyes, and waved with a gloved hand. “James.”
“Pietro.” Ironwood drew his coat tighter around himself and watched the Manta take off, returning to the warmth of Atlas without hesitation.
“I wish I could say it’s a pleasure to see you, but… these circumstances are far from ideal.”
“Indeed.” With the snow now mostly settled again, Ironwood found his gaze drifting higher. An Atlesian cruiser loomed overhead, the barrels of its cannons gleaming in the late-morning sun. Ostensibly, its purpose here was to protect and serve the task force sent to comb through Watts’s compound and seize his assets. However… it was also the first line of defense, if Watts had been playing with forces beyond his control here, if something unthinkable might be unleashed, if the secrets here were truly as terrible as they seemed to be.
“The project?” he said finally. His question needed no elaboration; Pietro immediately knew what he was asking.
He nodded, turning his mechnochair back toward the laboratory. “Shall we go in?”
Ironwood was only too glad to. The entrance—if it could be called that now—was a pair of blast doors blown open and buckled inward. They had to step past twisted metal beams and pass through a hastily constructed plywood wall before they finally met warmer air.
A squad of soldiers saluted as they passed, Ironwood following Pietro deeper into the complex. It was a slow journey. In some places, bullet marks littered the walls, or debris nearly blocked their way, or they had to wait at a locked door for Pietro to type something into a keypad. He had the sensation of moving downward as the hallways gradually grew more intact, emergency lighting giving way to still-functioning ceiling lights. It was at this point that Pietro stopped, shimmying his mechnochair to shake off the last bits of unmelted snow still clinging to it, and reached into his jacket. He produced a folder and handed it to Ironwood.
“What’s this?”
“A summary of everything I’ve recovered from Arthur’s files. Unfortunately, he was quite thorough in erasing his server bank. Data recovery has been arduous and mostly unsuccessful.”
“Hm.” Ironwood leafed through the dossier, catching phrases such as Hardlight Dust and intelligent surveillance network before he met Pietro’s gaze once more. “I know you didn’t bring me here just for a dossier.”
“Correct.” Pietro started forward again. “Read the last printout in there.”
Ironwood obliged as he followed. There was no heading—it only seemed to be fragments of some sort of data log.
“October seventeenth: test unsuccessful,” he read aloud. “October twenty-fourth: test unsuccessful. October thirty-first: test… successful...” He trailed off as he processed the next words on the page, the meaning of them perfectly clear yet also incomprehensible.
“Four Grimm vaporized. Two petrified. First successful deployment of Project Argentum.”
A Grimm could be shot. It could be stabbed. It could be decapitated. It could be blown apart. It could be burned to a crisp. It could be frozen in place. Its body, given enough time, would dissolve. But Ironwood had never, in his entire life, done anything to a Grimm that he could accurately describe as vaporization, or petrification.
“Keep reading,” Pietro said, correctly guessing what his silence entailed.
Argentum. An Old Mantle word for silver. A curious choice, but he didn’t dwell on it for long as he began scanning an increasing number of ‘Test Successful’ entries. This time, he was too engrossed in the words to spare the time to say them aloud. Months flipped past—February, March, April—
May fourth: Test successful. Stage One testing complete. Proceeding to Stage Two. Concentrate.
That was the last entry. After that was nothing but months and months of blankness and the occasional contextless number or word.
Ironwood raised his head slowly. The final word struck him as odd—a seemingly personal note in what was an otherwise dispassionate record. “I don’t understand.”
“Neither do I. Ah, we’re here.” At an intersection, Pietro pushed aside a tarp hanging from the ceiling, and Ironwood was greeted with the sight of a short dead-end hallway, its only feature a foreboding metal door. Actually, it didn’t quite feel right to call it a door. A vault would be more accurate. A crew of technicians was clustered around the vault, tapping away at a bevy of computers which had been plugged into a nearby entrance.
“We’ve cleared every part of this facility except the lowest level… and this. If the partial blueprints I recovered from Arthur’s scroll are accurate, then this vault holds whatever force is behind this Project Argentum.”
Ironwood stared at the sealed vault, taking note of how sturdy its construction was. It had been built to keep anything out… Or keep something in. As he watched the technicians trying to hack their way in, he wondered for the first time if this might rise to the level of needing Ozpin’s attention. That man was the only one Ironwood could think of who would have the power to simply vaporize a Grimm.
That line of thinking was interrupted by a rapid chiming sound suddenly erupting from one of the computers. Immediately, the technicians crowded around its screen, conversing animatedly, and then—
The sharp click of something unlocking was impossible to miss. And before Ironwood could even think to call for additional soldiers or prepare a plan for entry, the door was slowly swinging open.
He drew Due Process, stepped forward, and barked an order at the technicians to retreat to a safe distance. He heard Pietro’s mechnochair pattering closer, but was fully aware that no order would stop him from seeing what was inside this vault. So Ironwood let him follow, and peered around the door into a mostly dark room.
One of the only sources of light was a computer terminal on the far wall flashing something he couldn’t make out from this distance. There was also a large glowing tube to his right—the purpose that served, he couldn’t even guess at. At the very least, nothing was leaping out of the shadows at them.
“I need a light,” he said, holding out a hand without moving his attention away from the vault’s interior. Almost immediately, Pietro placed a portable floodlight in his hand, already turned on. Ironwood swept the light in a slow arc across the room, the barrel of Due Process parallel to the beam, and saw cabinets, shelves, unknown technology—
The beam of light caught what seemed like a face, and Ironwood tightened his grip on his pistol, but after a moment, he realized it was a drone of some sort, plugged into the wall and dormant. There were two more next to it, and they didn’t look like the reprogrammed Atlesian Knights found throughout the rest of this facility and already dismantled.
That was all that he could see. He turned to the left, searching the wall next to him, and found what he was hoping for—a light switch.
With a touch, electric lights quietly hummed to life, and he had his first clear look at the vault.
It was… surprisingly understated, for a chamber that was supposed to hold such a powerful force. Yes, there was specialized equipment, the banks of tech, the oddly constructed drones, and the yet-un searched cabinets, but somehow, Ironwood had expected… More.
Pietro followed him into the room, and his gaze landed on something. “An electron microscope?” he said, frowning. “That’s…” He turned his chair in a slow circle, and the confusion in his tone only grew. “This appears more set up to be a biology laboratory, but…” He moved over to the still-flashing computer terminal and began typing.
Ironwood holstered Due Process and stood in place, sensing that Pietro was the more able investigator right now. However, his attention eventually returned to the most curious object in the room: the tube. It rose out of the floor, and ran parallel to the ground for several meters. Metal at the ends capped off a midsection of opaque Hardlight Dust.
It looked strangely familiar, and it took Ironwood a few moments to realize why. It resembled the life support pods equipped on certain Atlesian fightercraft to be used in case of survivable crashes into hostile terrain. In other words, they were meant to house living things.
“Pietro?”
“This computer hasn’t been fully erased! I might be able to access some of the recovery files—”
“Pietro. Is there a way to open this?”
“Hm?” There was a pause, and then Pietro muttered to himself, “Oh, is that what this panel is meant for? One moment—What does that mean—Ah, there.”
There was a quiet hissing sound, and then a hardlight panel slowly retracted into the tube. Ironwood looked inside, and a chill ran down his spine.
His line of work and duty meant he’d seen the worst of what the world had to offer, and his Semblance meant he’d long since learned how to be perfectly numb to such horrors. But there was no repressing the acute and genuine unsettlement he felt right now.
“James? What is it?” Pietro joined him, and a moment later gasped sharply.
A child.
There was a child in there.
It was fast asleep, curled up inside what was most definitely a modified life support chamber, and cuddling something tightly—some corner of Ironwood’s stunned mind noted it was a stuffed Beowolf toy.
“So that is why the computer warned me that opening this chamber would end stasis,” Pietro said softly. “Arthur… What in the world were you doing?”
The child couldn’t have been older than five years. Still sleeping, with an incongruously peaceful expression, chest rising and falling in slow breaths. Completely unaware of the surrounding chaos and mystery.
As Ironwood stared, Pietro returned to the computer. “…We’ve found Project Argentum,” he said after a moment, dazed.
“That can’t be possible.” For a moment, Ironwood didn’t know how to react. “This is the project? This is what Watts went to such great lengths to hide? This is how he vaporized Grimm?” he asked finally, moving closer to Pietro’s side.
“The terminal makes it clear.” Pietro tapped the screen. “It has a full copy of the directory index, and it’s the only thing in here labeled as Project Argentum.”
“How? How is…?” Ironwood leaned closer, trying to make sense of the blocky green words displayed on the screen. “The superweapon is… a toddler?”
“I’m not a superweapon!”
Ironwood spun around, his hand going to Due Process, only to immediately lower it as his brain caught up with his reflexes and he realized that the source of the disturbance was the child. Who, in the few seconds that his back had been turned, had somehow climbed out of the stasis pod and snuck up behind them without alerting him. And was now directing a stormy scowl at Ironwood, arms crossed and not appearing frightened in the least.
Ironwood stared. Why… Why were there rose petals fluttering through the air right now?
“Not a project!” the child snapped, stamping a foot and baring teeth at Ironwood. “My name is Ruby!”
Ironwood blinked. He’d thought this was a boy, but Ruby was most definitely not a name associated with boys. So, a girl after all?
“Ruby?” he repeated, letting the hand which had nearly drawn a pistol on a child fall to his side.
Ruby didn’t reply. She turned away, arms crossed and staring resolutely at the far wall with her chin raised defiantly.
Ironwood looked at Pietro for help, but he seemed just as confused.
“Ruby?” he tried again.
“Ruby!” Ruby snapped, so violently that it made her red-tipped hair shake. That hair—shoulder-length and shaggy and unkempt—made Ironwood wonder if she’d ever had a haircut.
Pietro let out a quiet chuckle. “I think Ruby wants an apology, James.”
“Er. Of course.” Ironwood bent down, reaching a hand out to her. “Ruby, I—” he started to say, only to be cut off when Ruby whirled around, grabbed his outstretched hand, and chomped down on it with what had to be every ounce of force that could be mustered in a toddler’s body.
Ironwood had been shot repeatedly by White Fang grunts, mauled by Grimm on multiple occasions in his career, and fallen off a motorcycle twice, but damned if a child biting him didn’t somehow hurt more than all of those things combined. And Ruby wasn’t letting go.
“Pietro... please… help...” he said through gritted teeth. He didn’t trust himself to try to pull Ruby off without flinging her into the ceiling.
“Er, Ruby, could you—” Pietro’s request was cut off by Ruby unleashing a truly ferocious growl, only slightly muffled by Ironwood’s hand, and then somehow biting even harder, making his Aura pulse violently.
Pietro sighed and shook his head. “Try the apology. I don’t think anything else will work.”
Ironwood nodded tersely and made a titanic effort to keep his voice even. “Ruby, I’m sorry.”
Still growling quietly, Ruby didn’t budge. “Why?” she said, her tone clearly sulky despite still being muffled by Ironwood’s hand.
“I’m sorry for calling you a project,” Ironwood said, and he meant it.
Ruby flicked her eyes up to Ironwood, radiating suspicion, but at least she’d stopped making feral noises. “My name’s Ruby!” she said firmly. Although, it sounded more like “Mrrrrrnnnrrrrryyyy,” given her current preoccupation.
“You’re Ruby,” Ironwood repeated, reminding himself to be patient. “I’m sorry for saying that you weren’t one.”
And then, just like that, it was like Ironwood had never said anything in the first place. Ruby finally released his hand, a brilliant smile breaking over her face. She gave him a cheery wave. “Hello! Nice to meet you!”
“…Hello.” He stood back up, staring at the angry red tooth marks on his hand. It was a miracle the skin hadn’t been broken. He decided to keep his Aura active around her.
Pietro brought his mechnochair closer, coming to Ironwood’s side. He leaned forward and gave Ruby a warm smile. “Hello, Ruby. I’m Pietro, and this is James.”
Ruby swiveled to look at Pietro, and then her eyes went very wide. “Whoaaaaa.”
Ironwood was confused, until she slowly reached out and poked one of the legs of Pietro’s mechnochair. Then, emboldened by a lack of negative response, she shuffled closer and began inspecting the metal appendages from every angle, making little noises of amazement.
“Oh, you’re a fan of robotics, are you?” Pietro said, a bit of mirth slipping into his tone despite the surreal scene. “Careful with the joints—you don’t want to get your finger pinched!”
Ruby giggled, and then, suddenly—there was no other way Ironwood could describe this—she disappeared with a faint shwoop.
“What?” he said, staring at the empty space in front of him. Then he heard her giggling again. From behind Pietro’s mechnochair. His confusion only grew as he saw the same rose petals as before drifting through the air around her as she prodded the robotic machinery. In fact, the rose petals seemed to be originating from her, slipping off her skin like scales being shed.
He reached out and caught a petal in his hand, staring at it. After a few moments, it dissolved, leaving nothing behind.
Ironwood gave Pietro an alarmed look as he reached the only conclusion that made sense. “She’s already found her Semblance?”
Pietro voiced the second part of that realization. “If she has a Semblance, that must mean she’s unlocked…”
“Ruby.” Ironwood knelt down on one knee and brought himself near Ruby’s eye level, making sure to keep his limbs safely out of reach this time. “Can you do this?” He closed his eyes, let his Aura flash over his body, and looked questioningly at her.
Ruby looked confused for a moment, but then nodded eagerly. “Yeah! But mine’s red!” She closed her eyes and screwed up her face in concentration, which would’ve been a heartwarming sight if not for the red shimmer flashing all over her body, which meant…
Why did this child have an unlocked Aura at an age when she wasn’t even old enough to understand what it was?
“What happened to you?” Pietro murmured, sounding exhausted and fearful, and also angry.
That was a question Ironwood wanted answered as soon as possible. He waited for Ruby to drop her Aura, and then asked what would be the first of many questions.
“Ruby, what’s your last name?”
Ruby’s only response was to tilt her head in a way that made it clear Ironwood’s question made absolutely no sense to her. Which, unfortunately, was about what he’d expected.
Still, he tried again. “Are there any other names that you have been called? Other than Ruby?”
Ruby made a thoughtful face and then nodded rapidly, creating a brief crest of hope in Ironwood, which was immediately extinguished by her next word: “Subject.”
“Subject?” Suddenly, his blood was boiling, and from the angry noise that Pietro made, it was clear he was feeling similarly. How dare Watts—
“And Argentum,” Ruby said.
At that moment, she turned, meeting Ironwood’s gaze, and for the first time, he noticed her eyes. Her irises were the color of pure liquid silver.
Silver. Argentum.
An eye color that, as far as he knew, did not exist except in an old legend.
“By the Brothers,” Ironwood whispered. “She is the experiment.”
Until now, he’d been able to cling to some bizarre hope that this was somehow Watts’s daughter being kept in his twisted idea of parental care, but… it couldn’t be denied anymore.
“But how?” Pietro said. “We’ve already seen her Semblance.”
“I don’t know.” Ironwood rubbed his forehead, and then refocused his attention. “Where did the name Ruby come from?”
Ruby gave him a look that made it clear she thought that was a stupid question. “Me! I’m Ruby!”
Fair enough.
“How long have you been here?”
She shrugged. Ironwood paused, thought through the implications of that, and asked a more specific question.
“How old are you?”
Shrug.
“Where are you from?”
Shrug.
“Do you remember anything that isn’t… here?”
She squinted in thought, and then nodded. “Something bright. And warm.”
That could be any number of things. Including the sun, he realized with a fresh wave of horror. When was the last time this child had seen the sun?
There was no point in questioning her further for the time being. Although—he did have one more question for now, just to clear up something he was still confused about.
“Are you a boy or a girl?” he asked.
Ruby stared at him, blinking slowly. “What’s that?”
Ironwood closed his eyes and took a deep breath, trying to keep himself calm. Well, a medical exam—which would be given as soon as possible—would answer that question, at least.
“Pietro,” he said, starting to stand up. “Call the cruiser. We—”
He cut himself off abruptly as he heard shouts coming from deeper in the facility, and then gunfire, rapidly coming closer.
“What the—” He stepped out of the vault just in time to accost a fleeing soldier. “What’s going on here?!” he said, catching him by the elbow and snapping into his battle mindset.
“Grimm! Grimm! There’s a Grimm—”
A tremendous roar echoing through the hallways drowned out the rest of his sentence.
“Arthur kept Grimm in here?!” Pietro said. “What was he thinking—”
At that moment, two large Beowolves bounded around the corner, big enough that they had to follow each other single-file down the hallway. They slowed to a prowl when they saw Ironwood standing in their way with his pistol drawn, but kept advancing.
“Pietro—” Ironwood started to say, only to stop short when he heard a new growl, much smaller and quieter, from behind him.
He spared a glance backward, and saw Ruby standing there, her fists clenched as she bared her teeth at the Grimm, snapping her jaws together like she might actually try to bite off their heads.
“Bad doggies!” she shouted before growling again, louder.
Ironwood only understood the next thing that happened because he was looking back at Ruby when it occurred. He’d been about to tell her to get back in the vault—and would’ve picked her up and thrown her inside if necessary—when suddenly, Ruby’s eyes flared with a brilliant light which exploded outward and enveloped everything. For a moment, all he could see was silver.
Several interminable moments passed before his vision cleared. The first thing he noticed as he blinked away the bright afterimages was that there was one less Grimm in the hallway. A few dissolving black particles on the floor were the only trace of it. The second thing he noticed was that the second Grimm was not moving. This Beowolf had somehow changed color to a single shade of dark gray—
As if it’d been turned to stone.
Ironwood lowered Due Process and slowly turned back to Ruby, who was bouncing up and down, giggling and looking extremely pleased with herself.
He stared.
Pietro was staring too, with a look of pure shock that Ironwood was sure was reflected on his own face.
It was incomprehensible. But they’d both witnessed it. A child who could vaporize Grimm with a single glance.
The world would never be the same.
To anyone who happened to be in one of the rooftop gardens of Atlas Academy one day during a winter storm, there would be nothing unusual about the sight of a small child rolling around delightedly in the snow, dressed in a fluffy red parka and a black winter hat and fuzzy mittens. What would be unusual to see was the most powerful man in Atlas standing at the edge of the garden, watching quietly while he conversed with the smartest man in Atlas.
Ironwood stared at Ruby and tried once more to answer an increasingly baffling question.
“How did one of Atlas’s most prominent minds abduct a child without anyone noticing?” he said to Pietro.
All the searching he’d done so far had not brought him any closer to answers. A check of every kingdom’s missing child database yielded nobody matching Ruby’s name or description. He’d even contacted the chieftain of Menagerie to check the records of the island nation, with no luck.
Their situation wasn’t helped by the complete dearth of information they had, either. What remained of Watts’s records revealed nothing more, not even a name; and further questioning of Ruby hadn’t brought anything else to light. Even exercising simple logic seemed like an insurmountable task in this context.
“You’re sure that Watts couldn’t have taken her from somewhere outside of Atlas?” he said.
Pietro sighed. “It’s been a long time now, but Arthur used to be as invested in my Aura research as I am. It was the chief endeavor of our scientific careers. If he’d left the kingdom, that would’ve been a long enough absence to disrupt the timeline of building Penny, and I most definitely would’ve noted such an occurrence. As such, I have known everywhere that he’s been for a long enough time that I know he has not left the kingdom since before Ruby could’ve been born.”
Ironwood nodded. And yet, it seemed impossible for Ruby to have come from within Atlas. He knew that the Atlesian missing persons database was more exhaustive than any other kingdom’s.
He was quite aware of the possibility that someone else had brought Ruby to Watts, but that was an investigative dead-end. And yet, the dead-end was the most plausible explanation.
A peal of laughter carried across the garden, and they turned to see Ruby tumbling head over heels down a snowdrift. When she came upright again, her face was caked with snow. She immediately shook her head wildly, flinging the flakes off like how a dog would dry itself.
He had to wonder if Ruby had ever seen snow before. She was certainly enthralled enough for it to be a possibility.
Or rather, he was enthralled. The medical examination had confirmed what Ironwood had initially thought in the laboratory: Ruby was a boy. Although, knowing that for sure hadn’t stopped Ironwood from continuing to get it mixed up. And any attempts by him to get Ruby to consider a non-feminine name were met with startlingly fierce resistance. So the name was staying for now, and… Ironwood had given up on figuring out what to do about the rest of that for the time being. This was a near-feral child who didn’t know what gender was and would need several years of learning how to be a part of human society before any of that could be addressed.
Pietro had suggested perhaps this behavior meant that Ruby, when older, would choose to be transgender. But that subject was decidedly not Ironwood’s area of expertise. Matters of gender were quite beyond him. To him, there was nothing particularly significant about what Ruby wanted to be called. She was—no, he was—
She, Ironwood decided, with a defeated sort of acceptance, since that was what his own memory had apparently decided to default to. That would be something to be resolved later on. The important thing right now was her eyes, anyways.
He was familiar with the legend of silver-eyed warriors. So was Pietro. Ozpin had never mentioned whether or not there was any truth to that legend, and Ironwood didn’t feel comfortable approaching him with that question right now. He needed to gather more information first, understand the situation more clearly. Which might take some time.
“There is another explanation.”
Pietro’s voice drew him out of his thoughts, and he looked up to see him taking off his snow goggles and slowly massaging the bridge of his nose. “I’ve been reluctant to suggest this until now because of… how immeasurably sad it is. But…”
“What is it?”
Pietro fixed a faraway look on a point somewhere near Ruby. “What if there never was a family or a home which was robbed? What if Ruby was just… made, in that laboratory? What if she was engineered to be the perfect weapon, created and grown artificially for the sole purpose of experimentation?”
The now-recognizable shwoop of Ruby’s Semblance momentarily caught their attention. Neither of them could actually see her moving through the garden, but what was plainly visible was the trail of her Semblance. The shedding rose petals mixed with the falling snow, leaving a floating crimson trail through the intensifying snowstorm wherever she went.
“James, I’m beginning to genuinely think that’s actually what happened. Everything about Ruby feels like a direct rebuttal to our work. Did Arthur start all this in response to how slighted he felt? Perhaps he intended this as a twisted sort of insult against us—was he hoping to create a weapon to rival Penny, or even surpass her?”
A troubled expression was working its way across Pietro’s face, and Ironwood had to wonder if there was more to his thoughts which he wasn’t saying aloud.
“It makes too much sense,” Pietro finished.
Ironwood sighed. “And now Ruby is in our hands.”
“Hi!”
They both jumped at the noise, before realizing Ruby had managed to walk up directly behind them without being noticed. She didn’t seem to have heard any of what they were saying. Instead, she was looking up at Ironwood expectantly.
“Are you a soldier?” she asked, once she saw him looking.
“What?” Then, belatedly understanding the question, he answered. “Oh. Yes, I’m a general.”
“You protect people?”
Ironwood nodded slowly. “Yes, that is my job.”
“I’m going to help,” Ruby said, her tone utterly serious. She looked up into Ironwood’s eyes, her silver-ringed gaze boring into him. “I will save the world.”
The tone was so utterly serious that Ironwood nearly agreed on reflex. He considered his answer. “Maybe you will,” he said finally, offering what he hoped was an encouraging smile. “You certainly have the resolve for it.”
That answer seemed to please Ruby, because she let out a giggle and spun away from him, falling over into the snow and flailing her arms around in what might’ve been an attempt at a snow angel.
“It’s true,” Ironwood said, turning back to Pietro and lowering his tone. “That power could save the world.” If only Pietro knew how sincerely he meant that. He kept thinking of Salem and what Ruby might be able to accomplish against the woman who controlled all Grimm.
He wondered, not for the first time, if he should tell Ozpin about this. But at the same time, this was a matter which desperately needed to be handled internally. One of the premier scientists of Atlas, experimenting on a child in the name of fighting Grimm? This was Atlas’s—Ironwood’s—responsibility. Better to wait to share Ruby until he had something Atlas could actually be proud of. Ozpin would know someday, when Ironwood had more knowledge of the situation and better control of it.
“What’s on your mind, James?” Pietro said.
“We—” Ironwood paused as a door opened behind them. He turned, and relaxed as he recognized one of his soldiers bringing out a thermos of coffee and two mugs, which he’d requested a few minutes ago.
“Thank you,” he said, saluting to the soldier as he took the delivery. He turned to Pietro. “Coffee?”
“Please.”
As he poured out a steaming mug for Pietro, Ruby reactivated her Semblance and disappeared to the other side of the garden. She whipped up a vortex of powdery snow as she went, unwittingly turning her snow angel into something more like a snow abomination in her wake.
Ironwood handed the mug to Pietro and resumed his train of thought. “Ruby has no past. It falls upon us to provide her a future.”
Pietro nodded once, fiddling with the collar of his coat. “I can’t even begin to imagine the challenge ahead. How do we go about finding a foster family for such a unique child? How will we balance Ruby’s needs and wants with the importance of her powers?”
Ironwood shifted his position, moving his boots enough to shake the snow which had started to accumulate around his feet. “It will be easier than you think, actually.” Pietro was thinking on a slightly different track from him, but that was to be expected. “We will take her into the protection of the Atlas Military and teach her how to defend herself while we seek to understand her powers.”
Pietro gave him an uneasy look. “Is that… fair to her?” he said at last. “After all of this… Ruby deserves to have a choice in what she becomes.”
Ironwood took a moment to pour himself some coffee, mulling over the words to use in explaining himself. “She will. Eventually,” he said finally, putting down the thermos. “When she is old enough to understand what powers she possesses and choose a future, she can do whatever she wishes. If she so desires, she may walk away entirely, leave the kingdom, take up a normal, anonymous life, and never set foot in Atlas again. But, for now…” Ironwood stared down into the blurry reflection of himself in his mug, bracing himself as he spoke the next words. “She can’t have a choice.”
Shock covered Pietro’s features, and he opened his mouth to reply, but Ironwood held up a hand, staving off the protest. He had known these words would be controversial, but he’d decided blunt honesty was the best route.
“Even if Ruby never wants to use her powers again, she will always have a target on her back simply because of those eyes. Which is why we must train her. Did Watts tell others about his project? Are there collaborators? But even if there aren’t, word of Ruby’s power might still get out somehow. And there are most certainly people in this world who will try to take this power for themselves without care for the child who wields them. That is why she needs to be under our protection. I would genuinely fear for her safety otherwise.”
Pietro no longer looked so conflicted, which gave Ironwood hope. He wished he could show him the true danger at play, tell him about Salem. What would the Queen of the Grimm do if she found out there was a child who could destroy Grimm with a single glance? Ruby would be marked for life. Perhaps she already was.
Pietro took a long, contemplative sip of his coffee, and spoke. “You... make an undeniable point about her safety. I will concede that Ruby would need protection and proper training in self-defense. But—” New resolve hardened his features. “—How is what you want to do any different from what Arthur did? She will still be raised in a restricted environment, trained with a singular purpose, watched closely, and have her powers studied. It sounds like the same thing—just with a bigger cage.”
“And how is what we need to do for Ruby any different from how we are already treating the PENNY Project?”
Pietro’s eyebrows shot up, and he went very still and silent. For a moment, Ironwood was worried that he’d just gravely insulted him. But the brief flash of shock quickly faded from his face, turning into something more indeterminate as he rubbed his beard in thought.
“You make a very good point,” he said at last, and there was a note of defeat in his voice. “I suppose that if I object to this future for Ruby, then I would also be objecting to Penny’s future.”
“Exactly.” Ironwood felt a pang of regret at how harsh it was to frame things that way, but he needed Pietro to look past his sentimentality to see it from the pragmatic point of view. For Ruby’s sake.
“It’s similar to how a parent makes decisions for their child until the child is old enough to choose on their own. There are certain things that simply have to be done for them.”
“Parents... Yes. I know I just floated the possibility that Ruby was grown in a laboratory, but what if she was stolen from a family, and we somehow find her parents?” Pietro said. “We couldn’t possibly stand in their way.”
“And we won’t. If we do find them, I would gladly let them choose their child’s future. However, I believe there’s a very good chance a parent would choose for her to stay here.” When Pietro opened his mouth again, he held up a hand, staying his words. “Consider a parent’s point of view. What would you do if it was your child, who possessed something which put her in immense danger, and you knew you couldn’t protect her? Would you hang onto her, and risk her life? Or would you let her go, to protect her?”
Pietro went silent, his gaze following Ruby’s distant form as she frolicked in the snow. Finally, he slumped down in his mechnochair and let out a heavy sigh. Then he took a long sip of his coffee before speaking.
“Well, James, you’ve convinced me.”
Pietro’s agreement brought Ironwood no joy. He was far from happy with this situation even as he got his way.
“Pietro, I want to make myself clear,” he said as Pietro gave him a questioning look. “I do not see Ruby as Watts did.”
The expression on Pietro’s face told him that he was hitting upon something quite vital to his objections, and he plunged on, heartened. “She is not something to be molded into a weapon, and to think otherwise would be heartless. She was born with a gift that could save countless lives. All I am suggesting is that it would be prudent of us to give her the tools to make sure no one tries to take advantage of her for their own means. But I promise that I will never force her to be something she doesn’t want to be.”
Pietro stared at Ironwood for a long second, and then he broke out in a grateful smile. “Thank you, James. That puts me at ease.” He held out his mug. “A toast, then?”
Ironwood tapped his mug against Pietro’s. “To Ruby,” he said after a moment’s thought.
Pietro smiled. “And to Penny.”
They drank, and Ironwood was glad for the warmth. The day was only getting colder.
Pietro put aside his mug. “Could you make me one more promise?”
“Name it.”
Pietro lifted his head to look him directly in the eye. “Don’t let Ruby lose sight of her humanity.”
Ironwood’s answer was immediate. “I will not. You have my word.”
“Thank you, James,” Pietro murmured. “You have no idea how much that means to me.” He cast one more look across the garden to Ruby, whose red form was almost lost in the snow. “Whatever she chooses to be someday, I have a feeling she’ll be truly sensational.”
Notes:
Just want to say it again, Ruby is a trans girl in this story.
Also, a heads up, I won't be getting back into the actual RWBY fandom. I think my days of being in fandom are over, so I'll be staying in my corner on AO3, writing Penny and Ruby for the foreseeable future.
And I'm going to be honest, everything that happened to Penny in Volume 8 hurt my soul in a way that took me a really long time to recover from. This fanfic is just one part of that healing, but it's an important part. There are so many things in this story that hold great personal importance to me, which is part of why I'm so confident that I'm going to finish it this time around. I'm writing War Machines just as much for myself as for anyone else. Thank you for reading.
Chapter 2: In For A Penny
Chapter Text
Present Day — Beacon Academy
Penny took a moment to triple-check that her weapon was secured, adjusting the holster which hung from her back, and then she stepped out into the bright sunshine of Beacon Academy’s grounds. Time: 3:14 P.M, 15.92 seconds. Ambient temperature: twenty degrees Celsius. Humidity: forty-four percent. Surroundings: typical. All systems operational and functioning within normal parameters. There was no sign of her plan going awry yet.
She adjusted her visual sensors to focus on her current objective: the group of incoming Beacon students disembarking from the airship which had just landed at the grounds. She set course for them, crossing the quad at a not-too-fast, not-too-slow pace. This was it. There would be no turning back after this. It was time… to make friends!
Now, she was no longer just Penny, the scared girl who had woken up at Beacon with no memory of where she’d come from or why she existed. Now she was Penny Pallas, the amazing and confident Huntress-in-training, who would guard against the worst of evils and make the best of friends!
Most of the new students were directing their attention upwards, admiring the towering spires of Beacon Academy, and so it was easy for Penny to slip into the crowd without drawing undue attention to herself. And now came the hard part: the actual process of making friends.
This was a vital part of being a Huntress. She would need to be able to connect with the people of Remnant, reaching out to prevent conflict and helping people work together for a better world. However, she… did not have a great deal of experience in this area.
She’d considered that Ozpin and the various members of Beacon’s faculty could technically be called friends since she knew them all quite well, but… they failed to meet certain parameters of her definition for a ‘friend.’ Example: She wanted to have slumber parties! That was an activity that friends did! And she could not conceptualize of having a slumber party with any member of the Beacon faculty. She wanted, more than anything, to make friends with her peers.
That being said, Penny did have two friends already amongst her peers, friends who met every facet of the definition, but that was not particularly encouraging right now because she had formed those first two friendships in extremely abnormal circumstances. Circumstances which were not applicable to the current situation… unless the other students wanted to sneak covertly around campus (Friend One), or a fight broke out (Friend Two).
Penny fiddled with the hem of her skirt and glanced around nervously at the chattering students. Her research had led her to believe that a proven way to make friends was by the action of ‘mingling,’ but the actual definition of mingling was something that was frustratingly nebulous beyond ‘occupy the same physical space as others.’ She was occupying the same physical space as her peers right now, and it was clear that she needed to do much more than just that! But what? Was she just supposed to… walk up to others and start talking about various topics?! What topics were appropriate for a first interaction? What if she picked the wrong thing? What if everyone thought she was weird? What if they rejected her? What if—
Stay calm, she told herself, her logic circuits kicking in to remind her that most other incoming students very likely had similar anxieties. Panicking about possible outcomes would not help her in this endeavor.
There were many benefits of being a synthetic person, and perhaps one of the most helpful was having hardware dedicated to disproving the destructive irrationalities that usually accompanied fears. Positively motivated logical processes that couldn’t be paralyzed by fear were extremely useful for staying calm in stressful situations.
Her logic circuit reminded her of another undeniable fact: two friends already! If she could have two, she could have more! Exactly how many more was a question she’d wondered on multiple occasions. Why would a Huntress stop at two friends when she could have four? Or eight? Or sixteen? Or thirty-two? Or sixty-four? Or—
Her attempt to compute how many powers of two she could reach before she exceeded the population of Remnant (and therefore exceeded the limit of possible friends) was interrupted by a ping from her passive proximity sensors warning her that someone else was about to walk straight into her. She took immediate evasive action, jumping sideways to avoid a collision. Unfortunately, the other person also took evasive action. In the same direction.
WHAM.
“You IDIOT! What do you think you’re DOING?”
Oh no. This was most definitely not how friends were made. Damage control!
“I’m sorry!” she said to the white-haired girl sprawled on the ground in front of her. “It was an accident!” She bent down to pick up the Dust vials that had scattered across the pavement during their collision. One of the vials of Ice Dust was leaking. That was… undesirable.
“Well, maybe you should look where you’re going!” The girl got to her feet and began rapidly gathering up the vials as well. “Honestly! Why would you even walk around with your head in the clouds like that?” she said, tossing her long ponytail over her shoulder
Wait, what did that mean? They weren’t nearly high enough in the sky to be near any clouds? Penny turned to her databases for help. It was a phrase she’d never heard before.
‘Head in the clouds’: a common Atlesian turn of phrase, an idiom that signifies that someone is not paying attention, i.e. their ‘head’ (their attention, their presence of mind) is figuratively somewhere far away from the present moment.
Ah. In the space of a millisecond, she’d figured out what the girl meant, and armed with this knowledge, she prepared to apologize further.
“I am sorry! My attention was elsewhere—” She paused to pick up a vial of Fire Dust by her foot. Oh dear, this one was also leaking. “Are you hurt?”
“No, and that’s no thanks to you!” the girl huffed, snatching away the leaking vial from Penny. “You should learn to look where you’re going!”
The girl was still angry even after Penny had apologized repeatedly and tried to help fix the mess. Hmm. Irrational anger and emotional overreactions? Lots of exaggerated physical movement? Considering that this was their first day at Beacon Academy, could all these things mean that this girl was secretly nervous and trying to hide it under a veneer of anger? It could be a perfect chance to form an emotional connection. “I am sorry if I upset you. It’s perfectly alright if you’re nervous. This is our first day, after all!”
The girl’s face turned a spectacular shade of red against her pale skin.
Or. Perhaps she was simply angry.
“I’m sorry!” She started to apologize further, but then she was interrupted by an arm landing on her shoulder. A new voice spoke.
“Hey, you better have a damn good reason why you’re yelling at my friend.”
Penny was not surprised by the intrusion, because immediately she had a match for the voice in her databanks, and even if that were not enough, there was no mistaking the black-and-yellow prosthetic arm with a built-in shotgun which rested on her shoulder now.
“YANG!” Penny said happily, spinning around and hugging the second friend she’d ever made. “Salutations!” She made sure to activate maximum hugs mode, because Yang deserved it. She was so cool.
“Gufkfladjj,” Yang muttered.
“What, Yang?” Penny asked, still hugging her. That word didn’t seem to be part of any language she knew.
“Penny… can’t breathe,” Yang gasped out.
“Oh! Sorry!” Penny immediately let go and stepped back. Hair color: bright blonde. Eye color: lavender. Height: six feet zero inches. Outfit: red scarf, tan jacket, yellow crop top, black shorts. Current emotions: excited. Yes, this was most definitely Yang Xiao Long and not someone who’d stolen her prosthetic arm and was doing an excellent job of mimicking her voice. It was always good to check!
“No worries,” Yang said, rubbing her side. “Wow, though. Do that for too long and you probably could drain someone’s Aura. I forgot for a second that you’re stronger than a full-grown Ursa.” She let out a small laugh.
“I will make sure to hug with more appropriate strength in the future,” Penny said sheepishly. She’d always wondered about the origin of that word. Why did sheep signify a sort of bashful embarrassment? She’d seen sheep, and they didn’t look very bashful or embarrassed. They just looked sleepy.
“Well, I’m glad you’re here!” Yang cocked her head. “I was getting worried because I didn’t see you on the airship. Thought maybe you weren’t attending anymore or something.”
Oh dear, that was the one thing she’d hoped Yang wouldn’t notice. Fortunately, she had a cover story ready for that, too. “I arrived early!” she said quickly. And it wasn’t even a lie. She had come to Beacon early. Just very early. Very, very early. Very, very, very—
“Excuse me!”
Penny and Yang both turned to look at the angry girl, who was waving her arms in an apparent bid to capture their attention.
“Are you going to just ignore the fact that you’ve damaged a great deal of my specialty Dust?!”
“It shouldn’t be hard for you to get more, I’m sure.”
That was not Penny or Yang who spoke—it was someone else behind them, a voice which had no match in Penny’s database.
She and Yang turned to look at the newcomer, and Penny was greeted with the sight of a black-haired girl. She was wearing a black bow with two extra ears tucked underneath it—a Faunus. Outfit: black buttoned vest, white undershirt, white shorts, black leggings, black boots. Height: five feet ten inches. Eye color: amber. Heart rate: normal. Current emotions: unknown. Identity: unknown.
“Pardon?” the angry girl said.
“I’m not sure why Weiss Schnee, heiress to the Schnee Dust Company, would be worried about procuring expensive Dust.” The newcomer seemed to be making an explicit effort to talk to only Penny and Yang. She picked up one of the scattered Dust vials, examining the label. “Huh. Not SDC-brand Dust. Does this mean that she actually feels some guilt over her company’s controversial labor practices, questionable business partners, and subpar working conditions?”
Her expression was entirely neutral, and her tone just as much so. Penny couldn’t tell if this was meant to be said in anger, or in protest, or in smugness—but this girl was a Faunus, and the SDC’s discriminatory treatment of Faunus workers was a well-known fact, so maybe this girl was ‘sticking it to the man,’ as she’d heard other people say? Either way, she sensed a perfect opportunity to make another friend.
“It may simply be higher-quality Dust than anything the SDC has to offer!” Penny added enthusiastically. “Their near-monopoly means that they have been able to lower their standards of Dust production in pursuit of greater profits without suffering any economic repercussions!”
The amber-eyed girl shot Penny a look of surprise. Mission accomplished! Maybe? Was she impressed surprised, or just simply surprised surprised?
Weiss turned a shade of red similar to when she’d started screaming, but another outburst did not arrive.
“Hey, it’s almost like the biggest company stays on top just because it’s the biggest, not because it’s the best!” Yang added.
Now Weiss did speak. “Why are you all ganging up on me all of a sudden?”
“Ganging up on you? You were ganging up on Penny before!”
“I’m a single person! It is physically impossible for me to gang up!”
“You were definitely trying, though.”
Weiss kept arguing with Yang and the black-haired girl, but Penny had stopped paying attention to the words they were saying, as she’d just noticed a set of extremely dangerous conditions forming. Weiss was energetically waving around a leaking vial of Ice Dust as she spoke, apparently not noticing the leak, and the vial the black-haired girl was holding was also leaking Gravity Dust, both of which were mixing with the Fire Dust leaking from Weiss’s suitcase—
Penny shot her hand out and grabbed Weiss’s wrist, abruptly halting her movements. She knew seizing the limbs of strangers was generally not how friends were made, but drastic action was required.
“You should not make any sudden movements,” she said firmly as the other three girls stared at her, shocked into silence. “This vial and several others are leaking, and we are very close to causing a disastrous explosion.”
Weiss looked down at the vial she held, and for the first time, she noticed the growing clouds of red and blue and black around them.
“Oh,” she said, her voice not angry for the first time. There was a pause. Then, very slowly, she added, “Unhand me.”
Penny obliged, detecting the girl’s pulse decreasing to a point where she would be able to operate rationally, and watched her turn to her suitcase—moving slowly now—and pull a tube of sealant from the side compartment. She carefully applied the sealant to both vials, and thankfully, the black-haired girl had the presence of mind to offer the gravity vial to Weiss, so that one was quickly sealed as well.
“Thank you,” Weiss said, blinking at Penny. “Perhaps you aren’t as… spacey as you first seemed.”
Crisis averted! Now things were going swimmingly! (Penny loved that word). Perhaps this girl could even be a friend now that their disagreement was over! “Sensational!” she said. “I’m so glad that we could put this accident behind us!”
Wait a minute. Was this mingling? Did this count as unplanned social interaction? Was she actually in the process of making friends normally despite all the screaming and spilled explosives?
The four of them had fallen into silence, and Penny took the opportunity to analyze their facial expressions, tugging at the strings of her hoodie as she did so. She was proud of how much she’d progressed in being able to recognize emotions. By now, she could identify most people’s emotions through visual cues. Of course, there were still plenty of facial expressions that confused her—usually when the other person was feeling more than one emotion at once, or trying to hide something. Or when sarcasm was involved. Sarcasm was the worst to decipher. But for the most part, she made far, far less mistakes than she’d used to.
Yang was easy enough to read at the moment—she was watching Penny with what was definitely mild concern. Weiss just seemed confused as she continued cleaning up the spilled contents of her suitcase, likely still processing the sudden turn of events. The other girl had produced a book from one of her pockets and turned her attention to it. Penny snuck a glance at the title—“The Girl Who Turned To Stone.”
Oh! That was her favorite fairytale! Perhaps the two of them could bond over it! Although, if this was the first time the girl was reading it, then perhaps she had not formed an opinion about it yet. But still, it could be an excellent topic of conversation!
With that hopeful thought, Penny turned to analyzing the girl’s face. And, oh dear, that was a very neutral expression, and Penny was having a hard time parsing it. Hm… given the context, she was going to make an educated guess as a conversation starter.
“Are you nervous about starting at Beacon?” she asked.
Amber eyes flicked to Penny again. “Who isn’t?”
“Nobody, likely! For example, I am very nervous, too!”
Weiss scoffed, zipping up her suitcase. “You had me fooled.”
“I’m just extremely good at hiding it behind a wall of relentless positivity!”
For some reason, Yang winced when she said that. Odd. Maybe it was because she, like Penny, disliked people hiding their emotions. When other people hid their emotions, they usually expected Penny to still understand what they were feeling despite hiding that feeling, which was extremely difficult for her. For that reason, she tried not to hide her own emotions in case other people had trouble with that. However, today she’d decided that putting on a friendly face was more important than being upfront about emotions. Hopefully, she would stop being nervous soon and then she could stop having to do that.
She held out her hand. “Penny Pallas, Huntress-in-training!”
“Blake Belladonna.” Blake tucked her book under an elbow and shook Penny’s hand.
“It is a pleasure to meet you!” Penny entered the name into her memory, and then noticed an interesting coincidence. “Any relation to the chieftain of Menagerie?”
Blake’s eyebrows went up and her heart rate increased unexpectedly, but strangely enough she showed no other outward sign of a reaction. “No, it’s a common name in Mistral.” Her gaze briefly went above Penny’s eyes, to the top of her head—what was she looking at? Her hair? Her bow? Odd. “Not many people even know enough to ask that assumption, though.”
Penny nodded. “I apologize for the confusion.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“And this is my friend Yang!” she said, placing a hand on Yang’s shoulder (not too energetically, she remembered just in time) and smiling at her. “She is a very interesting individual!”
“An interesting individual? That’s a good thing, right?” Yang said, but she was smiling as she said it, so Penny knew it was meant in jest. Then she held a hand out to Blake. “Pleasure to meet you. I—uh—I like your bow!”
“Thank you. I’d say Penny pulled hers off better, though.”
Penny’s eyes widened. That was an unsolicited compliment! From a new acquaintance! She was winning at friendship!
“Thank you!” she said happily, bouncing up and down just a little bit. Then she clapped her hands together as an expression of excitement… only to realize with dawning horror that she’d made a mistake as her servos began completing the action. But she couldn’t stop the command sent to her servos now.
Clap— BOOM.
What she had not realized until too late was that the clapping of her hands would generate just enough of a concussive wave in the air to ignite the still-lingering clouds of Dust in the air around them. A shower of ice crystals and sparks of flame washed over Penny, and the wave of Gravity Dust-driven force knocked her backwards, jarring her weapon loose. She waved aside the smoke, looking around anxiously.
“I am deeply sorry! Is anyone hurt?”
She immediately zeroed in on the prone forms of the other girls. All their vital signs seemed normal, but—
Weiss looked up at her with an expression that—no, not angry, this could safely be upgraded to furious.
“You DUNCE!” she shrieked, shoving her ponytail out of her face. “You have the spatial awareness of a DOORKNOB!”
Okay, that hurt a little, because Penny had great spatial awareness. Better than this girl, she would venture to say! She had radar! How many people had that? Also, the insult didn’t even sound logical, because doorknobs didn’t need spatial awareness. By contrast, she—
“Hey, you dropped your sword,” a new voice said from beside her.
She turned to analyze the newcomer. Hair: floppy blonde. Height: five feet seven inches. Outfit: jeans, hoodie, sneakers, white-and-gold armor, a sword and shield at his belt. Eye color: blue. Heart rate: elevated. Emotion(s): extreme nervousness. Identity: unknown. He was currently bending down to pick up Penny’s dropped weapon.
“Thank you!” Penny said, grateful for the intervention of someone who was not screaming. “What is your name?”
The boy glanced up at her, an oddly-shaped grin spreading over his face. “The name’s Jaune Arc. Short, sweet, rolls off the tongue, lad—Huh?” He paused, his grin freezing on his face, and then he glanced down at the sword he was trying—and failing—to lift up. He pulled harder on it, to no avail. “Uh. Is it stuck to the ground?”
Penny could not hold back a smile. This was often the reaction people had when they tried to lift Luminous Electra. At first glance, it appeared to be just a longsword of common length with glowing green highlights—something which should not be a struggle for the average student to pick up. But Luminous Electra was so much more than an ordinary weapon.
She plucked Luminous’s hilt from Jaune’s hands, lifting it effortlessly and resting the blade on one shoulder.
Jaune’s eyes widened to a comical degree. “What? How?”
“Allow me to demonstrate!” Penny tapped a button on the handle. Her sword clicked and whirred, and the blade widened and elongated simultaneously, extending to a much longer length—taller than her, in fact.
“That,” Blake said, a faint note of amazement in her tone, “Is the biggest sword I’ve ever seen.”
“Luminous Electra is a rare type of weapon called a zweihander!” Penny said brightly. “Rare because very few people are capable of the strength needed to effectively wield one of them!”
Luminous Electra was Penny’s pride and joy. The blade felt perfect for her, and the design of her body meant the weight was no issue. What was the point of being a synthetic person if she was not going to take advantage of her incredible strength? And for close quarters, it was collapsible, even if a sword that was only reasonably large wasn’t as fun.
As Penny explained the sword’s function, Yang was grinning madly, as she did every time Penny mentioned the weapon being a zweihander—something which Penny was proud to understand as an inside joke between the two of them! Her first-ever inside joke, in fact.
“It has Dust chambers here. And here.” Penny tapped the two flat sides of the blade. “Which I can use either for ranged attacks on enemies, or for turning the blade into a flaming weapon of complete and utter destruction!” However, it would be best not to demonstrate that capability right now.
The look Weiss was giving her was an interesting one—she’d never seen that before. One for the databases.
“OOOOOH! How heavy is that sword?!”
Penny turned and registered a new face. H air color: orange. Eye color: blue. Outfit: combat skirt, metal-ringed corset, sleeveless top, fingerless gloves. Current emotion: very excited.
“It’s—” she started to say, only to be cut off by the girl stepping closer and inspecting the sword herself.
“Have I finally found someone who can measure up to me in an arm wrestling match?”
“A what?” Penny squeaked. Was this girl challenging her to a fight? Was it meant to be a bonding activity between friends? What was arm wrestling? Didn’t people already use their arms to wrestle? Or did the name somehow imply that it was wrestling that specifically prohibited the use of arms?
Weiss, still in the process of cleaning up her spilled Dust, looked up with a frown. “You’re the girl who was challenging everyone on the airship to arm wrestling matches, aren’t you?”
“Yup.”
“And when I challenged her, she beat me so hard I got flipped over a table,” Yang added.
The girl grinned, looking right into Penny’s eyes. “Nora Valkyrie is my name, and strength is my game!” She smacked a hand down on Penny’s arm, and then whistled appreciatively. “Girl, you’ve got biceps like rocks.”
That was a dangerously fitting choice of words, on account of most of Penny’s body technically being made of very refined rocks. But what was—
“Oh, you better believe it, she’s stronger than an ox,” Yang said, nodding.
“That’s nothing! One time, I beat an ox at—”
Penny clutched her sword tighter. “Will someone please tell me what arm wrestling is?”
“It’s simple!” Nora held out her arm, her gaze intensifying to a frankly scary degree. “We sit down. And we WRESTLE! With our ARMS!”
Penny made no move to accept the challenge. “What differentiates this from normal wrestling?”
Instead of replying, Nora called over her shoulder to a black-haired boy, who was standing apart from them, looking at a map of the campus. “Ren, will you officiate?”
“Sorry, Nora,” the map-reader said without looking up. “The referee is off-duty for the afternoon.”
“Aw.” Nora only looked dejected for a half-second before she turned back to Penny and Yang, and gave them a feral grin. “Well then, this will be a no-holds-barred arm wrestling match! It’s steel cage time, and I’m going to drop a stone cold stunner on you! Pick up a folding chair and pray to your gods now, because I’m putting you on the ropes as soon as that bell rings!”
“Yang?” Penny said, increasingly distressed by each new word coming out of Nora’s mouth. “Is this going to involve injury or dismemberment?”
She took a step back just to put a bit of extra distance between her and Nora, who was making her very nervous. Unfortunately, as she did so, she bumped into Weiss, who was still cleaning her spilled Dust. The collision knocked Weiss forwards… directly into the pile of loose Dust which she had just finished sweeping up.
But Penny realized her mistake even as the collision was happening, and this time she was able to do something to avert it. She whirled to catch Weiss just before she landed in the Dust, averting an even bigger explosion than before.
Unfortunately, as Penny whirled around to catch Weiss, Luminous Electra struck the rapier which was affixed to Weiss’s belt, and the brief clash between the two finely honed blades generated a small shower of sparks. A small shower of sparks which fell directly onto the pile of loose Dust.
KABOOM.
There was most definitely a certain way that Yang would describe this sequence of events, but Penny did not have Yang’s ability for wordplay. So, instead, the way that Penny would describe it was: this academic year was certainly beginning in a manner metaphorically similar to a rapid uncontrolled detonation. And also literally similar.
Kaboom, indeed.
Chapter 3: Friendship-Building Activities
Notes:
Hello! The rapid updates are because I’m hoping to get through the first seven chapters more quickly, and then I’ll be spacing the updates out a bit more once I get to the never-before-posted territory beyond chapter 7.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Penny eased open the door and peeked into Beacon Academy’s ballroom, scanning the area to make sure there were no professors present. Once assured her entrance would go unnoticed, she slipped in and quietly closed the door behind her. Her plan was proceeding perfectly. Thanks to the model of Beacon’s architectural layout she’d saved in her local storage, she’d been able to locate this small service door into the ballroom, the side way allowing her to bypass the main entrance, where Doctor Oobleck was checking in students. The service door had been locked, of course, but… Well, it was no match for her superpowered strength. She would fix the broken handle after initiation. For now—
“Hey, Penny! Over here!”
She turned her head to see Yang waving at her from a circle of sleeping bags and recognizable faces. Time for socialization, part two!
She padded over and set her sleeping bag down in a gap between Yang and Nora.
“Saved you a spot,” Yang said cheerily.
“Thank you!” Penny surveyed the rest of the group. Blake was on the other side of Yang; Jaune was there and next to Nora was the black-haired boy she’d referred to as Ren, and finally, directly opposite Penny was—
“Really? We’re inviting over the girl who exploded everything?”
“Oh, shut it, Weiss, she’s my friend. And you know it was an accident.”
“I really am sorry,” Penny added as she unrolled her sleeping bag, trying to make her voice sound as sincere as possible. It was harder than normal, because she was also full of joy at hearing Yang call her a friend. It was something she knew already, and Yang had even said it before, but hearing someone call her that never got any less exciting!
“Is knocking people over and blowing up things a habit for you, Penny?” Blake said.
Penny froze. Oh no. Blake had the tone that people sometimes had when they used sarcasm, but also sometimes had when they weren’t using sarcasm, which meant that Penny had no idea whether she was being serious or not. And to make it worse, her face was very unreadable.
“Um… no?” she said tentatively. “I am very coordinated and nonexplosive.”
Blake nodded, and then shot a look at Weiss. “See? Nothing to worry about.”
Weiss huffed loudly, but didn’t say anything else, while Penny basked in the relief of having said the right thing. Every time someone used sarcasm, it provided a potential learning experience for her. Even if most of the time she didn’t learn anything.
She took out her scroll to check for messages—but a blinking light alerted her to a low battery.
Penny let out a quiet noise of annoyance. This was possibly her least favorite thing about having to hide who she really was. If she didn’t have to worry about people finding out she was an artificial girl, then she wouldn’t even need a scroll, because everything a scroll could do, she could do better! She had high-speed CCT connectivity, so no need for the scroll when she could just take a call straight from her brain. She could access the CCTnet. Her eyes were literally cameras capable of sixteen different light spectra—everything. But no, because people might be afraid of her and think of her as less than a person, she had to settle for carrying around this metal rectangle with capabilities and a battery life that were positively embarrassing compared to her own. People were stupid.
Nora’s voice interrupted her thoughts. “Need to charge your scroll?”
Penny nodded.
“Watch this. Can I have it?”
Penny handed it over, if only to see where Nora was going with this. The scroll was replaceable, after all. And then Nora did something completely unexpected: she jammed her pinky into the charging port. And somehow, the screen lit up.
Penny stared. Her scroll was charging. How? Was Nora… like her? It couldn’t be. She’d detected a very human pulse in Nora from the moment they met. But wait, maybe she was a cyborg? And Nora was making no effort to hide it at all, so maybe she could ask…?
“How are you doing that?” she said cautiously.
“My Semblance!” Nora said brightly. “I can do electricity things!”
Oh. Penny couldn’t help but feel at least a little bit disappointed by that.
“I haven’t ever used a charger in my life, and I don’t plan on changing that anytime soon!” She glanced down at the screen, and then handed it back to Penny. “Here you go.”
Penny stared at the screen. Nora had just taken her scroll from three percent to eighty percent in ten seconds. Right then and there, she made a silent resolution to never make enemies with this girl, because as a walking voltage sink she had complete control over one of Penny’s biggest weaknesses. There was a reason why she didn’t go out during thunderstorms. That would not stop her from wanting to be friends with Nora, though! She, the amazing and cool Penny Pallas, would not let a little fear stop her from making a friend!
“Why are you all over here in the corner, anyway?” she asked, glancing at the rest of the first-years, who were scattered throughout the rest of the ballroom. There was a definite and peculiar separation between them and this group.
Yang shrugged. “We all still smell like soot from the explosion, and it was bothering everyone else, so we were kinda forced to move over here.”
“Oh.” Penny did not yet have olfactory sensors, so she hadn’t noticed that fact. Of course, that wasn’t something she would admit.
She wiggled into her sleeping bag until it enveloped her up to her neck, and then a realization struck her. Was this a slumber party? It wasn’t the most voluntary of gatherings, but other than that, this met many of the requirements! Sleeping bags! Peers! Idle conversation! Nighttime! It probably would not have any of the other activities associated with slumber parties, though—everyone needed to get a good night’s sleep before initiation, including Penny.
She did not sleep in exactly the same way a human or a faunus did; she entered a low-power state which mimicked organics’ sleep and had its own essential purposes. Her consciousness matrices eased their workload, allowing her processors to devote much more energy to storing her memories, cleaning unneeded data, and running deep diagnostic checks on her body. All very important things which would be much harder to do without sleep. She could go without sleep for a long period of time if needed, but it would decrease her processing efficiency.
“So, yeah, we smell like a bonfire and we don’t even have any of the cool things that come with a bonfire,” Nora said, emphatically flopping her head down onto her pillow. “I’ve definitely had better girls’ nights.”
Girls’ night! Nora was calling it a girls’ night! That was one of the alternate terms for a slumber party! Penny wiggled in excitement, making her sleeping bag shift around.
“Can we call it something else?” Jaune said, and there was a strange inflection in his words which made Penny look at him more closely. What did that tone signify? There wasn’t anything like it in her emotional analysis systems.
Nora, meanwhile, had her own odd reaction—she gave Jaune a look filled with indecipherable meaning, and then nodded and spoke in a chipper tone that didn’t seem to match what’d just happened a second ago.
“Sure thing! Sleepover’s a better word for this anyway, that’s all we’re going to be doing. Sleeping. And waiting for it to be over. So initiation can start.”
No one replied to that, and a silence fell. Penny did not like silences. She liked talking, and silence meant that nobody was talking and that was bad. Because when people weren’t talking, they tended to communicate through funny glances and body language, and Penny did not like funny glances and body language because she understood almost none of them. At least with talking, people would say what they were thinking sometimes.
However, it seemed that the opportunity for further conversation had passed. Everyone had a book or scroll out, except for Yang who was writing something and Ren who looked like he was actively trying to sleep.
Penny scanned the rest of the room, looking amongst the students for one particular person—the first friend she’d ever made, even before Yang. Even though Penny hadn’t seen her in some time, she’d believed there was a chance her friend could be one of the incoming students. But her scan turned up nothing.
Penny hoped her first friend was okay, wherever she was.
After a few seconds of mild disappointment, she turned her thoughts to something else that had been puzzling her all afternoon, something less significant but more mystifying. When introducing himself, Jaune had called his name ‘sweet.’ That didn’t make sense to her. Words didn’t have a taste, right?
Suddenly, alarm flooded Penny. What if words did have a taste? Was she just now learning something that everyone around her knew? Had she been missing out on a fundamental part of the sentient experience?
And if words had a taste, did that mean that some words were sour and some were sweet? Well, if that was true, then ‘swimmingly’ absolutely had to be a word that tasted sweet.
She wanted to ask Jaune about it, but he’d almost completely buried himself in his sleeping bag now to look at his scroll. At the moment, likely not amenable to unexpected questions.
She was about to pull herself deeper into her sleeping bag when Blake put her book down and glanced at Penny and Yang.
“I’ve been wondering—you two seem to know each other already?”
“Correct! We met a month and a half ago,” Penny said.
“Saying we ‘met’ is kind of underselling it, Penny.” Yang gave her a knowing smile, and then turned to Blake. “We met in, uh, a pretty unique way.”
“Oh?” Blake raised an eyebrow. “How unique?”
1.5 months ago—City of Vale
Penny knew she appeared very out of place right now. Someone seeing her might even think she was lost. And that would be an understandable assumption, given that she was a teenage girl walking alone through an industrial area of Vale late at night. This narrow path between tall, silent warehouses would not be an advisable shortcut for the average person. However, Penny was very, very far from average.
She somewhat hoped that some nefarious perpetrator might try to attack her. It would be good practice for being a Huntress! And it would be better for someone to target her rather than someone else who couldn’t protect themselves. She was quite capable of bashing a criminal’s face into the pavement and then hauling them off to jail. And that would be one less criminal on the streets thanks to the valiant efforts of Penny Pallas, Huntress-to-be!
Well, Huntress-to-be, if her plan was successful. The contents of her backpack were one more part of her plan. As was the gleaming, fresh-from-the-forge sword holstered just underneath the backpack.
Accessing her internal browser, she pulled up the timetable for the airship to Beacon and calculated her ETA to the station. Thanks to her shortcut, she would arrive with time to spare to catch the last airship to Beacon.
If she missed the airship, then her absence would definitely be noticed, and then there would be concerned questions from the Beacon faculty for which she would need to provide an adequate excuse. But not to worry! She was going to be on time, and there would be no need—
“Help! Help! She’s going to kill us all!”
Penny stiffened at the sound of the terrified cries, and then she broke into a run, her body’s various fight mechanisms springing into action. Her radar shifted from manual to automatic; the focus of her eyes broadened, defaulting to distance scanning for tracking threats; her circuits hummed with extra electricity as her servos primed themselves for a flurry of movement. There weren’t many things Penny knew about her origins, but she did know she was built to fight. Or at least, she was built in a way that made her extremely good at fighting.
It seemed that she would not be on time now.
As she ran towards the cries, she registered the sound of a series of explosions, followed by a burst of gunfire. And then another. She leapt out from the narrow alleyway, finding herself at the terminus of a dead-end street, and across the way was some sort of nightclub. People were pouring out its doors, panicked cries filling the air, as more gunfire sounded from inside the club.
Despite the chaotic scene, a wave of excitement rushed over Penny. There was a crime in progress, and she! Was! Going! To! Stop! It!
She stepped into the road, pulling Luminous Electra off her back, and began weaving through the fleeing crowd towards the entrance. Just as she reached it, a man wearing a black suit, red tie, and sunglasses rushed out, only to skid to a halt when he saw Penny going the opposite way.
“What are you doing, kid?! Blondie in there will kill you if you get in her way!”
“The perpetrator is blonde? Thank you!” Penny said, before darting past him. The pistol at his belt meant he was probably security, but he couldn’t have been a very well-trained guard if he was fleeing from the danger. Either that, or the danger was very dangerous.
She dodged several more civilians and stepped inside to find a scene of chaos. She took in overturned tables, smashed drinkware, a cloud of smoke hanging in the air, before focusing on a scene in the center of a deserted dance floor: a girl with red eyes and long, flowing blonde hair that reached almost down to her waist who was standing over the unconscious forms of two girls. Thankfully, their vitals seemed fine from what Penny could detect.
There were several other guards with the same suit and tie and sunglasses as the one who’d fled past Penny, and they seemed equally unwilling to fight, mostly cowering behind overturned furniture. There was even one of them who was lying on the ground and pretending to be dead even though her sensors made it clear he was quite conscious and alert. And then Penny realized the blonde-haired girl was staring at her.
She was holding her arms like a boxer, and one arm was a prosthetic with some sort of gun-gauntlet combination built into it. On her non-prosthetic arm was a similar weapon but with a larger barrel. But the most notable thing about her appearance was her hair, which… appeared to be on fire. Photovisually, that most definitely appeared to be flames licking off the curls, bathing her in a flickering light. But the flames didn’t register on her infrared vision at all, and neither her hair nor her clothes were damaged. How utterly strange. Was it a Semblance?
That was something she could puzzle out later, though. For now, she had to take action. The fire girl was giving Penny a look that seemed mostly… confused.
“Salutations!” Penny said cheerfully. “Is a crime being committed?”
“Um,” the girl said, blinking at her. She looked down at the two unconscious girls, and then back to her. “Depends on your definition of a crime?”
That sounded very much like the answer a criminal would give, and confirmed what Penny already suspected from her surroundings. She raised Luminous Electra, leveling its tip at the girl. “Please put down your weapons and cease destruction of this establishment.”
Fire-head held up her hands in an unexpectedly nonconfrontational gesture, and then said something even more unexpected.
“Hey, I’m not looking for a fight.”
Penny looked slowly around at the ruined nightclub, double-checking just to make sure that her photoreceptors were not glitching. “That seems unlikely.”
Fire-head glanced at the gauntlet on her arm, as if just noticing it for the first time. At the same time, the flames around her hair began to die down. “Okay, I might’ve been expecting a fight, but they started it!” She broke off, and then put a hand to her forehead. “Honestly—I came in here looking for one lousy thing, and I guess that was too much to ask, because—you know what, I’m just going to cut my losses and leave.” She made a move sideways but Penny moved with her, remaining in her path.
“I am sorry, but I cannot let you leave until the police arrive.”
“They don’t call the police here.”
Now it was Penny’s turn to blink in confusion. “Why wouldn’t they?”
And then several things happened in very quick succession.
The girl’s eyes flicked to something over Penny’s shoulder. She shouted, “Oh no you don’t!” and fired off a shot from her prosthetic, her hair re-igniting. Something exploded behind Penny. And a microsecond later, Penny decided it was time to take more direct measures to subdue this wrongdoer.
The nightclub was large and open with arching ceilings, which meant she could use Luminous Electra to its full extent. She clicked the transform button, and Luminous elongated, glinting energetically in the swirling party lights. This wasn’t how she’d expected her sword to see real combat for the first time, but then again, live combat was rarely expected!
Fire-head’s eyes went very wide at the sight of Luminous Electra in zweihander mode, and then Penny was leaping forward, angling the flat of the blade at her opponent’s side—not seeking to do serious injury, just discourage her from further fighting. But the strike missed as her opponent fired her gauntlets into the ground, jumping away just in time to avoid being hit.
“Fucking hell,” she said, her eyes wide. “You’re actually—” She turned and yelled at someone behind Penny, in the same direction that she’d yelled earlier. “Junior, what the hell’s wrong with you?! You’re employing kids now?”
“You’re a kid!” ‘Junior’ yelled back at the same time Penny said, “I am not a kid!”
But indignation aside, the momentary distraction gave Penny the opening she needed, and she lunged forward, bringing the pommel of Luminous Electra down on her opponent’s head. There was a flash of Aura, and she staggered backwards, but quickly recovered, firing a round from her gauntlet in a warning shot that sailed over Penny’s head.
“Look, I don’t—”
Penny didn’t let her finish, pressing her initiative and swinging Luminous in a wide arc, forcing her to retreat once again. Briefly, she wondered where the police were—she should’ve been able to hear approaching sirens by now—and then had to sidestep to dodge a shot aimed directly at her. It seemed that Fire-head was done with warning shots.
“Will you just let me go?!” she snapped between blasts, using the shielded edge of her gauntlet to deflect a swipe while simultaneously firing with her other arm. “I don’t want to hurt you!”
“Neither do I, but I cannot let you leave!” Penny could see that this girl was tired already from the previous fighting, and she believed that if she kept up her attack, she could subdue her within—
The girl glanced over Penny’s shoulder and then shotgun-jumped away again. Logically, Penny chased, but then, just as she passed through the space previously occupied by her opponent—
Boom.
An explosion from behind Penny knocked her forwards onto her face, Luminous Electra flying out of her hands.
It took her a few moments to get her bearings, her sensors spinning wildly in an attempt to recalibrate. Where had that shot come from? She’d been watching the barrels of her opponent’s gauntlets, and they hadn’t fired—
She rolled over onto her back with the intent of jumping upright again, only to come face-to-face with Fire-head, who was standing directly above her.
“Just stay down, please?” she said. “I don’t know why you’re here, but I—” She broke off as Penny’s radar lit up, informing her that someone was approaching them. Junior, the bearded bartender, stepped into her field of vision, holding an enormous bazooka on one shoulder. He had it aimed directly at the blonde girl.
“Sorry, girlie,” Junior said, nodding to Penny. “I was aiming at the she-devil. Thanks for the help, though.” Then he cocked his bazooka. “She’s going to pay for the damage to this place, one way or another.”
Fire-head put a hand on her hip, tilting her head and not looking intimidated in the least. “I knocked you out like two minutes ago, you really want to try that again?”
“Oh, I’m not going to go for you this time.” Junior suddenly shifted the bazooka’s barrel down, pointing it directly at Penny’s head. “Put down your weapons or the little miss gets it.”
What? What was he doing? His sneering face held absolutely no concern for her well-being at all. Just what had Penny walked into?
“You’re holding one of your own people hostage?” Fire-head seemed much more concerned for Penny. She was now realizing that perhaps she should’ve waited to know more about this situation before charging in.
Junior snorted. “She’s not with me. No idea where she came from.” He pushed the bazooka a little closer to Penny—she could see right down the inside of the barrel now. “Weapons down. Now.”
“What?” And now Fire-head’s eyes met Penny’s again, thoroughly confused. “What’re you doing here?”
“I was passing by and I saw a scene of chaos and terror! I thought help was needed.”
“Oh, that’s—huh.” The look on her face was a fascinating mix of surprised and amused and dismayed. Her red scarf, which she wore loosely around her neck, had gotten bunched up, and for some reason, she chose this moment to untangle it before continuing. “Okay. So, in case you didn’t know, this isn’t an upstanding establishment. It’s a mob hangout.”
“What?” Penny looked up at Junior again, stunned. “You are a criminal?”
“Nothing provable in a court of law, kid.” His tone was growing more and more exasperated with each new thing out of his mouth. “Now will you shut up and—”
“Then what are you doing here?” Penny said to Fire-head (At this point, her hair was no longer on fire, but Penny still needed some way to refer to her internally), ignoring Junior.
“I was looking for information! About a woman I’m searching for!” Fire-head shot a glare at Junior. “And I know he knows something about her because he’s the same kind of person she is, but he was playing dumb! I was putting the screws to him when his goons started shooting at me!”
Oh. She had been defending herself. Suddenly, her odd behavior when first encountering Penny made much more sense.
“Hey—” Junior started to say, only to be immediately interrupted by Fire-head, still talking to Penny.
“So you were just… you were just walking around in the middle of the night in a bad part of town with a fuckoff-huge sword and you heard a fight and you ran towards it?”
“Yes!” Then, considering that was not an adequate answer, Penny elaborated. “I am going to be a Huntress! It is my duty to help wherever I can, whenever I can!”
“A Huntress? Wait, are you a student at Beacon?”
“Not yet; I will be starting this upcoming semester!”
Fire-head’s eyes went very, very wide, even wider than when Penny had made Luminous go full-size. “No way. No way. I’m an incoming first-year, too! We’re going to be classmates!”
A classmate! Could she be a future friend? They had certainly gotten off to a difficult start, but—
“Will you two stop blabbering and LISTEN TO ME?” Junior yelled, cutting off her thought process.
Penny thought the yelling was a little unnecessary, since he was right there, but that was beside the point. She was getting quite tired of his posturing, and he’d finally moved the bazooka close enough to her head that she could do something about it.
Quicker than the human eye could track, she reached up, grabbed the bazooka’s barrel with both hands, and yanked it forward with a great degree of force. Junior barely had time to scream as he was flipped over Penny and thrown onto the floor in a sprawling heap, knocked unconscious immediately.
“I believe an introduction is in order!” Penny said, jumping to her feet and holding out a hand to the other girl, who was still gaping at the abrupt takedown. “My name is Penny!”
“I’m Yang,” the other girl said. “Also, good grief, nice job.”
“Thank you!” Penny beamed at the compliment, entered the name in her database, and surveyed the rest of the nightclub. Hmm. It seemed that some of the mob lackeys—not security guards, as she’d previously thought—were getting their courage back and seemed to have designs on attacking them. “I believe we should vacate the premises now.”
“Yeah, let’s skedaddle,” Yang said.
Oooh, skedaddle. That was a good word. Nice and bouncy. That was going in Penny’s favorites.
She cast a sideways glance at Yang as they departed, and found herself wondering… Could they be friends? None of this seemed like typical friendship-building activities, but they had introduced themselves to one another! That was a good first step. And Yang seemed quite impressed with her!
They stepped out into the now-deserted road, and she took a moment to emotionally prepare herself for whatever answer she received. “Perhaps... we could be friends at Beacon?” she asked finally, vibrating with anticipation.
“You kidding? Of course! I think we’re gonna get along great,” Yang said, giving her a wide smile.
Penny went through each word of Yang’s reply and realized, to her utter shock, that Yang was accepting her offer of friendship. There was no way this was happening. Was she dreaming? This had to be a dream. Even though she knew perfectly well it wasn’t a dream, because in dreams words didn’t make sense and all the words were making sense right now. It had to be a dream. This was too good to be true. Right? She checked her radar. Radar didn’t work in dreams. And her radar told her that yes, there was definitely a girl standing next to her, a girl who was now her friend and had called her cool. She lunged forward and hugged Yang.
“Ah!” Yang yelped. Then: “Okay! I guess you’re the kind of person that hugs a lot. That’s cool.”
Cool. Yang had called her cool. This was one of the best days of her life!
“I can’t wait to see you at Beacon!” she said. “I am looking forward to saving the world with you!”
“Wow, ambitious much?” Yang let out a small laugh. Then she came to a stop, fingering the red scarf around her neck and gazing off into the distance at something Penny couldn’t see. Then she held up her scroll, stared at something on it, and sighed before pocketing it.
Just before Yang put it away, Penny caught sight of a black-haired woman with red eyes like Yang’s, who looked strangely like her.
“Yeah, I’m looking forward to it too.” Yang balled her prosthetic hand into a fist, pointing it at Penny. “To saving the world.”
Pause. Yang was clearly waiting for something. Penny sensed an unidentified social custom.
“Uh…” Yang waved the fist slightly. “Are you going to leave me hanging?”
“Hanging?” Penny glanced at Yang’s feet in confusion. “But you’re on the ground.”
“No, I mean…” Yang pointed at her fist. “Fistbump?”
“What?” That term was not in Penny’s databases.
“You don’t know what a fistbump is?” she asked, astonishment plain on her face.
“No, what is it?”
“You… you bump your fists together. Like this.” She made another fist with her remaining hand and tapped them together. “Now you do it.” She held out the fist again.
Penny bumped her fist against Yang’s. “Like that?”
“Yup!”
“Why do people do this?” she asked, fistbumping again.
“Uh… because it’s cool?”
“Ooh! So we’re being cool?”
“Absolutely.”
“Hooray!” Penny tapped her fist once more, and then again, harder. “Fistbump!” She wasn’t just acting cool, she was being cool!
“Okay, careful, that last one was hard enough it could hurt somebody who doesn’t have a metal hand,” Yang said, clacking her prosthetic’s fingers together.
Oh dear. Yang had no idea how unintentionally accurate her choice of words was. She would have to be more careful with such gestures in the future.
Yang’s eyes—curiously enough, now lavender-colored instead of red—went to Luminous Electra, safely strapped to Penny’s back again. “Is that a zweihander?”
“Yes, it is!”
An indecipherable expression came over Yang’s face—the most Penny could make of that was she thought something was funny. “You should meet my dog sometime.”
Penny blinked slowly at Yang. “What?”
“You’ll see when you meet him.” She clapped a hand down on Penny’s shoulder. “Come on, I think I owe you a soda for dragging you into that mess.”
All of Penny’s confusion at the leap from swords to dogs was replaced by consternation as she wondered how to hide the fact that she could not drink fluids.
Present Day—Beacon Academy
“—So, yeah. That’s how we became friends!” Yang said to their captive audience. At first, it’d been just Blake listening, but slowly everyone else, even Weiss, had started paying attention. After a pause, Yang added, “It sure was a thing.”
“What was a thing?” Penny asked. “I am sorry for my confusion, but there are an infinite number of things that could be the thing that you’re referring to.”
“I mean....” Yang let out a little laugh and waved her arms in an arc. “The whole thing.”
“Yes,” Penny said after thinking about it, “You are right. That was most certainly a thing. Many things.”
“Vigilantism. Ugh.” Weiss sniffed loudly. “You haven’t even taken a class at the academy yet and you’re trying to exercise authority on the streets?”
“Okay, how many classes is it okay after?” Yang said.
Weiss’s only reply was a groan, and then she flopped face-first into her pillow.
“Fascinating,” Blake said. She was watching Yang with an expression that Penny found to be quite peculiar. “Did you ever find the person you were looking for?”
Some of Yang’s energy seemed to drain out of her, and she shook her head. “Nope.”
The way Yang said that left an awkward silence over everyone, as Penny struggled to think of how a conversation could be restored from that point. Thankfully, Yang took care of that.
“But enough about me. Penny, question!” Yang turned abruptly to her. “How did your parents let you have a zweihander for a weapon? I had a hard enough time convincing my dad that I wasn’t going to blow myself up with my shotgun gauntlets.”
“Erm—” Penny ran through a series of possible replies she could make, most of which would only invite more questions about her past. She could only think of one way to answer that would be absolutely guaranteed to stop any further pursuit of this subject. But it was also the most reckless option. And if what Yang had just said was a conversation-killer, then this would massacre the conversation. But it was still better than making people suspicious.
“My parents are dead,” she blurted out.
Fortunately or unfortunately, it worked perfectly. Yang closed her mouth with an audible click, and suddenly no one seemed able to look directly at her, and most definitely no one was saying anything. Until—
“That explains a lot,” Weiss muttered, her voice still muffled by the pillow.
“Hey!” Yang snapped. “Watch it!”
“Aaaand I think that’s our cue to go to sleep,” Blake said, shutting her book with a thump.
In one of those nonverbal forms of communication that Penny still didn’t quite understand, everyone else behaved similarly, putting away things and fluffing up pillows and getting settled. Except for Yang, who was still writing something, holding a pen light between her teeth for illumination.
“What are you doing?” Penny asked quietly.
Yang started to say something completely incomprehensible, which Penny could only understand as “rnn a lrrr oo nn ud,” before realizing she still had the pen light in her mouth. She stopped writing to take it out, and now her words made sense to Penny. “Sorry. Writing a letter to my dad.”
“Oooh, fun!”
“I promised I’d keep him updated on how I’m doing.” Yang scribbled out one final line and folded the paper up, tucking it into her duffel bag. “I’ll mail it tomorrow.”
Then she yawned and curled deeper into her sleeping bag, her mane of hair fanning out around her on her pillow as she laid down fully.
“We have a game we play where we try to summarize our day to each other in one word,” she said just as Penny thought she would be drifting off to sleep. “One word, how would you describe today?”
“Swimmingly,” Penny said after a moment’s consideration. Yes, there had been some hiccups and unfortunate incidents, but overall, many good things had happened!
Yang chuckled, very quietly. “That’s not the word I picked, but I like it.”
“What did you choose?”
“Explosive.”
“How… fitting.”
And now this talk of words was reminding her of the very important question from earlier.
“Yang?”
“Mmmm?”
“Do words have tastes?”
“...Penny, what.”
Notes:
Penny and Yang’s meeting has been changed from the original version. In the original version, they met at Torchwick’s dust robbery, but I changed it to Penny interrupting the Yellow Trailer.
Chapter Text
Penny made sure to be the first person at the launchpads the next morning, even before Ozpin and Glynda. She sat down in the grass near the edge of the cliff with her back to the school, with Luminous Electra laid across her legs. This was the final part of her plan, and in a few minutes, her success or her failure would become clear. She traced her hands along the circuit-board pattern that ran up Luminous Electra’s blade, and tried not to think about what would happen if this didn’t work.
She wanted to protect people. The fervency with which she felt that was startling. This was a piece of her, something from her lost past that felt… integral to herself. It felt wrong to sit idly by in such a dangerous world when she was so powerful. There were so many people she could help… if she were allowed to help.
She wanted to help. She very much wanted to help.
There was nothing Penny could do now except watch the trees below rustling in the early-morning breeze as she waited.
A red-and-green hummingbird buzzed down from above, and flitted around her head—apparently mistaking her brightly colored hair for a flower of some sort. She giggled, and shook her head gently, trying to encourage the bird to look elsewhere without scaring it. But instead of flying away, the bird swooped down to her midsection, where it hovered for a few moments before alighting on her forearm.
Penny’s eyes widened, but she kept all of her excitement internal, not wanting to spook the tiny creature perched on her. It kept cocking its head back and forth as if trying to understand what it was looking at.
“I am sorry, but I am not a flower,” Penny whispered. If only she could learn to speak hummingbird. “There are some nice wildflower patches north of here. Try looking there!” She pointed and gave a careful shake of her arm, and finally the hummingbird flew off in a blur of motion, disappearing into the foliage almost immediately.
She closed her eyes and smiled, and for the rest of her wait she concentrated on the trilling of distant birds, making a game out of picking out individual calls and identifying the species as quickly as possible.
Eventually, Penny felt a ping on her radar—what she was waiting for. Two figures were walking down the path from the school. As they rounded the last bend, they both stopped short at the moment when they would’ve caught sight of her sitting there. After thirty-four seconds, the two figures began walking towards her again, with a considerably faster pace. Penny did not allow herself to turn around until she heard a voice directly behind her.
“Penny,” Ozpin said, his tone full of surprise. “What are you doing here?”
She stood, turned, and drove the tip of Luminous Electra into the ground before her like she was planting a flag between her and Ozpin. Then she looked directly into his eyes, and spoke words which she had spent hours choosing.
“I am going to be a Huntress.”
Her voice rang out into the morning stillness, and in the pause that followed she wondered if perhaps she’d grossly miscalculated this. She tried to parse any part of Ozpin’s reaction, but there was absolutely nothing in his face that she could understand. She did not dare to say anything else yet.
Finally, Ozpin gave Glynda an indecipherable look. Glynda gave him one right back. And then she walked away without a word, tapping at her scroll. Was it a glitch in Penny’s emotional analysis systems, or was there the tiniest upward curl at the corners of Glynda’s lips?
Ozpin looked down into his coffee mug and let out a long sigh. “When you were brought here by your father, I made a promise to him.”
Penny went very still. It was rare for Ozpin to speak of her life before awakening at Beacon. Any hint she received about that mysterious period of her life, she treated with the utmost importance.
“A promise that I would not let any harm come to his daughter.”
These words were familiar.
“How would I be keeping any part of that promise to him if I let you become a Huntress and go forth into all the immense danger that the occupation carries?”
She closed her eyes. And this was what she had been told on previous occasions when she inquired about being a Huntress.
“But I promised him another thing. I promised that I would ensure your freedom.”
Penny opened her eyes, surprise coursing through her cables. That was new.
Ozpin glanced at the hilt of Luminous Electra, which she continued to grip tightly, feeling as if she couldn’t let go until she definitively knew his answer.
“And how would I be keeping any part of that promise if I stopped you from doing something you desired with all your heart and soul?”
Another hummingbird, sporting the same plumage as the one from earlier, zoomed past. Penny wondered if it was the same bird.
“Two promises. Whatever decision I make, I will break one of them. So, I’ll leave it up to you, Penny. Which promise should I honor?”
Safety or freedom. Freedom or safety. Perhaps it was an excellent philosophical debate, but Penny did not want to be at the center of a philosophical debate. Not when the answer felt so obvious to her.
“Safety does not signify anything to me without freedom,” she said.
A slow smile crept over Ozpin’s face. He took a sip of his coffee, nodded, and held out a hand to her.
“Welcome to Beacon Academy, Miss Pallas.”
Penny beamed. The shift to the honorific that Ozpin used for Beacon students told her everything she needed to hear—everything she’d hoped to hear. It was happening! It was happening!
She pulled Luminous Electra out of the ground, re-holstered it, and shook the Headmaster’s hand. “Thank you! I promise that I will do my very best!”
“Oh, believe me—” Ozpin shook his head. “You do not need to convince me of how much you want this, or how qualified you are—of your strength in both, I am quite convinced.”
“I’ll take some of that strength right about now,” came Glynda’s voice—she’d rejoined them and was still focused on her scroll. “We have about ten minutes before we can expect the other students to begin arriving, and in that time I am going to create a student profile for you in the Beacon database, Miss Pallas—a process that normally takes hours, I should mention.” She stopped typing to pinch the bridge of her nose. “Honestly, you couldn’t have informed us of your intentions a few days earlier? I think the result would’ve been the same.”
Penny sheepishly tugged at the strings of her hoodie, drawing the edges of the hood close around her face. “I believed that a dramatic touch would be the best way to convey the significance of my desire to be a Huntress.” It was an informed decision! Ozpin most definitely had an appreciation for dramatics.
Ozpin coughed. Glynda made a harrumph noise. “And naturally, the task of resolving the now-asymmetrical team architecture falls to me.”
“I do not think that will be a concern. After all, there are usually at least several students that drop out during initiation. I believe Beacon has a waitlist procedure for such situations?”
Glynda looked up and stared at her. “Miss Pallas, if you bring that combination of preparation and determination to your training, you just might save the entire world.”
Penny blinked. Was Glynda being sarcastic? She was a very serious person, but it seemed incredibly illogical to assume she could save the world based on how she’d convinced Ozpin to let her attend Beacon. Personally, Penny thought that her ability to decapitate a Nevermore in one swing was much more relevant to her world-saving ability.
“The first person you make eye contact with after landing will be your partner for the next four years.”
A murmur swept through the crowd of first-year students at those words from Ozpin. Penny turned to look at Yang, who was also looking her way.
“We can be partners!” Penny said excitedly as the first catapult launched, sending Weiss into the sky.
“You bet!” Yang said, pulling out a pair of aviator sunglasses.
“I’ll aim for wherever you land! And I am exemplary at tracking, so just stay put and I will find you in no time.” With Penny’s infrared vision, tracking Yang in the forest would be easy. And her landing strategy would make it even easier. Oh, she couldn’t wait. It was going to be so exciting!
“See you at the bottom.” Yang adjusted her aviators, made finger guns at Penny, and then, with a WHANG, she was gone, flying into the deep blue sky.
Penny ran a quick system check—everything was working—and then—
WHANG.
She was flying. Well, not truly flying, just moving through the air in a parabolic arc consistent with an object thrown in the air, but she was going to actually begin flying right about— now.
Flight mode, activate!
At the apex of her arc, she sent a command to the necessary components, and a panel opened in her back. Two gleaming white wings slid out with a ka-chunk, passing through the flaps she’d cut in her clothing and extending out through the sides of the small metal backpack she’d built for the sole purpose of disguising her wings. To anyone else, the metal backpack hid the area where her wings met her back, making it look as if she was just wearing a jetpack with retractable wings. The backpack’s only function was concealment, and it was essentially just a shell. A very important shell, though!
Flight mode, activated.
Penny fired her wing-mounted thrusters. Now in full control, she soared through the air over the Emerald Forest, still tracking Yang’s form as it fell towards the treeline. She couldn’t help the giant smile that broke out over her face. This. Was. Actually. Happening! Her initiation was underway! She was officially on track to become a Huntress!
“Welcome to Beacon Academy,” she whispered to herself in wonder as the wind buffeted her face, repeating the ever-so-important words Ozpin had said to her minutes ago. “Penny Pallas, Huntress-In-Training.” Oh, yes.
“I’M DOING IT!” she cheered to nothing in particular, flipping herself over in midair to face the sky, reveling in the warm sunlight on her face.
Touch, unlike many other senses, was something that her body was able to perceive. Her skin’s sensors had been originally designed only to perceive extreme temperatures and textures which might damage her body, but she’d long since customized these sensors to detect smaller variations in temperature. That may not have been the most efficient thing to do since her modified sensors generated lots of extra data, but who cared about efficiency when she could feel the warm sunlight on her face! Or cool drops of morning condensation on grass! Or the warmth of someone else hugging her! All these touches were some of the most important data to ever flow through her processors.
She had felt the warmth of the sun on her face many times before, but this was the first time she’d felt it while flying over the Emerald Forest as a Huntress-In-Training. And somehow, for reasons Penny did not know how to quantify, it felt better. Quite literally, it generated many more ones and zeros in her associated memory than she would’ve expected
Even the Emerald Forest looked prettier today! Lush green green trees as far as she could see, a cloudless blue sky that stretched on forever, and distant purplish mountains that—
WHAM.
Wha—?
Suddenly, Penny was in a ferocious spin, and an array of warnings lit up her sensors. Possible structural failure in right wing—right thruster failing—ground proximity warning—unidentified objects in mouth—
Penny spat out something soft and fuzzy—a black feather?—and switched off her right thruster, and fired it again, hoping it would ignite. It did, at reduced power, giving her just enough thrust to pull out of the spin. Now out of immediate danger, she slowed to a hover and scanned for the source of the catastrophe.
Nearby, a very-dazed looking bird was tumbling out of the sky, shedding the same black feathers Penny was spitting out.
“Birdy, no,” she whispered in horror as it fell into the trees.
Her right wing had buckled inward where the bird struck, but thankfully the damage had spared both the thrusters and the power cables, so the only problem now would be reduced lift and increased drag. It would be best to touch down now.
As she landed, she retracted her wings, wincing at the sound of scraping metal as another array of warnings flashed across her sensors. That right wing did not want to go back in. She’d need to fix it later, but for now her not-jetpack would hide the damage.
She switched her radar to automatic, and nodded in satisfaction when no hostiles showed up in the vicinity. Only then did she realize that she’d completely lost track of Yang. Nothing was showing up on her radar, either. Turning in a circle, she couldn’t even detect a heat signature anywhere.
Now she was not sure what felt more intimidating: braving the Emerald Forest alone, or facing a randomly assigned partner.
Suddenly, a heat signature flashed in the trees ahead. Yang?
Penny drew Luminous Electra, her senses on high alert. Yes, there was definitely a human ahead, but it was behind a bush, rendering its outline too indistinct for her to identify. Only one way to find out!
She pushed aside a branch and stepped into a small clearing. Weiss Schnee stood on the other side, her rapier drawn and aimed at Penny.
Oh.
Penny was having less-than-happy feelings about this.
For a few long seconds, they both stood, staring at each other. Finally, Weiss lowered her weapon.
“Hello!” Penny said, minimizing the disappointment which was rising up inside her. She had no idea how to make this girl like her. Everything she’d tried so far just hadn’t worked. So she would keep trying. Some would call that insanity, but this time she was going to try harder.
And then Weiss said, “No.”
“What?”
“I cannot attain perfection with you as a partner. Pretend this didn’t happen. Find someone else.”
Before Penny could calculate a reply, Weiss turned as if to leave.
“I—” she started to call out, only to abruptly stop when her radar warned her of something approaching. Approaching directly at Weiss, in fact.
“Weiss?” she said. “There’s—”
Weiss did not acknowledge Penny, and Penny could not help but think that if Weiss had listened to her, she would’ve avoided running directly into the person who emerged from the bushes at that moment.
Thud.
Weiss staggered backwards in a cry of surprise as Penny scanned the newcomer. Height: six feet five inches. Eye color: green. Hair color: red, pulled back in a ponytail. Outfit: stylized bronze armor, clearly forged with incredible quality.
Weiss, curiously, appeared frozen in place, staring at the green-eyed girl, who had paused upon seeing Weiss but was now looking back and forth between her and Penny with uncertainty.
Penny stepped up to Weiss’s side, putting a hand on her shoulder. “My apologies!” she said brightly. “We’re already partnered up!”
The green-eyed girl nodded and darted soundlessly back into the brush, leaving Penny alone with a still-gaping Weiss.
Fourteen seconds later, Weiss turned, leaned her head against a nearby tree, and began pounding the trunk with her fist.
“Weiss?” Penny said cautiously.
“I could’ve had Pyrrha Nikos,” Weiss said without looking up. “The Invincible Girl. The greatest fighter of her generation. A demigoddess in all but name. Instead, I’m stuck with a girl who thinks light-up sneakers are appropriate Huntress attire.”
Penny looked down at her shoes. What was wrong with them?! They provided a more-than-sufficient amount of durability and traction, and the fact that they were black and lit up in neon green was an immense bonus! They were hip!
Her entire outfit was hip, in fact. She had a poofy combat skirt (Weiss couldn’t possibly criticize that aspect of her outfit because she was also wearing a combat skirt) and the incomparable form of attire known as the hoodie, and temporary tattoos! A Huntress needed to put on a friendly appearance, and what better way to do that than little water-soluble designs of kittens applied to her skin?
“Do not fret, Weiss. I am just as capable as anyone else in our year.”
“I seriously doubt that,” Weiss muttered. “Pyrrha has poise, and grace, and flair, and you have…” She lifted her head from the tree and stared at Penny, her face scrunched up into a squint which made her feel very uncomfortable. “…An oversized sword.”
Penny stepped back, and for the first time, she felt genuinely tired of Weiss’s behavior. She was eager to make friends, and so she’d tried not to let Weiss’s yelling and criticism bother her. But now? She just wanted Weiss to stop. She could not imagine facing this demeanor for four whole years.
Suddenly, Penny heard a loud crunch from behind her, and at the same time, her radar beeped, warning of a large object speeding straight at her head. Without looking, she threw her right arm out and caught whatever was about to hit her just before it smashed into her head, blocking its path with her outspread palm.
Weiss’s eyes bulged as she stared at whatever was behind Penny, and Penny turned her head to see a massive Ursa towering over her. Her arm was holding back one of its massive paws, which had been milliseconds seconds away from smashing her with a potentially deadly blow. The Ursa was straining its arm, completely unable to make an inch of progress against her. She could feel the force of its arm pressing down on her, and it didn’t matter. Her body had been built to withstand blunt forces much greater than even a fully-grown Ursa.
She dropped Luminous Electra and, with her now-free other hand, grabbed the Ursa’s paw and leaned forward, pulling its arm down hard. The Ursa flipped forwards over her crouching body and landed flat on its back in front of Penny.
She let go of its paw to seize its neck with both hands, pinning it to the ground with one knee across its chest. And then she looked up at Weiss, whose mouth had fallen completely open, her eyes bulging and her rapier half-drawn.
“I believe there is a common phrase that very aptly describes me!” She continued to meet Weiss’s stare and ignore the Ursa roaring and flailing under her, her grip unyielding even as Weiss had to take a step back to avoid a wayward paw. “Never judge a book by its cover, or a girl by her shoes!”
She picked up Luminous Electra with one hand before the creature could move, and swung her blade down onto its prone body. It exploded into dust instantly.
Weiss was still staring at Penny, completely oblivious to the black Grimm gunk piling up on her shoes. Hm. It wasn’t often that Penny could ascertain a person’s emotion with exactly one hundred percent certainty, but that was what was happening right now with Weiss, whose expression was pure shock and nothing else.
“How?” she managed, finally finding her voice. “You… you just stopped a blow from an Ursa like it was nothing. You didn’t even flinch. That’s not possible, even with Aura.”
Penny stopped short. She’d planned for this. She knew exactly what she had to say. She’d rehearsed it already. But in the moment—actually having to lie—it felt different.
“It’s my Semblance,” she said. And then moments later, she hiccuped. Ugh! She thought she’d finally rooted out that bit of coding inside her which was responsible for the strange hiccup-upon-lying protocol, but it seemed there was a backup file somewhere inside her that she still would have to track down. And the excitement of initiation was bringing the nervous habit back to the surface.
Thankfully, Weiss didn’t seem to notice. “Your… Semblance?” she asked.
“I have super strength!” Which was at least partially true. Her body was designed to parameters far beyond the strength of a normal human. So that technically, in itself, wasn’t a lie. “It is like my body is made out of metal.” Again, not a lie. “Here, I’ll show you.” She turned to a tree next to her and sized it up before drawing her fist back and punching it with a force calculated to split it in half.
With a crunch, the trunk splintered directly where she’d hit it, and the tree swayed for a few seconds before crashing to the ground.
Penny turned to Weiss as the tree settled amongst the undergrowth, a few stray leaves floating down around them. She took a moment to nonchalantly inspect her knuckles where they’d connected with the bark. It appeared her skin was holding up okay. That was good. She’d been worried that a collision with enough force would scrape it away and reveal the very un-organic parts of her underneath.
“Well, Penny...” Weiss straightened, and the shock finally began to slide off her face.. “I admit that I have been… rather harsh… in forming my initial judgment of you.”
Penny brushed a speck of dust off her shoulder. Was that praise? Well, compared to everything else that Weiss had said, it was.
“I do believe I can make you work as a partner, in fact,” Weiss said, and if Penny was better at recognizing emotions in voices she would’ve confidently said there was admiration in Weiss’s tone. There was a chance she was misidentifying it, though.
“But I need to warn you, being my partner won’t be easy. I need to attain perfection.”
Penny frowned slightly. “That is not realistic.”
Weiss shifted slightly, putting her rapier back in its holster. “As the heiress to the world’s largest company, I am held to a much higher standard than my peers.”
“But perfection? It is statistically and physically impossible for anyone to be perfect.”
Penny was quite literally an intentionally constructed person, capable of micrometer-precise inputs and nanosecond-perfect timing, and even she did not think ‘perfection’ was possible to attain. Even putting aside the thousands of ways an environmental or technological glitch could occur, no matter how accurately tuned or isolated her processors were, there was always a chance that a cosmic ray could flip a bit in her data and throw off a calculation. So how could anyone expect perfection from the chaotic force of nature that was the human body, filled with bones and fluids and unstable chemical reactions?
Weiss sighed. “You may be correct, but only by aiming for perfection can I attain the exemplary results that I need.”
Penny tilted her head. “That sounds exhausting. Why do you need that?”
Weiss opened her mouth, but before she could reply, another voice cut through the brush.
“Hellooooo? We saw a tree fall over here, is there a Grimm we need to kill?”
“What?” Weiss said, at the same moment Penny said “Hi, Yang!”
“Not a Grimm, then!” A bush in front of them shook violently, and then Yang poked her head out, grinning widely. “Yo, Pens, really sorry but I ended up with another partner—” Then her eyes fell on Weiss, and she blinked slowly. “Oh. My condolences.”
Weiss crossed her arms. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Not to worry! We are starting to build a rapport,” Penny said to Yang, instead of answering Weiss. “Who is your partner?”
“Look up.”
Penny did, monumentally confused, until her radar picked up someone crouching on a tree branch directly above, hidden from the radar by leaves until now.
Blake Belladonna dropped neatly down between Penny and Weiss and nodded to them both.
“I saw the temple to the north of here. We should probably go there together?”
Blake’s suggestion was met with assenting nods, and in a matter of moments the four of them set off on a journey.
They had walked a fair distance when suddenly, Penny’s radar went off, alerting her to an anomalous presence ahead.
“Hold on.” She raised a cautioning hand to the others. “There is something nearby.”
Weiss, Blake, and Yang all drew their weapons.
“Trouble?” Blake said, shifting into a crouch.
“Inconclusive,” Penny said after a moment. Whatever it was, it wasn’t moving on her radar‚ but that didn’t exclude the possibility of Grimm. And it also could’ve been a false positive—her radar was advanced, but it had its glitches.
“What did you see?” Weiss said, leveling her rapier at the trees.
“…See?” And then Penny remembered, oh right, Weiss had no idea she had radar, only conventional eyesight. “I am… not sure.”
Blake used her katana to slice away a tree branch blocking her way. “Looks like there’s a clearing ahead.”
There was indeed. And in that clearing…
“Whoa,” Yang said as they came to the clearing’s edge. “There can’t be too many of these out here.”
The wreckage of a bullhead was scattered before them. The most visually arresting feature was the mangled and warped main fuselage of the ship, jammed up against two rotting tree stumps. A deep gash in the ground traced the path the bullhead had made as it crashed and disintegrated. The wings had been torn from the fuselage and twisted into nearly unrecognizable scrap, and the thrusters weren’t in any better condition—one was wedged into a tree, and the other was embedded in the ground, as if they’d been flung there by some immense being having a tantrum.
“This is old,” Blake said as they advanced into the clearing, lowering their weapons. “It’s all rusting. Has to have been out in the rain for a long time.”
“Yeah.” Yang was edging over to the cockpit. She glanced in and let out an immense sigh of relief. “Oh, good. No bodies. I wonder if the school knows this is here?”
Well, Penny couldn’t blame her radar for thinking this was anomalous. There were a great deal of odd angles and shapes for signals to bounce off here.
“I can’t imagine they wouldn’t know.” Weiss was poking at a small piece of wreckage with her rapier. “I don’t think a ship crashing near Beacon could go unnoticed.”
Actually, Penny had heard Ozpin mention this wreck once to Glynda. But why had he mentioned it? She went deeper into her memory. He had been talking about the danger of—
She reached for Luminous Electra. “I think we should depart immediately.”
“Why?” Yang said. “I don’t—”
Unfortunately, Penny didn’t get a chance to explain what danger Ozpin had been talking about, because that danger manifested itself before them in the form of a massive grinding sound. Slowly, the ruined fuselage began to lift up out of the ground, and simultaneously, the thrusters ripped themselves from their resting spots and skidded across the ground towards the main fuselage, barely missing Weiss as she dove out of their way.
“What—” Weiss started, only to be cut off by Penny’s shout.
“GEIST!”
There was a half-second where they were all staring at the massive Grimm assembling itself before them, the thrusters settling under the fuselage to form legs, while the wings rose off the ground to become arms. And then slowly, the beast turned to face them, a single giant yellow eye staring out at them from behind the cracked canopy.
Thankfully, nobody needed an explanation of what a Geist was. Or, if anyone actually did, nothing Penny could say could be as educational as watching the thing trying to kill them.
“They can possess a ship? That’s just not fair!” Yang yelled, launching a volley at it from her shotguns. When her shots bounced harmlessly off its armored back, she let out a noise of frustration that was cut off when she had to roll out of the way to avoid being smashed by a wing.
Penny deflected a careening thruster with her sword and scrambled towards the edge of the clearing, trying to get out of range of the Geist’s limbs. It seemed that everyone else was having the same idea—except Blake, who had leapt on top of the nose of the bullhead—now pointed skyward—and was firing into its canopy. But the glass was holding strong, and as Penny watched, the Geist whipped around, tossing Blake into the broad side of a tree.
Penny and Yang ran for Blake as Weiss waved her hand, and then a row of… something appeared in front of her. It looked like glowing white sigils floating in midair, but Penny didn’t have time to concentrate on that, because in the next second she was by Blake’s side. Yang got there a moment later and stepped between Penny and the Geist, laying down a barrage of double-fisted cover fire. Blake was on her hands and knees, breathing hard, her pulse elevated but other vital signs relatively steady.
“Are you okay?” Penny said worriedly.
“Just… fine…” Blake gasped out. “Had the… wind knocked out of me.”
Then Penny’s radar lit up with a type of warning that she had come to associate with IMMINENT DANGER! and at the same moment, Weiss yelled, “PENNY!”
She turned and swung Luminous Electra straight into the path of the Geist’s giant wing-arm as it flew towards her, and the collision of metal produced a shockwave that ruffled her hair. But she held her ground, the giant blade doing exactly what she’d designed it to do: stopping anything smaller than a mountain.
“Move!” she said to Blake and Yang, who were still beside her. “It’s going to—”
The Geist drew back and swung again, and the other two dashed back into the clearing as Penny batted away its next attack. Meanwhile, Weiss had switched to a new kind of floating sigil—this one was light blue, and seemed to be bombarding the Geist with ice, but it wasn’t having any effect at all. Nothing was getting through.
Weiss stopped her barrage to wave frantically. “Penny! Blake! Yang! We need to hit it with everything we’ve got!”
“You got it!” Penny spun the Dust cylinder on Luminous Electra, landing on Fire Dust. The dual barrels on either side of the blade were supposed to let her shoot no matter which way the sword was facing, but it didn’t hurt that they also doubled her firepower. She lifted Luminous, narrowed her eyes, and pulled the trigger.
Gunshots rang out from all over the clearing. Suddenly, the Geist was under attack from four directions as a colorful array of projectiles bombarded it. It staggered under the initial assault and turned in a half-circle, suddenly confused as to where to focus its attack next, but it remained stubbornly upright.
“Come on!” Yang roared, unloading her gauntlets with astonishing speed. “Take some damage, will you?!”
As if answering Yang, the Geist tilted down, its fuselage brushing near the ground.
“It’s down! Press the attack!” Blake yelled. “If we—”
But then Penny realized that the Geist wasn’t down. It was rooting around in the wreckage for something.
When it reared back up, there was something attached to the end of its arms. Penny squinted, trying to identify what it’d picked up. And then dread coursed through her.
The Geist was now dual-wielding a pair of massive miniguns that were packed to the teeth with ammunition. It seemed that the crashed bullhead had been armed. Very armed.
“RUN!” she screamed, but Blake, Weiss, and Yang were already in motion as the sound of gunfire exploded across the clearing, clouds of dust kicking up around their feet as they ran for cover. Penny ran for a large boulder, and when she dove behind it, she wasn’t surprised to see the other three already there.
“We have to run!” Blake said, flinching as a spray of gunfire shredded the tree just in front of them.
“Are you out of your mind? We’ll be easy targets if we run!” Weiss shot back. “We’ve got to destroy it before it destroys us!”
The hyperactive rattle of the miniguns continued unabated, and as the rock Penny was leaning against began to shake intensely, she calculated that they wouldn’t have long before their cover was obliterated.
Blake shook her head violently. “Do you see all the downed trees in this forest? Even if we destroy the Geist’s armor entirely, it’ll just find something else to possess and come after us again. We have to get to an open space.”
“But we can’t stay ahead of it!” Weiss said. “And where would we even go?”
The ground shook under them in steady, rhythmic tremors—the Geist was approaching them, Penny realized.
“The temple with the relics!” Yang said suddenly. “There’s gotta be some other students there that can back us up, right?”
“We’ll be sitting ducks in the forest!” Weiss protested again. “Anything we have to go around, it’ll just run right through!”
Suddenly the boulder shook with tooth-rattling force, and a large, watermelon-sized chunk of it went tumbling over their heads and landed about eight inches from Yang’s ankle. She stared at it for a half-second, and then shook her head. “I don’t know about you, but I’m taking my chances with running!”
Penny had been listening to the back-and-forth conversation with growing eagerness, because she’d found a solution. This was what she loved about battles. She never had to worry about social cues or saying the wrong thing or what other people were thinking when they were fighting giant monsters. The language of battle was very easy to understand.
“We can use my flight mode!” she said.
Weiss, Blake, and Yang stared at her.
“Your what?” Weiss said.
Penny had to resist the urge to clap a hand over her mouth. “Sorry, my jetpack!”
“You have a jetpack?” Weiss, Blake, and Yang asked simultaneously.
In reply, Penny deployed her wings, wincing at the metal-on-metal scraping of the damaged wing against her wing shell.
Weiss frowned. “It looks defective.”
“Just a little surface damage!” Penny said, while quickly rechecking all her sensors just to make sure it was , in fact, surface damage. Thankfully, it was. “If I fly up above while you all are on the ground, I can keep the Geist’s attention off you until you’re out of the forest, and then we can regroup at the temple.”
“That’s perfect— wait—” Blake hesitated. “Penny, if you’re up in the air, that thing’s going to have a clear shot at you. You can’t put yourself in that kind of danger.”
“There’s an easy solution.” Penny pointed at Weiss. “Weiss, I need you in the air with me! Use your glowing symbols to block that thing’s guns!”
“But how am I going to fly?!” Weiss said.
“Simple! I’ll carry you!”
“Are you—” Weiss started to say, but that was as far as she got before Penny lunged forward and wrapped her arms around Weiss, lifting into the air.
“It’s a plan! Let’s go!” she said before Weiss could protest, and they all scattered. And not a moment too soon, because Penny had barely gotten three meters in the air before the boulder they’d been hiding behind disintegrated as the Geist brought down the blunt end of a wing down on it.
“This is the WORST IDEA EVER!” Weiss shrieked as Penny rose into the air, her arms wrapped tightly around Weiss.
“If you have any better plans, please share them with me so I may adjust accordingly!” Penny said, adjusting her flight vectors.
Weiss didn’t answer, so Penny chose to move forward on the assumption that she did not have a better plan in mind. So, Plan A—
She slowed to a hover. “Hey! Over here, you big bag of bolts!” she yelled at the Geist, hoping it would notice her.
It did, in fact, notice her. It swung both of its miniguns towards her, their barrels spinning energetically, and Weiss inhaled sharply, raising her rapier. A glowing white sigil appeared in front of them, and not a moment too soon. A storm of gunfire blazed across the sigil, leaving glowing black marks in the air just inches from their faces.
“Use both of your hands to cast your symbols if you need to!” Penny said. “I can hold you just fine.”
“I can cast perfectly well with one arm, thank you very much,” Weiss snapped, clinging harder to Penny’s neck as she aimed her weapon. Another hail of gunfire pattered off the sigil, but this one didn’t let up. “And by the way, my ‘symbols’ are called glyphs. ”
“Fascinating!”
“Penny, go,” Weiss said suddenly through gritted teeth. “It’s too much gunfire, I don’t know how long I can hold this—”
Penny didn’t need to hear another word. She weaved left, dodging the hail of gunfire, and then put on a burst of speed, zooming forwards. The Geist followed, tracking its newly skybound prey.
“It’s following us,” Weiss said as the Geist lumbered through the trees after them. “I don’t know whether to be glad that the plan is working, or utterly terrified that we’re being chased by a sentient gunship!”
Personally, Penny was thrilled. This was the first time that she and Weiss were actually working as partners! And all it had taken was being placed in mortal danger! Maybe this partnership could really work!
She switched to infrared vision and glanced down, scanning the woods. Blake and Yang were sprinting through the forest, heading due north. Then she lifted her head and saw the temple on the horizon. Activating her telescopic vision and zooming in, she could see that yes, there were already some students assembled there. Good. There would be backup. If they could reach it.
The sound of bullets pattering off Weiss’s glyphs again brought her attention back to their flight, and she shot upwards again, rolling to the left, to the right, and left again.
Weiss made a strangled noise. “Can you try to fly more smoothly?”
“I cannot. The damage I suffered during the bird strike earlier today reduced the amount of lift I can produce in my right wing. As such, I have to continually adjust my flight path or we will crash.”
“You said that was just surface damage!”
“It is surface damage. I can still fly!”
“I am never trusting anything you say EVER AGAIN!” Weiss screamed as the angry buzz of bullets filled the air around them yet again.
Penny decided not to respond to that. Weiss, looking over Penny’s shoulder as they flew, had the only visual reading of the Geist, and she didn’t want to distract her from their defense any more.
There was a distant, echoing boom from near the temple, and a moment later Penny saw the flash of an explosion—oddly enough, a pink explosion.
“What—LEFT! GO LEFT!—was that?” Weiss said.
“There seems to be a conflict at the temple,” Penny said. She zoomed in on the far-off battle and gasped. “They are fighting a Deathstalker and a Nevermore simultaneously. They’ve—ooh, that was a good shot by the red-haired girl. She just took out the Deathstalker’s eye!”
“The red-haired girl?!” Weiss cast another Glyph, gripping Penny’s neck even tighter. “Do you mean Pyrrha Nikos?”
Oh, right—Penny zoomed in a little further, and recognized her as the girl who Weiss had run into earlier. “Correct! She is doing an exemplary job of fighting that Deathstalker.”
“Of course she is. She’s perfect,” Weiss said. Then, after a pause, she added: “Wait. We’re bringing this Geist into a fight with a Nevermore and a Deathstalker?”
“Just a Nevermore now,” Penny said. “I believe that Nora has blown up the Deathstalker, if the giant pink mushroom cloud is anything to go by.” That, she had to admit, was not an outcome that she’d predicted.
“I… okay. Keep flying. Please. GO UP! GO UP!”
What had brought on Weiss’s sudden panic was, in fact, Penny getting distracted by the distant battle and sinking too close to the trees. She pulled up just before they brushed the tips of the nearest pines, making skyward again.
But as they shot up, Penny realized that the glyph that Weiss was holding was now angled downward, leaving an opening for—
Several bullets slammed into her wing, which was already weakened by her accident earlier. One second passed. Two seconds. And then a flood of warnings flashed across her mind. All of them telling her that the energy cable on her right-hand wing had just split from the force of the bullets’ impact.
Right on cue, her right thruster spluttered, and its high-pitched whine faltered, turning into a splutter.
“Please tell me that was intentional,” Weiss said.
Penny had to act fast. She dismissed all the warnings, cut all power to her right-hand wing, increased the thrust on her left-hand wing, and banked left to avoid going into a spin that would be unrecoverable at this altitude.
“Penny? You meant to do all those things, correct?” Weiss said, her voice very quiet.
“Weiss.” Penny tried to find appropriately “I must inform you that one of my jetpack’s engines has gone out.”
“THEN WHY ARE YOU GOING UP?!”
Penny had, in fact, leveled out by the time that Weiss asked that question, but it was a forgivable error on Weiss’s part. “I can still fly safely to the field ahead! It is quite possible to fly on a single thruster. It only takes concentration and—”
Her left thruster coughed and went silent.
What? Penny frantically checked all the alarms—nothing, nothing except “electrical anomaly in left wing” but how—oh, the damage to her right cable must’ve caused a short-circuit in the left wing somehow—a short circuit that she didn’t know how to fix—
“Weiss,” Penny said again. “Status update. We are going to crash.”
“WHAT?!”
“But fear not! Even with the damage to my wings, I can still glide safely to our destination! I can maintain a glide ratio of—”
“You said we were going to crash!”
“It will be a very controlled crash.”
“Brilliant,” Weiss muttered, readjusting her glyph. A particularly concentrated burst of gunfire lit up the air around them. “Will we be able to stay ahead of that thing?!” she finished, once things had calmed down relatively.
Penny didn’t answer, because she was too busy calculating their descent rate. Now that she was a little bit closer and she could estimate distances better, she had a better idea of what it would take to—Oh. Oh, dear.
“We are not going to make it,” Penny said.
“WHAT?”
It was an especially bad miscalculation, given that she was supposed to have unparalleled computing power. “Even at the most optimal glide ratio, I will descend below the treeline approximately—”
Suddenly, something was pushing up on Penny from beneath. She looked down and realized that Weiss had cast one of her glyphs beneath her, and it had just slowed their descent immensely.
“Does that help? Please tell me it does.”
“Yes! Yes!” she said, recalculating. “We can make it now if—”
“Penny. The Geist is catching up to us.”
Right on cue, a splintered tree branch flew by Penny’s head.The problem with gliding was that if she wanted to go faster, she had to descend faster. And they quite literally could not afford to descend any faster right now. Penny could see the Geist getting closer and closer on her radar, the fire from its machine guns growing more and more ferocious—
And then just as the Geist was about to be within arm’s reach, gunfire broke out from the forest floor almost directly beneath them, peppering its main body with fire that, while ineffective, pulled its attention away from them.
“Yang! Blake!” Penny said joyfully. She hadn’t even checked her infrared, but they must’ve caught up, noticed their predicament, and laid down covering fire. “We’re going to make it! We’re going to make it! We’re going to—” Penny faltered as they closed in on the treeline. “We’re… going to hit that tree.”
And then they did. Fortunately, it was literally the last tree before the forest gave way to open field. Just before impact, Penny whirled around in midair, putting herself between Weiss and the tree, and her right wing hit the trunk first with a worrying crunch. They bounced off and tumbled downward, cascading through branches and leaves, and landed in an unceremonious heap on the ground.
For a few moments, there was complete silence as Penny listened to yet another wave of alarms for her flight mode, each of them more severe than the last.
Weiss rose to her feet and let out a groan. “I will… never… disparage the quality of comfort on an Atlas-to-Vale flight… ever again.”
“Are you okay?” Penny said.
“Yes. You?”
“I’m sensational!” Penny jumped to her feet and tried to retract her wings. They jerked, moved an inch, and stopped. There was a loud metallic clang. And nothing else happened. Well, one thing did happen. She got more warnings about how damaged her wings were.
A cacophony from the woods pulled her attention away. “Let’s fight that Geist!” she said, drawing Luminous Electra. She could worry about her wings later.
She and Weiss backed away from the forest as the trees nearest to them began to shake. Blake and Yang came sprinting out of the undergrowth, firing behind them as they went. And seconds later, the Geist burst out, tossing aside several trees as it stomped into the open.
“Great! The gang’s all here!” Yang said, coming to a stop next to Penny and Weiss. “Now we can die together!”
“Die?!” Penny repeated, glancing at Yang, who looked oddly cheerful for someone who’d just made such a pronouncement. “Does our outlook seem that poor to you?”
“Oh, sorry. Joking,” Yang said, cocking her gauntlets.
Ah. Sarcasm. It was always sarcasm that got her.
“We got it away from the trees.” Blake glanced at the wide-open field behind them. “Now we need to figure out how to kill it. And I’ve got an idea.”
The Geist, for the moment, seemed to be preoccupied by the sudden change of scenery. It glanced around in confusion, completely ignoring them.
“Let’s hear it,” Yang said.
“Weiss, how many of those symbols can you do at once?”
“As many as you’ll need. And they’re called glyphs.” Weiss said, looking none too pleased at having to repeat her definition. Blake ignored Weiss’s displeasure and looked at Penny.
“Penny, your jetpack—?”
“Not working,” Penny said, while frantically trying to restart the left thruster. There was nothing actually wrong with it as far as she could tell, but whatever electrical short the right wing had caused was clearly keeping it from restarting.
“Okay. We’ll have to—”
Whatever Blake was going to say, it was lost to the annals of time, as the Geist chose that exact moment to charge at them again.
Penny and Weiss broke left, and Blake and Yang went right. The Geist went after Blake and Yang, coming just inches away from their backsides with a swipe of its arms.
With the Geist’s back turned to them, Penny and Weiss launched another salvo at it, Penny switching her sword to Fire Dust.
“Do you know what Blake’s plan is supposed to be?” Weiss asked, twirling her rapier in a complex series of motions. A giant glowing glyph appeared under the Geist’s legs, tossing the metal beast sideways in a cloud of dust.
“I have a reasonable inference!” Penny was still trying to restart her left thruster, and she was still getting an error message tossed back at her every time she tried it. What was going on back there?
Unfortunately, all Weiss’s glyph had done was turn the Geist’s attention onto them. It immediately recovered from the fall and was stomping towards them, raising its massive arms.
The most logical thing to do in such an instance would be to dodge out of the way of such an obviously telegraphed move. But this was the first day at Beacon, and Penny felt like showing off a little. Besides, she had to impress her partner. So she set her legs, raised Luminous Electra in a double-handed grip, and braced herself.
The Geist brought down its arms on Penny with a deafening CLANG, and she moved exactly 0.03 meters. Penny was choosing to believe that right now, if a Geist could look surprised, it would... look surprised. And then she shoved upwards, and the Geist was sent stumbling backwards, its attack returned with an even stronger force. Showing off was fun!
“How can you just do that?” Weiss said, staring at Penny open-mouthed. “I know it’s your Semblance, but you act like your body’s indestructible!”
Penny froze, trying not to let Weiss see how close she’d come to the truth. Showing off was a mistake, actually.
Thankfully, she was saved from thinking of an acceptable reply when more action from the other half of the battle caught their attention.
Blake was tossing her pistol to Yang, stretching out the attached ribbon between them—making a perfect tripwire for the Geist as it staggered backwards. It never saw it coming. Blake’s ribbon caught the creature’s leg. It stumbled again, and for one exciting second, it was tipping over.
But then it swung its arms around and somehow arrested its descent—before whirling around and kicking Blake sideways.
Penny lowered her sword, watching the Geist make another pass at Blake as Yang rushed to defend her. Even if they tripped it, it knew how to get back up. This was a smart one.
The Geist turned a minigun on Penny and Weiss at that moment, and they scattered to avoid getting hit. But the Geist chose to follow Penny with its gun, the breeze from the bullets whistling just inches from her hair.
“OH NO YOU DON’T!” Out of nowhere, Yang slid in front of Penny and immediately took a faceful of bullets.
“Yang!” Penny cried, reaching out, but Yang just looked back at her with a grin as bullets bounced off her Aura. And then the Geist was distracted again as Blake ran between its legs, slashing at what would be its ankles, if a Grimm made of airship wreckage had ankles. Penny took the opportunity to check Luminous Electra’s Dust levels. She was out of Gravity Dust, and almost out of Fire Dust. This fight needed to end soon.
“What I wouldn’t give for a speed Semblance right now,” Yang grumbled, reloading her gauntlets. “Something this big shouldn’t be able to move that fast.”
“Oh! Speaking of moving!” In all the chaos of the fight, she’d completely forgotten to check her left thruster again. Maybe the break had given it the time it needed to sort out its electrical nonsense. She restarted it once more, hardly daring to hope, and—
Nothing. Not even an error message this time. Penny stomped her foot in frustration. A new approach was needed. It was time for… concussive maintenance.
“Yang?”
“Yeah?”
“Please kick my jetpack.”
“What?”
“Kick it in the left wing on the lower side. Any force will be sufficient.”
“If you say so!” WHAM.
Yang had chosen to kick with a very large amount of force, and the reaction was immediate. The thruster came back online with a roar, and Penny rose into the air.
“How did that work?” Yang said, taking a step back.
Concussive maintenance! Always a terrible idea, but sometimes the best terrible idea. Except, there was one problem. The thruster had turned on at full power. And it was not throttling down, no matter how many times she sent the command.
“Thank youuuu!” Penny called out as she zoomed upwards. At the moment, there wasn’t much else she could do besides fly. She turned her attention back to the fight, zeroing in on the Geist as it was trying to grind Blake into dust. She buzzed its head in an attempt at a distraction, and Blake saw Penny fly overhead.
“Penny!” she shouted, hurling her pistol towards her.
Penny reached out and caught it before giving Blake a questioning look. Blake made a twirling motion with her fingers and pointed at the Geist. And Penny understood immediately. That was a brilliant idea.
She dove for the Geist as it made attempt #17 to squash one of them—it was Weiss who was currently the target, but she was doing an admirable job keeping it off-balance with repeated attacks with her Ice Dust. And the Geist was so caught up in trying to go after Weiss that it completely failed to notice as Penny came soaring in and swooped around its legs, wrapping Blake’s ribbon around them. As she came back for her second go-round, the Geist noticed her going past its head—but before it could make a move at her, Yang came charging at it from below and fired point-blank into its underside.
That pulled its attention away once again, and it turned both of its machine guns on Yang at once—but Yang didn’t even try to block. She stood there, grinning, for one, two seconds, and then—
Instead of gunfire, there was nothing but a rapid clicking. Penny, just finishing her fourth circle with Blake’s ribbon, glanced over and realized that the miniguns had finally, finally run out of ammo. The barrels, still pointed at Yang, were spinning pointlessly.
The Geist, suddenly noticing that its two best weapons were now useless, might’ve retreated at that point if it weren’t for what Penny had been doing for the last twenty seconds.
As she came out of the final turn, she had wrapped Blake’s ribbon so securely around the Geist’s legs that it was practically immobile. Of course, it didn’t know that yet.
Penny swooped low, stabbed Blake’s katana into the ground to anchor the ribbon, and pulled up just as the Geist took one step—one attempt at a step—and came crashing down, kicking up a spray of dirt and grass. However, even tied up, it flailed its arms, still trying to push itself forward—
“Yang?” Penny heard Blake call.
“READY!” Yang replied, followed by the sound of an explosion.
Penny looped back around, still trying to negotiate her completely-stuck thruster, and had just enough time to note that Yang’s hair was on fire like their first meeting before Yang fired her shotguns behind her, sending her speeding through the air towards the prone Geist, flames streaming behind her and her eyes glowing redder than her scarf.
Yang slammed a fist into the Geist, and there was a sound like a thunderclap as wreckage went flying in every direction. The fuselage itself, where the Geist still resided, bounced and tumbled several times before coming to rest in the middle of the field, a massive dent in its back where Yang had hit it.
Penny stared. Or, at least, stared as well as one could stare while flying through the air at a high rate of speed. That had not been a normal punch. She very much wanted to know how Yang’s Semblance worked.
“Weiss, lock it down!” Blake yelled.
Weiss waved her hand, and circles of black glyphs appeared around every strewn part of the Geist, which had been cut off from its limbs for the moment.
Spindly, twitching Grimm arms shot out from the central fuselage, darting across the clearing and latching onto the scattered parts, but when the Geist tried to pull them back to the main body, Weiss’s glyphs held strong. The Grimm had been rendered completely immobile.
Penny, still circling above, saw her opportunity. She flicked a switch, and Luminous Electra’s Dust barrels retracted back into the blade. The Dust cylinder, set to Fire Dust, had just enough left for the final move. She pulled the trigger, and instead of firing a Dust bullet, the Fire Dust spread down the middle of the blade, igniting as it went.
When she’d explained yesterday that she could turn the blade into a ‘flaming weapon of complete and utter destruction,’ this was what she meant. She was now wielding Luminous Electra as a giant pillar of flames that was still very, very sharp.
She dropped into a steep dive, Luminous Electra held in front of her and pointed directly at the burning eye of the Geist, lurking behind the bullhead canopy.
And then mid-dive, her left thruster coughed and died.
Well. She was just falling now. Still, that didn’t change her plan.
Luminous Electra punched through the canopy, sending up a spray of broken glass, and went straight through the eye of the Geist. The Geist exploded into black dust even as the blade kept going, piercing through the other side of the wrecked bullhead and finally grinding to a halt, embedded in the fuselage and the ground.
Just like that, the fight was over.
Penny lowered herself to the ground, kicking aside a cloud of dissolving Grimm gunk. She yanked Luminous Electra out of the soil, stepped out of the now- very- wrecked bullhead, and looked around.
Yang was doubled over, taking deep, heaving breaths. Weiss’s glyphs disappeared, and she began to sway like she might fall over. Seeing Blake run over to check on Yang, Penny chose to check on her own partner.
“Weiss?” she said, appearing by her side and holding her by the shoulders to steady her. “Are you okay?” Her vitals seemed just fine, aside from a heart rate that was very elevated for obvious reasons. Nothing that suggested an incoming medical emergency.
“I’m fine,” Weiss gasped out. “I just—just need a minute.”
“Excuse me, are you all okay?”
Penny looked up to see a towering redhead standing before them—Pyrrha.The same girl who had skewered a Deathstalker’s eye with her spear from fifty feet.
“I’m sorry we couldn’t help you,” she continued. “We were across the ravine when we saw you come out of the woods, and the Nevermore destroyed the bridge. By the time we found a way back across, it looked like you had the situation under control.”
Weiss let out a groan. “If that was having things under control, I can’t imagine what it’ll look like when we actually mess up.” Then she looked up and noticed Pyrrha. “But we did have things under control!” she added in a hasty, breathless tone that was oddly unlike her usual manner of speaking.
Then she turned to look at Penny, squinting. “Your wing is smoking.”
“It’ll be fine. It’s all electrical.”
“It’s smoking harder.”
“I stand corrected. May I borrow some Ice Dust?”
Notes:
jaune: you talked your way into beacon without any transcripts, just by showing up?!
penny: what, like it’s hard?
Chapter Text
“Penny Pallas. Weiss Schnee. Blake Belladonna. Yang Xiao Long.”
Safely out of the Emerald Forest and with all electrical fires now extinguished, Penny was bouncing in anticipation as she stood onstage before Ozpin with her new teammates.
Her new teammates. Just the simple action of thinking about that phrase made her vibrate. Her team was being formed, and they were only seconds away from being named! This was so exciting!
The only thing that was making this moment less-than-wonderful was the fact that her wings were still refusing to cooperate in any way, shape, or form. And, still extended in a crowded space, they were causing… problems. She’d already accidentally hit Weiss, and just a minute ago the only thing that stopped her wings’ casualty count from doubling were some sharp reflexes on Blake’s part.
And she had seen the strange looks that other students were shooting at her wings. She was not sure if the unwanted attention was due to the fact that she was still wearing her fake jetpack indoors, or due to the numerous dents and scorch marks on it. However! There was no need to dwell on the unwanted attention, because her team was being formed!
“The four of you collected the white knight pieces.”
She had been thinking over possible team names in her head ever since the four of them assembled in the Emerald Forest. And she hadn’t thought of a single working combination of letters despite thinking through every possible permutation. No pronunciation seemed to make any sense. Wubyip? Yapwab? Bwiyp? Pwiyb? Bipyaw? It was an impossible feat.
And an even more important question was who would be their leader? Could it be her? Leading wasn’t something she’d ever had the chance to do, but maybe this would be her chance! Still, best not to speculate—it wouldn’t be good to get her hopes up that she’d be team leader, only to be disappointed if someone else was chosen. It would be unkind to have a bias against their leader from the start.
“From this day forward—”
Penny took a deep breath and tried not to let her thoughts go into overdrive. This was it. Her team was being formed. From this day forth, she would be working with these girls to protect the world. They would face mortal danger on a daily basis, going head-to-head with countless terrifying beasts, horrors beyond anything the average civilian could imagine. Who knew what strange, exotic Grimm she would face? An airship-possessing Geist was just the tip of the iceberg! But, more importantly than anything else, they would be living together for the next four years. Which basically meant a slumber party every night, right? Would hair-braiding be involved? Was her own hair long enough to be braided? Hmmm. Longer hair could be fun! But to get that, she would have to figure out the exact chemical formula for the polymers that her hair was composed of—that was still a mystery to her. Maybe they would paint each other’s nails! Would nail polish stick to her synthetic fingernails? She would have to investigate. Pillow fights? What about pillow fights? Would they have those? She’d always wanted to have a pillow fight. The idea seemed so novel! It was combat without the possibility of anyone getting hurt!
“—You will work together as… Team Battleship.”
Penny turned to see the letters of their names rearranging to form ‘BSYP’ on the giant screen above them.
Well, there were certainly extra sounds added in, but it was an undeniably cool name!
“Led by… Blake Belladonna.”
“Yes!” Penny said, turning to Blake. “Congratulations!” She had more than earned this honor, and Penny was ecstatic with the selection.
Blake was staring at Ozpin with wide eyes, and she didn’t seem to register the congratulations that Penny and Yang were offering her at first. “Um. Thanks, guys,” she said finally, giving them a smile that looked very… odd to Penny.
Ozpin waited until the round of polite applause had ended before continuing. “That concludes the initiation. First-year students, please remain in the auditorium.”
“Eh...” Yang shook her head as they filed off the stage. “I don’t know about this team name. It feels like a stretch.”
“Is there even any other combination that could work at all?” Weiss said.
“Hm.” Yang took out her scroll and started typing on it. “Give me a few. I bet I can come up with something better.”
Considering that Penny had applied her computing power to this issue and not found anything better than Battleship, she did not feel confident in Yang’s ability to find something, but she could not say that aloud.
“Hey you guys, congratulations!”
Penny turned to see the newly formed Team JNPR waving to them from the first row of auditorium seats.
The rest of Penny’s team flopped down in the seats, clearly still exhausted from the day’s fighting. Which was understandable, even if Penny herself felt as charged as ever. Sometimes she wished there was a way to transfer some of her immense energy reserves to others.
“Thank you!” she said, beaming. And then, to Jaune: “Congratulations on being named team leader!”
“Thanks. Yeah… I gotta be honest, I wasn’t expecting that.” Jaune scratched the back of his neck as he glanced over the rest of Team BSYP. “Crazy day, huh?”
“Agreed! I have never had an engagement with the Grimm as unique as today’s events.”
“Oh, yeah. I thought we had it tough with a Deathstalker and a Nevermore, but a Geist with machine guns? Congratulations on beating it.”
“I thought killing two giant monsters was cool, but then you did that… I’m kinda jealous,” Nora added. Then she jabbed a finger in Penny’s direction. “You! I saw how you were waving that sword around like a toothpick! When are we going to arm-wrestle?”
Penny still did not know what arm wrestling was, and for that reason she was afraid to give a definitive answer one way or the other. Thankfully, she was saved by Pyrrha speaking up.
“You were an excellent choice for leader, Blake,” she said, giving her an appreciative look. “You made some inspired strategic decisions during that fight.”
Blake smiled at Pyrrha’s words, ducking her head. “Thank you. I thought of it in about fifteen seconds, so I’m just glad it didn’t end with us all in a coma.”
“Got it!” Yang said.
She was triumphantly holding up her scroll for everyone to see that she’d rearranged the team’s letters to ‘BXPS.’ She stopped for a moment, drawing in an overly emphatic breath, and then declared: “Team Biceps!”
“Team Biceps?” Weiss squeaked, every ounce of color draining out of her face.
“I LOVE IT!” Nora squealed. “Go ask Ozpin to change it right now!”
“We cannot—we cannot be a Huntress team named Biceps!” Weiss hissed. “Why are you even suggesting this?! It’s disgraceful! It’s unprofessional! No one would take us seriously!”
“Come on, Weiss! Team Biceps!” Our slogan could be…” Yang rolled up her sleeve and leaned over, almost falling onto Weiss’s lap, and stuck her own bicep directly in front of Weiss’s eyes. “WELCOME TO THE GUN SHOW!”
Weiss pushed away Yang’s arm and proceeded to bury her face in her hands. “Biceps are not even a color!” she said, her voice muffled.
“You sure about that? Biceps equals skin tones, so… it passes muster for me.”
“Team name changes can’t possibly be allowed, right?” Weiss looked around in desperation, as if expecting someone to confirm that. “It must be against the rules. Yang, just give up and—”
“Actually, team name changes are allowed!” Penny said. She had committed the entire Beacon student handbook to memory, so she was quite sure about this fact.
Suddenly, Weiss looked even closer to passing out than she had in the aftermath of the Geist fight. “WHY ARE YOU TELLING HER THAT?”
“However, it also requires the approval of every member of the team,” Penny added.
“Oh, thank the stars.” All of the tension left Weiss’s body. Then she whirled to Yang and jabbed a finger to her chest. “I would rather die than be on a Team Biceps, so you can stop with whatever delusions you’re having right now.”
“All right, all right, all right, I accept defeat.” Yang held up her hands. “We can still have fun with Team Battleship, at least.” She fixed a goofy grin on Penny. “Because, you know, battleships also have guns.”
Weiss groaned, but didn’t protest further.
“And Penny’s basically a fighting machine, so that’s even more fitting!”
Yang’s choice of words sent a stab of fear through Penny’s processors. There was no way Yang had guessed, was there? She knew that people used ‘machine’ as a figurative compliment, since it implied effortless, almost automatic action in a person. So was she being too automatic in fights? She’d spent so much time working on her behavior to try and fit in, but… was it still obvious when she fought? Did she need to be more unpredictable?
Penny studied Yang’s face. As far as she could tell, Yang was looking at her with genuine appreciation and no suspicion. Maybe it had just been a coincidence in her words. But she had been wrong about faces before. So, it couldn’t hurt to be a little more unpredictable.
Maybe she would do some backflips the next time she fought. Backflips seemed like a very unpredictable thing.
The whine of microphone feedback brought the possibility of further conversation to an end, and BSYP and JNPR turned back to the stage as Ozpin tapped the microphone.
“If you all would check your scrolls now….”
A slight buzz, easily picked up by Penny’s auditory sensors, filled the room as everyone’s scrolls vibrated simultaneously.
“You all have just received your Beacon login credentials,” Ozpin continued. “You should now be able to log into the student portal and find your room assignment, class times, and other vital information you will need in the coming weeks. I advise you to examine it with care. That is all I have to share with you tonight. Your baggage has been delivered to your rooms, and you are now free to retire to them.”
“Room assignments!” Jaune opened his scroll. “Where are you guys?”
“Let’s see... ” Blake tapped on her scroll, pulling up the assignment while Penny, Weiss, and Yang looked over her shoulder. “West 502.”
Jaune looked up from his scroll. “Hey, we’re in West 503! We’re hall buddies!”
An excited babble of “Hall buddies!” came in reply from all members of both teams. Even Weiss! But Penny thought it was possible Weiss was only excited about being across the hall from Pyrrha.
She would be living across the hall from four potential friends! Jaune and Nora were definitely the closest in her opinion to attaining ‘friend’ status, but Ren and Pyrrha seemed quite nice as well!
Four maybe-friends for neighbors. This academic year was starting truly wonderfully.
“And now we can sleep,” Blake said. “I can’t speak for all of you, but I’m beat.”
“Mmm. Same,” Yang agreed with a yawn, and with that the two teams began to depart.
Penny glanced between the members of her team as they approached the elevators, thinking fast. If Blake, Weiss, and Yang were going down to their room now, this could be the perfect time to repair her wings.
“I’m going to go down to the workshop and fix my jetpack,” she said. Had she made that sound casual enough? Was there any way to be casual about fixing a jetpack?
Weiss glanced back, squinting at Penny. “Now? You’re not going to get some sleep?”
Oops. Time to deflect suspicion. And for once, she didn’t have to hide the truth. “If I leave it like this, it might catch fire again. I believe that setting our room on fire during our first night as a team might leave an unfavorable first impression with the administration.” It would likely also leave an unfavorable impression with her teammates.
“Oh,” Weiss squeaked, taking a step away from Penny as the elevator opened with a ding . “Well... Don’t stay up too late. We cannot be late to our first class.”
Penny watched as Blake, Weiss, and Yang stepped into the elevator.
“What time is our first class, anyway?” Blake asked, pushing the button for the fifth floor.
Weiss rapped her scroll. “Nine o’clock sharp. On the other side of campus, I should add.”
Blake let out a nervous laugh. “This… might be a bad time to mention that I don’t own an alarm clock.”
“I hope I remembered to pack mine,” Yang said.
As the doors slid shut, the last thing that Penny heard was Weiss squawking, “Do either of you understand the concept of time management?!”
Now in a very different part of Beacon, Penny looked down the hallway one way. And then the other way. And then she checked her radar. And did an infrared check, for good measure. Because there was always the chance that someone with an invisibility Semblance had followed her. But—all clear.
She tapped the keypad on the door, quickly entering a 64-character randomized alphanumeric passcode (easy for her, and only her, to memorize), and the door slid open with a friendly chirp. Anyone who somehow managed to figure out the passcode would’ve found themselves in an elevator with exactly two unmarked buttons and one sliding panel in the wall. That was because there were only two people in the entire world that could’ve operated this elevator: Her, or Ozpin.
As soon as the elevator was closed, she ran radar and infrared checks on the elevator’s interior itself. Because there was always the chance that someone was already in the elevator and waiting for her.
Penny pushed the left button, and the panel—the only other feature in the elevator—retracted. A cable with a hexagonal connector slid out. It was a cable unlike any other in the world—at least, to her knowledge. She reached up and loosened her bow, turning it in a complicated series of motions before it unlatched from her head. Her fingers brushed over the small hexagonal data port built into her head that was normally hidden by her bow, and she reached for the cable.
Of course, she always checked the cable for any sign of tampering. Because there was always the chance that someone had gotten into the elevator, inserted some sort of electronic hacking device, and left before anyone could notice.
No, Penny was not paranoid. Paranoid people were afraid of what might happen because they didn’t know what might happen next. But she could plan for hundreds of outcomes for any given situation, so she always had an idea of what might happen next! Most situations only needed six possible outcomes to be planned for, but when it came to keeping her own secrets, she liked her plans for possible outcomes to be near the triple digits.
Satisfied that the cable was safe, she plugged it into the port in her head and simply thought: Up. And up the elevator went.
The port in her head was meant for some sort of technological interface, but Penny had never seen any kind of technology that used her type of connector. To create an interface with this elevator, she’d had to reverse-engineer the entire connection.
The elevator stopped with a ding. She unplugged herself and stepped out into a circular room with a high, vaulted ceiling. Far above, giant windows took up the entire walls, letting in enough moonlight to illuminate the room by itself. Floating green lights in the ceiling cast an ethereal glow over everything. A spiral staircase climbed up the walls, leading to a balcony that came level with the giant windows. If she chose to go up there, she would be looking out over Beacon’s campus.
This was the top of one of the academy’s towers, and it was her workroom. When she needed to repair herself, she came here.
She walked over to the other side of the tower, where a robotic arm sat dormant. It was one of the tools she relied on to complete repairs that she couldn’t do by herself. Such as taking off a fake jetpack that was stuck to her back. Her own
“Salutations!” she said, patting the arm’s shiny metal elbow and unhooking another interface cable attached to it. The arm wasn’t supposed to be sentient, but she believed being nice to machines was always a good plan of action. Humans could be so mean to machines sometimes, and what if one did have a soul and was just afraid to show it yet? Or didn’t yet know how?
Penny powered the arm on, waited patiently while it made all its usual startled boot-up sounds, and plugged herself in to it and sat down. Then she went to pull off her fake jetpack. Only to realize it wasn’t possible to remove right now because it would only come off when the wings were retracted. But in order to retract her wings, she needed to fix them. But in order to fix her wings, she needed to have her jetpack removed. But in order to have her jetpack removed, she needed to fix her wings. But in order to fix her wings—
Penny sighed.
She was very glad for the ability to sigh. As someone who didn’t actually need oxygen to live, it could’ve been optional. But she had breathing functionality! Although, it technically wasn’t breathing if it served a completely different purpose for her than it did for other people. Her ‘breathing’ served to help prevent overheating in her body by expelling heated air and drawing in cooler air. (Which, she had been startled to realize a long time ago, made her somewhat like a dog.)
It also meant that sometimes her exhalations became hot enough to be fire hazards. For that reason, she was not allowed to enter Beacon’s library in the first fifteen minutes after an engagement with Grimm. She hadn’t known that the flashpoint of some types of paper could be so low.
Anyway! Sighing! It was a very good action to do, because it felt very emotionally relieving, and she was sighing now because she was going to have to use the angle grinder, which meant that she’d have to use the arc welder later, which meant that she’d have to—
It was going to be a long night.
Penny did not want to be here. She wanted to be with her team, celebrating their first night together and putting on pajamas and going to sleep like a normal girl would. That was how the first night at Beacon was supposed to be. But because her body worked differently, she was here, alone and trying to fix something that other people didn’t have to deal with.
She unplugged herself from the arm and walked over to the nearest workbench, where the angle grinder was exactly where she’d left it two weeks ago when she repaired a dent on her foot. Unfortunately, she realized as she picked it up that the blade was too dull.
By itself, it was a very simple fix—nothing more than taking a new disc from one of the cabinets along the wall and replacing the worn-out one. By itself, it wouldn’t take more than a minute to complete.
But it wasn’t by itself. It was one more task on top of a quickly growing stack of them, the tipping point which sent a fresh wave of anxious thoughts rolling through her as she opened the parts cabinet. Was this what the rest of her time at Beacon would be like? It was all too easy to envision more mechanical problems, more complicated repairs, all of them separating her from her teammates and making it impossible for her to bond with them. How was she supposed to make friends when she was too busy trying to keep herself functional?
Her teammates were likely having an exciting conversation in their dorm right now, recalling the events of the day with happiness and admiration, and she was completely absent from this bonding activity, stuck alone until her body was working properly.
Oh no, what if they were talking about her? What if they were talking about how strange she was? What if they were figuring out at this very moment that she was a synthetic person? What if they had decided to kick her off the team already? What if they were already petitioning Ozpin for a new teammate? What if Ozpin would be coming up the elevator in just moments to tell her that, despite all her attempts to appear as normal as possible, she had been found out and that she could no longer be a huntress because clearly she was too strange and different? What if—
And then the elevator beeped. Penny’s eyes flew to the screen by the door, and her eyes widened as she took in the message displayed. Ozpin had just entered the elevator.
After a moment of terror, she reached out and tapped out a permission for him to come up. And then she didn’t move until the doors opened and Ozpin stepped out, tapping his cane lightly against the floor.
“Penny, how are you—”
“Do they know?” she burst out.
Ozpin, stopped short by her words, blinked once, twice, and then shook his head slowly. “No, Penny. None of your teammates know.”
“Oh.” Suddenly, Penny felt tremendously useless. How was she supposed to be a good Huntress when she couldn’t stop herself from worrying about this? But logically, the only way to stop worrying was...
She turned away from Ozpin, her gaze passing over the various pieces of industrial machinery and the cabinets of raw materials around the room before she found a blank section of wall to stare at. She hugged herself tightly, trying to quell the rising pressure in her chest and throat. “I’m—I’m going to have to tell them.”
“Sometime, perhaps,” Ozpin said, and his reply sounded so noncommittal that she whirled around to face him. Could he possibly be saying… that she didn’t...
“Surely I have to tell them? I shouldn’t hide this from them! They deserve to know that—that I’m different, and that there’s people who might be out to get me, and—” Penny forced herself to stop. She could feel her body temperature starting to rise, the stressful situation sending her processors into a frenzied whirring. How could her new teammates be her friends if she told them? How could they be her friends if she didn’t tell them?
A sensation on her shoulder broke up her thoughts. Ozpin had crossed the room to lay a hand on her shoulder, and he was looking directly into her eyes. “Telling someone your deepest secrets, the ones that you’re most afraid to let go of, is something that’s incredibly hard to do. You may indeed tell your team about yourself someday, but that should only come when you are ready.”
Penny stared back. She wanted to believe what Ozpin was saying, she wanted to have a reason to put off telling them, but it still felt horrible. “What if I’m never ready?”
“Never is a long time. Longer than you might think.”
Was that a joke? It couldn’t be. Ozpin’s expression looked far too serious for it to be a joke. Unless it was sarcasm—
“Your secrets and your past are your own, Penny—not someone else’s to demand from you. In the end, nobody will make you say anything except yourself.”
Not sarcasm, then. And his words gave Penny the best answer of all the outcomes she’d considered for this conversation. “I will tell them.” She paused upon realizing the words had come out with more force than she’d intended, rumpling the hem of her skirt in her hands, and then she turned back to the angle grinder. “But... not yet.”
“I understand,” Ozpin said.
He understood. That was all Penny needed to hear before she darted forward and wrapped her arms around Ozpin. She couldn’t hug him when there were other students around because first-year students weren’t supposed to be friends with the Headmaster, so she’d resolved to just give him extra good hugs when the opportunity arose. Like now.
“Thank you,” she said.
‘Of course.” Ozpin was silent, and then he added in a slightly strained tone, “I do need to breathe, Penny.”
“Oh! Sorry!” Penny jumped back. “Are you all right?”
Ozpin chuckled. “Perfectly. It’ll take more than a little suffocation to stop me.” He fell silent, gazing at a window outside. “The actual reason I came up here was to discuss your future.” He paused again. “And your past.”
Penny nodded. She’d expected this. There was no more fitting place for her to discuss this topic than this tower. Because this was where her memories began.
Some time ago
Penny opened her eyes, very quickly realizing that a significant amount of time had passed since she’d last been conscious. She was sitting in a chair at a small table in a circular room, and a man in glasses sat across from her.
“Salutations!” she said immediately, initiating greeting protocols. “My name is Penny… Penny… Penny…” She trailed off, struggling for the next word, and it was only then that she realized that something was very, very wrong. She had a last name, she was sure of it, but… she couldn’t remember it? It was just… gone from her memory. And it quickly became apparent that her surname was not all that was missing. She had no idea of what had happened before she arrived in this room. Or... how she had arrived here. Or… any idea at all of what had happened in the previous days… weeks? Months?
There was no before. She had no memory.
The only hint that she’d ever existed before was a definite sense of years passing. A feeling that there should have been something in her memory, something to fill in the before. A before that had lasted a long time. She had existed. She was sure of it. But where? And with who? And why could she not remember anything?
Penny closed her eyes and tightened her fists, trying to hold in a growing panic. There were too many questions. And no answers at all. She… did she even know who she was?
No. She did know who she was. She was Penny, she was a girl, and she existed. She liked fireflies and she liked laughing at things with somebody else and she liked the color green and she didn’t like the noise that jet engines made and she didn’t like when people treated her as if she didn’t have any feelings and she didn’t like the rain.
She wasn’t sure how she knew these things, but she did. And if someone asked her how she knew those things when she didn’t remember anything about her past, she couldn’t explain it. It was just… there. Parts of her, just as much parts of her as the servos in her elbows or the sensors in the tips of her fingers.
The panic didn’t abate, but it stopped rising up in her and making her feel as if she was about to malfunction horribly. She had herself, and that was enough for now.
She opened her eyes again and looked up at the man, fully analyzing him for the first time. Hair color: silver. Eye color: brown. Outfit: black coat, black pants, green vest. Heart rate: normal. Accessories: coffee mug in hand. Cane leaning against the table. Current emotions: concerned. Identity… known? This was… Professor Ozpin, the renowned headmaster of Beacon Academy. Which meant… he was likely trustworthy. How did she know who he was?
Well, he was a well-known individual. It simply could’ve been common knowledge dropped into her memory banks. Any personal memories were gone, but there was an accumulation of general knowledge in her memory banks still, non-specific knowledge that could’ve been picked up by anyone from any corner of Remnant. For example, she could name every species of Grimm known to populate the continents, but… how she had actually acquired that information, she couldn’t know. Which Grimm had she fought, exactly?
Wait, why had that question even come to her mind? Had she fought Grimm before? Penny blinked, shaking her head as if to try to shake loose memories that were refusing to appear. This was a useless endeavor. She needed help. Which meant addressing Ozpin.
“I… I am missing critical information from my memory banks,” she said finally, hoping that her voice was the right mix of pleading and cautious and without sounding too scared. “What has happened to me?”
“You have had most of your memory erased,” Ozpin said.
His words were like a mountain collapsing on top of her. Erased? By who? Surely not… by Professor Ozpin? Did he have some sort of nefarious motive? But if he had erased her memory for malevolent aims, why would he tell her immediately after? But then who had erased her memory? And why? Who would take away her memories, her past, her life?
She twisted in her seat, observing the room. It was empty and featureless aside from the two of them. There were no windows at eye level to see out of, but the uninterrupted blue sky outside the windows higher up suggested that they were at an elevated altitude.
“I would like to see where I am,” she said after a moment, her eyes following the path of the spiral staircase up to the balcony she’d just noticed.
“By all means,” Ozpin said, gesturing.
Penny pushed her chair back and rose, noting with surprise some resistance from the servos in her knees. She shook her body out, moving her arms and then her head, discovering other joints that were even stiffer. One finger joint was, in fact, stuck. This would only have happened after being in low-power mode for a very long time. Even longer than her previous estimates.
She walked up the stairs, her knees slowly loosening up. She wasn’t sure what she hoped to see. It wasn’t as if her memories would be laid neatly out on the ground outside like someone’s laundry.
Cresting the last step, she stepped out to the windows and gasped as she saw a vast array of buildings laid out beneath her. Even in her current distress, she couldn’t help but notice how stunning the view was. And on her left was a huge tower, even taller than the one they were in, its distinct shape was immediately recognizable.
Footsteps sounded on the stairs. She turned and saw Ozpin ascending. The combined presence of the headmaster and the Cross-Continental Transmit System tower led her to a conclusion that she could state with ninety-nine-point-eight percent certainty.
“This is Beacon Academy.”
“Indeed it is,” Ozpin said. “ I imagine this must be a time of great panic and confusion for you, and I hoped that being able to see where you were might ease your worry at least a bit. Magnificent, isn’t it?”
Penny gazed out at the landscape, only to realize she hadn’t found what she was looking for. She’d been hoping that seeing where she was might trigger some dormant memory, un-erase at least a little of the blankness of her past so that she might understand anything of what was happening to her. But there was nothing.
She turned back to the only source of answers in her currently-very-small world. “Why am I here?”
“Your father sent you to me for your protection. ”
“Oh.” Penny processed the information and then focused very quickly on one part of that statement. Her father? “I have a father?” she asked.
Then, as she spoke the word father, she was suddenly seized with the feeling that there was something she should be remembering here, something that was just below the surface of her memory but frustratingly out of the way. Something she had to remember. But what…?
And then a second thing struck her. Protection? What did she need protection from? She was ready to face any kind of danger! She had a body that could withstand a direct hit from a Goliath tusk!
…Why did she know that without having to check?
“Why do I need to be protected? I’m strong.” Immediately, she regretted speaking so quickly—Ozpin hadn’t even had time to reply before she’d fired her next question.
“Ah. Precisely.” But he didn’t seem to mind as he came to stand next to Penny, gazing out over the landscape below. “ There are powerful individuals that want to use you for their own aims. Because of what you are.”
Penny frowned and looked down at her hands. On the surface, she looked like a human. But underneath, the electricity thrumming in her circuits and giving her consciousness told a very different story. She was very physically strong. And damage-resistant. And maybe other people wanted that strength. But why would they want that strength? To protect themselves? Or to hurt others?
“For what?” she said aloud. At Ozpin’s questioning look, she hastened to clarify. “What did they want to use me for?”
Ozpin sighed, and his lips settled into a tight line. Something flashed across his expression that Penny couldn’t parse. “I cannot tell you, Penny. I wish I could, truly. But you and your father agreed that removing the memories of your past would be best for your protection.”
Gazing at her reflection in the window, Penny saw her eyes widen. “I... I did this to myself?”
“It was an incredibly hard choice for you both. But in the end, you decided that remembering would only place you in much greater danger. And it was your own decision, one that you voluntarily made.”
“Oh.” All of a sudden, she felt heavier than she ever had. What had happened to her? What was so dangerous, so powerful, to drive her to do something as awful as erasing her own past?
The feeling of a memory just out of reach returned, as if there was something stuck to the back of her mind that was just a few good shakes of her head away from coming loose. Penny had to resist the urge to actually shake her head. No matter how much it felt that way, Memories didn’t work like that, especially not hers.
“However, at the very least, I can tell you why they wanted to use you.”
Penny looked up again as Ozpin continued, his indecipherable expression transforming into one of disgust. “The people who want to manipulate you don’t understand that you’re a person with your own agency, and you have a heart and a soul. They sought to control you, take away most of your autonomy.” His eyes went to the horizon, tracking the path of a distant airship across the sky. “Unfortunately, they have the power to do that with ease. That is why your father sent you here. So you would be free.”
“But…” Penny turned away from the window and took two short steps towards the stairs, curling her fingers into nervous fists, suddenly very aware of a tightness in her chest, one that she wasn’t sure came from sensors failing from lack of use, or from her sudden despair. “He couldn’t come with me?”
“Your father wanted nothing more than to come with you. But he was too visible, too easily followed. He had to send you alone. Just like your memories, he was afraid that his presence would only place you in infinitely more danger.”
“Is he safe?”
“Yes. He was never in danger. Only you.”
There was silence between them for a moment, and then she heard a footstep. Ozpin was by her side again, giving her a look that… Pity? No, that wasn’t it at all. Sympathy? Closer… but still no.
“He loves you a great deal,” Ozpin said, stopping her emotional analysis in its tracks. “He could have chosen to keep you with him in secret. But he knew that would have meant a fearful life spent in constant hiding, and he understood that would not be an enjoyable life for you. He gave you up because he wanted what would be best for you.”
What was best for her? Penny stepped away again, back to the windows. No matter how hard she tried, she could not form an image, even a made-up one, of her father in her mind. It was... disconcerting. And just as she couldn’t fathom his face, she couldn’t fathom the idea of a confined life—being stuck in a hiding place, someplace like this tower, for the rest of her life? For fear of being found out by some entity that only saw her as some tool?
The sudden conclusion she reached was so jarring, surprised her so much and brought her thoughts to a halt so quickly that she had to triple-check her sensors just to make sure that something hadn’t actually hit her in real life. Her father was right. She didn’t want to hide.
“I’ve heard many times that the truest sign that you love someone is being able to let go of them.” Ozpin took a sip of his coffee and gazed up at the arched ceiling. When Penny didn’t respond, he continued. “It is a very hard thing to do. And your father did it more gracefully than most people on this planet would, including myself. To keep a promise to him, I wish to ensure your freedom.”
“You... do?”
“I want to give you a choice, Penny. Whatever you wish to do next, I will do my best to help you.”
“Really?” Even as she asked that, she was already panicking at the thought of having to make a choice when she had no idea what she wanted.
“You could stay here, at Beacon. You would be welcome.” Ozpin paused, looking closely at her as she nodded eagerly. “If that’s not to your liking, I could help you find a family to live with, one that would accept you as one of their own without a second thought. And... if you think I am lying to you about any of this, then I will not hold you here against your will.”
Penny considered her response. Did she trust Ozpin?
And then the memory that had been scrabbling at the edges of her consciousness finally rose into her mind. It was small, but luminous against the empty depths. Lying somewhere deep in her storage banks, barely remembered yet undoubtedly there. It wasn’t even a complete memory—all but one sensory input was missing. This memory was just a sound. But it was a voice, soft and gentle. Speaking to her. Saying her name.
“Penny. You can trust Professor Ozpin. He will keep you safe.”
And Penny immediately knew this was her father’s voice, and that he cared. It was another fact about herself that she was just as sure about as fireflies and the rain. She had a father, and from somewhere in the past, he was telling her the truth.
“You can take as long as you need to make a decision, by the way, and you can change your mind anytime.”
Finally, Penny’s deep-rooted panic began to abate. She had herself, and she had the love of her father. With his words echoing in her mind, Penny knew her answer.
“I would like to stay here at Beacon.”
Present day
Ozpin took a seat on a stool, leaning his cane against one of Penny’s workbenches as he stared at her with a very focused gaze.
“Becoming a Huntress means it will be almost inevitable that you’ll re-encounter your past, and the people who sought to control you. And they may still seek such a thing.”
“I know.” Penny looked down at the angle grinder in her hands, and decided to replace the disc now. It would give her something to keep busy with as she talked. “I considered a wide range of outcomes, and ultimately I feel that becoming a Huntress will be my safest course. After all, even if I were to try to hide forever, there is always a genuine mathematical possibility that I would be found by my pursuers. It would be better to train to defend myself in such an event. Perhaps the legal status of being a Huntress might discourage them. It would also be beneficial for me to make friends who are willing to fight to defend me. And also… I do not want to hide forever.”
Penny still believed living at Beacon was a much better alternative to whatever secret existence she would’ve been confined to if she’d stayed with her father, but… she was still hiding here. It was just a more expansive confinement.
Ozpin nodded. “Excellent points. I agree with all of them—especially that you will have to face your past someday.” He fell silent as Penny unscrewed the grinder’s disc, and didn’t speak until she’d finished swapping it out.
“I just wish that I could delay that someday for longer,” he said finally, sighing.
Penny nodded.
“When that day does come… I promise I will tell you everything. But until then… I have another promise to keep.”
“You make a lot of promises,” Penny said, only to immediately wonder if maybe that was an impolite thing to say. Fortunately, Ozpin just laughed quietly.
Then he picked up his cane in one hand and lightly tossed it to the other, as if he was testing its weight. “I’ve broken more promises than anyone else on this planet.”
Penny thought that was a rather strange thing to say.
“Speaking of which. It’ll be another broken promise if I don’t get started on a stack of paperwork for Glynda.” He stood up. “You won’t mind if I leave you to your repairs?”
“Not at all!” Penny waved cheerily. “Good night, Headmaster!” She’d almost called him Ozpin, but she couldn’t do that anymore. She had student rules to follow.
“Thank you.” Ozpin stepped into the elevator and leaned his cane against the wall, and then, just as the doors were about to close in front of him, he spoke again. “I have great confidence that your teammates will accept you as you are, Penny.”
Penny listened to the whoosh of the elevator descending for a moment before picking up the angle grinder once more and rigging it to the robot arm. Would her teammates understand? Yang was her friend, after all. Blake seemed very nice. Weiss…
Her logic circuits reminded her, very helpfully, that she didn’t have to think about that until she felt ready to tell them.
But how could she ever feel ready if she wasn’t sure her teammates would accept her?
Her logic circuits suggested that thinking about this right now would not help repair her wings.
That was an undeniable point, and Penny turned her full attention to the repairs again. She wanted to finish with enough time to get a small amount of sleep, at the very least. Without any sleep, her processors started behaving in ways that just felt… unpleasant. Icky, even. And it really did make a difference in her memory recall. Her father, whoever he had been, had been very good at making real mechanical functions in her body mimic biological functions. She had long ago arrived at the conclusion that he was very smart.
Penny lowered the speed of the angle grinder, approximating that she was near the end of the cut.
Her father. The person who had built her. Penny wished that someday she would have an actual name for him. When she was a successful Huntress capable of protecting herself, maybe it would be safe enough to know the truth. But until then, when she wanted to feel close to her father, this room was where she came. It was the closest connection she had to her past.
Just then, Penny’s fake jetpack housing finally came loose as the robotic arm cut through the last support, and immediately she manipulated the robotic arm to pull it off. The first step of the repair was complete, and now she could run a deep diagnostic, which would take some time but would identify every issue with her wings.
She started the diagnostic and stood up, making a mental file for the future to be more careful with her flight mode. It was perhaps the most delicate piece of machinery in her body. Well, “delicate” was a relative term, considering that her wings had crashed into a projectile at speeds approaching triple digits and been shot, kicked, set on fire, and then frozen—and were still in one piece and retaining a slight degree of function. Her body could withstand a great amount of damage. Perhaps that was why there were people that would stop at nothing to control her.
She was on the balcony now, gazing out the windows. Far below was the whole sweep of Beacon’s campus, its streetlamps dotting the darkness. The sight was endlessly comforting—this was the only home she could remember. There was no better place for her to learn to be a Huntress.
But as pretty as the campus was, Penny’s eyes always gravitated upward to the stars shining through the glass.
These were the same stars her father could see. Was it nighttime where he was? And if it was, was he looking at the stars as well? And if he was, was he wondering about her just as she was wondering about him?
There was one particular constellation in the night sky that Penny always fixated on. A formation of seventeen stars in the night sky, named for Pallas, a legendary warrior of ancient times. Three stars in a short line made up her belt, and below, the two brightest ones marked her feet. A cluster of five above the belt formed the head, and a string of stars trailing northward away from her belt represented a raised sword. This was the constellation that Penny had taken her new last name from.
She had no idea what her previous last name was. All she remembered was a brief moment of panic after waking up at Beacon, the sensation that she had a last name that was right there, she was supposed to know it, it was missing, someone had stolen it—but that feeling faded almost immediately.
She’d needed a last name for legal, bureaucratic, technical, and social reasons. And after days of tireless research, she had chosen Pallas. It sounded right somehow. There was something about the double-P of her name that made it jump from memory storage extra quickly, and it made her wonder. Did her old last name start with ‘P?’ Had her father liked alliteration just like she did? There was no way of verifying it, but she believed it was true.
And the story behind it—the legend of Pallas was a well-known one. A brave warrior from long ago, who had single-handedly defended an entire city from an enormous Grimm invasion for seventeen days, saving it from certain ruin long after other, more famous and successful warriors had given it up for the dead.
Penny could think of no better choice for her last name. Just like how Pallas never would’ve done anything besides protecting the city, she never would’ve done anything besides becoming a Huntress. She wanted to protect others. It was a belief sunken deep into her circuits and etched into the metal of her frame, woven through the wires under her skin and molded into the currents of her processors; a part of her.
She gazed at Pallas’s twinkling outline, and she hoped that her father didn’t worry about her too much. Soon, he wouldn’t need to. She would learn to protect everyone else and herself. Pallas had protected an entire city. Penny would protect the entire world.
Someday, she would find her father again. Would he be proud? She had a name. A team. A life. Friends. Freedom.
She hoped he would be proud.
“Thank you,” she whispered to the stars.
Notes:
So, the biggest change to this chapter is probably the team name. Some people might be disappointed that Penny’s team is no longer named Team Biceps like it was in the original version, but in the end I found a name I genuinely liked better! After all, it’s so symbolically fitting that in War Machines, the team is named Battleship. Also, “battleship gray” is a color, so it feels more in line with the color naming rule. But at the same time, Team Biceps lives on, in Yang and Nora’s hearts, and in Weiss’s nightmares.
Chapter Text
Hours later, Penny slipped into Team BSYP’s room, carefully closing the door behind her. The hinges were thankfully well-oiled, and only silence greeted her as she checked for an empty bed. She let out a sigh of relief and was about to move towards one of the unoccupied beds when she realized that there shouldn’t have been more than one unoccupied bed.
The room was dark, but her night vision was working perfectly, and a second scan revealed where the still-awake member of her team was. Yang sat on the windowsill with an elbow propped up on one knee and the other leg hanging down to rest on the floor; her head was turned away from the door, the moonlight outlining her upper body as she gazed up at the night sky outside. She didn’t seem to have noticed Penny, but just as Penny made up her mind to not disturb her, Yang turned her head, surprise filling her expression.
“Oh, hey!” she said quietly. “Finally done with the repair?”
The repair—? Penny was alarmed until she remembered that Yang meant her fake jetpack, not her synthetic body. She shrugged off the newly fixed ‘equipment’ and leaned it against the wall before turning to Yang.
“Yes. Were you waiting for me? I’m sorry!” she whispered anxiously. It would not do for Yang to have sleep deprivation on the first day of classes because of her—
“Oh, no, no—” Yang waved her arm lazily. “I woke up a half-hour ago and I couldn’t get back to sleep. So I’ve been just sitting here, waiting until I’m tired again.” She shrugged. “Who knows if that’ll happen, though? My nerves are a little crazy right now.”
“Oh, good!” Penny’s voice got a little louder than she’d intended at the end, but a quick glance at Weiss and Blake’s sleeping forms assured her that she hadn’t disturbed their sleep cycles. The room was still filled with unpacked luggage and boxes, and the beds were positioned in a blatantly unsustainable arrangement. Some work would still have to be done. She looked back to Yang, sensing a potential mutual interest. “Were you watching the stars?”
“Mmmhmm.” Yang nodded. “I like to do it sometimes. It’s relaxing.”
“So do I!” Penny thought for a moment before sitting down on the opposite end of the windowsill, steadying herself on the cool marble surface. “They’re pretty.”
Yang gave her a small grin. “If you like them here, you should come visit my home in Patch sometime. You can see so much out there.” She sighed. “I would always see a few shooting stars every night back home, but I haven’t seen any here yet.”
That made sense. Penny had seen shooting stars a few times, but almost never from Beacon’s campus—usually while flying over the forest away from the bright lights of the school that washed out the finer details of the night sky.
“Still, I can see most of the constellations my dad and I would see when we used to go stargazing. We got pretty good at naming them.” She pointed skyward, her hand tracing a slow path across the sky. “The Big Scythe, the Little Scythe, Ursa Major, The King’s Ranger, Pallas—” She broke off, glancing at Penny with a grin. “Hey, that’s you.”
“Well, I am not actually a formation of stars in the sky... but yes, we do share a surname!”
Yang nodded. “Honestly, though... Pallas reminds me of my mom. Strong, brave, probably one of the best huntresses ever…” She trailed off. “Yeah.”
“Your mother is a huntress?” Penny said, trying not to sound too eager in asking this question. But growing up with a defender of humanity as one’s parent sounded incredible.
Yang looked at Penny, and her expression morphed into something unreadable. “Was.”
Oh. Only after Yang had spoken did Penny recognize her facial expression. It was the same expression that Ozpin had on his face on that first night when he’d told Penny, the truest sign that you love someone is being able to let go of them.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I should not have asked.”
“No, it’s fine. You didn’t know.” Yang went back to staring skyward. “It’s not a secret or anything. But yeah, it’s just me and my dad.” She paused, and looked askance at Penny when she didn’t respond. “I was a kid, Penny; it was a long time ago. You don’t need to look at me like that.”
Penny tried to set her features into neutrality again, but it was harder than she was expecting. “I’m sorry. I did not mean to bring up a difficult subject.”
“You didn’t. It’s actually a good thing that you brought it up, because I’ve been wanting to… Well...” Yang lowered her head and looked Penny directly in the eye. “Penny, I wanted to tell you something. I know it’s really late, but... Do you have a minute?”
“I don’t think it’s possible to physically possess time?” Penny tilted her head in thought. “But I believe you are asking me if I need to go to sleep soon. And the answer to that is, I do not.” She could put off sleep for a little longer. Whatever Yang was about to say, it felt more significant.
Yang, whose expression had gone strange at Penny’s musing on the possession of time, returned to ninety-percent determination. “You sure?”
“I can function on very little sleep.”
“Okay. Cool.” Yang let out a heavy sigh. “Look. You said your parents are dead, and that wound seems like maybe it’s still pretty fresh for you? So I just wanted to let you know if you ever need to talk, I can be here for you. Because, you know...” She made a vague gesture. “I’ve been there and I won’t make it weird.”
Initially, Penny was confused. What was Yang talking about? Penny’s father wasn’t dead, just missing. She began running back all of her previous interactions with Yang in her mind, trying to find what might’ve led Yang to believe such a thing. But she hadn’t—Oh. Oh, dear.
The hasty excuse she’d made the night before initiation to deflect suspicion about her parents. She thought that normal etiquette around dead parents prevented most people from bringing it up again! But she had failed to consider someone else actually having dead parents.
This was a dangerous situation. Because Penny’s “trauma” was made up, and Yang’s wasn’t, and Yang might be about to reveal things that were very private, things that Penny had no right to know because she wasn’t telling the truth.
“Yang?” she said. “I… my parents may not be dead in the same way that yours are.”
Yang raised an eyebrow. “Oh, yeah?”
No, that was not how she’d meant to say it. Why was this so hard? “I... My experience may be very different from yours,” she tried.
“Oh, don’t worry about that.” Yang waved off Penny’s concern immediately. “I wasn’t expecting you to be in the same situation as me. I probably know better than anyone else that there’s more than one way to lose someone.”
Yang’s choice of words stopped Penny short.
There’s more than one way to lose someone.
Well, she had lost someone, technically, and it was definitely in a different way than everyone else. Maybe… Yang was someone she could talk to, then? About how it felt? About how awful it was to have known there was someone who loved you who was just… gone?
“Thank you,” she said finally, thinking furiously of a way to make her situation sound natural. “Still, my situation might sound… peculiar to you.”
“That’s fine.” Yang gave her what Penny hoped was an encouraging smile. “Trust me, I won’t judge.”
Penny took a deep breath, quelling the rising temperature in her core. “I never had a mother, as far as I know,” she said finally. “And... I have no memories of my father. But I still miss him,” she said, the familiar longing for her own father setting in as she drew her knees up to her chest and hugged them tightly. She didn’t like the way the words came out of her mouth. They sounded too vague. Surely Yang would ask for more details—
“Penny. That’s not weird at all. In fact, I can relate to that a whole lot.” Yang looked out at the courtyard, a frown settling onto her face. “I never knew my other mom. She’s not dead but she left and it hurts. It hurts even though I never knew her. I get it.”
Penny took careful note of the subject along with a reminder to treat it carefully around Yang. She decided to bring things back to her father.
“To be accurate, I do not know if my father is dead, exactly. I just don’t know if I’ll ever see him again.”
“Oh.” Yang nodded, her voice turning sympathetic again. “I know that feeling, too, Penny. The same exact thing happened to me.”
“Really? With… the mother who left?”
“I guess. But also with my actual mom, the Huntress. The one who stayed.” A small smile flitted across Yang’s face. “Her name was Summer Rose, and she was the best mom anyone could ever ask for. She would come back from a full day of destroying Grimm, and then she’d tell me the best bedtime stories ever; all about killing Nevermores and Goliaths… Honestly though, I bet she could’ve made fighting a mosquito sound exciting.” Yang sighed. “But one day, she left for a mission and never came back. There was no body to recover. No way to know where exactly she went. No way to tell how she’d died, or even if she’d died. She was just… missing in action.”
Missing. That was a good way to describe Penny’s past. Except, technically, she was the missing one. Did her father know where she’d gone? If the people who wanted to control her ever stopped wanting that, would he have a way of finding her? If she died, would he have any way of knowing?
She blinked, shaking off her thoughts. Yang was likely expecting a reply by now. “I’m sorry,” she said again. Why did the word sorry feel so powerless sometimes? Was there no other word in this language that could do a better job than sorry? “That must have been awful.”
“Eh.” Yang shrugged. “Losing Summer actually hurt way less than losing the mom I didn’t know. I think it’s because I know why Summer died. She was a Huntress. She died doing her job. She knew the risks, she knew she might die, and she did it anyway. But I don’t know why my other mom left. And I might never know. And that’s—that’s... Yeah.”
Yang fell silent. And then she said, so quietly that Penny wondered if it wasn’t directed at her, “Maybe Summer hurt less because I was used to it by then.”
“Because of your other mother?”
Yang stiffened. Her eyes darted to Penny, away again, and back. Penny couldn’t help but notice the sudden increase in her heart rate, which had been fairly steady until now. Finally, she nodded her head in a jerky motion. “Yeah.”
The reply puzzled Penny, because it was completely unlike how Yang had previously acted when bringing up the second mother. Of course, she wasn’t going to ask, but it seemed as if there was something else that Yang wasn’t telling her. And that was fine! Yang was allowed to not tell her things, because it would be extremely hypocritical of Penny to expect otherwise!
“I guess that wouldn’t convince a caterpillar, would it?”
“What?” Penny looked up guiltily. Had it been that obvious that she was thinking about it? But Yang wasn’t even looking at her.
“I... had a little sibling.” Yang lifted her scarf from where it’d been resting on her neck, rolling the red cloth between her fingers.
“I’m sorry.” Penny was having to say that word again. If this kept up, she was going to invent a new word that did a better job than sorry. Something that took ‘I understand that this creates a massive amount of varied emotions in you and I want to help you feel better about these emotions but I’m not sure how without seeming obtrusive or like I’m making this about me somehow’ and condensed it down to one word that was only used for that type of situation. ‘Sorry’ was used too often.
Yang nodded, thankfully not appearing irritated by the repeated apologies. “I don’t have many memories of my baby brother. I just remember holding a baby in my arms a few times, playing, things like that. But even though I was only three years old, I was so excited to be an older sister. And then...” Yang paused, closing her eyes. “There was a Grimm attack on our house. It was the middle of the night. I don’t really remember it, but they got through the wall in the room where his crib was, and… There was nothing left. Just… just some blood, and that was it. A whole human life, just gone.”
She paused there, the afterimage of her words floating out into the night sky, and then she continued in an even quieter tone.
“The kid never even got a name.” Then, at Penny’s confused look, she quickly added, “I should explain that. I’m from Patch—do you know it?”
Penny ran through her databases. “Somewhat. It’s an island, part of Vale, correct?”
Yang nodded. “Right. So, there’s a tradition on Patch, where you don’t name a child until their first birthday. Because… Well, it used to be that back when the Grimm were way more of a problem on Patch, a lot of babies born there didn’t even make it to their first birthday. So people would wait until they knew their kid was going to survive to name them. And even after it got easier to fight Grimm, everyone kept doing it. Summer got named on her first birthday, and I got named on my first birthday, and then my baby sibling… Well, the attack happened before his first birthday.”
She let her scarf drop back to her collarbone. “He didn’t live long enough to get a name. So the gravestone just says, The Lost Rose Child.”
A silence stretched out between them, in which a breeze came through the window and ruffled Penny’s hair while she wrestled with the decision to say ‘I’m sorry’ yet again, but Yang ended the dilemma.
“Summer blamed herself for it,” she continued. “The baby had been sick, and she’d been staying up too late taking care of him, and she got too exhausted, too stressed out, too worried, and then…” She shook her head. “She was different after that. She tried so hard not to let me see any of her sadness, but I could tell. Maybe that’s why she started going on more solo missions… and then...”
She did not need to finish the sentence for Penny to understand the meaning. Neither of them said anything for a long time, long enough that the sky in the east started to lighten before Yang let out a long breath.
“I don’t talk about it this much normally, I promise. I’m just thinking about them a lot tonight.” She shook her head again. “I’m following in Summer’s footsteps now. She knew what she was getting into. I hope I do, too. And I hope I can make sure some other family out there has a kid without worrying about it getting eaten by Grimm.”
Yang reached out and placed a gentle hand on Penny’s shoulder. “Point is, I’m probably the expert in family trauma on this team. So if you ever want to talk about your parent stuff some more… I’ll be more than happy to listen.”
“Thank you, Yang.” Penny smiled. “I will probably take you up on that offer at some point. Also, have you received therapy for this?”
Yang blinked once, twice, three times, and then said, “No.”
“Okay.” Penny jumped off the windowsill and leaned forward, pulling Yang into a crushing—but not literally crushing, because that would be bad—hug. “I know that a hug is not an acceptable substitution for therapy, but I would like to give you one anyway.”
Penny felt Yang’s chest shake slightly with a chuckle as she returned the hug. “Thanks, Penny. I appreciate it… Sorry for dumping all that on you.”
“It’s no problem at all!” She pulled back, but before she could add that she was quite happy that Yang trusted her enough to tell her these things, Yang’s eyes drifted over Penny’s shoulder.
“Oh, hey. The sun’s coming up. I’m going to try and get a little more sleep before class.”
“Okay.” Penny stepped back. “I will—”
Unfortunately, when she stepped back, her heel connected squarely with her fake jetpack, which she’d forgotten was leaning against the wall. It went rolling away and bounced off Blake’s bedpost with a resounding clang.
Blake shot upright in bed at the sound, her eyes scanning the room, but she quickly relaxed upon seeing Penny hastily picking up her fake jetpack.
“Sorry! Sorry!” Penny whispered to Blake, gently sliding the jetpack under the bed.
“What time is it?” Weiss mumbled, raising her head from her pillow, her face half-obscured by a curtain of loose hair. When no one answered, she reached for her scroll, and upon seeing the screen, groaned and sank back into her bed.
“Sorry, guys!” Yang said, waving sheepishly. “We didn’t mean to wake you up.”
“No, it’s fine… I was already awake.” Blake reached up and tugged at her bow, and Penny’s eyes widened as she remembered she’d been amiss.
“I’m sorry, Blake! I forgot that Faunus with extra sets of ears have super-sensitive hearing abilities. I’ll make sure to be quieter when you’re trying to sleep in the future!”
There was a pause. That should’ve been Penny’s cue that something was wrong.
And then Blake and Weiss said, at the same exact time and volume, “What?!”
Notes:
I’d say this chapter and the next one have much less changed from the original version in comparison to what was changed in the other chapters, but that’s largely down to me being happier with what I originally wrote in chapters 6 & 7 than what I originally wrote in chapters 1-5. And after that… we’re gonna be in uncharted territory :D
Chapter 7: Trust
Notes:
Hello, all! I have commissioned some art of this story. A lot of art, in fact! The first piece that I'll be sharing with y'all is this wonderful work by my friend DesiB717 on Tumblr. This is Penny at the start of Beacon initiation, during the moment in Chapter 4 when she's just been launched into the air! I'm super happy with how this came out; it really captures the feel of the moment perfectly.
And if you'd like to reblog the piece on tumblr, here's a link to her post!
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
“And when exactly were you planning on telling us this?” Weiss asked.
She sat on the edge of her mattress, her arms crossed. Blake, from her own bed, was matching Weiss’s position almost exactly. Penny had not moved from the windowsill, but Yang had stood up, and was looking back and forth between their teammates.
Penny was deeply confused by Weiss’s reaction. Why was this such a shock to her? But, more distressingly, why was Blake shocked?
Weiss, meanwhile, wasn’t waiting for a reply from Blake. “You weren’t planning on telling us, were you?”
Yang shifted forward slightly. She didn’t seem nearly as perturbed as Weiss, but there was definite surprise in that expression, at least forty percent.
Penny stared. Had... had they not realized that Blake was a Faunus? But her ears were right there! She had seen them immediately! How could Weiss and Yang not see them?
She moved her eyes to Blake’s ear again, if only to double-check that they were—
...Under a black bow. Hidden under a black bow. A black bow that she hadn’t taken off once in the past forty-eight hours.
In other words, a perfect camouflage for her ears. Hidden from everyone except a person with infrared vision that could easily pick out heat signatures under a layer of cloth.
Oh. Oh, no. Penny had just exposed someone else’s secret—
“You were trying to hide it?” she whispered, horror creeping into what felt like every wire of her body.
Blake and Weiss whirled to look at her, and Penny immediately wished she hadn’t said anything, she just wanted them to look away—
She got her wish. At Blake’s expense.
“Why?” Weiss stood up and took a step towards Blake, whose eyes snapped up at the sudden movement. “Why would you hide this from us?”
Weiss’s expression was so muddled with emotions that Penny honestly couldn’t tell if Weiss was afraid of Blake, or completely disgusted with her. It was at least twenty percent furious, though.
For the first time, Blake spoke, her voice tight and low, but her spiking heart rate coming through loud and clear to Penny. “Maybe because I’d hoped to avoid a situation exactly like this.”
“Situation? What situation?”
Blake’s bow twitched. Weiss’s gaze snapped to it—just for a second—but long enough for Blake to notice. She reached up and adjusted her bow, her eyes never leaving Weiss. “An overreaction.”
“Wha—if you had just told us about this from the start, then this wouldn’t be happening!”
“Would you have listened to me?”
Weiss blinked. “What?”
“Would you have listened to me when we were fighting the Geist if I hadn’t been wearing this bow?”
“How is that relevant?”
Now Blake stood up, shaking off the blanket piled in her lap. “Because I have plenty of reason to believe that you wouldn’t take orders from a Faunus.”
“I—” Weiss recoiled, her expression darkening. “I—”
“Weiss.”
That came from Yang, who was stepping forward. Three pairs of eyes swung toward her. “Blake’s right. She’s got a right to privacy. It shouldn’t change anything for you.”
“It changes everything!” Weiss jabbed a finger towards Blake. “The only thing that I know about you now is that you lied to us!”
Blake stepped forward, the space between her and Weiss rapidly shrinking. “I never lied!”
“You never told the truth, either!”
“Is it something that you really had to know?”
“As your teammates, we had every right to know!” Weiss snapped, her expression darkening even further. “How am I supposed to trust you as our leader now, when you’ve hidden something as important as what you are from us?”
Weiss’s words, sounding like something out of Penny’s worst fears, hit her like damaging blows. No one noticed when she reflexively hunched her shoulders, trying to make herself take up as little space as possible. Was Penny a bad person for hiding her nature from her team? It couldn’t be. It couldn’t be. It couldn’t be—
Blake stared at Weiss for a few moments, her expression hopelessly indiscernible to Penny, before turning and walking out of the room without a word.
“Blake—” Yang called, before throwing a glare at Weiss and running out into the hall.
Penny’s audioreceptors easily picked up the conversation as Yang caught up to Blake—first, Yang, speaking rapidly and worried, asking if Blake was all right.
Only to be cut off by Blake, firm and angry and receding into the distance: “I’m sorry, Yang, but I don’t really want to talk right now.”
She listened as Yang followed for a few more moments, made several more attempts at saying something with no reply, and then one set of returning footsteps.
Yang stalked back into the doorway. However, she only stayed there for a few seconds before her eyes fell on Weiss, and she scowled. Instead of re-entering the room, she headed off in the other direction.
Suddenly, Penny was alone in the room with Weiss. She very emphatically did not want to be here. Not with Weiss’s last words echoing around inside her head, the accusation of hiding something too important to be hidden. How was she supposed to tell her team about the even bigger thing that she was hiding?
She couldn’t tell them. Weiss would hate her for even daring to hide such a thing. But even worse, Blake would hate her, too. She’d revealed Blake’s secret for everyone on the team—and she could hear Blake now, saying angrily, You couldn’t keep my secret when you had one that’s even bigger than MINE? You don’t deserve to have secrets! Now I’m going to tell the whole world what you are!
And Yang would hate her for tearing apart the team with another secret. Maybe Yang already did hate her? For revealing Blake’s secret and creating a rift in the team?
Penny was the root cause of this entire problem. She couldn’t tell her team. Not ever. But… they would figure it out eventually, wouldn’t they? Things would start to add up for them. They would start asking questions. It was only a matter of time! And then—
“Penny?”
Penny jerked upright. Weiss was staring at her, looking surprisingly unsure of herself. “Are you going to—”
“You will not tell anyone else, right?” The words were out of Penny’s mouth so fast that it would be a miracle if Weiss could understand them.
Weiss squinted at her. “Why are you—”
All Penny could think of was all the other people at Beacon who still didn’t know Blake was a Faunus—all the people who Weiss could tell Blake’s secret to.
“It is still a secret. Our secret. We still have to keep it. For her. To earn her trust.” Her heightened emotions were causing her operating temperature to rise, and her breathing was correspondingly speeding up to try and keep her cooled. “You said that she’s lost your trust. But you haven’t earned hers yet.”
Trust. What a horribly complicated thing. She wanted everyone to trust her and the fact that she was a real girl. But in order for that to happen, she had to trust other people first in order to tell them. How could anyone take such an enormous leap of faith?
“And why would we want her trust?”
Penny stared at Weiss. “You don’t?”
“After the things she hid from us?! She’s clearly too unreliable to have as a teammate!”
“Why would Blake want your trust?”
That response sent something flitting across Weiss’s face, but only for a moment, before she crossed her arms and reset her expression back to anger. “I have been an exemplary member of the team! And furthermore—”
Penny stamped her foot. The resulting sound was… slightly louder than she’d intended. But it had its desired effect, as Weiss fell into silence, watching her with somewhat widened eyes. “We would not have defeated the Geist without Blake’s plan.”
Weiss didn’t respond. Was that good?
“We all had to trust each other at least somewhat to win that fight. Including Blake! And now we have just betrayed her trust in us by finding out something that she was afraid of us knowing!”
She wanted to leave. She needed to leave. She was almost positive that Weiss would be able to tell that she was hiding something as well. Every word she was saying felt more and more dangerous. But she couldn’t do that until she was sure somehow that Blake’s secret was safe, that Weiss wouldn’t immediately try to tell everyone—if all else failed, one of her backup plans (the least desirable one) was threatening to snap Weiss in half.
“Afraid? Why would she be afraid?”
Penny searched Weiss’s expression—shock, surprise… Was there anger? She couldn’t tell. But any of those were better than suspicion.
“She’s got nothing to fear!” Weiss continued, crossing her arms.
Penny stared at Weiss, and wondered if she was truly unaware of what the Schnee name could signify in Faunus circles, or if she was just too angry to connect some very obvious dots.
Weiss noticed her staring. Weiss stared back. Surprisingly, the deadlock only lasted less than a minute.
“Well,” Weiss huffed, uncrossing her arms. “I acknowledge that my family name carries a reputation. But I am not just a name!”
“Do you think Blake knows that yet?”
“She…” Weiss opened her mouth, only to close it. And then open it again. She sat back down and gave Penny a questioning glance, one drained of the ire from before. “Shouldn’t she?”
“She has known you for three days.”
That was all Penny needed to see, and all she could bear to endure. Finally, with her stress temperatures still climbing, she could be quite sure that Blake’s secret was safe with Weiss for at least several hours. Time to leave. She slipped off her perch on the windowsill just long enough to retrieve her fake jetpack. As she strapped it on and prepared to make her exit, she looked back at Weiss. “Everyone has secrets. Is there something about you that you are afraid of someone else knowing?”
“You can’t just ask me—” Again, Weiss stopped.
Penny took advantage of the pause. “You cannot expect Blake to tell you everything. Perhaps you believe your desire to be perfect means you have no secrets.” Penny deployed her wings and hopped back onto the windowsill. “But there are lots of people in this world who do not try to be perfect, and their secrets need to be respected, too.”
“Penny—”
The start of Weiss’s reply reached Penny just as she fired her thrusters and departed the room. And then she was in midair, trying to escape the crushing feeling deep inside her, which felt like a horrible snarl of malicious code spelling out her doom.
Blake hadn’t expected to be made a team leader. She wished the surprises had stopped there.
Thankfully, it was early enough in the morning that the courtyards were still deserted, which meant no one saw her running away from a problem yet again. She sat down heavily on a convenient bench, the disastrous words from before hurtling through her head.
Stupid. How could she have ever hoped this would go well? Weiss was almost right, in a way. What kind of leader kept things from the people that were supposed to be trusting her implicitly?
The look of horror on Penny’s face as she’d whispered, you were trying to hide it?— Blake could almost see any chance of earning her teammates’ trust evaporating in that gaze. Penny seemed devastated.
She sighed and let her head fall back, gazing up into the branches of the oak tree above her. Really, how had Penny managed to figure out she was a Faunus? Was it just that her disguise was actually terrible and everyone was too polite to tell her? No, Weiss and Yang had definitely been surprised. Penny seemed to just… know. Like she’d been able to see right through her bow.
Blake stopped that train of thought with a violent shake of her head. However Penny had done it, it didn’t matter. There was only one thing that she wanted to concern herself with right now. Even if she wasn’t sure how to accomplish it.
Professor Ozpin had open office hours, but she couldn’t remember exactly when. And with her scroll still back in her room, she didn’t really have a way to look the times up online. Maybe if she simply walked in and made it clear that it was an urgent matter, she could—
“You’re up early, Miss Belladonna.”
Or he could practically appear in front of her, sounding as if this was like any other chance meeting with a student.
“Headmaster,” she said, sitting up and nodding her head in greeting. “How are you?”
“Optimistic. The first day of the new semester always puts me in a good mood. I must say, I wasn’t expecting to see anyone out and about this early.”
“Well…”
“Especially not in pajamas.”
Blake looked down, noticing for the first time that she’d literally rolled out of bed to come here.
“I—” she started, only to be cut off by the buzz of an engine. She and Ozpin looked up just in time to see Penny flying out the window of their dormitory. Blake watched, worried, as the girl circled for a few seconds before diving behind another wing of the school. She had left her teammate alone with Weiss…
None of the decisions she’d made this morning were good. She shouldn’t have walked out. But she just didn’t want to face… All of that.
“I don’t think that Penny is taking a shortcut to get breakfast,” Ozpin said. “Blake, is everything all right?”
Blake closed her eyes briefly, taking a deep breath and trying to steel herself for what she was going to say.
“I want to resign as team leader.”
Ozpin was silent for a moment. And then he sat down on the bench, leaning his cane against his knee. “May I ask why?”
“I… I’ve lost the trust of my team.”
“Ah.” Ozpin’s expression didn’t change. “Did they find out?”
“Yes.”
“I’m sorry. You deserved to tell them on your own terms.”
“I don’t know what my own terms would’ve been,” Blake said. Any plans she might’ve had went up in smoke as soon as she discovered the Schnee heiress was on her team. “And... that’s why I’m not fit to be a leader. If I didn’t know how I was going to deal with something as simple as this, how am I supposed to handle the responsibilities of my position?”
What she didn’t say aloud was that this wasn’t the first time she had failed someone who had relied on her. She’d failed so miserably before that he’d spiraled beyond any hope of saving. And she was afraid of letting the same thing happen with her teammates.
“You certainly did a fine job orchestrating the defeat of the Geist. That’s something a licensed Huntress would struggle with.”
“My teammates didn’t know anything about me then. Now they know…” She hesitated. “...Too much.” She pushed on before Ozpin could reply, the need to put an end to this morning almost overwhelming her. “I can’t deal with four years of this. It’s already exhausting.”
An imagined future was unfolding in her mind. Four more years of suspicious stares and cutting remarks (just the tip of the iceberg) from Weiss, four years of her teammates wondering what else she was hiding, four years of being on a team that would only be a team in name only.
“Hm.” Ozpin rubbed his chin, studying Blake intently. “You aren’t the first leader who’s come to me like this, you know. The first few days after a team’s formation are rarely easy. Let me ask you a question.” He leaned forward slightly. “Who would you have as leader instead?”
“Well—” Blake blinked, trying to fight down the renewed wave of frustration as she drew another blank. Had she thought anything through in the last few days?
“Well, it’s…Yang or Penny, either one,” she offered finally. “Yang’s much more outgoing than me. And Penny—with all that energy she’s got, I don’t think anything short of an entire mountain could stop her.”
“Hmm.”
“They’re both… more resilient than I am.”
Ozpin sipped from his mug. “I notice you didn’t mention one of your teammates.”
“I think it’s rather obvious why.” Blake was rapidly losing confidence in her ability to even be any kind of student at Beacon, and so she’d stopped caring about the impropriety of what she was saying. And when Ozpin didn’t press, she decided to plunge into even riskier territory. She’d messed up plenty today; one more impolite question couldn’t break what was already broken. “Professor, I don’t know how else to ask this, but—why did you admit her?”
“Ah.” Ozpin nodded. “That is a good question.”
Well, that was a phrase Blake was used to hearing. Usually in the most frustrating contexts. Ozpin seemed to be taking time to put together a suitable reply, so she turned her attention to the grounds and waited. With the early morning sun shining down from a cloudless sky, it was admittedly lovely. The kind of day where she’d normally want to settle down on the grass with a book.
She sighed. The morning weather had no right being this beautiful amidst this disaster. It felt almost insulting, like it was her fault for not being able to match the mood of the climate.
“You probably expect Miss Schnee had a spot at Atlas Academy earmarked for her?” Ozpin said, drawing her attention back.
Blake nodded.
“Well, perhaps it will clarify things if I tell you she didn’t even apply to Atlas.”
She couldn’t help the genuinely shocked “What?” that escaped her.
Ozpin continued to be remarkably unfazed by her questioning. “I wondered the same thing. Why wouldn’t she apply to Atlas Academy? With that name, she would be guaranteed entry and a fast-track career as a Specialist. Especially since her older sister, not far removed from her Academy days, is already one of General Ironwood’s most trusted lieutenants. Certainly, glory would’ve been within easy reach. Unlike Beacon. Where she must do much more to prove herself.”
Blake nodded but didn’t respond, sensing that he had more to say.
“And you might also wonder why she even wants to become a Huntress,” Ozpin said after a moment. “Surely if she stayed within the company to inherit its leadership, she would have more power, fame, and fortune than the life of a Huntress could ever provide. So why ignore the easy paths? By coming to Beacon, she has deliberately made life harder for herself.”
And for other people, Blake thought.
Ozpin tapped his fingertips together. “When I look at Weiss, I see someone who wants to be challenged. Someone with a drive to make herself better.”
Blake blinked, turning his words over in her head, and frowned. “If you’re saying that I should try to be more accommodating of her, that’s not going to happen,” she ground out.
“No, no, not at all. That would be the opposite of what she needs. What I’m saying is that you should push her. Challenge her. Keep making her uncomfortable, forcing her to adapt to you. I think she will respond quite well to that.”
“Why do you say that?”
“She’s already changing. She’s already learned to work with a girl she could barely stand at first.”
Blake lifted her head. It was true, Weiss had been civil with Penny after the Geist fight. And that was a sharp difference from the explosive (literally) fit that she’d witnessed before initiation. But there was still a world of difference between her and Penny.
“How much can she change?” she muttered.
“Why don’t you find out?” Ozpin said. “You’re still her team leader.” He glanced at his watch and rose from the bench. “This isn’t about giving her one more chance, Blake. It’s about giving yourself one more chance.”
Blake looked at the cobblestones directly underneath her feet. One of them had a web of cracks which looked somewhat like a curved sword. One more try, she decided. One more.
“Professor? What do I do now?”
Even though she hadn’t actually said she was trying again, a small smile crossed Ozpin’s face like he knew exactly what was happening. “Well, if you’d like my opinion… I think it would be a good idea to talk to your team.”
Even if Penny hadn’t been built with an internal mapping and positioning system that let her know where she was at any given moment, she’d lived at Beacon long enough to be familiar with every corner of the campus by now. Including the hiding places.
In the corner of one courtyard, there was a tall hedge that ran along the perimeter until it seemed to end in some bramble bushes by an even-taller stone wall. However, if one ventured close to where the brambles met the hedge, they would find just enough room to squeeze between—which would let them slip between the hedge and the stone wall. Upon doing so, they would discover a little alcove carved into the wall with a fountain and two stone benches. The fountain, caked in moss and lichen, clearly had not run in years. If Penny had to guess, the hedge hadn’t been part of the original campus design, and the alcove had once been open to the courtyard for all to see. But now it was a perfect retreat.
It was also where she’d initially met her first-ever friend.
Penny wasn’t even sure what she hoped to accomplish by being here. She just wanted to avoid all the things going wrong. At least her body temperature was back to normal.
Maybe everything could be okay. Maybe it wouldn’t. Maybe, maybe, maybe. Another word that she didn’t like, almost as much as she didn’t like sorry. Why couldn’t she know now?
Maybe was a word which usually meant there would be far, far too many possible outcomes for her to sift through. When she couldn’t consider all possibilities, she felt unprepared. She did not like feeling unprepared, because it meant that things felt uncertain. Uncertainty scared her. Uncertainty meant having no idea if bad things might happen or not.
Why were social situations always like this? It was so comparatively straightforward to map out the possible outcomes of a combat situation! But in a moment like this? It felt like her processors were just shrugging helplessly at her. The only thing she could do was wait for things to happen and do what felt right. But currently, she had no idea what felt right.
Suddenly, a ping from her radar (which she’d remembered to set to automatic mode for once) alerted her to the approach of something. She looked up. Whatever it was, it was on a direct course toward her hiding spot. She sat up straighter as the approaching form stopped at the edge of the bramble bush, and then someone said tentatively:
“Penny?”
Penny recognized the voice instantly. “Blake?”
“Penny! Are you okay?”
“I… Yes? Thank you? Are you?” Penny rose to her feet, immediately thought better of it, and reseated herself.
“Is it okay if I join you?”
Penny froze briefly. Was Blake coming in here to berate her? She didn’t sound particularly angry. “Yes, if you would like to.”
The branches rustled, and Blake ducked in, tugging her sleeve away from a particularly protruding thorn. Her eyes landed on Penny, and a small smile flashed across her face. “Hey.”
“How did you know I was here?” Penny said. She’d thought she was hidden from the courtyard. Maybe Blake was a bat Faunus, and she had echolocation capabilities?
“I saw you going this way, and it should’ve taken a lot longer to find you, but…” She started to sit down on the stone bench opposite her, before changing her mind and lowering herself to the ground, crossing her legs. “I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but your sword is peeking over the top of the hedge.”
“What?” Penny looked up, and realized that yes, because of where it was holstered on her back, the tip of Luminous Electra’s blade was just high enough to be visible from the other side of the hedge. Oops.
She set it on the ground next to her. “I like to come here sometimes. It is a very nice spot, isn’t it?”
Blake was tracing something in the dirt with the tip of her index finger. “I agree.” Then abruptly, she raised her head, meeting Penny’s gaze. “I’m sorry.”
Penny stared at Blake. “For what?”
“For hiding who I was.”
All Penny could think about was how similar this suddenly felt to the scenarios she’d imagined in which she told someone the truth about herself. “Why would you be sorry for that?” she said at last. “It is I who needs to be sorry.”
“What?” Blake was staring back at her. “You’re not… what…?”
“And I am so sorry. I didn’t know that you were hiding your… your identity. If I had known, I would never have said anything! I’m sorry… I put your secret out there and now other people know it and I can’t take it back—” Penny squeezed her eyes shut and flattened her palms against the cool roughness of the stone bench, her breaths quickening again. How was Blake handling all of this so well? If this had happened to her— she didn’t know how she’d be able to even move right now. And this absolutely would happen to her, wouldn’t it? Her secret was far bigger and much harder to hide.
Strangely, Blake looked as shocked as she had when Penny had first exposed her secret. “Penny, it’s okay. You didn’t know.”
Deep breath. Deep breath. Penny opened her eyes again and rocked forwards slightly. “I promise I will not tell anyone else about you being a Faunus. Your secret is safe with me. I do not have any issue with you keeping your identity to yourself.”
“Thank you,” Blake said, blinking rapidly.
But Penny was only feeling more and more nervous. Why was Blake so surprised that Penny wasn’t mad at her? Did Blake think she was supposed to have an issue? Did that mean Blake would have a problem if someone else was hiding something? Did she somehow think hiding things was shameful after all? Would Blake view her as nothing more than a malicious deceiver?
“Blake?”
“Yes?”
“Is it… okay to hide things?”
“Why...” Blake was looking intently at Penny as the first word came out of her mouth, and it had more than a little sharpness. Then she trailed off into silence, but her eyes did not waver from Penny.
Penny clasped and unclasped her hands before folding them under her thighs to stop herself from moving anymore. She looked downward, concentrating on the path of a beetle across the ground, but she knew Blake’s eyes were still on her. Was Blake expecting her to say more? But saying another word felt far too dangerous at this moment.
“Oh.”
It was a very quiet sound, so quiet that it might’ve just been a hitch in Blake’s breath, but Penny caught it, and she looked up. Blake’s gaze had softened.
She tilted her head, and then spoke. “Yes. It’s okay. It’s more than okay, Penny.”
“Really?”
“Really. Sometimes… we just can’t tell someone something yet. You’re not in the wrong if you don’t want to tell them, even if they seem like they’re a good person who won’t do you any harm if they know.” The smallest of smiles appeared at the corner of Blake’s lip, but it didn’t seem judgmental, and she made no effort to flatten it. It seemed fully directed at Penny.
“Oh. Thank you.” Penny was having trouble understanding how that could be true. But because Blake believed it, she felt like she could believe it.
Was Blake someone she could tell? She seemed to... understand. Maybe more than anyone else she knew. It wouldn’t be now. Not anytime soon. But sometime. Blake was a friend. She was sure of that.
She slid off the stone bench and lowered herself into a kneeling position next to Blake. Just as Blake was giving her a questioning look, she reached out and buried Blake in a hug.
“Wh—” Blake started to say, only to fall silent. After a few more seconds, she returned it. “Thank you, Penny. Thank you… for understanding.”
Blake was definitely someone she could tell. Eventually.
However, there were still more pressing issues to attend to. “Shall we return to our room?” she said, reluctantly ending the hug.
“Well…” Blake hesitated. “Right now?”
“I am estimating that unless we return in the next ten minutes, the potential confrontation that may ensue when we return will have a significant chance of causing us to be very late for our first class.”
“Class.” Blake was silent for a moment. “We’re still going to have to go to class after we’ve dealt with all of this.”
“And eat breakfast. And unpack. And rearrange our living space. I believe our room was only designed to hold two students, not four. We might have to turn our beds into bunk beds.”
“Bunk beds?” Blake tilted her head. “Can we do that?”
When Penny re-entered Team BSYP’s room, Weiss was sitting in the exact place that she’d left her. Yang was back, sitting next to Weiss, and Penny wasn’t sure how to interpret their stiff postures. Had they been talking, or just existing next to each other?
Weiss rose to her feet as Penny and Blake entered, her arms crossed and her expression utterly unreadable to Penny. However, her elevated heart rate told a different story. Penny had never understand how anyone could keep emotions off their face despite clearly feeling so many things inside.
“Weiss,” Blake said, stopping next to Penny.
“Blake,” Weiss said.
Penny scanned the room. No signs of imminent danger. Weiss’s rapier was behind her, leaning against the wall. Blake’s weapon was hanging off a bedpost. Yang, having observed the exchange with her hands on her hips, chose that moment to cross the room, coming to stand on Blake’s other side.
Weiss’s eyes flicked back and forth between the three of them, and then she drew in a slow, deep breath.
“I… do not like things being kept from me,” she said.
Almost imperceptibly, Yang edged closer to Blake. Penny mirrored the movement.
“It might be more accurate to say that I do not like it when people don’t tell me things,” Weiss continued. “Which... is why I have to apologize to you.”
Penny blinked. Wait, what? This was not one of the expected outcomes.
“I’ve spent most of my life expecting people to tell me anything I want to know. Because for most of my life, my name has meant that things are not kept hidden from me. But now… my name has made someone not want to tell me something.” Weiss paused. “That… is new. And I did not realize it until a short time ago. I apologize for accusing you of being deceitful.”
An apology? Complete calm? Were things allowed to go this well? Did Penny need to readjust her planning algorithms to be more optimistic?
“I know you don’t trust me. So this is what I want to know, Blake. What do I need to do to earn your trust? What should I do in order to make you feel comfortable telling me things such as the fact that you’re a Faunus?” Weiss fell silent, giving Blake an expectant look but otherwise keeping her body language entirely neutral.
Blake, meanwhile, seemed deep in thought. “That… might take a while.”
Weiss nodded. “Don’t worry. I wasn’t expecting you to answer that right now.”
“No. I meant that it might take a while for me to be comfortable sharing... private things with you.”
“Oh.” Weiss was silent, but for only a moment. “Regardless, I will try. Where can I start?”
“I’m the leader of our team.” Blake said the words slowly, as if she was trying them out on her tongue for the first time. “If I knew something I thought would be dangerous to our team—If I thought you would be endangered by not knowing something that I knew, I would tell you. Please trust me on that.”
Weiss uncrossed her arms and nodded. “All right.”
Silence fell. The four girls looked between one another, every expression suddenly unreadable to Penny. Weiss started to raise her hand as if to ask for everyone’s attention, only to immediately lower it. Yang shifted her weight from foot to foot, still glancing back and forth between Weiss and Blake but with much less urgency. Blake, meanwhile, made a motion like she was about to walk past Weiss—getting so far as a half-step in the direction of her bed—but reversed course.
Penny, meanwhile, stood perfectly still. The situation was over. Why was no one doing anything? Well, if no one else would, then she would do something!
She lunged forward, putting one arm around Weiss’s shoulder and the other around Blake’s. Weiss let out a sound that was halfway to a squawk as Penny pulled them to her, initiating the best hug she could offer.
“Hug time! Yang, join—!” She didn’t even need to finish her request as Yang collided with the trio, wrapping her arms around them all.
“We did it, Team Battleship! We survived our first disagreement!” Penny said, her voice slightly muffled by having Weiss’s ponytail jammed against her face. But that was fine.
“Hooray!” Yang said.
“That we did.”
“Could you please ask permission before hugging me in the future?” For one moment, Weiss tried to back out of the hug, making the group shake violently, but Penny and Yang’s embraces held fast before she let out a sigh and stopped. She paused, and then laid a hand on one of Penny’s elbows.
Penny had to resist the urge to squeal. Weiss was voluntarily issuing affectionate physical contact! This day was getting better and better!
“Go, Team Biceps!” Yang said
“Battleship!” Weiss hissed. “We’re Team Battleship! Yang, I will literally pay you lien to never say the words “Team Biceps” ever again.”
“Huh.” Yang paused. “How much lien are we talking, exactly?”
Weiss’s only response was a small hmph. With that, Team BSYP fell into silence. Warm happiness flooded Penny, and she tightened her hug just a little, feeling the others’ weight against her, the warmth of their skin on her modified sensors. Hugs were something she would always treasure. And this was her first group hug!
Her teammates. These were her teammates. If they were people she could hug, maybe they were people she could trust. And maybe they wouldn’t get suspicious of her. Maybe they wouldn’t ever wonder about her strange habits. Maybe they wouldn’t start asking questions. If Weiss could accept Blake as a Faunus, maybe she could accept Penny as a synthetic person. Maybe someday Penny could tell her team.
For once, maybe felt comforting.
Notes:
And with the first seven chapters uploaded, we are officially at the farthest point that my original War Machines reached years ago! And I won't be stopping anytime soon, because I currently have chapters 8-21 completely written! Now that I'm in entirely new territory, I'm planning to post one chapter per weekend (I might play around with upload days depending on personal preference), which means as of right now I have a three-month backlog of chapters ready to be uploaded. Honestly, it's making me quite emotional to be forging past what I previously accomplished and finding new heights. This story has existed in my mind in some form or other since 2017, and finally I feel like I'm doing justice to what I've been envisioning. I hope you enjoy the journey!
Keep an eye out for Chapter 8: 'Closer And Closer' sometime this weekend.
Chapter 8: Closer and Closer
Notes:
And here we go! Forging new ground for War Machines! I'm so excited! Also, I'm sharing another piece of art for this story at the end of the chapter!
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Several months later
The concept of ‘fun’ was surprisingly uncomplicated for Penny. Perhaps someone else might assume that a girl with immense computing capabilities would have much higher standards for enrichment, but no. She was quite interested by the most simple of things! Some examples: the path a leaf took while falling from the sky, the random zigzagging patterns in a carpet, the pulsing glow of an energized Dust crystal… And on, and on. And if she did need to stave off boredom, she could simply decrease the amount of processing power devoted to a task. She could potentially assemble a 500-piece jigsaw puzzle in three minutes, but that was not as fun as dialing back the processing allotment for the puzzle and doing it over several hours with the help of a friend. As she was doing currently with Blake in their dorm room, when the door opened and Yang strolled in, carrying a stack of papers.
“What’s this?” Blake said, glancing up as Yang plucked a sheet off the top and slid it across the table to her and Penny.
“I’m starting a queer student club!” Yang said. “Honestly, I’m surprised there wasn’t one already. Been putting up flyers all morning.”
Blake’s eyebrows rose as she took the paper and started reading it, while Weiss looked up from her bunk where she’d been doing homework. “A what club?”
Yang blinked at Weiss. “You know. Queer.”
“I think I am failing to understand something.”
Penny peered over Blake’s shoulder. She knew about the many ways to express one’s identity, but she had never considered if any of them might apply to herself. Hmm. Was it something that she could, or should, consider?
Yang, meanwhile, was still trying to explain to Weiss. “By queer, I mean the kind of people who would get kicked out of the upper-crust Atlesian society you live in.”
Weiss’s only reply was a blank stare.
Yang sighed, held up a flyer, and pointed to the rainbow flag printed in its corner.
“Oh!” Weiss said. “Why didn’t you just say so?”
Yang stuck her tongue out at Weiss, and dropped the papers onto her desk. “Nora, Ren, and Jaune are going to come, and hopefully some upper-class students show up as well. Y’all interested?”
“Thank you, but I will decline.” Weiss was already going back to her textbook. “I do not fall into the category of any of those identities.”
“I’ll be there,” Blake said.
“Heyo!” Yang made a pair of finger guns at her. “Welcome to the club! Literally!”
“Been here for a while,” Blake replied with a smile.
Penny stared down at the advertisement as Blake and Yang kept talking. Was this a place where she would be welcome? It was a group specifically intended to welcome and celebrate differences, and… She was certainly different. But was she different in the right way?
“I…” she started to say out loud, only to hesitate.
Blake and Yang fell silent, clearly intending to signal that she could speak, but the increased attention was the opposite of what Penny wanted right now. Thanks to her ultra-fine-detail vision, she could also see how Yang’s eyebrows went up a little, but not in a judgmental way, just a concerned, ‘oh is this something important that I should sit down for?’ kind of way. Normally such a nuanced reading of a face would be beyond Penny’s emotional analyses, but she knew Yang well enough to understand her more subtle expressions. And Blake’s upper ears (concealed under the ever-present bow) had shifted in what could’ve been a similarly emotive gesture.
It was very likely that they were genuinely interested in what she might have to say about her identity! However, Penny found herself losing her courage. So, instead, she hedged.
“…I do not want to enter a space that is not intended for me.”
“Penny.” Yang leaned over to the other side of the table, and put a hand on each of her shoulders. “The whole point of a queer club is that it’s for anyone who feels like they might need it,” she said softly.
Yang’s hands were very warm, and the temperature felt reassuring to Penny somehow.
“You don’t have to come if you don’t want to. But if you do want to and just aren’t sure if you’d belong… I’m going to tell you, as a raging lesbian, you can come to the queer club if you want to come.” She squeezed Penny’s shoulders before straightening back up. “No pressure, though.”
“Thank you.” Penny let the feeling of Yang’s hands on her shoulders linger in her sensors, remembering the comfort they brought, and then she nodded. “I will… think about it.”
“Awesome!” Yang gave her one more encouraging smile, and then hopped up onto her bunk. “First meeting is the weekend after next.”
“Why not this weekend?” Blake said. “It’s a long weekend.”
“Oh, that’s because—Oh shoot, I forgot to tell you all!” Yang smacked her forehead and sat up. “I’m going back home to see my dad for the long weekend—the airship ride’s just short enough to make it manageable—and the rest of the team is invited as well! So if anyone wants to come along… My dad would love to meet you. And the house sure could use some guests.”
Penny needed no time to think about her choice. An invitation to Yang’s home? That sounded like a swimmingly good time. “Count me in!”
“I’d love to,” Blake added.
Every head in the room turned towards Weiss, who slowly turned a page in her textbook before sighing. “I suppose I should come along too, rather than suffer an empty room for an entire weekend.”
Penny was slowly learning the intricacies of Weiss’s vernacular, and if she was interpreting that right, what Weiss meant was that she would be lonely if she stayed behind. Of course, if Penny were to voice that translation directly to Weiss, she would deny it even though it was true. Weiss was an odd individual.
“Heck yeah!” Yang flopped fully onto her back and threw her arms into the air. “Team getaway!”
A general exchange of logistics and plans followed, and Penny took a moment to ponder something strange that Yang had said a few moments earlier.
“Yang?” she asked finally, unable to figure out the meaning herself. “Are you angry about something?”
Yang furrowed her brow. “No. Why?”
“Well, you called yourself a ‘raging lesbian,’ but—”
Yang broke into a fit of wheezing laughter before she was done, and with a sigh Penny realized that she might have to begin learning the intricacies of Yang’s vernacular as well.
“Really, Penny, I’m sorry for laughing,” Yang said as she fiddled with the key to the Xiao Long household. “It was just… It caught me off-guard, but I can see how anyone could make that mistake.”
“It’s fine, Yang!” Penny said. “No offense was taken.”
“Alright, but I just want it to be known that you should never feel bad for not knowing what a word or a phrase means. Words are weird and sometimes I don’t know how they make sense.” She paused, still jiggling the key. “—But I will actually be raging if I can’t get this door to open—” The lock clicked and the door swung open. “Finally! Home sweet home.”
They walked into a quiet, dim entryway, and Yang flicked on the lights. “Dad’s out getting groceries, so it’ll just be us for a little bit. Guest rooms are upstairs. Oh, and—”
Yang was interrupted by the sound of a barking dog. Moments later, the inner door was nudged open, and a small gray corgi bounded into the room and leapt up into Yang’s arms.
“Zwei!” Yang said, catching the dog with clearly practiced ease and kissing his forehead. “Oh, I’ve missed you, how have you been? Have you been getting lots of tummy rubs and treats? Have you been keeping Dad company?”
“You have a dog?” Weiss and Blake said at the same exact time, but in very different tones.
Blake, in fact, had shadow-cloned away into a corner of the room immediately after hearing the first bark. And even with her bow in place, it was clear that her upper ears were trying their best to flatten against her head.
“Blake, you okay?” Yang said.
“I don’t like dogs,” Blake ground out, her entire body tensed up, never taking her eyes off Zwei. “And it has nothing to do with me being a Faunus. I had a very bad incident with a dog when I was a child.”
“Oh dang, sorry. I can—”
“How could anyone be afraid of such a cutie little boochie woochie moochie poochie?” Weiss cooed. She was simultaneously petting Zwei and squeezing his face, and Zwei looked like he was very much enjoying it.
Yang pulled her gaze off Blake to stare at Weiss. “—Are we speaking the same language right now?”
Penny was wondering the same thing. Some of the things Weiss had just said did not appear in any dictionary she had access to.
“Oh, hush.” Weiss continued to pet him. “He is precious.”
Yang rolled her eyes and looked back at Blake with fresh concern. “I can keep him in the basement, if you want. He’s got a bed down there—”
“No, it’s fine.” Blake took a deep breath and stepped forward, although Penny noted with concern that her heart rate did not decrease. “I’ll be… fine. Just don’t expect me to be friends with him.”
“You’re sure?”
“I’m sure.”
“If you say so.” Yang turned away from Weiss, and suddenly she was holding Zwei out to Penny. “Wanna say hi?”
“Er…”
Penny knew dogs had a very acute sense of smell, and she most definitely would smell different to him thanks to her mechanical nature. Would Zwei dislike her because of that?
Well, there was only one way to find out! She extended a cautious hand, holding it out for Zwei to sniff. Which he did, and then he looked up at her, panting, his tongue hanging out in a big doggy grin. That was… good, right? At the very least, he wasn’t displaying a fear response.
She moved closer and began petting him behind his ear with careful strokes. His fur was soft, quite pleasantly so. It was a new sensation for her skin, and she logged the sensation away. She always liked experiencing new sensations. Especially soft ones. Good soft things: hoodies, blankets, grass, and many more… and now dogs!
Suddenly, Zwei squirmed in Yang’s arms and pulled himself forward, putting his front paws on Penny’s chest, and then he licked up and down the side of her face.
“Oh!” Penny gasped. “Is he…?”
“Aw! He likes you!” Yang said.
Zwei liked her? Even though she was different? Penny felt a giddy surge of… well, it was a good emotion, but it was hard to put into words!
Then she remembered another thing about Zwei. She reached back, pulled Luminous Electra off its holster, and held it out. “Hello, Zwei. Would you like to try out my zweihander?”
“Oh!” Weiss threw up her hands as recognition dawned on her face. “That’s why you always start smiling whenever Penny mentions her sword!”
“Guilty as charged,” Yang said cheerfully as Zwei sniffed curiously at the hilt of Luminous Electra. After a few more seconds, he barked once.
That seemed to be dog-speak for ‘this is too big for me to hold,’ so Penny put Luminous away and went back to petting Zwei, and Zwei went back to attempting to lick her face.
“Okay, Zwei, I think that’s enough. You don’t need to give her a bath.” Yang gently lifted Zwei off Penny and led Team BSYP into the rest of the house. She disappeared momentarily into a side door and then reappeared a few moments later without Zwei, closing the door behind her. “Okay, he’s in the basement. But he can open doors if he’s really determined, so he might find his way out at some point.”
“Wait, Yang, I—” Blake started to protest, only to be stopped by Yang holding up a hand.
“Blake. This is my home, and I’m going to do my best to make it feel like a home for my entire team, not just me. Your comfort matters here, as much as mine. And Weiss’s. And Penny’s.”
Blake blinked several times in rapid succession, and Penny sensed her heart rate finally dropping back to resting levels.
“I… Thank you, Yang.” She gave Yang a small smile that was somehow different compared to most of the smiles Penny had seen from her.
“And speaking of comfort… If you want to, not have that on while you’re here…” Yang gestured at the top of her head. “We don’t have neighbors, and I promise my dad won’t be weird about it.”
“Thank you. I’ll think…”
Then for a brief moment, Blake’s gaze flicked to Penny, their eyes meeting just long enough for Penny to wonder what was going through her leader’s mind.
And then Blake nodded, and reached up to her bow, tugging at the end of the ribbon until it came undone. It was the first time Penny—or anyone on the team, for that matter—had seen Blake’s Faunus ears in the open.
Blake gave a quiet groan and flicked her upper ears back and forth. “…I forgot how good it feels to not have them tied down.”
Suddenly, Blake and Yang were both looking at Weiss in a way that made it clear to Penny that this was one of those frustratingly indecipherable silences where meaningful things were deliberately being left unsaid. Penny found herself scrambling to figure out any of it.
How did organic people manage to just communicate things through silence? It wasn’t as if they had some sort of organic-only telepathy or anything! Penny was much more likely to have telepathy, what with her ability to wirelessly communicate. And yet. Here she was, trying to understand what was passing between Weiss and Blake and Yang as if they had some sort of cellular-cranial Bluetooth. She was the one who had Bluetooth. Not fair.
Perhaps they were concerned about how Weiss would react to seeing Blake’s Faunus trait? That seemed like a logical conclusion, so Penny turned to study Weiss as well.
“I…” Weiss looked at Blake and nodded slowly, repeatedly. “I am genuinely happy that you have a chance to really be yourself around me, Blake.”
Blake smiled once more, the calmest that Penny had seen her all day. “Thank you.”
Weiss’s words resonated in Penny’s memory. Would she feel the same way when Penny revealed her real nature? She could only hope.
A sudden impulse struck her, and she jumped forward, sweeping up Weiss and Blake and then Yang in her arms and pressing them together in one big happy team hug.
“Ack—some warning, Penny? Please?” Weiss spluttered. But notably, she did attempt to leave the hug. In fact, she pulled herself even closer to Penny and Yang and Blake.
“I care about you all so much,” Penny murmured. And she did, so much that the care felt like it was going to overflow out of her. This hug was one way in which the feeling actually did spill into her surroundings.
She felt closer to telling her teammates, her friends, the truth about herself. Not all the way there, but closer.
It was these kinds of hugs that made Huntress training so very worth it, regardless of whatever hardships or anxieties she met in her journey.
“So, where’s home for you girls?”
Taiyang Xiao Long was a loud, joyful man with hair the same color as Yang’s and a voice which echoed in any room just like hers did. Penny could very much see the familial resemblance. He’d kept up a steady stream of pleasant conversation ever since returning to the household.
Currently, he was making pizza for their dinner, and he’d invited Team BSYP into the kitchen to ‘watch a fine art,’ as he’d put it.
Unfortunately, the question he’d just asked fell flatter than the baking sheet he was spreading flour on, met with only an uncomfortable and resounding silence.
Finally, Weiss spoke up. “…My family’s estate in Atlas, I suppose.”
It said something unfortunate about the team that Weiss’s reticent and emotionless answer was the most forthcoming response. Blake seemed genuinely taken off-guard by the question. While Penny did have a ready answer, it was a strange one, which might invite questions she wasn’t ready to—
“Beacon,” Blake said quietly.
Penny momentarily forgot all sense of subtlety and jerked her head around, immensely surprised. Blake had the same exact answer as her? But unless she had missed some things, Blake did not live at Beacon—
Oh. She meant… there was nowhere else that she could call home. Penny very much wanted to give Blake a hug at that moment.
Then, lest Blake think she was being unkind, Penny quickly offered her own answer.
“Also Beacon,” she said. Although, it was a tad more literal than Blake. Penny had lived at the academy for some time before becoming a student, after all.
She could tell Blake was looking curiously at her, probably in the same way Penny had just been.
“Well.” Taiyang dropped a ball of freshly risen pizza dough on the cooking sheet, slowly passing his gaze over each member of the team. “I’m sure Yang has told you this already, but if any of you need a place to sleep, a roof over your head, a place of refuge—you’re always welcome here. This house can definitely use extra occupants.”
Penny found herself reflecting on the peculiar sentiment, and then agreeing with it. The ‘guest rooms’ had clearly not always been guest rooms—they held strangely personal traces, outlines of people long gone from the house. People she only knew by way of what Yang had said about them, and what she could infer from the house.
In Penny’s room, an empty weapon rack for a massive sword, one that might’ve rivaled Luminous Electra.
In Blake’s room, a bookshelf filled with handwritten battle journals, detailed accounts of engagements with Grimm and ne’er-do-wells, all of them covered in so much dust that it was clear Penny was the first person in years to open one of them.
In Weiss’s room, one that seemed to have been lived in more recently than the rest, a forgotten flask found under the bed, thankfully empty—which Weiss had thrown out the window upon discovering.
In the storeroom, found as Penny looked for a jar of pizza sauce on Yang’s request, the mangled and splintered remains of a crib, shoved into a corner behind a shelf and almost completely hidden.
“Now observe closely,” Taiyang said. “Here’s something they won’t teach you at Beacon.” With that, he picked up the dough and began tossing it in the air, deftly spinning it on his hands until it was a flat disc of dough. And then he kept going, flipping the disc from one hand to the other, and then tossing it behind him, up and over his head and catching it on his index finger again without the dough’s spinning ever ceasing. He dropped the dough back onto the baking sheet and bowed as Team BSYP clapped enthusiastically.
“Dad!” Yang said, utterly delighted. “You couldn’t do any of that when I left for Beacon!”
Taiyang winked at her. “I’ve had a lot of practice. Had to find something to pass the time with my daughter flying the nest, after all.”
Penny blinked. Flying the nest? Did Yang have flight capabilities? …More likely, that was an idiom.
“So how much have you spent on pizza dough?” Yang said teasingly.
“Not a lot. I put a tablecloth down so I could just reuse whatever I dropped.”
Yang made a very emphatic gasping sound, covering her mouth with both hands. “I leave for a few months and you start eating food off the floor?”
Penny was quite sure that was sarcasm because Yang smiled immediately after saying it. Taiyang smiled back at her and began spreading tomato sauce on the dough. They were very clearly a father and a daughter, enjoying each other’s company and having the kind of understanding that could only come from living together for years and years.
Penny wondered if she’d once had that kind of understanding with her own father. And she wondered if she could ever have it again.
Late into the night, with Taiyang gone to sleep and the pizza mostly eaten, Blake surprised everyone by suggesting they play Truth Or Dare.
“Obviously, you don’t have to do or say anything that makes you uncomfortable,” she explained. “I thought maybe it would be a good team-building activity.”
“I don’t see how this is going to help us fight creatures of Grimm,” Weiss said, but she was sitting down in the circle with the rest of them without further objections.
After some explaining to Penny of what exactly the rules entailed (fortunately, she was a quick learner!), they flipped a coin to determine who went first. Blake won. She looked at each member of Team BSYP before her gaze landed on Weiss.
“Truth or dare, Weiss?”
“Hm.” Weiss tilted her head, thinking for a moment, and then said, “Truth.”
Blake hesitated for a moment that would’ve been nearly imperceptible to anyone except Penny (who saw it easily thanks to her microsecond-accurate refresh rate on her vision), and said, “What are you going to do with the Schnee Dust Company when you inherit it?”
Penny understood that the inherent idea of Truth Or Dare was that anyone could ask any question or dare anything, but even so, she was somewhat surprised by Blake’s first choice of question. Wasn’t the opening round of a game supposed to be easy?
Weiss, however, seemed unfazed. “Fix it, of course,” she said.
Blake propped her chin up on her hands. “Fix it how?”
Weiss stared back at Blake for a moment, while Penny wondered if she should point out that Blake was breaking the rules by asking a second question. But then Weiss answered anyway.
“…I am not entirely sure. My father has always kept a great deal of secrecy around how the company is run.”
“Mm.” Blake nodded. “Just keep in mind, it’s a lot harder than you might think to completely change an organization from the top.” Her Faunus ears drooped noticeably as she spoke the next sentence. “I… speak from experience.”
A silence fell, Penny and Weiss and Yang all watching Blake with varying degrees of concern. Blake, for her part, kept on lying on her stomach, looking off into the distance, until—
“Does anyone mind if I take the last slice?” Blake gestured to the remains of the pepperoni pizza.
There were no objections.
Penny had thought it was a good pizza, at least judging from the data relayed by the texture sensors that she used to judge food. In yet another fascinating biological-mimicking feature created by her father, Penny was capable of functional eating. Any food which she ate would be completely incinerated internally for energy. It wasn’t intended as her body’s primary power source—nothing yet could outdo simply plugging herself in. Rather, her father seemed to have included this feature to help her fit in. Because without eating capabilities, it would’ve been quite easy for others to notice something truly different about her.
She still couldn’t ingest drinks—too inefficient to incinerate—but it was much easier to fake the action of drinking.
Suddenly, the sound of Weiss saying her name pulled her back into the present moment.
“Penny. Truth or dare?”
It took a moment for Penny to make her choice. A dare seemed less frightening than a truth, but… what was a Huntress if not someone who faced the scary things?
“Truth,” she said, sitting up straighter.
Weiss thought for a moment, and then spoke. “What is your greatest fear?”
The question was not nearly as scary as Penny had anticipated. She’d been worried that Weiss might ask, are you secretly a robot? or what have you been hiding from us? or do you have radar?
Still, it was a tricky one. There were things she was afraid of, certainly. Thunderstorms, because of the lightning which might overload her systems. Actually, related to that, powerful, uncontrolled sources of electricity in general. Such as Nora.
But there were steps and precautions Penny could take to mitigate that kind of fear, and it was the kind of fear she could allay with her logic circuits quite easily. The most truthful answer to this question would be something that even her logic circuits struggled to grapple with. There weren’t many things like that.
She was afraid of being found out, but she couldn’t say that. Besides, being found out didn’t necessarily scare her. It would feel nice to have people know what she was and accept her. So… what was it about being found out which was scary?
And then she found the right words. The real fear hiding behind the concept of being found out, the fear which felt like it could freeze every servo in her body when she thought too much about it.
She’d been sitting with her legs crossed, but now she uncrossed them and pulled her knees up to her chest, hugging them tightly against her.
“My greatest fear is that other people will be afraid of me.”
She looked down, suddenly unable to meet the gazes of her teammates. What if, by telling them that she was worried about other people being afraid of her, they would become afraid of her?
“Oh. Because of your Semblance?” she heard Yang say.
Penny nodded. That was part of it, so it was technically not a lie to say as much. She knew she was already unsettling before sharing anything about her robotic nature because of how her unassuming appearance and cheerful personality caused everyone to underestimate her until she demonstrated her immense strength. And the sheer whiplash caused by seeing her cheerfully snap a Beowolf’s neck could deeply unnerve some people.
“Wait. So when Aloysia Dawn called you ‘something out of a horror movie’ last week…” Yang went pale. “Oh, no.”
Penny nodded. She remembered that incident with a distressing amount of sharpness. “I did not like that. I know she meant it as a good-natured joke. But I am not a joke.” She was not a joke! She was not a monster pretending to be a girl! She was Penny Pallas! And if this was how people could perceive her when they thought she was a human… how much worse would it get if they knew she was entirely synthetic?
“Why didn’t you say it was bothering you?” Weiss said. “We would’ve told her off for you.”
“I did not want to make a scene.” Maybe she should have made a scene. Maybe she should have tried to assert her personhood. But she’d been afraid of making the situation worse somehow, calling more attention to it when that was the last thing she wanted.
“I’m sorry,” Blake said. “I thought something was a little off about you that day, but I never made the connection.”
Was the solution to be less cheerful, so people had a better idea of what to expect? But she didn’t want to be less cheerful! “I want to help people. I want to stop fear, not cause more of it. But how can I do that when I’m…?” She didn’t let herself finish that thought.
“You know, Penny… Other people being afraid of someone is more common than you might think,” Yang said.
Penny finally summoned the courage to look up. “Really? What do you mean by that?”
Yang gestured at herself, and her eyes flickered red for a moment. “People are afraid of me because I’m loud and fiery and I can punch through a brick wall.”
Weiss raised a hand. “And people are afraid of me because of my last name.”
Blake pointed to her ears. “And my bow—part of why I wear it is that some people are afraid of Faunus, in the worst way possible.”
Penny stared at her teammates. “But… None of you are scary.” How could anyone be afraid of them? Even Weiss! The Schnee name was well-known, but Weiss was also short, and it was statistically proven that short people were considered less scary. And Yang was so cheerful, and Blake was calming, and Penny would never use the word scary to describe any of them.
“Exactly,” Blake said. “Sometimes, people are going to be afraid of something about you that you can’t change.”
“Or something you don’t want to change,” Yang added.
Penny frowned in thought, picking at the hem of her leggings. “But then what do I do about it?”
“You be yourself,” Blake said, her amber eyes suddenly full of intensity. “Because if you try to make yourself palatable to every person in existence, you’ll be afraid of yourself.”
“Oh,” Penny said.
Oh, indeed. Blake was right. Blake was so very right. Penny would never want to be afraid of herself. And she thought maybe sometimes that happened to her. There were times she was so afraid of what other people would think that it spilled over into being afraid of herself and then she couldn’t look at herself or think about herself or think about anything or—and the only thing that could fix that spiral of thoughts was a very long time sleeping.
Penny turned her head slowly, watching the subtle shifts in her teammates’ expressions. Could she tell them? Should she tell them? Was this something she could do right now? Late at night on the floor of the living room of the Xiao Long household with a gentle rain falling outside and a pizza crust on the floor seven centimeters from her left foot and Yang and Blake and Weiss looking at her with no fear, just warm friendliness?
…Not yet.
She still didn’t feel ready. But she did feel closer.
One reason not to do it now: It was her turn.
“Yang! Truth or dare?”
Yang smiled widely. “Truth.”
Seeing that every question so far had been quite momentous, Penny felt like her chosen question would not be out of place. Besides, she was extremely curious about it.
“How did you get your prosthetic arm?”
Yang leaned back against the wall, letting out a slow breath, and for a moment, Penny worried that she’d gone too far. However, after a few more moments, she just shrugged.
“Nothing heroic, sadly. I was just a little kid who didn’t understand how the world worked, and I went out alone in the woods looking for my missing family members one too many times. It’s kind of funny to look back at what I thought. I knew my baby sibling was eaten by a Grimm, but I thought for way too long that if I could just find the Grimm that’d eaten him, I could cut open its belly and find the kid asleep inside, safe and sound, and then I could be a big sister again.” She raised her arm, twisting it back and forth and staring at the prosthetic fingers. “I got lucky. If my uncle wasn’t already looking for me when I ran into a horde of Grimm, I would be dead.”
Penny did not know what to say in response to that. Yang’s tone was light, and she was never reluctant to talk about the unfortunate details of her childhood, but even so she wondered if she’d gone too far with the question. At least, she wondered that until Yang kept talking.
“You know what’s a bad combination? A little girl and an expensive prosthetic. I can’t tell you how many heart attacks I gave Dad by using my arm for playing fetch with Zwei.” She leaned closer and lowered her voice to a whisper. “Don’t tell him, but I still do it sometimes.”
Penny thought about it. If a prosthetic could stand up to the rigors of battle, it could stand up to the rigors of a dog’s teeth.
“I’ve been thinking I need a cooler-sounding story to tell people,” Yang went on. “Because the arm’s a good conversation-starter, but telling them how I got it is good at ending the conversation. I’ve been thinking maybe I should say I got it in a wrestling match with an Ursa? Or by saving a beautiful woman from a collapsing building? Or because—”
“How about because you blew up your arm with an early prototype of your hand-mounted shotguns?” Weiss cut in.
“Hardy har har.” Yang detached her prosthetic and shook it at Weiss like she was Glynda singling out someone with her riding crop. “Ember Celica has always been the pinnacle of safety!”
An exchange of passionate opinions about the veracity of various weapons followed; at the conclusion of which Yang remembered they were supposed to be playing a game and pointed at Blake.
“Blake, truth or dare?”
“Dare.”
“Oh, thank goodness.” A huge grin spread over her face. “I was worried that everyone would just keep picking truths and I’d never get a chance to do this. So. Blake! I dare you to draw a mustache on my dad’s face without waking him up.”
Blake’s eyebrows shot way, way up. “Yang, you can’t be serious.”
“It’s a dare,” Yang said. “A double dare, even. Dad could sleep through the collapse of a kingdom.”
“Hm. All right.” Blake got to her feet and stretched, briefly balancing on her tiptoes. “I’m going to do you one better. I’m going to draw the mustache, and then I’m going to turn his entire face into an artistic canvas.”
Yang, who had clearly been prepared for this because she was already pulling a permanent marker out of a nearby drawer, blinked at Blake. “For what?”
“Artwork of the phallic variety.”
Oh, Penny thought, her eyes widening. This might be the meanest thing I’ve ever let someone do.
It was a miracle they didn’t wake up Taiyang with all the giggling that followed.
The forests of Patch were a lovely place for a walk. Everything was drenched in the lush green colors of summer, and butterflies flitted amongst the wildflowers which grew next to the path they traversed. It was true that these forests held Grimm, but Penny almost hoped there would be a Grimm foolish enough to attack them, because she wanted to see how quickly the combined martial force of Team BSYP could obliterate a lone Beowolf.
“Not much further now,” Yang said. “Careful, there’s a rocky bit right before we get there.”
In contrast to Yang’s casual cheer, Penny, Blake, and Weiss stayed mostly silent as they picked their way over tree roots. Even though Yang was treating this as a normal walk in the woods, it didn’t feel right to act informally on their first visit to Summer Rose’s grave.
There was a break in the trees ahead. Almost immediately upon reaching it, Yang turned and stopped. “Hey, Mom! Been a while.”
The position of the grave confused Penny. It was at the treeline, which seemed like an illogical choice given how much open space there was on the cliff—
And that was when she noticed the other grave.
It was smaller than Summer’s, but it sat at the cliff’s edge, in a precise symmetry with the dimensions of the clearing.
“Huntress training is going pretty well. My team’s here with me—meet Blake, Penny, and Weiss!”
Penny looked back and forth between Summer’s grave and the other one, reviewed some chronological information in her memory, and made an inference.
“Blake’s our leader. Together we form Team Battleship—it’s nice to have a name that’s really damn cool.”
The smaller grave was meant as the center of a visitor’s attention, and Summer’s grave was placed to be as unobtrusive as possible to the scene—to avoid intruding on the solitude of the little gravestone.
“My teammates are all great people, you’d love them.” Yang paused, and then added, “…Well, I don’t know if you would’ve liked Weiss at first, but she’s mellowed out a lot and she’s cool now.”
Weiss rolled her eyes but said nothing as Yang continued on, talking about her life and what’d occurred in the last few months.
“…I hope you don’t mind that it’s getting harder and harder to remember what you look like,” Yang said. She moved a little closer to the grave before crouching down on one knee and putting a hand atop the headstone. “And Dad doesn’t even have any pictures of you, so… I can’t really refresh my memory. Lately, whenever I try to think about your face, all I can picture is a fuzzy blob of nothing. If I think really hard, I can still sort of make out the shapes and the colors, but it’s fading. I don’t know how to stop it, but I promise I’ll never forget the feeling of you, though.”
Finally, Yang fell silent, and then glanced at the others.
“Don’t all stand around here on my account. Feel free to check out the view.” She nodded to the cliffside behind them.
Penny took the opportunity to walk over to the other grave and read the name—or at least, what was there in place of a name: The Lost Rose Child.
Ah. She recalled what Yang had told her that first night in their dorm room—the baby who didn’t live long enough to get a name.
There was something else inscribed beneath those words, but in much smaller text. She zoomed in her vision, and saw—
Someone, in another time, will remember us.
Something about the words sent a surge of emotion through Penny, and she committed them to her memory with extra care.
The grave was in pristine condition, hardly any weathering visible anywhere, which seemed incongruous considering how exposed to the elements this cliff was.
Her radar registered someone approaching, and she turned to see Yang coming up behind her.
“Hey, kiddo,” Yang said, crouching down and lightly fistbumping the grave, her prosthetic’s metal fingers clacking against the stone. Then she stood back up, and gave Penny a shrug. “I never know what I could say to someone I never really met. So… I just do that, usually.”
As the four of them turned to leave, Penny noted that Summer’s grave was in the same virtually untouched state. The only explanation for their condition could be years and years of frequent and meticulous upkeep. Upkeep which hadn’t lessened in the months while Yang was at Beacon.
Penny thought of Taiyang, living alone in a house that’d already lost multiple occupants, with a daughter going to Beacon to pursue the same thing which had killed her mother.
She wondered how he lived with the knowledge that every day might be the day another grave was added to the cliff.
She wondered if her own father thought a similar thing every day, somewhere out there in the world.
They had a redeye flight back to Beacon which required getting up at a ridiculously early hour to get to the aerodrome. As such, with three-fourths of the team incredibly groggy, they were mostly silent on the flight. They were the only ones on the airship, so they sat together on one of the central lounge couches, somewhat paying attention to the news broadcast which played on a nearby television. Yang suggested another round of truth or dare, which was voted down by the other three. That was probably a good thing, considering how the previous game had ended with Yang daring Weiss to accept a team name change to Team Biceps, which was followed by Weiss sticking Yang to the ceiling with a glyph.
Shortly after they lifted off, Yang fell asleep, and a few minutes after that, her head lolled over and came to rest on Blake’s shoulder.
Weiss treated this development with what Penny thought was a strange amount of significance—she stared at Blake with an expression that was… Well, Penny couldn’t describe it, but it was blatant. Blake, meanwhile, offered no reply except a blush.
That was the most notable thing to happen for most of the flight. Yang was still sleeping on Blake’s head, and Penny was playing a card game with Weiss, when the news feed flashed suddenly.
“Breaking news: Another Dust store was burglarized last night, the latest in a string of robberies stretching back months—”
“That’s got to be the White Fang,” Weiss said, shaking her head. “I can’t think of anyone else who would be robbing all of these stores.”
“Really?” Blake fixed a glare on Weiss. “That’s what you’re going with when there have been actual eyewitnesses who saw Roman Torchwick leading one of the robberies?”
“That must’ve been a one-off.”
“What fascinating logic you’re employing.”
“Why don’t we find out for ourselves!” That was Yang, jerking awake and sitting bolt upright. She glanced at the others. “There’s a big shipment of Dust coming into Vale by ship later this week, and I’ve never been more sure in my life that a robbery was going to happen. All that Dust just sitting out at the docks? Come on.”
“Are you suggesting a stakeout?” Blake said.
Penny sat up straighter, excitement flooding her. A stakeout! Her first one ever! Maybe they would actually stop a crime! She couldn’t wait to see what kind of fascinating adventure would await them at the docks!
Notes:
The next chapter, coming next weekend, is titled "The Lost One," and I think that should tell you all you need to know about who's going to be introduced in that chapter!
And now, the second artwork I commissioned! This one comes from the fantastic artist @artsbysmarty on Tumblr, and it's a drawing of the Geist chase from Chapter 4! I'm really, really happy with how this one came out.
Chapter 9: The Lost One
Notes:
This chapter was seven years in the making, and I'm feeling quite emotional about having finally reached it. And I have some more art to share! My wonderful friend DesiB717 surprised me with animations of Penny and Ruby's weapons transforming between their various modes! Below is Luminous Electra's animation, and at the end of the chapter is the animation for Ruby's weapon!
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
“You think our unknown Dust thieves thought this was too good to be true?”
Penny, Blake, and Weiss looked over to Yang, who had lowered her binoculars and was staring off into the distance contemplatively. Team BSYP was on their third hour of staking out the docks, without a single sign of trouble. The enormous cargo containers of Dust, emblazoned with the Schnee Dust Company logo, remained perfectly untouched.
“It does seem like an incredibly obvious target,” Blake said. “Honestly, if I were one of the thieves, I’d think it was a trap.”
“They’re criminals. They can’t be very smart,” Weiss muttered.
Blake stared at Weiss, but didn’t say anything before she stood up, doing one long, slow scan of the docks with her binoculars.
Penny had been given a pair of binoculars, too, but they were essentially useless compared to the zoom capabilities her photoreceptors had. Still, appearances had to be maintained, so she was pretending to keep watch with her binoculars… but in reality, she was concentrating on using her audioreceptors to scan for sound instead of visuals. Surveillance was best done in a variety of mediums!
“Let’s fan out, sweep the docks on foot, see if we find anything strange. Check in by scroll with each other every five minutes, meet back here in thirty. How does that sound?”
Blake’s plan was met with nods of assent from the rest of the team, and there was a quiet chorus of clicks as the safeties of weapons were turned off and ammunition was loaded.
Penny was quite thankful for the chance to use the full extent of her night vision without necessarily needing to explain how she’d seen an adversary out of pitch-black darkness. Somehow, claiming to have a diet rich in carrots did not seem like a believable excuse.
Blake set her foot on the fire escape which was their way on and off the roof and paused, looking back at them with a grin. “Team Battleship, ready to set sail on the dock?”
Penny tilted her head, confused. Was that… supposed to be a joke of some sort?
“Couldn’t think of anything better?” Yang said in a sympathetic tone. Definitely a joke, then.
Blake sighed. “We’re a team named after ships and we’re doing a mission at the docks. I really should be able to think of a good joke, but… I’ve got nothing.”
With that, she dropped out of sight, shimmying down the fire escape with a speed no one else on the team could achieve.
Well, Penny could technically beat Blake to the bottom, but she was skipping the fire escape entirely, just activating her flight mode and jumping off the roof. She landed and waited for the rest of her team, and they paused for a moment on the ground to nod at each other. Then they split up.
Penny chose a route that took her towards the northern edge of the docks, where the train tracks entered. Several empty boxcars sat on the tracks, their doors ajar, and Penny approached them cautiously, wondering if there would be someone hiding inside, but a quick check showed them to be empty. She stepped back, satisfied, and turned to keep following the perimeter—
Wait. Something had just flashed on her infrared vision. Above her, on top of the boxcar, just an indistinguishable blur, but there was no mistaking the heat signature of an organic being in motion.
She drew Luminous Electra, extending it to zweihander mode, and stepped back, trying to get a clearer view of the boxcar’s roof. There was something faint and glimmering drifting in the air now, and Penny zoomed in, trying to make sense of what she was seeing.
She couldn’t identify it with any certainty. The best description she could apply to her visuals was… silver dust.
And then something appeared on her radar out of quite literally nowhere at the same moment she registered a soft thunk behind her, like someone landing on the ground. Penny turned around and found an unidentified girl staring at her.
Outfit: Black-navy blue jacket, tactical pants, black cape, crisscrossing bandoliers, utility belt, fingerless gloves, black combat boots, goggles with tinted lenses set askew on top of her head. Height: Five feet two inches. Hair: black, reddish at the tips, done up in a single braid which reached to her waist. Heart rate: elevated. Eye color: brown. No, a correction to her previous observation: the girl was wearing brown-colored contact lenses . Penny could not ascertain her true eye color. What she could ascertain was that the girl was armed.
She was holding a white-and-blue staff with a two-handed grip in the middle and a slightly curved blade extending straight out the end—a war scythe.
And the war scythe’s tip was pointed directly at Penny.
Penny tightened her grip on Luminous Electra as she and the girl stared at each other, the girl’s braid waving slightly in the wind. More of that silver dust hung in the air around her, catching the moonlight and making the air ripple like the surface of the sea. The girl was crouched in a ready stance, clearly expecting a fight (her vambraces and shin armor made it clear just how ready for a fight she was, too), and her expression was one of deep suspicion, but also maybe ten percent confusion.
And then the girl spoke.
“Are you the enemy?” she said, narrowing her eyes.
Funnily enough, that was what Penny had been about to ask. So she decided it would be a good response.
“Are you?” she said.
The girl blinked. And then something odd happened. One moment, she was staring at Penny. And then the next moment, she was gone with a faint whooshing sound. No movement, just gone. Penny stepped back, refreshing her photoreceptors. Had her vision just glitched?
She reviewed her visual history of the event, and only when she slowed it down to frame-by-frame viewing did she realize what’d happened. The girl seemed to explode into a cloud of that same silvery powder before jetting away in a silver-colored streak at a rate of speed so high it sent small shockwaves through the air around her.
“Hello?” Penny called out into the night. “Are you still here?”
No answer. The cloud of dissolving silver particles left behind by the girl’s Semblance floated through the air towards Penny, carried by the ocean breeze. She felt a light brush against her cheek where the cloud came into contact with her, and she even managed to catch some in her hands. Studying it this closely, it was as if someone had taken pure silver and ground it up into a powder that glittered fiercely, highly reflective in a way that normally only the most precious of metals could manage.
She watched it dissolve, and then shook off her stupor, pulling out her scroll and activating a call.
“There is someone here!” she whisper-shouted into it. “We saw each other, and she ran away!”
“What?” Weiss and Yang said in overlapping voices, before Blake’s tone cut through the call.
“Everyone, meet at the fire escape ASAP. Penny, can you still see her?”
Penny scanned her surroundings, finding nothing in every type of vision she had. “No, she is gone.”
“Okay. Stay on the call until we can all see each other.”
Penny activated her flight mode and soared across the docks, keeping a careful watch for any other sign of the girl, but all she saw was her team gathering at the fire escape where they’d diverged.
“Are you okay?” Blake said as she landed.
“Completely,” Penny replied, still searching for the girl. “We did not fight—it was just an exchange of words. She asked if I was an enemy.”
“Was she a Faunus?” Weiss said.
“Weiss!” Blake snapped with a sudden venom in her tone that made Penny flinch. “The White Fang isn’t hiding in every shadow you see, you know!”
“Not—not that I could tell,” Penny added hastily, not wanting to give Weiss more fuel to display prejudice. “She did not display any White Fang livery, either.”
“Hmph.” Weiss crossed her arms. “The Dust thief can’t be just one person, can it?”
“Maybe she’s trying to stop a robbery, like us? Beacon student?” Yang offered.
Penny shook her head, double-checking her databases just to be sure. “That is impossible. I didn’t recognize her, and I can remember the face of every Beacon student.”
Blake pinched the bridge of her nose. “Okay, so. Mystery girl. Has a weapon. Might not even be here anymore. Is there anything we can even do until we see her again?”
“Huh. I guess we really are on the same side.”
The sudden and new voice made every member of Team BSYP jump, even Penny because she had not seen anything on her radar—
As her teammates looked around wildly, Penny realized the voice had come from above.
She looked up and saw the same girl, perched on the fire escape and watching them with her weapon in hand. Even with visual confirmation, Penny still couldn’t pick her up on her radar, and it took her a moment to understand why: the fire escape was utterly fouling up her radar signals due to its interlocking metal bars, rendering the girl completely invisible. Penny had to wonder, was that on purpose?
At that moment, the girl noticed Penny staring. She smiled and waved energetically before flipping down from the railing and landing neatly in front of Team BSYP.
It was then that Penny noticed the girl’s weapon had transformed—instead of a war scythe, the staff was folded in half, with a firearm grip now deployed from one end. The blade at the end of the staff had been pushed up to make way for the new business end of the weapon—twin gun barrels, one on top of the other. With that shape and the scope attached to the barrel, this mode was unmistakably a heavy sniper rifle.
“So, looks like we’re all trying to stop these Dust thieves!” she chirped, spinning her weapon around her hand before holstering it on her back.
Blake had not lowered Gambol Shroud. “I’m sorry, but who are you?”
The girl wheeled to face Blake and gave her a snappy salute. “Ruby Karyatis, first-year cadet of the Atlas Military Academy, at your service!”
Atlas? Ruby was an Atlesian student? What was she doing here? Penny considered that she could be one of the exchange students for the Vytal Tournament, but they weren’t due to show up yet.
“Aren’t you a little young to be a student?” Weiss said, squinting.
“Nope!” Suddenly, Ruby was staring at Penny, her eyes widening as she focused on something just behind Penny. “Is that a jetpack?”
Penny glanced back, and realized she’d forgotten to retract her flight mode. “Yes—” Suddenly she found herself talking to empty air and silver dust, because Ruby had semblanced behind her.
“It’s got to be custom-made from the ground up, right? I’ve never seen one like this!” came her voice. She was craning her neck to see every detail of the wings, which immediately made Penny nervous, because what if she noticed it wasn’t actually a jetpack—?
“Hm. You don’t have much space for fuel in there—probably makes it lighter, but how long can you keep it in the air?”
Oh, no. The fuel for Penny’s jetpack was herself, by way of energy supplied from her deep-cycle battery cells. And she had never considered that she might need a cover story for this. Well, when all else failed…
“It is a secret,” she said.
“Oooooooh.” Ruby nodded appreciatively. “Trade secret. Smart, very smart.” She paused, a distant look coming into her eyes. “I’ve always wanted to be able to fly, but conventional jetpacks just aren’t plausible, so…” She kept staring at the wings. “I’ll just keep dreaming about it, I guess.”
And then her reverie disappeared and she hopped sideways to gape at Luminous Electra, which Penny still held in one hand.
Meanwhile, Weiss and Blake and Yang were exchanging a look. It was one of those shared looks that Penny could almost never decipher, so most of the time she just tried to copy the expression on everyone else’s face. But this time, she was quite sure that it was a look of shared confusion about Ruby.
“I’ve never seen a zweihander in the wild until now! This is a unicorn!” She moved even closer, her hands hovering just inches over the blade. “You’ve got a gun built into it, too! And a channel down the blade for Dust… you’ve really added some versatility! Is it enough to overcome a zweihander’s lack of maneuverability and extreme vulnerability at short range?” She looked up, meeting Penny’s eyes once more, and after a moment, Penny realized she meant it as a question.
She had never quite been able to understand the phrase ‘her eyes were shining.’ Until now. Yes, human eyes could be reflective, but they weren’t particularly luminous. Except for Ruby. She couldn’t explain it, but Ruby’s eyes were definitely shining as she looked at Penny, even through her contact lenses.
“Er… Yes?”
“What do you do if someone gets past your blade?”
“I hit them? With my hands?” Considering that Penny’s hands could meet the legal definition of a weapon on their own, she really should have been able to make that sound more convincing.
“Hmmm.” Ruby tapped her chin. “Simple, but undeniably effective.”
Suddenly, she blurred and reappeared next to Yang, literally lifting one of her arms up to study Ember Celica.
“Are those gauntlets with shotguns built in?” she gasped.
“Er… Yeah?” Yang said. She must’ve been caught extremely off-guard, because she didn’t even try to pull her arm away from Ruby.
“You’ve integrated the gauntlet into your prosthetic! How artful and utilitarian! And those are spring-loaded sliding triggers!” Ruby continued, fresh amazement filling her voice. “Do you punch to fire this? Which means in combat you can shoot your opponents while punching them in the face at the same time?”
“Um… Yes,” Yang said, still appearing completely lost.
“Oh, how brutally unorthodox!” Ruby gushed. “I love it!”
“What?” And then Yang shook her head as if to clear out her confusion, and finally pulled her arm away from Ruby. “Look, I’m sorry if this is a weird question, but—have we met before?”
Ruby paused in her whirlwind of movement to blink at Yang, scrunching up her nose. “Um, I don’t think so?”
“Oh. I just… You look weirdly familiar, like I’ve seen you somewhere, and I don’t know why.”
“Highly unlikely!” Ruby said cheerfully. “This is my first time outside of Atlas!”
“What are you doing here, anyway?” Yang started to say, but just like with Penny before, the question was asked to empty air as Ruby blurred again and materialized behind Blake.
Penny continued to be amazed by the speed of this girl’s Semblance. If she was struggling to see it with her high-speed vision, then it must have appeared like actual teleportation to the others.
Now Ruby was admiring Gambol Shroud, which was strapped to Blake’s back. “Look at the craftsmanship on this one!” she said, positively cooing. “I’ve never seen a sheath that big! Ooh, and—” She zeroed in on the handle end of Gambol Shroud. “—an elastic band? What a fascinating concept! Undoubtedly, this lets you perform incredibly dangerous acrobatic maneuvers with it, right? You must’ve whacked yourself so many times while learning to use this!”
“What?” Blake said, and that was all she had a chance to say in reply, because Ruby was already next to Weiss and staring at Myrtenaster.
“A Multi-Action Dust Rapier!” Ruby was saying reverently. “Artful… versatile… extremely tricky to plan against… but a little bit too formulaic for my tastes. And let’s be real, pretty boring if you run out of Dust.”
“Excuse me!”
Finally, it was Weiss, waving her arms frantically and genuinely yelling, who managed to capture Ruby’s attention. “Is there a point to any of this?!”
“Of course there’s a point!” Ruby said, not appearing bothered in the slightest by the interruption. “All this is exactly why I’ve been so excited to meet Beacon students!” She clasped her hands together and did a little jump before spinning in a circle. “You all do such fascinating things with your weapons!”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I always want to know more about weapons. They’re extensions of our bodies… the thing we rely on most as huntresses… and they can be anything you want them to be! How are they not the most important thing in the world?”
Ruby put her hand on her own weapon and sighed, looking off into the distance. “Sometimes I wish I was a weapon,” she said wistfully. “It’d be so much easier. Just an assemblage of metal in someone’s hands to be pointed wherever I’m needed.”
Penny shifted her weight, looking at Weiss and Blake and Yang and wondering if they were as concerned by that statement as she was. She knew perfectly well that there was nothing wrong with being an assemblage of metal! It was a wonderful thing, in fact! But the way Ruby was talking about it… she sounded like she didn’t want to be a person.
Meanwhile, Ruby kept talking at breakneck speed. “Weapons are also the thing I’m best at talking about, and my guardian said I should try to make some friends while I’m here since I don’t have any yet, and I’d really like some, so I figured why not talk about the thing I’m good at talking about and see if I can make any friends that way, and you all are the first people I’ve met here, so!” She looked back and forth between them, shifting her weight from foot to foot, and then nodded rapidly.“Yeah! Weapons?”
Penny watched Ruby thoughtfully, a new purpose filling her. She had been unsure what to think of Ruby… until now. She had two very important pieces of information about Ruby that quickly made up her mind. One: Ruby did not have any friends. Two: she wanted friends. And Penny Pallas, the number-one friend-maker on Remnant, had the power to change that! She was going to be Ruby’s friend!
She still cherished the feeling of making her first friend. It was something that felt warm and energetic and made her entire body pulse with excitement. And now she was about to share that feeling with somebody else. How wonderful that this was a feeling that could be created in others by something as simple as saying:
“Ruby,” Penny said, stepping forward and holding out a hand. “I think it would be sensational to be your friend!”
So what if some of her behavior was a little odd? Some of Penny’s behavior was most definitely odd, too. Ruby was energetic and easily excited and liked to talk about weapons and perhaps didn’t have the best grasp on how other people’s thoughts worked, and all of those things were true for Penny, too!
Ruby’s eyes had gone very, very wide. She stared down at Penny’s hand.
Behind Ruby, Weiss was staring in horror at the interaction and very emphatically mouthing NO at Penny over and over again. Penny ignored her.
“You’re serious?” Ruby whispered.
Penny nodded. “Utterly so!”
Ruby made a very loud squeaking sound, shot out a hand and grabbed Penny’s as if she was afraid it might run away suddenly, and then after a few moments’ hesitation, she shook rapidly, vibrating in place so quickly Penny wondered if she was activating her Semblance.
“Oh my gosh oh my gosh oh my gosh ohmygoshohmygoshohmygosh OH MY GOSH!” she squealed.
Weiss buried her face in her hands.
Penny grinned. Friend: made! She hoped she would be a good first friend for Ruby, like Penny’s first friend at Beacon had been for her. Penny hoped her first friend was doing okay, wherever she was now.
Abruptly, Ruby stopped moving, cocking her head at Penny. “Um. What’s your name?”
Penny giggled, just a little bit, and then quickly smiled at Ruby again just to make it clear she wasn’t making fun of her. “I am Penny Pallas!”
Ruby nodded rapidly. “I’m Ruby, in case you missed it! Ruby Karyatis!” She pulled her weapon off her back, displaying it proudly. “And this is Lunar Enforcer!”
Coincidence detected! “My weapon, Luminous Electra, has the same initials as your weapon!” Penny said.
“Ooooh, is it a sign we were meant to be friends?” Ruby said, dropping her voice to what was probably intended as a ‘mysterious’ tone. But before Penny could reply, she froze. “Wait. Sorry, I need to ask you one thing before we can be friends.”
Penny nodded and waited.
“Are you a member of the White Fang?”
What?
Penny stared. The question was so unexpected, so completely out of nowhere, that she—along with the rest of her team—could not think of a way to reply.
Finally, it was Blake who spoke, saying, “...What?” in an incredibly flat tone.
Ruby shrugged. “Sorry, I have to ask!” She pointed at Penny’s head. “You’re wearing a bow, and headgear is one of the ways that White Fang agents can disguise their Faunus traits when they’re performing covert operations. It’s standard military knowledge—how to identify hidden enemies. And I cannot let myself be friends with an active White Fang member, because that would be a horrible breach of security.”
“I…” Blake stared at Ruby. “There are so many things wrong with that logic that I don’t even know where to begin.”
“Of course she’s not White Fang!” Weiss cut in suddenly. “She’s a Beacon student! Do you think they just let anyone in here?”
At that moment, Penny’s sensors alerted her that Blake’s heart rate was spiking rapidly.
“Huh.” Ruby tapped her chin. “Good point. It would be an impossibly bad oversight on the academy’s part to admit a criminal into the school, so never mind that.” She shook her head. “I’m sorry! I guess sometimes a bow is just a bow! Yours is very nice!”
“And what would you have done if she was in the White Fang?” Blake said. There was a strange note to her voice now, and her heart rate was still at the level of someone in a full sprint.
“Well—” Ruby stopped to look around before leaning in. “Don’t tell anyone this, but—” she began, her voice lowered. “I’d have so many questions.”
“Questions?” Blake said. She had a look on her face that Penny had absolutely no idea how to decipher.
“Of course! I’m not supposed to fraternize with the enemy, but if I could talk to a White Fang veteran without worrying about getting killed, I’d have so many questions to ask about their philosophies of weapon design. The improvised weapons that I’ve seen some White Fang members use are the coolest. I’m really interested in how they handle maintenance without access to conventional workshops or facilities! And how do they balance Dust usage with not having a steady supply? We could learn a lot from their methods!”
Ruby paused, then shrugged. “And then I’d have to arrest them. But they’d have my respect!”
“Right. Okay. Um, Ruby, we’re going to have a team-only meeting, can you… can you go check the perimeter of the docks and give us a few minutes of privacy?” Blake said.
“Sure thing!” Ruby saluted them and waved to Penny before vanishing in a cloud of silver dust, nothing but a receding blur in her vision.
For a few moments, there was just a silence that felt rather stunned.
“What?” Weiss said. “That girl… What is wrong with her?”
Blake crossed her arms. “She’s Atlesian.”
Weiss appeared so utterly confounded that Blake’s jab, which might’ve gotten a rise out of her any other day, slipped by completely unnoticed.
Penny noted that Yang was still standing off to one side, watching the spot where Ruby had disappeared.
“Are you alright?” she said, putting a hand on Yang’s shoulder.
Yang nodded. “Yeah, definitely. It’s just… where have I seen her before? It’s gonna bug me.”
“I’m sure you will figure it out.”
“I hope so.”
Weiss sighed, shaking her head. “I can’t believe that girl thought you were in the White Fang, Penny.”
“I was,” Blake said.
“As if there would be White Fang amongst Beacon’s ranks! What a preposterous—” Weiss’s head snapped around. “—WHAT?”
Notes:
“Its blade bears a superficial resemblance to that of an agricultural scythe from which it is likely to have evolved, but the war scythe is otherwise unrelated to agricultural tools and is a purpose-built infantry melee weapon.”
-From the Wikipedia page on the war scythe.
Chapter 10: Cat's Out Of The Bag
Notes:
Content warning for this chapter (click this text to reveal):
Discussions of police brutality/violence
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Penny had to check her auditory memory just to make sure she’d heard Blake right. She checked twice, in fact. And it was undeniable. She, along with Yang and Weiss, watched Blake, waiting for her to continue.
Blake was turned away from the team, staring off into the distance. “I was in the White Fang. But I left,” she said slowly, as if she was suffering from a glitching vocal processor.
“When?” Weiss said, her voice pitching up an octave. “How long? Why?”
Finally, Blake faced them again, shuffling to the left to sit down on an overturned crate. Her amber eyes bore into each of them in turn, before landing on Weiss. “I had parents that were active in the movement, and I was always with them, so I suppose you could say I was born into it. And when the Fang took a turn for the more overtly militant, my parents left. I didn’t. I stayed because we were finally getting results, and it made me happy. We were finally getting the respect that we deserved.” She closed her eyes, pain flashing through her expression and her heart rate accelerating, before pulling her legs closer to her chest and letting her chin rest on her knees. “But somewhere along the way, it started feeling like the Fang was taking things too far. Targeted direct action just became violence for the sake of violence. Like people weren’t trying to build a better future anymore, just lashing out at the world in frustration, and reveling in it. And I… I couldn’t do anything to change it. So… I left.”
Blake fell into silence, still not meeting anyone’s gaze, and Penny found herself completely without an idea of how to reply. What was an appropriate reaction to this? She believed Blake had been trying to do the right thing, of course—how could she not after how long they’d worked together as a team? But she did not know how to express that.
Unfortunately, Weiss wasn’t nearly as lost for words.
“You were a member of a terrorist organization,” she said, crossing her arms. “And you don’t sound very sorry about it.”
Blake lifted her head as slowly as if there was a heavy weight resting on her neck, and glared ferociously at Weiss. “Did you listen to anything I just said?”
“I heard it all. And I am appalled!” Weiss jabbed a finger at Blake. “Even putting aside your outrageous apologia for their violent methods, even putting aside how many awful things you must’ve done—”
Abruptly, Blake shot to her feet, cutting Weiss off. “What do you want? Proof that I’m not with the White Fang anymore?”
“As if I could trust anything coming from you!” Weiss snapped. “You broke your promise to us!”
At the mention of a broken promise, Penny tensed, old fears stirring in her memory banks—being found out, being hated, being distrusted—all of these things maybe happening to Blake, too—
“Weiss. We agreed that I could wait to tell you these things until I was ready. You agreed to that.”
“That’s not what the agreement was!”
Weiss’s voice rang out across the shipyard, and Penny was feeling increasingly scared. She didn’t know what to do. She felt frozen where she stood, as if her servos didn’t want to cooperate. Normal conflict resolution did not apply to her two teammates hurling vitriol at each other. She very much wanted Weiss to stop, but she did not know what would make her stop.
She looked to Yang for guidance, but there was nothing in Yang’s expression that offered any reassurance—just a deep exhaustion as she flicked her eyes back and forth between the two.
Weiss took a step forward, and suddenly there was far too little space between her and Blake. “We agreed that you could keep a secret as long as it didn’t endanger us! But you—you’re dangerous! You’re a criminal! You’ve been endangering me with your very presence this entire time!”
Blake did not step back. Instead, she stiffened her posture, and made every inch of her height advantage above Weiss very visible. “I’m still the same person you’ve known this entire semester.”
“And that person is a lie! And a delusional lie, if you think the White Fang has ever done an ounce of good! That’s why you think it can’t be the White Fang behind these thefts! Because you’re one of them!”
It was impossible for Penny to miss how Weiss’s hand was clenched tightly around Myrtenaster at her hip; how Blake’s hand rested on Gambol Shroud’s holster. She needed to make her partner stop—before something awful happened—but her processors felt entirely devoid of any ideas for how to intervene, whirring in a manner that felt thoroughly useless.
“The White Fang has done so much more than you could ever imagine,” Blake snapped. “Because no one was protecting Faunus workers from the atrocious crimes of your company before we came along! We were a group of freedom fighters with no money and no resources trying to push the most powerful company in the world into behaving at least slightly more ethically!”
“Freedom fighters!” Weiss let out a short, sharp laugh which was maybe the most unkind noise Penny had ever registered. “Yes, I’m not proud of what my company has done, and I’m going to change it! But do you know what your people have done to me? Nothing could justify that!”
“What? You, the pampered and posh heiress? What could we have ever done to you?!”
“Let me tell you!” Weiss snarled, her voice growing low and deadly. “I’m the daughter of the man who runs the company! I’ve had a target on my back for as long as I can remember! All my life, I’ve had to reckon with the knowledge that I could be killed to make a statement!” Her fists tightened, and she turned away from Blake—but even without Weiss facing Blake, the situation did not seem any less tense to Penny. “The White Fang has turned my life into a living nightmare. Friends of mine put in danger, relatives disappeared in the middle of the night, thefts, attacks on shipments, the sabotages, the strikes—all of these things the White Fang was doing made my father angry. And he only got angrier when people started dying, board members and employees and advisors. So very angry. There were nights when—nights when he would come home and, well—” She gave a bitter laugh and turned away. “Nights when nothing I could do would please him, and anything I did would earn me—” She paused, twitching violently, and then the next word came out of her mouth in a way that sounded eerily unlike anything else she’d ever said. “—necessary discipline.” She turned a glare full of accusation on Blake once more. “Of course, I could never fight back because I needed to be a perfect heiress for him.”
She stopped there, breathing rapidly almost to the point of hyperventilation, and a deathly silence fell. Penny looked nervously to Yang, wondering if perhaps this was when they should intervene—
“Weiss.” Sadness flashed across Blake’s face, but immediately she was all rock-solid anger again, and her next words were saturated with pure rage. “None of that is my fault. You cannot blame me or the White Fang for your father abusing you.”
SHWM.
In one fluid move, Weiss whipped out Myrtenaster and unleashed a glowing white glyph on Blake.
But Blake had seen it coming, and the glyph caught nothing except a shadow clone which dissolved in midair as it was thrown backwards, and then Blake was standing directly in front of Weiss, Gambol Shroud drawn in its pistol form and aimed squarely at Weiss’s forehead.
“Weiss!” Yang growled, and finally she made a move, cocking Ember Celica and coming to stand next to Blake. “Don’t you dare do anything like that again.”
But even as Penny knew she should be standing by Blake’s side as well, she still found herself unable to make a move, just… terrified of doing the wrong thing, or saying the wrong thing, or making things worse somehow. Her friends were fighting. Her team was turning against itself. She didn’t know what to do. She didn’t know how to fix this. She wanted to enter low-power mode and take refuge inside her circuits where she didn’t have to perceive anyone or anything and there would be no problems and nothing would be scary.
Weiss held Myrtenaster at an angle, not entirely pointing it at Blake, but most definitely staring murderously at her.
“You want to play the victim, Weiss?” Blake spat out. “Fine. I can do that, too. You’ve always been able to separate the crimes of your company from the crimes of those people.” She gestured at her bow-covered ears as the words those people spilled out of her mouth. “But here’s something you’ve either been too dense to realize, or too stupid to figure out: the crimes of your company are why those people are acting like that. I’ve done my best to keep in mind that you’re just a kid with no control over the company yet, but since you’re willing to blame me for things your father did to you, maybe I should try blaming you for the things your father’s done to me.”
Penny heard a distinct choked noise come from somewhere in Weiss’s throat, something seventy percent gasp and thirty percent yelp, and she had no idea what it meant.
“ Do you know why the White Fang hates the Schnee Dust Company?” Blake said. “Why I was more than willing to go to war with the company?”
Weiss said nothing.
“When my parents left the White Fang, it wasn’t because they necessarily disagreed with the direction we were taking! It was because they were tired. They were tired of putting their body on the line and winning only the smallest concessions, tired of the broken bones and concussions from the batons of Atlesian military police sent in to break up peaceful strikes and protests, tired of the aches in their bodies from always looking over their shoulders and sleeping with one eye open—I was a kid and I watched the revolutionary spirit get beaten out of my parents and how could I not want to fight the Schnee Dust Company and the entire world after that?!”
Blake paused for a moment, long enough that Penny started to wonder if she was expecting Weiss to answer, but then she continued abruptly.
“I had a friend in the Fang who was the daughter of two Atlesian mineworkers. Her parents were killed in a mine explosion when they were forced to handle unstable Dust crystals with woefully inadequate safety gear, in a mine designed with appalling structural flaws that lacked even the most basic of rescue equipment. My friend can only hope that they died immediately in the initial explosion, instead of suffocating to death over the hours following the collapse, trapped and unable to move in complete darkness. She hopes they didn’t have to feel the weight of an entire mountain pressing down on them, every breath they took getting shorter and staler until their lungs gave out and they slipped into oblivion.”
Weiss still was saying nothing, but Penny could see that the color was slowly draining out of her partner’s face and the furiousness was slowly fading.
“That was far from an isolated occurrence, and there are so many victims—even more when you count those who weren’t killed but were left with scars and lifelong injuries. And it was mostly poor, underpaid Faunus workers in those incidents. The Schnee Dust Company likes to tout the fact that it employs humans and Faunus in equal numbers, while ignoring that the vast majority of Faunus work in the riskier, lower-paid positions that the company pays no particular attention to, in the most unsafe mines where they have to be lucky in order to leave alive and unharmed. It’s an entirely silent way of mowing down Faunus in numbers that would be criminal if they came from anywhere besides the SDC, which has all of Remnant over a barrel with its Dust monopoly.”
Even though Weiss had gone stock-still, Blake held up a hand as if to stave off a rebuttal. “And before you say that the White Fang should’ve used nonviolent methods to protest that… Well, nonviolence sounds nice and poetic and noble, but it meant nothing when we were getting mowed down, eradicated, broken apart and eroded and sent to early graves and nothing was changing.”
“Blake—” Weiss started to say, only for Blake to stomp her foot, silencing her.
“Do you know why I’m afraid of dogs?” she said, letting out a short, strangled laugh. “It’s not because I have cat ears. It’s not because of any stupid innate Faunus thing like I’m sure you’ve been thinking. It’s because when I was at a protest when I was eight years old, they sent in police dogs to break us up! One of them mangled my ankle so badly that I might’ve needed an amputation if I hadn’t unlocked my Aura in the middle of having my leg chewed up by a dog that weighed more than me because I’d dared to stand up for better pay and safer working conditions. And then, the headline in the news the next day wasn’t about how there had been a brutal and entirely unnecessary crackdown on a peaceful protest. The headline was about how the White Fang had murdered a poor little police dog.”
Weiss was not aiming Myrtenaster at Blake anymore.
“I stayed in the White Fang because I didn’t want being lucky to be a requirement for the survival of a Faunus. I stayed because I wanted the SDC to stop killing us. I stayed because asking nicely for rights and respect wasn’t working, so what were we supposed to do except try being not nice?”
Blake broke off there, falling into a silence punctuated only by her rapid, heaving breaths like she’d just run a marathon. And when she did continue, she sounded as exhausted as if she had. “And even after that. Even after all that. I still left the Fang because I thought they were going too far. I understand why they’re this way now. But I don’t agree.”
She glanced at Yang, and then Penny, and then she was looking at Weiss again with that same unending gaze she’d had at the start of this conversation, where she seemed to be looking at something far beyond the four of them. “Weiss Schnee, heiress to the Schnee Dust Company,” she said slowly. “You say you want to fix the company, but so far, you haven’t convinced me that anything’s going to change when you take over, except maybe the branding you use to cover up all the blood you spill.”
And finally, she spread out her arms, Gambol Shroud no longer pointed at Weiss. “So, there you have it, Weiss. This is me. That’s my life story. That’s my ‘outrageous apologia for their violent methods.’ What are you going to do about it?”
Blake’s outburst had changed something inside Penny somewhere. It had overthrown the acute fear which had been keeping her limbs locked in place. Now, she felt free to move again, like a malicious program had finally been erased. She stepped forwards, and took up a place on Blake’s other side, staring at Weiss and coming to an internal resolution. If Weiss was still combative to Blake after all of that, Penny was going to throw her into the harbor.
Then, from above, something clattered.
The sound was so sudden in the tense silence that every member of Team BSYP looked up, and Penny was the first person to realize it’d come from the fire escape—
Where Ruby was crouched in the exact same place as before, staring at Blake with wide eyes and clutching her weapon with both hands. She wasn’t aiming it at anything, but she was holding it in front of her like a shield.
“You were in the White Fang?” she said, her voice shrill.
The entire team froze, even Weiss.
Penny searched desperately for something to say, something to deflect suspicion from Blake—only to have her attention yanked away as she picked up a distant sound. The sound of an airship.
Actually, three airships, she realized as the sound drew closer. She spun, and spotted the lights of three bullheads flying in low from the ocean.
“We have a problem!” she said loudly, trying to capture everyone’s attention.
It must’ve worked, because she heard a round of gasps a few moments later as the bullheads came into human auditory range, their red-hot engines whining as they rotated into landing mode.
Blake swiveled between Weiss and Ruby and the approaching bullheads, as if she wasn’t sure who was the greatest threat right now.
“That’s got to be them,” Yang whispered as the bullheads touched down on the other side of the docks. “Do we—”
She was interrupted by the clang of cargo doors being thrown open, and then a group of armed, masked figures stepped out from the belly of the ships, fanning out across the docks.
Immediately, Penny noted Grimm-style masks, military-spec rifles, distinct animal iconography on their clothing…
“No,” Blake whispered, and suddenly all the anger was gone from her voice, replaced by pure panic. “No, no, no, no, nonononono—What are they doing?!”
The White Fang.
And Penny could see in her long-range vision that they were experienced, too, from the way they held their guns—one ponytailed member even had a specialty weapon which was some sort of gun-whip combination with electricity crackling around the long, undulating blade. This had to be a planned, significant operation in progress.
“Why are they here?! This isn’t—this isn’t—it makes no sense!” Blake whispered frantically, no longer paying any attention to Weiss. Or anyone else, for that matter.
Penny tightened her grip on Luminous Electra, getting ready for another fight. Even though the fight between her teammates was still very unresolved. Even though Ruby was still sitting on the fire escape and staring at Blake with wide eyes like she was about to arrest her. Everything was collapsing into a level of unpredictability so hopelessly complicated that her prediction algorithms had given up entirely on offering tactical suggestions.
She could only hope that everyone knew which side they were on.
Notes:
I feel bad for leaving the chapter at this cliffhanger, but Blake and Weiss's fight really does feel emotionally and tonally distinct from everything that happens afterward. It felt better to me to let Blake's anger stand on its own instead of combining it with what happens in the next chapter (and trust me, a LOT happens).
Chapter 11: A Warrior Will Soon Run Wild
Notes:
Hello everyone, you’re getting two pieces of art in this chapter, and they both have Ruby!
First up, right below this note is a commission from lesbianneopolitan on Tumblr (known as TempusUmbra in other places) and I am super happy with how this one came out! And here is a link to the post if you want to reblog!
And the second commission for this chapter is going to show up halfway through the chapter at a certain scene. It’s from Helihi on Tumblr, and I am also tremendously excited with how it turned out!
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
They dove behind a shipping container moments later, the team acting in a strange synchrony even with the tension still vibrating between them. Blake was pressed flat against the back of the container, breathing rapidly.
“How? Why?” She peered around the corner again, and then pulled back like she’d been smacked. “We always tried to be unpredictable—we never needed that much Dust— this is way too risky for them—”
Weiss was studying Blake with an expression that Penny could only hope meant she was actually thinking about things again. “...You truly didn’t think the White Fang was behind this.”
“I would’ve bet my life on it!” Blake said. “They—where did they get airships? We didn’t have so much as a rowboat when I left—” And only then did she seem to realize who’d said that to her; her head snapped around to stare at Weiss. “Well, I was wrong, and you were right for all the wrong fucking reasons. Do you want a trophy?”
Weiss didn’t reply. She just stared at Blake.
Penny’s eyes darted up to the fire escape again, but Ruby was gone, a few drifting particles of silver the only sign that she’d ever been there.
“Uh, girls, things just got a little weirder,” Yang said. “Look who else is here.”
“What?” Suddenly, all of Team BSYP was peering around the corner, and Penny immediately spotted the distinct newcomer who’d just stepped out of an airship, holding a lit cigar. Outfit: white trench coat, black bowler hat, red cane. Height: six feet two inches. Hair color: red. Eye color: green. Current emotion: unknown. Identity: known.
“Roman Torchwick, known lawbreaker and danger to the public,” Penny whispered.
“Why are they working with him?” Blake hissed. “He doesn’t care about Faunus rights in the slightest! There’s nothing he has that they could want! He’s—”
Blake froze, and through the arm jammed up against Penny’s side, Penny felt her muscles stiffening.
“Ilia?” she said in a half-choked, half-gasping voice.
If Penny was following the path of Blake’s gaze correctly, she was looking at the girl with a ponytail.
“Wait, do you know one of them?” Yang said.
“I can talk to her.” All the shock was gone from Blake’s voice already; she was holstering Gambol Shroud and staring straight ahead. “I need to talk to her. Alone.”
But before she could shadow-clone away, Yang caught her by the hand. “I’m coming with you.”
Blake glanced back, her eyes widening. “No, Yang, I can’t—I won’t drag you into my past. The only person who should be involved in this is me—”
Yang shook her head. “Maybe I don’t know anything about your past, but I do know I’m not letting my partner run into danger alone.” With that, she lifted her other hand and placed it atop Blake’s hand, enveloping it in hers. “I’ve got your back, and that’s a promise.”
There was a brief silence where Blake looked down at her hand in Yang’s as Penny detected her heart rate picking up again, and then she gave a single nod.
“...Okay.” She stood up, and some of the intense panic drained out of her voice. “Penny, stay here and try to keep an eye on what they’re doing, but don’t attempt anything too risky yet. I know there’s more going on here.”
Penny nodded. And then, to her astonishment, Weiss nodded along with her.
Blake noticed it, too. She gave Weiss an emotionless stare, and then she turned away, tapping Yang’s arm. With that, the two of them were off, running into the darkness.
Penny pulled up her radar and began counting the number of hostiles, while Weiss continued to just stand there.
“Penny?” she said after twenty-three uneventful seconds. “Do you think it’s possible that someone—or rather, a group of people—who I’ve heard nothing but awful things about my entire life… might actually not be as bad as I’ve thought all along?”
Penny was most definitely terrible at interpreting vagueness, but this particular time it was extremely easy to figure out what Weiss was alluding to. “I think that it is very possible,” she said. “Especially when you have only ever heard one perspective on the someone or the group of people.”
“I’ve heard plenty of perspectives—” Weiss started, some of the previous indignation starting to return to her tone, but Penny interrupted her before she could get any further down that track.
“Can you name a perspective on the White Fang you’ve heard which was in no way connected to your father, your company, or the kingdom of Atlas?”
Weiss opened her mouth again. Only to immediately close it. And then open it again even more quickly… only to close it even faster.
“You have heard one perspective.” With that, Penny went back to her radar. She’d been tracking one blip on her radar which seemed to be disappearing and reappearing every few seconds as it moved around the edge of the docks, which had to be Ruby, but she couldn’t find her anymore…
“So what exactly is going on with your teammate?”
Penny and Weiss spun around, weapons pointed at the source, and found Ruby staring at them with one hundred percent confusion. Penny decided to make an internal note in Ruby-associated memories that Ruby could entirely elude her radar somehow.
“Is she a spy or something?” Ruby continued, seemingly not noticing the surprise and alarm coming from Penny and Weiss. “You’re sure she’s on your side, right?”
Suddenly, gunfire rang out from the other end of the docks, in the direction Blake and Yang had run. Immediately, Ruby disappeared in a burst of silver, leaving Penny and Weiss frozen in place—they could both recognize the staccato pops of Gambol Shroud’s pistol or the thunderous cracks of Ember Celica, but those gunshots were neither sound. Finally, the sound of Ember Celica rolled across the docks—but no Gambol Shroud.
Penny and Weiss sent worried looks at each other (and it relieved Penny so much to see Weiss worrying about Blake), and they broke into a run, sprinting towards the sounds of conflict, which only intensified as they neared.
One especially powerful explosion shook the ground underneath them, and as Penny and Weiss struggled to keep their balance, a body came flying out from between two shipping containers and landed with a thud ahead of them. Yang.
Penny didn’t even have time to be worried, as Yang was moving as soon as she hit the ground, but her bandolier had split open, spilling ammo everywhere, and there was a smear of soot on her face and a scorch mark on her top. She fired several shots back in the direction she’d come from, and then noticed Penny and Weiss.
“They got Blake!” she yelled, her eyes wild and unfocused.
“What?” Weiss said, firing a massive glyph at two White Fang members just as they came charging around the corner, tossing them back like they were made of paper. “What do you mean, got?”
“She went to talk to the White Fang girl—I couldn’t hear what they were saying but it turned into an argument real fast—and then she was spotted, and the White Fang girl did something with her weapon that tied her up so fast I couldn’t even do anything—and then I got shot in the face.”
“Where is she now?” Penny said.
Yang shook her hair out of her face and raised her fists. “About to find out.” With that, she charged forward.
Penny reactivated her flight mode and looked at Weiss. “I should be airborne.”
“Good idea. I’ll back up Yang.”
That was all they needed to say. Weiss ran after Yang, pulling up an enormous glyph which hovered above her head, and Penny fired her thrusters, lifting off. She didn’t need much altitude, just enough to get over the stacks of shipping containers and stay out of melee range.
A scene of chaos greeted her as she soared towards the center of the docks. The White Fang, previously emptying the shipping containers of Dust crates, were opening fire on Yang and Weiss, pinning them down. And then Penny spotted Blake, trussed up and lying on the pavement with the ponytailed White Fang soldier standing over her and Roman Torchwick approaching them, spinning his cane jauntily in one hand.
Penny made a split-second calculation, took a deep breath for an extra rush of necessary cooling, and dove for Blake. If she timed it right, she could swoop in, pick up Blake, and flee without taking a single hit—
Only as she closed in on Blake’s position did she notice something which immediately disintegrated her entire plan.
Electricity.
The segmented metal chain-whip-thing that was tying Blake up was crackling with electricity.
Untamed electricity.
Penny hit full reverse on her thrusters and only just barely managed to avoid touching Blake, instead landing… directly on the head of the White Fang girl. Who went down in a heap with a startled cry that cut off when she hit the ground facefirst, her Aura flashing wildly all over as Penny rolled off. When she regained her balance, she found herself staring at Roman Torchwick at the exact moment that he was leveling his cane-gun at her.
She only just barely managed to get Luminous Electra up in time to block, the shot clanging off the flat of her blade and scorching the ground.
“Stop, in the name of the law!” she declared, although privately she did not feel there was a high probability Torchwick would comply with that.
He did not. Instead, he blinked at her and said, “What are you, Dumbo The Flying Elephant?” before firing again.
Penny stepped back, being careful to avoid both the unconscious White Fang girl underfoot (it made sense that she was unconscious, Penny was made of metal and had landed on top of her, after all) and also the chain wrapped around Blake which was still a live electric source.
“Actually, wait.” He looked around, pointing his cane at each member of Team BSYP. “Dumbo, Matchstick, Cat Ears, Rich Bitch—don’t tell me you’re a Beacon team.”
Penny did not know how to respond to that, and decided the best course was to simply send Fire Dust down Luminous Electra’s blade and attack Torchwick with a pillar of flames. It brought her a bit of satisfaction to see Torchwick’s eyes bulge momentarily when she extended Luminous Electra to its full length while igniting it.
The shock quickly disappeared, though, replaced by an annoyed concentration as Torchwick seemed to realize Penny was actually worth paying serious attention to, and began firing a barrage at her, backing out of range of her swings again and again. Which was good; if he was moving away that meant he was moving away from Blake, and Penny didn’t need to win, she just needed one of her not-vulnerable-to-electricity teammates to get to Blake and untie her.
What was not good was that Torchwick was quite fast and accurate with his shots, and whatever kind of Dust he had loaded into his weapon, it packed a devastating punch. Even when Penny blocked a shot, the recoil it sent through her body was very nearly throwing her off-balance, which made it harder to attack effectively, and if she wasn’t attacking, Torchwick was shooting—all creating a cascading effect which was tilting towards her defeat with alarming speed.
And then Penny heard a yell of pain behind her.
Yang!
She looked back just in time to see Yang sent flying again, her Aura flashing and melting away. And then, too late, she realized she’d made a mistake.
An instant later, one of Torchwick’s overpowered Dust rounds flew past Penny’s guard and slammed into her stomach. Her body held strong, but there was nothing she could do to stop herself from being blown backwards by the explosion that engulfed her.
When she could make sense of the world again, she was lying on the ground next to a shipping container with a distinctly Penny-shaped dent in its side, and she had a series of alarms from her sensors telling her she was either dying or getting hit by a meteorite (explosions tended to have that effect on them). She dismissed the alarms, running a quick diagnostic just to confirm nothing was catastrophically broken, and jumped up, ready to run back into battle—
Only to find Ruby standing in her way, staring at her in confusion.
“Blake’s White Fang? But she’s your teammate?”
“Used to be,” Penny corrected. She could still hear the sounds of battle, which meant someone was still fighting—
Ruby blinked once, very slowly. “But… she just… stopped being one of them?”
“Yes, people change; no one ever stays the same thing forever!”
Ruby was still in her way. It would be quite rude to push Ruby out of the way, but exceptions could be made for a life-and-death situation—
“Ohhhhhh,” Ruby said slowly, as if she’d never considered such a thing could be true until today. Then suddenly she straightened, a curiously intense look coming over her face. “Stay here. I’m going to end this battle.”
“What—Ruby, wait!” Penny cried, reaching out and catching her by the hand. “You cannot face them alone. We should go in together—”
Ruby shook her off with surprising strength and turned to face her, smiling cheerfully as she lowered her goggles over her eyes. The red-tinted lenses reflected the light of the full moon with a sublime gleam, creating the momentary illusion of Ruby’s eyes being nothing but dancing circles of moonlight.
“Don’t worry, Penny. This is what I was born to do.”
She saluted and activated her Semblance, disappearing before Penny could ask what she meant. With no other options, Penny took a deep, cooling breath and ran back into battle.
Not a moment too soon. She darted in front of Weiss just as her Aura gave out, and stood protectively in front of the collapsed forms of her two teammates, blocking the continuing barrage with Luminous Electra.
Suddenly, there was a lull in the battle as the White Fang stopped their fire—maybe they were going to ask Penny to surrender? She would gladly accept that mercy rather than endanger her friends by continuing the fight—
“Roman Torchwick!”
The voice was high and not very authoritative, but every eye and photoreceptor array in the vicinity swung towards the source.
A small hooded figure stood atop a stack of shipping containers overlooking the scene, silhouetted by the moon with her cape fluttering in the wind. Ruby.
“Huh?” Torchwick leveled his cane at her. “Another one of you? What do you want, pintsize?”
Ruby took three slow steps forward before she reached up with both hands, lowering her hood to reveal her face, her braid falling free again. “Your reign of terror ends tonight!” she shouted.
She gave Torchwick what might be called a cheerful smile, but it was very different from the smile she’d just given to Penny. Now Ruby’s smile looked like a wild animal baring its teeth, seconds away from tearing out the throat of its cornered prey.
Torchwick snorted. “Are they accepting preschoolers over at Beacon now?”
In a fluid motion, Ruby pulled her weapon—Lunar Enforcer, she’d called it—off her back, the weapon unfolding and morphing from its sniper form back into the long staff. It was then that Penny noticed the war scythe was double-bladed, both ends of the staff holding identical blades in mirror images of each other.
Ruby held Lunar Enforcer directly in front of her with one hand as it clicked into place, still smiling that same feral smile. And then she flipped over the side of the container, landing neatly on the ground. “Last chance to surrender, Torchwick!” she called.
Penny tightened her grip on Luminous Electra. She did not know what Ruby was planning, but she could not let this girl get hurt trying to protect them—
“Oh wow, no one’s ever tried that on me before. I’m so scared,” Torchwick drawled. He turned to the White Fang soldier near him. “Okay. Get—”
His sentence was abruptly cut off when Ruby blurred, entering Semblance mode, and reappeared in front of Torchwick, bashing him dead-center in the chest with a spinning blow from Lunar Enforcer and sending him flying backwards. Ruby charged him before he had a chance to regain his footing, going low to sweep his legs out from under him with her staff. He didn’t even have time to figure out where she was before she slammed his face into the pavement and planted a foot on his back.
Penny’s mouth fell open a little.
All the White Fang soldiers’ attention abruptly swung towards Ruby, and they opened fire on her. She was interrupted in whatever she’d been about to do to Torchwick as she turned her head towards the new threat, but her body language didn’t appear concerned in the slightest. In fact, Penny noticed her shaking her head ever so slightly, like she couldn’t believe they were even trying this, before she disappeared in a burst of silver.
When she reappeared, she was in their midst, spinning Lunar Enforcer spinning so fast it appeared just as a circle of flashing blades, and Ruby just… just carved through the White Fang like they were training dummies, sending unconscious bodies flying, dodging gunshots like they weren’t even there, silver dust streaming off her as she blinked in and out of existence—Penny was starting to wonder if the White Fang could even see Ruby.
And now she understood what Ruby meant when she said she was going to end the fight. She had… underestimated Ruby.
The White Fang had, too, and now they weren’t paying attention to Penny or anyone else. Which meant—
Penny whirled to her teammates and set about checking their vital signs. Weiss was leaning against the shipping container, bleeding from a head wound and holding Myrtenaster weakly at her side. Thankfully, most of her vital readouts were registering as normal in Penny’s scan.
“Weiss, are you okay?” Penny asked, because it was always good to check.
“Not really,” Weiss said, which would have to be good enough for now. She lifted her head to look at something over Penny’s shoulder, and her expression morphed into groggy disbelief. “What. Is. Going. On.”
Penny glanced backward. The rest of the White Fang was closing in on Ruby, and she was handling each and every one of them with ease. Taking advantage of her super speed, the Atlesian girl wove between her opponents, exploiting every blind spot, drawing other White Fang into the crossfire, Lunar Enforcer never slowing—
When Yang had introduced Penny to the phrase ‘fighting machine’ at the start of the semester, she had failed to fully comprehend its meaning. But now, watching Ruby whirl through the battlefield in a manner metaphorically similar to a tornado flattening everything in its path, she felt like she finally understood the phrase.
“She is a sensational fighter,” Penny whispered.
“She said she’s a first-year?” Yang said, rising unsteadily to her feet before letting out a hiss of pain, her hand snapping to her side. “I think— ow! I’ve fractured some ribs. I won’t be much good right now.” She looked at Ruby again. “...But I think we’ll be fine.”
By now, the White Fang still standing were employing a new strategy of retreating, which at least meant it was taking longer for Ruby to defeat them since she had to pursue them. And that also meant…
“Blake!” Yang broke into a limping run. Penny, mostly supporting Weiss, followed her as Yang came up to Blake and, with one mighty heave, yanked away the electrified weapon tying up Blake. Just in time, too, as Blake’s Aura gave way right as Yang pulled the chain-whip undone.
“You okay?” she said as Blake groaned and stretched out her limbs, slowly sitting up.
“I… feel like I’ve been fried inside an oven,” Blake said weakly. “Where—”
She froze.
The White Fang girl who’d been knocked out by Penny earlier was finally stirring, lifting her head from the ground. Her mask had cracked in half, and she looked around in confusion before her one visible eye focused on Blake. She snarled, and then suddenly her skin turned bright red like an image scrolling across a screen—
Ah. Chameleon Faunus, Penny noted.
“Ilia…” Blake said, her voice quivering. “What is the Fang doing, allying with a lowlife like Torchwick?”
The girl apparently named Ilia laughed harshly at Blake. “Shouldn’t it be all the same to you now, traitor?”
Yang cocked Ember Celica; at the sound Ilia glared at her, and then, quick as lightning, snatched the chain-whip out of Yang’s hands and rose to her feet. Her Aura flashed all over her body as she backed away from them. With Blake, Yang, and Weiss’s Auras down and Penny unable to pursue someone with an electrified weapon, all they could do was watch Ilia leave.
“I hope you like being a cop,” she hissed at Blake, before turning and breaking into a run, vaulting over a shipping container and vanishing into the night.
Blake watched her go, her head turned away from the rest of her team, but Penny was garnering everything she needed to know about Blake’s mental state from the way she was slumped over, barely keeping herself upright.
“Hey,” Yang whispered. When Blake looked over, she held out Gambol Shroud to her. “You dropped this.”
Blake took it with hands that were visibly shaking, and mouthed a silent thank you to Yang.
Meanwhile, Ilia’s departure left exactly one White Fang member on the battlefield, running straight for the dock’s main exit, and as Penny watched, Ruby transformed Lunar Enforcer back to its sniper mode and raised it to her shoulder. She peered through the scope, tracking her target with a slow, unhurried turn. When she pulled the trigger, the soldier went down in an explosion of Electric Dust just before he reached the gates.
And then, the battlefield, somehow, was silent.
“How?” Weiss said, staring at Ruby. “Just, how?”
Penny tore her attention away from Ruby’s enthralling performance to look for the last problem: Torchwick. He’d disappeared. However, she wasn’t wondering for long, as she sighted his familiar white coat stepping out from behind a stack of crates, with nothing between him and the three bullheads.
Ruby caught sight of him as she was reloading. “I’ll be generous, Torchwick! Surrender’s still on the table!” she yelled, her voice carrying across the shipyard.
“Shut up, you weird little demon.” Torchwick tossed his still-lit cigar aside.
Littering! Penny chided silently.
“Suit yourself!” Ruby called back. And then she did something peculiar. She transformed Lunar Enforcer back into its staff form, and then she twisted it somehow, and then it was in two pieces—two equal ends of the staff, acting as dual short war scythes.
Ruby flipped both ends of the now-split staff, holding them in a reverse grip in each hand, and dropped into a crouch, one blade held in front of her at the ready and the other behind her in reserve as she flashed her teeth again.
“How many things does that weapon do?” Yang muttered.
Penny was about to reply that she’d counted four separate functions so far when Torchwick let out a short laugh, oddly devoid of humor, and slowly raised his cane. Penny frowned. As opening strategies went, that was a terrible move.
Except, she realized 1.3 seconds later, he was aiming at something else. She followed the path of his weapon up into the sky—and her eyes landed on a shipping container above Team BSYP, dangling from a crane.
She realized what he was aiming for at the moment Ruby did, but Ruby was the one with the faster reaction time.
A shot rang out, and an instant later Ruby appeared in midair, flying out of her Semblance and into the shipping container at high speed, just as its chain was severed by the shot from Torchwick’s cane. The container was immense and heavy, but it was no match for Ruby ramming into it with Aura-amplified force. It was thrown sideways, one side buckled inward where Ruby had hit it, and came crashing down two meters to Penny’s right as Ruby landed next to them, only to immediately semblance away.
The roar of bullhead engines pulled her attention in a new direction. One of the bullheads was lifting off, turning towards the open sea. Penny zoomed in and caught sight of Torchwick alone in the cockpit, pushing the throttle forward, looking very frazzled but nonetheless escaping.
Drat, she thought.
Wait, where was Ruby?
Movement across the shipyard caught her attention, and she had a visual read on Ruby again, who was dropping to one knee—wait, no, she’d activated her Semblance. But… as far as Penny could ascertain, she wasn’t going anywhere. All she could see was a swirling mass of silver dust whirling in midair like a miniature storm, spinning faster and faster and creating a growing vortex of air around her that was rapidly kicking up dirt and debris. Was she trying to—
Penny’s attempt at deciphering Ruby’s actions were interrupted at that moment by Ruby dropping out of her Semblance. She pulled an Ice Dust cartridge out of her bandolier, bit its top off, dumped out the contents, and re-entered her Semblance. The vortex swelled even larger, sweeping up the loose Dust and turning the air from silver to deep blue, ice and fog being flung in every direction. Penny made an appendment to her internal memory of the situation—Ruby wasn’t like a miniature storm now—she was a miniature storm.
And then the storm took off.
Ruby shot skyward, streaking through the sky like a bright silver comet in the night—and behind her was a billowing tornado of rushing ice and snow, growing bigger with every second, the wake of Ruby’s Semblance whipping it into a frenzy, sending shockwaves through the air that ruffled Penny’s hair even from this distance.
Ruby shot past Torchwick’s bullhead just as it finished its turn towards the open ocean, and behind her, the miniature ice storm engulfed the ship. Ruby dropped out of her Semblance three-tenths of a second later, landing on one knee with Lunar Enforcer held behind her in single-staff mode. A screeching whine echoed across the harbor as the bullhead’s engines came into contact with immensely cold temperatures and clouds of ice—on Penny’s infrared vision, all she could see was a deep, roiling black void of extreme cold. It didn’t take long to see where this was headed—seconds later, the bullhead was thrown out of the storm, fully inverted and its engines stalled. A blast of cold air rushed over Team BSYP as the bullhead impacted the ground tail-first in an enormous cacophony of crumpling metal and glass shattering, rocking the ground underneath them.
Ruby, completely unbothered by the airship crashing meters away from her, shook a few stray snowflakes off her head and stalked over to the wreckage, dragging out the unconscious form of Torchwick just as everything erupted into flames.
Team BSYP watched, speechless, as Ruby pulled Torchwick towards them through the sea of still-unconscious White Fang (that she’d taken out singlehandedly), with the flaming wreckage at her back lending her a… mildly devilish air, to borrow a word that Yang liked to say.
Ruby waved to them, back to her normal cheerful smile and appearing absolutely delighted with herself. “Any hostiles remaining?” she called, her voice almost drowned out by the sound of approaching sirens.
All Penny could do was shake her head in reply. She was still trying to process all of that.
“Ruby?” Weiss said. Her voice sounded much fainter than a minute ago. “What’s the name of your team?”
“Huh? Oh! Team Rust!” Ruby said. “With two S’s, R-S-S-T. We’re definitely not rusty, though! Why do you ask?”
“Thanks.” Weiss’s voice was wavering, and by now Penny was a little worried. “If we have to face you in the tournament, I’ll make sure to forfeit.”
It was Penny’s fault for not noticing sooner, but Weiss earnestly talking about forfeiting was what actually alerted her to the fact that her teammate was about to lose consciousness. She caught Weiss just before her head hit the ground.
“Well,” Ruby said, leaning against the door of the ambulance. “I think that was a successful mission!”
Yang, still holding a hand to her ribs as she waited for her Aura to kick in, and Weiss, holding an ice pack to her bandaged head, and Blake, having ointment applied by a paramedic to her electrical burns, and Penny, still debugging some of her sensors, stared at Ruby.
“...Mostly successful?” Ruby said after a few moments of silence. “We captured Roman Torchwick and a whole bunch of White Fang! And everyone’s alive!”
“We’re going to be suspended. We’re going to be expelled. We’re going to be stripped of our academic accolades. We’re going to be prosecuted criminally. We’re going to be banned from the other Huntress academies,” Weiss said, her speaking ability clearly not affected by her head injury. “We broke twelve rules in the school handbook—”
“Thirteen!” Penny cut in.
“— Thirteen, thank you Penny, and there have been students expelled for far less. How am I going to be able to face my father?!”
Yang shrugged. “Weiss, if my dad’s stories are anything to go by, I think we’re going to be just fine. This sort of activity gets treated with a slap on the wrist. And a pat on the back.”
“But I’m not supposed to even get slaps on the wrist!” Weiss hissed. Then she winced, pressing the ice pack harder against her head. “I’m turning into everything that I swore not to be as a student.”
“And is it so bad?” That was Blake, breaking what had been a long silence.
“Well—” Weiss hesitated. “I… I will have to think about that… But you!” she added suddenly, gesturing to Ruby. “Atlas is even stricter about this! Aren’t you worried about being disciplined?”
“I can kinda get away with a lot more because—” Abruptly, Ruby clapped a hand over her mouth. “Um. Forget I said that. Uh…” She looked sideways, giving Penny an oddly anxious look, and suddenly her face shifted. “Penny! Why haven’t you received any medical attention?”
“Well—” Penny plunged her hands into her hoodie. “I—” Being around the paramedics was making her slightly nervous. She had already refused treatment twice, because it would be impossible to explain to a paramedic why a heart rate monitor was reading her heart rate as 3. (It was not zero due to the way that her skin conducted electricity). But she could see the sideways glances the paramedics were giving her, and it worried her. What if one of them, in a fit of well-intentioned deception, tried to sneak up on her with a blood pressure sleeve? Thankfully, a taxi was supposed to arrive to take them back to Beacon soon. If the paramedics got really insistent before then, there was always the option to run and hide.
“I am fine,” she said. “I didn’t run out of Aura.”
“Oh, awesome.” Ruby flopped back down onto her makeshift seat—the ambulance bumper—and her gaze fell on Blake. “Um. Sorry for… not joining the fight sooner because I thought you were a bad guy…”
Blake sighed. “Apology accepted. At least you came around a lot quicker than most people would.”
Ruby nodded slowly, shifting forwards slightly and chewing on her lip. “So, um…” She looked around, confirming that the paramedics weren’t in hearing distance, and then said in what was maybe the loudest whisper in Penny’s databases, “Can I ask you about White Fang weapons and things?”
Blake made a choked noise which turned into a burst of worryingly uncontrolled laughter, before she abruptly cut herself off, putting a hand to her chest and wincing. Ruby’s facial expression didn’t change as she waited for a reply.
“…Some other time, maybe,” she said finally.
“Okay!” Almost immediately after, Ruby’s gaze landed on Penny. “Are we… friends now? My guardian always tells me the best way to make friends with somebody you don’t know is to survive a fight together, and you all seem really cool, and I’m gonna be at Beacon this semester as an exchange student, so we’re gonna see each other a lot, and…” She trailed off, holding out a hand to Penny hopefully. “Yeah! Friends?”
Penny nodded, giving her a cheery smile. “Ab-so-lute-ly!”
Ruby let out a small, excited giggle, and started bouncing up and down again. “Oh my gosh, I can’t believe it’s actually happening! We can…” She trailed off, tilting her head. “…What do friends actually do together?”
“I would be more than happy to help you find out!” And then Penny stepped forward and gave Ruby a hug, because she looked like she wanted one! And that inference was correct, given the distinctly excited squeaking noise Ruby made.
Penny looked over Ruby’s shoulder at Weiss, Blake, and Yang, who did not seem quite as eager to befriend Ruby, which was perhaps understandable. They just needed a little extra Penny-powered pressure.
She ran through her databases and assembled the most pleading, cutesy expression that she could conceive of, and aimed it at her teammates.
One second elapsed. Two seconds elapsed. Three—
In an almost simultaneous gesture, the other three members of Team BSYP sighed, looked at each other, and nodded.
“I suppose we’ll have to get used to seeing you a great deal this semester, one way or another,” Weiss said. “Consider us friends, too, Ruby.”
Ruby spun around, her eyes going even wider. “Really? Oh my gosh, four friends! In one day! And twenty-four criminals captured! This is the BEST DAY EVER!”
Weiss managed to make herself appear mildly pleased as Penny and Ruby exchanged scroll numbers. And then Ruby turned to Blake again.
“If you’re going to try asking about the White Fang now, the answer is still maybe later,” Blake said before Ruby could get a word out.
“Oh! Don’t worry! I wasn’t going to ask! I was just going to tell you something. I uh, I heard some of what you were saying about the White Fang.”
Oh dear. That was one thing Penny had remained unsure of—how much of Blake and Weiss’s fight that Ruby had overheard. It seemed she was about to to find out, for the better or for the worse.
If anything, Blake looked even more tired now. “How much did you hear, exactly?”
“Uh, well, by the time I heard you shouting and I got back in earshot, you were talking about how you nearly got maimed by a police dog? I heard everything after that.”
“Well. Okay.” Blake blinked slowly. “What are you going to do about it?”
Ruby shrugged. “Probably not much! You’re clearly on the good side, and I kind of get it, too? I think the SDC is really dangerous!”
For obvious reasons, Weiss looked thoroughly offended, but it was somehow Blake who had the more expressive reaction, staring at Ruby with an expression fairly similar to the one she’d made when she’d been appointed as team leader.
“What?” she said.
“They hold way too much power in Atlas,” Ruby said. “Sure, they’re on good terms with the military right now, but if there was ever a disagreement between the two… it’d be pretty easy for the SDC to make the military do whatever it wants, because, y’know, they supply ninety-nine percent of our Dust. And I don’t like that. Feels like they could just hold us at ransom if they really wanted to.”
Blake’s expression had gone from surprise to something Penny couldn’t decipher at all. “…I don’t know if you’re aware, Ruby, but you’re quoting what some people in the Fang say almost exactly.”
“Huh. Wild.” Now it was Ruby’s turn to look surprised. “But like, does the White Fang know there’s no way they can ever actually topple the SDC? The only people that could really pull it off is the Atlas Military, so why does the White Fang bother with a losing cause? Why go to all that trouble if you know you’ll never win?”
“Not gonna answer that.” Blake put a hand to her forehead, and now there was an uneasy quality to her tone. “Ruby—what would you do with the SDC if you could topple it yourself?”
Ruby brightened. “Oh, that’s easy! The Atlas Military should run the SDC!”
Blake muttered something so quietly that Penny was sure she was the only one who could hear it even with everyone else in such close proximity, and what Blake mumbled was: “Oh, no.”
“See, all the problems the SDC has, the military would solve! Because we won’t care about profits! We’ll just care about making sure the Kingdom of Atlas and the rest of the world is strong and prosperous! And since we’re so efficient and advanced and disciplined, none of the workers would ever get hurt again, and then the White Fang wouldn’t have to fight for their rights anymore so that problem would be solved! We could produce so much more Dust with so much less hassle, and the military wouldn’t have to worry about being weak, ever!”
“…So that’s literal, actual fascism that you’re advocating for,” Blake said.
“What’s that?”
Blake opened and closed her mouth several times before Penny decided that maybe she was incapable of forming words right now, and jumped in with a helpful answer.
“Putting large amounts of civilian power and commerce under the command of a military is not advisable.” She was about to add on with the actual dictionary definition of fascism when Ruby replied.
“But we’re the only ones who know how to get things done!”
However, before the conversation could progress any further (and Blake looked very much like she wanted to keep talking), Ruby jumped to her feet, looking down the street at something. From her position in the ambulance, Penny couldn’t see what Ruby was looking at, but her auditory sensors informed her a car was approaching. Their taxi…?
Ruby’s posture was suddenly much straighter. “Oops, my supervisor is here! You all should leave before she sees you. I don’t want you to get in trouble.”
“What trouble is there for us to get in, with her?” Blake said. “Beacon has jurisdiction over our discipline, not Atlas.”
“No, I mean, she’s the kind of person you can get in government trouble with. And I’m kind of already breaking the law by being here…”
“What?” Blake said.
Instead of elaborating, Ruby reached out and slammed the doors of the ambulance shut. A moment later, there was a click.
“…Did she just lock us in?” Yang said, staring at the doors.
Blake reached out and tried the handle. “Yes, she did.”
Suddenly, they heard Ruby’s voice from outside, loud and cheery.
“Good evening, ma’am!”
“Good evening, Cadet Karyatis,” came the voice of a newcomer, low and measured. It didn’t match anything in Penny’s databases, although, rather strangely she noted an abnormal similarity to Weiss’s voice. “Let me get this straight. You snuck out to go on an unauthorized stakeout because you had a hunch about criminal activity, and then you got into a fight with the most wanted criminal in Vale and a White Fang cell?”
Weiss raised her head, blinking rapidly, and opened her mouth like she was about to scream something. However, before she could get a word out, Blake and Yang simultaneously clapped a hand over her mouth.
“Mmmmmmmph!!!” she protested, vibrating furiously, but to no avail.
“Keep quiet,” Yang hissed. “You heard Ruby. Do you want us to get in hot water with some stuck-up Atlesian bigwig who’s probably got no sense of humor?”
For some reason, Yang’s words only seemed to be inciting Weiss to struggle harder.
“Weiss, please. Whatever it is, it’s going to have to wait,” Blake added. “I do not want to land in hot water with the Atlesian military.”
Fortunately for them, Weiss’s outburst didn’t seem to have attracted any undue attention, even if she was still struggling to free herself. Penny leaned forwards, trying to see through the crack between the doors, but with no luck—they formed a tight seal.
When she returned her attention to the conversation, the newcomer was saying, “I know you want to fulfill your duty, Ruby. But this incident illustrates exactly why you have to be careful. You know the General was already reluctant to let you come here ahead of schedule. When I report this to him, he might order you to return home.”
“That’s a punishment I’m willing to accept for what I accomplished tonight!”
A deep sigh. “Personally, I don’t think anything short of a court-martial will stop you from doing things like this. If this didn’t illustrate that, then the incident earlier this week where you chased down a Faunus stowaway at the docks and arrested him—”
“He was armed!”
“He was armed because he was a student of Haven Academy participating in the Vytal Festival.”
“Well, that’s stupid. Why did he stow away on a freighter instead of taking a passenger ship with the rest of his team?”
“…This is irrelevant. Ruby, my point is that your habit of overextending yourself is becoming dangerous. In the future, if you get in over your head, will you please just call for assistance?”
“I had it completely under control!”
“That is what every fallen Specialist in the history of Atlas has thought, right up until the moment when they didn’t have control.”
“Noted, ma’am.” Ruby’s tone was suddenly much quieter. “You won’t tell my guardian about this, right? I don’t want to worry her any more than she does already.”
“I won’t tell her.”
Now it sounded like they were moving away.
“I know you’re eager to save the world, Ruby. But your training isn’t over yet.”
And then Penny heard a car door opening and closing, followed by an engine revving and pulling away. Only when the sound of the car had completely faded did Yang and Blake release the still-struggling Weiss from their grasp.
“Okay, Weiss! What’s so important?”
“You dunces! We wouldn’t have been in any trouble because that ‘Atlesian bigwig’ was my SISTER!”
Everyone in the ambulance stared at Weiss.
“You have a sister?” Yang said finally.
“And furthermore, what is Winter doing here with that girl?! She’s one of General Ironwood’s most trusted lieutenants! Being a chaperone seems a little beneath her skill level!”
“Your sister is named Winter? Winter Schnee?” Penny said. “Does your family have a contractual obligation to keep the same theme for all their names?”
“Weiss? Have you noticed that Ruby isn’t really a normal person? In any way? At all?” Blake said.
“You—” Weiss stopped short. “...You have a point.”
They fell into a contemplative silence as the very confused paramedics let them back out of the ambulance. They made their way over to a few empty crates, forming an impromptu sitting area as they waited for their taxi to arrive. There was some idle chatter, but slowly Penny began to notice something wrong with one member of the team.
Blake.
She’d slowly withdrawn from the conversation, pulling her knees up to her chest and hiding most of her face in her arms so that all Penny could see was her amber eyes. Her pulse was also slowly but steadily climbing.
Finally, Penny could not let Blake sit in silent distress anymore.
“Blake?” she said quietly, trying not to sound accusatory or standoffish. “Is everything okay?”
Blake’s head shot up as soon as Penny said her name, only for her to immediately look away, avoiding eye contact with her team. Penny’s concern only grew.
“I’m sorry,” she said finally. “This is all my fault.”
Yang scooted closer to Blake, her face full of worry. “What are you talking about? We won.”
“But you… you and Weiss were hurt,” she said. ““I… I couldn’t bring myself to believe that the Fang would be doing something like this—I was being stupid and I put us in way over our heads. The only reason we won was because—because—a teenage supersoldier who still feels like a hallucination happened to show up—I don’t even want to think about what would’ve happened if we’d been alone.” She lowered her face fully into her arms, and didn’t move again.
“Blake, no,” Yang said softly. “You’re—”
“And I really did break my promise, didn’t I?” Blake let out a bitter laugh which was muffled by her sleeve. “Just not in the way Weiss thought. If I’d told you about being in the White Fang before today, I’m sure none of us would’ve been hurt because we wouldn’t be here.”
The first person to reply wasn’t Penny or Yang. It was Weiss.
“Actually, no. I don’t think you broke anything.”
Penny looked at Weiss, stunned. Was she misunderstanding, or was Weiss actually supporting Blake?
Blake was surprised, too, surprised enough to look up.
“You kept the White Fang thing a secret because you thought it would hurt us if we knew,” Weiss said. “Am I right?”
Blake chewed hard on her lip for a moment, and then gave a single nod.
“I think you’re missing something very important when you blame yourself for tonight, Blake. We’re Huntresses.”
Blake furrowed her brow. “What do you mean?”
Penny made a little ‘oh’ sound as she realized what Weiss was getting at, and decided to jump in to help. “We would have been at the docks no matter what! We were not there because we wanted to stop the White Fang—we were there because we wanted to stop a crime!”
“Our decision would’ve been the same regardless of what we knew about your past.”
Yang nudged her. “You’re also forgetting it was me who suggested the stakeout.”
Blake blinked. “Oh. Right.” And then she put her legs down, still hunched over but no longer trying to hide herself. “I’m… still kind of mad at myself, but also, I believe everything you just said. I don’t ever want a fight to go that poorly as long as this team is my responsibility, so… I’ll hold myself to a higher standard in the future. While also recognizing that tonight was a team effort. For better or worse.”
“That’s right!” Yang moved closer again, and laid a hand on her shoulder. “We’re Team Battleship. We fight together, and… I guess we sink together, too.”
Blake snorted. “Oh great, more tortured metaphors.”
“Still better than calling us Team Biceps!” Weiss said.
That made them laugh—all of them, and joy filled Penny as she saw Blake sit up straighter, like a weight was lifting off her back.
When they fell silent again, Weiss stood up, her arms crossed, tapping at her elbows. “Furthermore, I… I owe you an apology, Blake.”
Blake didn’t say anything, only nodding to indicate that Weiss could continue.
Weiss took a deep breath. “I’m sorry for saying some truly horrendous things about you, and I’m sorry for not understanding your past motivations.”
Penny leaned forward onto the edge of her crate as she waited for Blake’s reply. When it came, it was exactly what she’d hoped for.
“I accept your apology.”
“How can I make it up to you?” Weiss asked.
“Honestly, Weiss? I just want you to listen to me more. Like when I say there’s reasons why the White Fang is this way. Like when I say that there are much greater evils in the world than the Fang. Like when I say I’m not a scary boogeyman hiding under your bed because I used to be in the White Fang.” She stood up slowly, putting a hand on her hip and holding the other out to Weiss. “I am Blake Belladonna, and I want to help people. I always have, and I always will. I joined the White Fang because I thought that was the best way to help people, and I left the White Fang because I thought that was the best way to help people.”
There was a silence as she and Weiss looked at each other—a silence that did not feel even slightly uncomfortable to Penny. Then Weiss stepped forward and took Blake’s hand.
“It’s a promise.”
“And this is a group hug!” Yang announced, jumping up and scooping Weiss and Blake into her. After a few seconds of holding them close, she glanced over at Penny. “Hey, Pen, you gonna join, or…?”
Penny blinked, and rushed to join the circle of warmth and care and closeness.
“Describing this day in one word, I’m calling it successful,” Yang murmured.
Yes. Successful. Penny agreed. Successful in so many ways.
She’d been… thinking deeply, and now she continued to think as she embraced her teammates. She was thinking about how Weiss had accepted Blake in the end. About how, after all that had happened, Blake’s secrets were safe with Weiss. About how Weiss had eventually accepted that it was okay for Blake to hide something as big as that from them. About how Weiss had discovered that Blake was someone almost completely different from her… and now, afterward, was still proud to be her teammate.
And now Penny finally knew that Weiss was someone she could trust with everything about her.
She trusted Blake and Yang, too. Blake understood what it was like to hide a part of yourself from everyone else. Yang had never once objected to Penny’s unorthodox behaviors or social troubles or other oddities. Penny just felt… safer in their presences. And now she realized as she pressed an arm to Weiss’s back… she was feeling safer in Weiss’s presence for the first time.
With that, everything clicked into place. She was still nervous, of course, but now it felt like she could spend years getting to know Weiss and Blake and Yang and never get rid of that last lingering bit of nervousness. Maybe it would always be there, and maybe that was okay.
Penny squeezed her eyes shut and pulled her teammates closer. Tomorrow, she was going to tell her team the truth about herself.
Notes:
Ironwood: “why would I waste time giving ruby a political education which won’t matter when I could be using that time for more training? surely this will not have unfortunate consequences”
This chapter was three years in the making, and I’m so glad I could finally share it. Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you all next week!
Chapter 12: Real Girl
Notes:
'Cause I'm alive
Like a puppet with a heartbeat
I'm on fire
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Penny leaned closer to the mirror and stared at herself, taking in every centimeter of her face. The freckles splashed across her skin, the angle of her chin, the groove between her nose and upper lip, her reflective green eyes…
It was very easy to linger on her eyes. Only when someone leaned in quite close could they see that her eyes were very different from everyone else’s. Instead of dilating and shrinking like human eyes, or expanding and contracting from slits like some Faunus eyes, her photoreceptors appeared much more like a camera shutter, the aperture growing or shrinking by way of tens of small moving slats within her photoreceptor housing—literally, her eyes. If someone were to get close enough to her eyes, they would see that her pupils were not circular, but rather two many-sided polygons.
The eyes are the window to the soul, a poet had once said. Were her artificial eyes windows to her artificial soul? What would her teammates think when they looked into these eyes after she told them the truth? Would they see her for the girl that she was? Or would they… would they just see her as something irreconcilably different, something that was not even alive?
This was one of the reasons that Penny was… not entirely comfortable with eye contact. She worried that if people looked at them for too long, they would lose sight of who she was, as incongruous as that may have sounded. She wanted people to know she was alive.
Because she was alive. So very alive. She felt that life thrumming and whirring inside her every day, so clearly and so acutely, sometimes it ached in the best way possible. Being alive and having awareness was wonderful, and she was thrilled to have it, to have fingers that could run over the carefully machined hilt of Luminous Electra, and wings that let her fly over the campus and see everything all at once, and infrared vision that let her see the warmth and pulse in every living thing, and… and… so many other things.
She was proud of being a synthetic girl! She wasn’t ashamed of it in the slightest! She was just life in a different form, pulsing away like anything else on this planet! Just with a different kind of pulse—an electric one.
She hoped her teammates would be proud of her, too. She hoped they would see her pulse.
Penny flicked off the bathroom light, and just before she departed the now-dark room, she caught sight of her eyes glowing faintly in the mirror, their luminosity the most noticeable thing in the gloom. It was nice, being a light in the darkness.
She stepped back out into the still-empty dorm room and wondered where she should be sitting when her teammates returned. Blake, Weiss, and Yang were at the library, picking up their textbooks for next semester, and she expected them to be back soon. Then there was a gap of several hours until they would start to think about going for dinner. Just the right amount of time to tell them.
Eventually she chose the windowsill, perching herself on it and pulling her knees up to her chest. She wasn’t sure if it made her more nervous to watch the door and wait for the faint creak of floorboards that would signal her team’s return… or to try and not think about that at all.
In her logic core, she knew her teammates were good, kind people who would accept her without pause. However, there was a much larger part of her which was practically screaming that as soon as her teammates found out just how different she was, they would react with disgust and rejection and hate and—and—
A small shape flitting across the window caught her attention, and she turned to see a bright blue butterfly throwing itself against the glass. She reached out and tapped the glass, hoping to send it in the right direction. The butterfly jerked away, startled, and bounced around in the air for a few confused moments before turning away and fluttering towards the open air of the courtyard.
“Safe travels,” Penny whispered as it flew away. She was left alone at the window again.
Would—would Yang and Blake and Weiss even still think that she was a person? Would they stop seeing her as a friend and start seeing her as some sort of dangerous intrusion into their lives? Would she become a joke to them? An embarrassment? What if they thought she was soulless? What if they thought she was disgusting?
No, no, no, she wasn’t any of those things, she knew that not just with her logic core but with all her metal heart, but—but—how could she convince anyone else? What would it take? Was it impossible?
Maybe it had been a terrible idea to be a Huntress. Maybe she was not meant to do any of this. Maybe the best thing for her safety and her happiness would be to go hide somewhere for the rest of her life. Maybe she should not be here anymore. Maybe it was hopeless to ever try living. Maybe—
Suddenly, Penny had the feeling of something deep inside her memory jolting, like some long-forgotten program unzipping itself, and then she was somewhere else.
There was a pouring rain washing over her, and her clothes were somehow already soaked. A faint sizzling sound hissed in her auditory sensors, a sound she couldn’t identify until she turned her head and realized that her flight mode was activated and the noise was coming from raindrops vaporizing as they hit the tips of her red-hot thrusters. Clearly, she had just flown somewhere. As for where… it was very dark; she was operating solely on infrared vision as she walked slowly. She couldn’t recognize anything, and the indistinctness of infrared signals in the rain were not helping.
She felt tense all over, and when she looked down at herself, there were scorch marks on her sleeves.
Then she looked up. Looming just a little bit lighter than the rest of the darkness of night was the outline of Beacon’s towers. She was on the grounds, not far from the building.
The school itself was dark and silent, except for one open doorway directly ahead, a rectangle of blazing light. There was a figure standing in the doorway, too far for her to make out individual features, but she instinctively knew it was her destination. She put her head down and kept walking. She was tired, but she only had a little longer to go.
…
…
…What.
Penny sat bolt upright, no longer drenched, no longer walking anywhere, no longer anywhere except the windowsill of her dorm room.
She blinked rapidly, checking her surroundings twice. What—what had just happened? Of all of the times to have a potential malfunction…
She hurried over to her bed, seated herself, and ran a quick diagnostic. A few seconds later, she came to a startling conclusion: That had been a memory. A memory unconnected to any of her existing memories. That did not make sense. Her memory did not have gaps. She remembered everything that happened in perfect chronological detail with impeccable recall, but this memory was missing so many things. No date, no context, numerous sensory details gone, incomplete positioning data… but somehow it had happened. She remembered walking through the courtyard, hunched over, her automatic radar active…
Logically, that could only mean one thing: This memory was from the time before she’d come to Beacon.
She stared at the memory in her own internal visual representation of her databanks, how it just floated unassigned in time, feeling like a taunt somehow. She had no idea where it’d come from, or how it’d survived being erased, but—
Creak.
Penny’s head shot up at the sound of the telltale creak of a floorboard she’d been waiting for, and seconds later the door opened. Immediately, she shoved aside all thoughts about the strange memory and refocused as Weiss, Yang, and Blake entered. It was time. Would her teammates ever look at her the same way again?
“We’re back,” Yang said, maneuvering a stack of textbooks into the room. “Anything catch on fire while we were gone?”
“No,” Penny said. She was seventy percent sure Yang meant that as a joke, but she had no capacity for humor at the moment.
It was not too late to change her mind. She could still say nothing, let the moment pass, let her teammates keep thinking of her as normal. And that would be safe. Safety felt very tempting.
But Penny wanted to tell them. She desperately wanted to tell them. She wanted them to know what she was, because as long as she hid this from them, she felt like they couldn’t really be friends with her. It was… it was like they were friends with some sort of facade of herself, a facade that she had to work very hard to keep up. She hadn’t let it down in months.
“Well, that’s good,” Yang said idly.
She had not noticed Penny’s nervousness. Which was to be expected. Penny had set her facial features into perfect neutrality as soon as the door opened.
Blake, halfway into swinging her leg onto the bunk above and across from Penny, paused and cocked her head. “Do you hear something?”
“No, what is it?”
“It’s… a hum, a faint one.”
Penny froze, staring straight down at her lap. Her processors. Her heightened emotions meant they were operating almost at full capacity, the highest they ever had around her team, to the point that they were just barely audible to the human ear. And definitely audible to a Faunus ear. And it wasn’t just the processors, but the internal fans kicking in—how stupid—how had she not anticipated this?
“Huh. I hear it, too,” Yang said.
Penny’s body temperature was spiking. She took a series of deep breaths, trying to bring things back to normal, but they had almost no effect. Breathe. Breathe. She had to breathe, she could not overheat now when she was about to tell them—
“Penny?”
At Weiss’s concerned voice, Penny looked up to see her standing before her, watching her with pursed lips.
Then she realized she’d drawn in on herself without meaning to. Her body language was all wrong. This was not how she’d wanted to tell her teammates, she was supposed to be strong and cheerful and and brave and not scared—
Yang and Blake were watching her with concern, too. It was—why did they have to see her when she told them?
It was not too late to change her mind. They might have some concern about why she was making odd noises, but they would not press. Penny could step back, pretend that everything was okay—
No. She was Penny Pallas, and she did not back down from something because it was scary.
“Yang. Blake. Weiss,” she began slowly. “There is something that I want to tell you all. It is something about myself.”
Penny did not look up, but she had an educated guess about what Yang, Blake, and Weiss would be doing right now. They were likely exchanging glances with one another, trying to figure out how to best deal with this. Likely, they would approach this as a team, which meant—
Yang sat down on the bed, on one side of her. Blake sat down on the other side. And Penny was sitting far back enough on the bed that Weiss could sit in front of her. Now Penny was surrounded by her teammates, and she knew that this closeness was meant as a gesture of comfort—and any other day she would have found it comforting, like something akin to a hug—but currently, she felt enclosed, trapped. They were too close and her proximity sensors were pinging continuously in her head, and she was trying to shut them all off while thinking about what she wanted to say at the same time—
Someone laid a hand on her shoulder, and she flinched. Yang.
“Penny, we—” Yang paused, looking at her hand, and then fresh concern filled her expression as she looked back at Penny. “You’re warm... really warm. Kind of scary warm. Are you okay?”
“It is fine. I am fine.”
Hic.
Penny flinched again at the sound, the one she was still trying not to make every time she lied, caused by some still-undiscovered bit of code she had yet to track down. She could not remember if it had happened enough times in the last several months for her teammates to notice the pattern. Regardless, they were concerned. They were concerned about her! Was this the last time they would ever be concerned about her?
She was still breathing rapidly, trying to bring down her temperature, and failing miserably. She was sure her teammates could hear all the noises her chassis was making right now.
Finally, she looked up, not quite meeting the eyes of her teammates, but at least enough so that she could see their faces. And they could see hers. “You are my teammates and my friends. I trust you all very much.”
Her teammates nodded, waiting in silence.
“I…” Penny opened her mouth, but could not bring forth the words. It still would be possible to just stop, to shut up, to stay hidden, let them think she was normal for just a bit longer…
“Is something wrong? We’ll do whatever we can to help you,” Blake said, her tone so patient and concerned and caring that it made something inside Penny clench.
“No, nothing is wrong. I—” Penny faltered. Everything was wrong, actually. She was about to find out if there was any possibility that the world could let her exist as she was. “You are my friends?”
“Of course.”
“Yes!”
“Undoubtedly.”
Penny felt as if she was standing at the edge of a very tall cliff, and if she looked down, all she could see was an abyss. Whatever was at the bottom, it was too far away to see from where she was right now. The only way to find out what laid ahead was to take the next step.
“I am… different from all of you.”
She expected maybe a little half-joke in reply, an attempt from someone to lighten the mood, but nothing came. Just a silence that she hoped was meant to be respectful.
“That’s okay!” Yang said finally. “Everyone’s got their differences.”
“Yes, but—” There was something strangely… comforting about what Yang had just said. Even if she had no idea how different Penny was. “My difference is very significant.”
“Penny?” Weiss said. “Do you remember the beginning of the semester, when I said I don’t like it when people keep things from me, and I would do my best to make sure you all could be comfortable with telling me anything?”
Penny nodded.
“I’ve learned that means I want people around me to be the truest version of themselves that they can be. It doesn’t matter to me what it is; I only care about you being true to yourself.” Weiss leaned forward a little bit, putting a hand on Penny’s knee. “So, Penny, whatever it is that you want to tell us… I promise that I will welcome it.”
Weiss’s words just made Penny feel everything even more, the terror and the hope and the longing and…
The longing. Just longing to have them really know her.
She shifted forwards. “I need to stand up for this.” She actually did—part of her plan to tell them involved something which was currently leaning against the wall on the other side of the room.
Weiss slid out of her way, and Penny walked over to her fake jetpack. When she picked it up, she hesitated for a moment, looking at her blurry reflection in the glossy metal surface. Then she nodded to herself, and returned to the bunk, placing the ‘jetpack’ down between her teammates.
“Could you tell me what you notice about this, please?” Then, just to make sure her teammates did not miss what she was laying bare, she pulled back several of its panels. A silence ensued as her teammates poked at it, cautiously at first, but then with what was most definitely a growing curiosity.
“Either this is the most advanced mechashift technology I’ve ever seen…” Yang said eventually. “Or… it’s not a jetpack at all?” She looked up at Penny. “But then where do… the wings…”
As a reply, Penny turned around, took a deep breath, and activated her flight mode.
The wings slid smoothly out of her back and through the barely-noticeable slits in her clothes custom-cut for this purpose, a ka-chunk resonating through the room as everything latched into place.
The sound of her teammates’ gasps, three distinct sharp intakes of breath, filled her with a sudden urge to fly through the window and never return, but she wrestled that feeling down and reached up to her bow. She unlatched it and lifted it away from her head, revealing the data-charging port hidden underneath.
And then she could not bear it any longer—she had to turn around to see what was in her teammates’ faces.
Blake was staring at Penny’s wings with wide eyes. Weiss kept moving her gaze from her wings to her head to the fake jetpack on the bed and then back to Penny. Yang was tilting her head, scrunching her eyebrows together.
Confusion. That was an outcome she’d expected. And confusion was far better than fear, or anger, or disgust, or so many other things that she had been scared of.
“The wings are… built into you?” Yang said slowly.
“It is not just the wings.” She gestured to herself, her arms, her chest, her stomach, her legs. “Every part of me is built. I am a synthetic person. Artificially constructed. A mechanical girl.”
She stopped, her processors whirring as loudly as they ever had, her respiratory cooling system doing its best to keep up. She most definitely appeared as if she was hyperventilating right now. The words were out of her mouth. She’d told them in undeniable terms what she was. There was no going back. She felt as if she was cradling her soul in her hands, a delicate little creature that’d flown away from its nest for the first time ever, and she was holding it out to the world for scrutiny. All Penny could do was hope the little creature would receive warm sunshine and love instead of pain and violence.
Blake and Weiss and Yang’s expressions morphed into something that was part shock and part something she did not understand. Penny looked down, because right now she felt better looking at the floor than looking at expressions she could not decipher.
“Whoa,” Yang said quietly. Was that a good whoa? A bad whoa? A neutral whoa? Penny did not know, but she needed to explain more, try to make herself understood, comprehended.
“I—I understand if you have concerns about having me as a teammate now,” she said, her words coming out in a sudden rush as she folded and unfolded her hands. “But I assure you, I am a real girl, I am a person, with full control of myself and my body and my autonomy, and I feel things, and I have a soul—an artificially generated soul, but it is real Aura—I can show you my Aura generator if you require proof—”
“Penny?”
At the sound of Yang’s voice, soft and filled with emotion, Penny looked up and realized that her three teammates were standing around her. Surrounding her. Was this a hostile situation? Were they about to hurt her? Penny wanted to hide, but there was nowhere for her to hide. She wanted to close her eyes, bury her face in her hands, block out all sensation and never think about anything again, but it was too late. They knew. They knew.
And then Yang spoke again.
“Can we hug you?”
Penny’s head whipped up, so fast a diagnostic sensor threw a warning about overtaxing the neck joint. A warning which she ignored in favor of staring at Yang, replaying those four words in her memory over and over again. A hug. A hug. Did this mean… they still wanted to be teammates? Or even just friends?
“Yes, please,” Penny said quietly.
Without another word, Blake, Weiss, and Yang wrapped Penny in the tightest group hug she had ever been part of. It was the best feeling in her entire life.
“You don’t need to prove anything about yourself to us, Penny,” Blake murmured. “You’ve already done that so, so many times over the last few months.”
“Even though I’m… I’m…” The words not real almost slipped out of Penny’s mouth, but she aborted the command in her vocal systems at the last possible moment. Yes, she was terrified of other people thinking she wasn’t real, but she knew for herself that she was real! And she was not going to say otherwise, even if she wanted to prepare herself for the pain of someone else thinking she wasn’t real.
“…So different?” she finished, settling on a choice of words that was far truer and much more respectful to herself.
“Just because we’ve found out something new about you doesn’t mean we’ve forgotten everything else!” Weiss said.
“I—I was worried about that,” Penny admitted. “I did not know if the shock would overshadow your existing impressions of me—”
“Nope,” Yang said. “Didn’t happen. You’re still you. And we’re still really happy you’re here, Penny.”
Penny closed her eyes. The outcome was so unequivocally positive that she almost could not believe it. She was still their friend. She was still their teammate. She was still the same person as before in their eyes.
Penny buried her face in the tumbling cascade of Yang’s hair, letting the softness take up all of her thoughts for a moment. She felt Blake pressing closer to her back, her head resting against her wings. Weiss was at her side, both arms around her and leaning her chin on Penny’s shoulder. They knew exactly what was under her skin, and they still wanted to hug her. It was everything she ever could’ve hoped for.
“Thank you,” she whispered. “Thank you, thank you, thank you… thank you so much.”
Her teammates murmured gentle affirmations and reassurances in reply, words that floated through Penny’s auditory processors and resonated throughout her entire chassis like a powerful surge of electricity.
And the hug went on for a long, long time, longer than any hug Penny had ever experienced.
Yang Xiao Long didn’t feel like she could say it aloud yet, but Penny was starting to feel kind of like the little sibling she’d never gotten the chance to have, protective instinct activation and all.
Which was maybe a crazy thing to say about a girl who she’d seen stop a charging Boarbatusk in its tracks by grabbing its tusks before flinging it onto Weiss’s rapier with enough force to impale the creature clean through. But also. Penny was so much more than her strength (just like Yang), and she did not like people who couldn’t see past how much she could lift (just like Yang), and Yang just wanted to… wanted to protect this girl (just like Yang had to do for herself once).
And Yang really didn’t like making assumptions about anyone, but she’d been pretty sure Penny was going to tell them she was trans, right up until when Penny told them she was something else.
Penny seemed to be still figuring out the world, something Yang had to do when she was much younger. And Yang wanted to put a protective arm around her and guide her through the journey of realizing the world was full of problems they wouldn’t be able to solve and bad things they wouldn’t be able to stop from happening.
At least, that was how Yang had understood it. Right up until the moment when Penny stood before her and spread a pair of metal wings, and then Yang realized there was still so much more to learn about Penny, about how she understood the world, about how she could understand the world.
Yang listened to Penny’s whirring as it quieted down. She had a friend who whirred. Wild. She could make a guess about what it meant, too. Really, really intense emotions. And if the whirring was going away… did that mean Penny was relaxed enough now to maybe take further questions?
Yang pulled back from the group hug a little, just enough for Penny to see her face. “Is it okay if we have, uh, questions?” she said carefully. “But like, not mean ones! There’s just some stuff I’m really curious about! And you don’t need to answer any of them!”
Penny nodded rapidly, her face filled with a frankly heartbreaking amount of cautious hope. “I would be delighted to answer anything you may be wondering!”
But there were so many questions jumbled up in Yang’s mind that nothing was leaping out at her. “...I don’t even know where to start. It’s like, what first?”
Weiss spoke up. “I have something I’d like to know.” When Penny turned an inquisitive look on her, she continued. “Why are you here?”
Penny tilted her head, clearly confused. “At Beacon? Because I wanted to be here.”
Well, that probably wasn’t the kind of answer Weiss was asking for, but also, that answer was so fittingly Penny that it made Yang want to squish her cheeks.
Weiss opened and closed her mouth several times without saying anything, before Blake leaned forward.
“I think what Weiss is trying to say is… It seems like it would take a great deal of effort and resources and time to make a person like you. She’s wondering—and I am too—why would someone go to such lengths, when… there are more expedient ways of making a person?”
“Oh.” Penny looked around slowly, and then said, “Perhaps we should sit down again.”
Yang raised her eyebrows, but chose to say nothing, and so the four of them sat back down on Penny’s bed atop her bedspread patterned with power symbols, with Penny’s posture noticeably less tense than before. Her wings slid back in, disappearing into her back like they’d never been there in the first place.
“You can keep your wings out, if you’d like,” Blake said. Yang and Weiss quickly nodded their assent.
Penny waved them off. “Oh, it is not a matter of comfort for me! It feels the same whether my wings are retracted or not. I prefer to keep them retracted for mobility reasons. And also so that I do not whack people with them.” She paused. “…It is nice to finally be my entire self around you, though.” And then the wings were back.
Yang’s heart clenched. Gods, how long had Penny been holding all this in? How long had she wanted to tell them?
She couldn’t help but look at the wings again and wonder how they felt, physically. Did they feel anything like how her arm felt? What did… well, what did all of being a synthetic person feel like? It couldn’t feel like having an entire body made of prosthetics, because then that wasn’t prosthetics, that was just the body.
She’d ask those things later, though. Much later. Right now, Penny was taking a deep breath (wait, a deep breath? Did she need to breathe? How did that work?), clearly about to speak.
“The answer to Weiss’s question is… I don’t know.”
Dead silence. Yang found herself looking at Weiss and Blake, who appeared just as lost as her.
“I have no memory of the first part of my life—the time before I was brought to Beacon.”
“Brought?” Blake said, and there was something wary in her tone all of a sudden. Not wary of Penny, if Yang had to guess, just wary of what things might’ve happened to Penny, for her to be brought somewhere.
But Penny flinched, as if she thought Blake was wary of her, and Yang jumped in immediately to make sure she understood the meaning.
“Were you abandoned at Beacon?” she asked, and Blake’s quick agreeing nod told her she’d hit on the intended meaning.
Thankfully, Penny saw Blake’s nod and visibly relaxed. “No. I chose to come here for my own safety.”
That, if anything, elicited more concern than Penny’s previous answer.
“Your safety?” Yang said, thinking of… Oh, any number of times when Penny casually absorbed hits that would’ve flattened any other student. “What does it take to put you in danger, Penny?”
There was a tendency that Penny had when she was scared of something, where she pulled in her arms and legs and ducked her head and seemed to be trying to make herself as small as possible, and every time she did it, Yang wanted to wrap her in a blanket and give her a mug of hot cocoa. And Penny was doing it now.
“There were people who wanted to… use me.”
Use. That word sent a shiver up and down Yang’s spine, and she saw anger flash through Blake and Weiss’s expressions. Penny couldn’t have made it any clearer what she meant even if she’d outright said there were people who didn’t see me as a person, just a tool.
Not having a blanket, Yang chose to lean forward and hug Penny again as Weiss asked, “Who?”
“I have no memory of who it was.”
And that brought the conversation thundering back to something Penny had said earlier which, honestly, had just kind of flown over Yang’s head. No memory? As in, none? Wait, how did memory work for Penny, anyway? Could she replay anything she saw like a video? Good gods, did she ever need to study for a test?
“I believe a similar occurrence in organics would be amnesia. What I do know is that I decided for myself to erase my memory, to protect myself and my father from the people who wanted to use me.”
“Your father?” Yang, Blake, and Weiss asked, all at the same time. Huh. It was almost like they were learning to think on the same wavelength more and more or something.
“Some might refer to him as my creator… but to me, he has always been my father and he always will be.” She looked down for a moment, tracing a slow path down the seam of her bedspread. “I also don’t remember him.”
“Oh…” Yang said, a realization hitting her. “So that’s why you said your dead parents situation was different from mine.”
Penny nodded. “No mother at all. Just a father whose name I cannot remember. I don’t even know if he is alive, but I hope he is.”
“You know, I can’t say my dead parents situation is anything like yours, but…” Yang shrugged. “The vibes still feel similar.” Oh, she was SO doing everything in her power to help Penny find her dad again.
“What are vibes?”
“Um.” Yang’s brain ground to a screeching halt as she realized she had no idea how to actually explain what vibes meant. Vibes were just… vibes! And there were so many other unexplainable words like that—honestly, how did anyone, not just Penny, make any sense of the world, ever?
“Wait.” Blake leaned forward. “If you don’t have memory of the past, then how do you know any of that is true?”
To Yang, that was… a worrying thought, but Penny had an answer ready surprisingly quickly, and it was not what she’d expected.
“Professor Ozpin told me all this.”
“What? He knows? He’s part of this?”
Penny blinked at Blake for a few moments before brightening. “Oh! I believe there has been a slight misunderstanding. I was not brought to Beacon at the start of this academic year—I’ve lived here for quite some time already. I was being quite literal when I said this was my home. Professor Ozpin was the first person I spoke to at the start of my current memory.”
“Huh. That’s…” Blake trailed off before nodding. “As long as you trust that’s the truth. I can believe it, too.”
They lapsed into another silence, but one which Penny looked far more comfortable with. She kept looking at them and then quickly looking away with an amazed little smile, like she still couldn’t fully believe that telling them had gone so well.
Gods.
Yang decided that Penny deserved some lighter, less existential questions now, and there were plenty of those! “Hey, Penny,” she said. “Feel free to not answer this or anything else, but I was wondering… how does eating work for you? Because I know I’ve seen you eating.”
“Oh! I was actually not eating! I was just projecting incredibly realistic holograms onto my plate and my utensils to make you think I was eating!”
“Wait, really?”
“And this is the part where I inform you that was a joke.”
“Penny.”
It was funny how close Blake Belladonna had come to the truth while still being so far away.
Penny wasn’t a human, but also wasn’t a Faunus. She had wings, but metal ones, not biological ones. Her bow covered something, but something completely different from what Blake had considered.
Ever since that turbulent first day of classes, she’d known Penny was waiting to tell the team something. Of course, she was happy to let her figure it out at her own pace. But at the same time, she’d hoped Penny would tell the team sooner rather than later—because she could see clearly how the secret weighed on her.
Blake had tried not to speculate. But there were certain signs that were impossible to miss which made her instinctively wonder. And those wonderings led her towards a conclusion. An incredibly wrong conclusion.
There was Penny’s instant clocking of her as a Faunus. The bow which she never took off. The fact that she knew who the Chieftain of Menagerie—her dad, in fact—was.
There was something else Blake had noticed by genuine accident: one morning, in the dorm, she’d found one of Penny’s t-shirts mixed up with her laundry. In the process of folding it up with the intent of putting it back on Penny’s bed, she’d noticed two slits in the back.
Her first thought had been, Oh gods, I tore up Penny’s shirt somehow.
Her second thought had been, Wait. These holes were stitched.
Her third thought had been, Exactly like how a Faunus with wings would make their shirt.
She put it back on Penny’s bed, neatly folded, without another word.
And then what had clinched it in Blake’s mind—or at least what seemed to clinch it—was when Penny had softly confessed that her greatest fear was other people being afraid of her. Because that was in Blake’s top three fears.
It sounded exactly like what an ex-Fang member would say… and she was filing that observation under ‘things that would be offensive if anyone besides Blake Belladonna said it.’
But Penny being ex-Fang came with its own puzzle—she’d clearly accumulated enough battle proficiency to enter Beacon, but then… which branch had she come from? Blake had been high up enough in the Fang that she felt like she would’ve heard about someone with that kind of skill.
At least, that was the puzzle she was grappling with until ten minutes ago. And now, she knew things she never would’ve even considered possible. All her questions were answered, and she had a thousand new ones. But after seeing how plainly terrified Penny was of being rejected, she deserved all of Blake’s patience. And she had the right to not answer anything. So Blake sat on the bed and listened as Penny explained her past, and she marveled at the fact that she was sitting next to a girl who ran on electricity and had a body made of metal. Her always-high body temperature made so much more sense.
“—I plug myself in to charge, and I have a room of my own elsewhere in Beacon for that purpose. It’s also where I perform my repairs.”
“Was that where you were on that first night when your jetpack—well, your wings, rather—almost caught on fire?” Weiss asked.
Penny nodded, and Blake found herself wondering how she handled the stress of having a body which could catch fire if damaged severely enough. Probably the same way humans and Faunus handled the stress of having a body which would bleed out if damaged severely enough.
“If you want, you could charge yourself in here, with us? So you’re not alone when you do that?”
“Really? You all wouldn’t mind seeing me… plugged in?”
Blake had no reservations about letting Penny charge in their room, but even if she’d had any, the sight of her brightening so powerfully at the prospect of being able to do that would’ve wiped away any doubts immediately.
She reassured Penny rapidly, almost stumbling over her words while Yang and Weiss echoed similar sentiments. Penny nodded, and the faint hum of her… computers?—processors?—grew louder. Blake would have to ask what was the proper way to refer to those.
“Thank you for being so accepting. I… this is beyond anything I could’ve ever hoped for.” She fiddled with the hem of her skirt, and then added in a much quieter tone, “I was so worried that you would think I am soulless. Or disgusting.”
Blake’s stomach twisted. “Never.”
“Not a chance.”
“The disgusting ones are the people who would think that.”
Some of Penny’s fears and insecurities felt so very close to Blake’s own. There were plenty of humans who thought Faunus were soulless or disgusting. Plenty of humans who saw them as things and not people. And she knew exactly what it felt like to be trapped between wanting to fit in and wanting to be yourself.
And now she was realizing just how many parts of daily language and society might be demeaning to Penny. It was considered an insult to call someone robotic. There was the I’m not a robot check featured on almost every website. Inhuman meant something bad or unsettling, humanity was seen as one of the most important things for people to have. There were so many movies where robots were the villains. Many of which were about irredeemably evil killer robots trying to destroy the world. And on. And on. And Penny had to live with that every day.
Blake silently resolved to do her best to make her feel welcome. Some of it, she was doing already, for Faunus reasons: personhood instead of humanity, for example. And Penny was doing something similar—over the course of their conversation this afternoon, she always used the term organics or organic beings when she didn’t need to specify humans or Faunus.
She was starting to think she could have some absolutely fascinating conversations with Penny about social complexities and intersectionality and identity. Because, quite literally, she was talking to an entirely new kind of person. Remnant was now made up of humans, Faunus, and synthetic people. She was witnessing a historic cultural moment.
But Penny was still just one person, and Blake would not overwhelm her with weighty questions. So all her curiosity about things like that would wait for other times.
“I can show you my Aura,” Penny said suddenly. “I—I have not learned to project it over my entire body yet, but it is inside me. The generator is right here.” She flattened her palm over the center of her chest—exactly where the heart would be in an organic body.
A rush of reassurances from the three of them followed—none of them needed proof of what they could see every day. Blake wondered if Penny realized just how incredibly alive she always was, as if her soul was even more highly charged than everyone else’s. It was apparent in the little things, like how she liked to stop to look at the rabbits scampering across on the quad, or how she drew her power symbol emblem on every page of her notebooks, or how she she stopped mid-spar to ask an opponent if they were okay after smacking them across the room, or so many other things. A never-ending list.
“Wait.” Yang cocked her head at Penny. “So every time you’ve taken a hit, that was without Aura? How are you still standing?”
“I was designed to be extremely durable.”
That raised an uncomfortable silence—not because of Penny, but because everyone was wondering why she’d been built that way.
“We’ll help you with your Aura,” Blake said. “It takes some practice if you’re not used to it.”
“I hope that’s something I can do.”
“It will be. I promise.”
Weiss Schnee was starting to think she’d never stop being surprised by Penny. Ever.
The first surprise had been when the strange, excitable girl with an oddly stilted speaking manner and light-up sneakers had flipped an Ursa over her shoulder without so much as blinking. The second surprise had been when Penny’s idea of ‘surface damage’ turned out to be ‘the barest minimum of airworthiness.’ And that was just in the first thirty minutes of Team BSYP’s existence.
Other surprises? Well, to name a few…
The first four times Penny had entered their dorm room by way of flying in through the (thankfully open) window.
When Weiss discovered that Penny was excellent at custom-making Dust ammunition thanks to having some of the best fine motor skills at Beacon.
When Penny had proven better than Weiss at remembering their professors’ lectures.
And. Well. Today. Which was certainly a surprise.
But honestly, Penny flipping the Ursa over her shoulder was still more surprising, in Weiss’s opinion.
It wasn’t just surprises, either. Sometimes, Weiss felt like her partner was a walking collection of paradoxes. She could be impossibly naive about some things, and yet also she seemed to know more than anyone else about certain things. She had the capacity to flatten anything in her path, and yet she always took great care with the tiny living things around them that anyone else would have ignored—insects and arachnids and avians… the list went on and on.
It was… fun. Weiss had never met anyone like Penny in her life before—and she’d arrived at that conclusion before Penny had revealed she was a robot! It was just… Penny was absolutely someone who could not exist in the upper echelons of Atlesian society which Weiss had lived in for her entire life, and she was slowly realizing that was a good thing.
Since Penny was talking about her Aura now, this felt like the perfect opportunity—
“I’ve been meaning to ask, Penny…” Weiss said at a lull in the conversation. “Your strength Semblance? Was that your cover story for why you could do things that no human or Faunus could do?”
“Oh.” Penny nodded. “That is correct. If I have a Semblance, I have not found it yet.” She fell silent, some of the brightness disappearing from her eyes. Which concerned Weiss, because she could count on one hand the number of times when she’d been able to notice Penny’s eyes dimming.
“There’s other people at Beacon who haven’t found their Semblance yet!” Yang said. “There’s Jaune, and I know one of the third-years hasn’t found hers yet, and—”
Weiss just knew that Penny’s Semblance would undoubtedly be another surprise. “We’ll help you find it,” she said. “What kind of teammates would we be if we didn’t?”
“Hey, you know what they say about Semblances coming from personal growth, so maybe now that you’ve told us about yourself you’ll find it! Maybe tonight?”
Considering the kind of circumstances Semblance discoveries usually happened in, Weiss really would prefer if events didn’t transpire for Penny to find hers tonight. She very much wanted the team to have a good night’s sleep before their exam tomorrow.
“You know, Weiss…”
The sudden turn in conversation from Blake, who was giving Weiss a look with a quirked eyebrow, only roused Weiss’s curiosity—she was thoroughly mystified as to what her team leader was about to say.
“Between me saying I was in the White Fang and Penny saying she’s a synthetic person, it’s my reveal that you treated as a bigger deal?”
“I!” Weiss felt her face lighting up in a flaming blush, partly out of embarrassment and also partly out of fear because she didn’t want Blake to think she still demeaned her somehow— “After yesterday, I am making an effort to not be as surprised or taken aback by such revelations!”
And then Blake broke down in laughter, and belatedly Weiss realized—she’d been joking.
“Don’t worry about it,” she said, reaching out and patting Weiss on the shoulder. “I appreciate the effort. But the real test is going to come when Penny reveals she’s spearheading a synthetics’ rights movement.”
At least Weiss could recognize that as a joke, even if the image of Revolutionary Leader Penny Pallas was mildly terrifying to consider.
Penny, however, seemed to be considering Blake’s statement in all seriousness, tilting her head and then looking down at her hands. “If I did someday need to lead a revolution for the rights of synthetic persons, would you all trust me to do it?”
“Yes,” Yang and Blake said near-simultaneously, before both of them turned to stare pointedly at Weiss. Who… still needed to wrap her head around the concept, honestly…
“Yes!” she said. “Knowing you, Penny, if something is driving you to violence, then whatever the situation is, your response must be entirely justified!”
“So to make you be more sympathetic to the White Fang, I should act more like Penny? Got it,” Blake said in that same lighthearted tone. “Penny, can I borrow your bow?”
Penny actually went so far as holding out her bow to Blake before she must’ve realized it was a joke, and then she withdrew her hand with an embarrassed smile and went to reattach it to her head.
And at that moment, Weiss realized—Oh. Penny’s emblem, which was embossed in the center of her bow, was a power symbol.
She already knew Penny was not a subtle person, but this felt like another level entirely.
Team BSYP talked for a long time, long enough that they almost forgot about dinner—until Blake’s stomach growled loudly. That sent them into a round of laughter as they stood up and made to leave for the dining hall.
Penny was realizing that she had far more processing ability than a few hours ago, and it was allowing her to think about things in a much more relaxed manner again. The stress had been literally taking up a great deal of internal resources.
Yang put a hand on the doorknob and then paused. “You know, Penny…” she said slowly. “I think you should come to the queer club.”
It did sound nice, even if Penny still wondered…
“Would I belong?” she said.
“Do you want to?”
Penny hesitated, searching her feelings and scrolling through all the ramifications of her chosen answer, and came to a decision. “Yes.”
Yang threw open the door and stepped through before turning around and gesturing to her. “Then you belong.”
During dinner, Penny received a text from Ruby—the first she’d heard from her since last night.
Hi Penny! Good news, I wasn’t expelled for going vigilante! Wanna do friend stuff sometime?
Notes:
The art in this chapter was a commission from pilot-boi on Tumblr!
Honestly, this chapter is my favorite of everything that I've posted so far. It was just... so comforting and heartening to write, and I wanted to make sure I gave Penny's coming-out all the attention and care that the moment deserved. Writing this was like wrapping up my soul in a big fluffy warm blanket.
Chapter 13: Things Left Unsaid
Notes:
Hello! If you'd like to reblog the art of Penny and Ruby that I commissioned from Helihi for Chapter 11, she's posted it on her Tumblr now! Here's a link to the post!
And if you'd like to reblog the art of Team BSYP's group hug that I commissioned from pilot-boi for Chapter 12, that has also been posted on their Tumblr now! Here's a link to the post!
And if you'd like to reblog the animations that DesiB717 made of Luminous Electra and Lunar Enforcer (as a gift for me!!!!), she's also posted those on her Tumblr! Here's a link to that post!
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Ruby had asked, what do friends actually do together? And ever since then, Penny had turned the question over in her mind, analyzing it and wondering if it was possible to answer, given how many different things friends could do together. Currently, the only conclusion she’d arrived at was that much more data was needed.
As for what Penny and Ruby were doing together as friends at this moment, in their first time hanging out in a non-combat situation: they were in Beacon’s machine shop as Penny showed Ruby around the various workspaces and Ruby made many appreciative noises.
“It’s so cool to be here! I feel like this place is the beating heart of the academy. Of every academy!” Ruby kept turning in circles, endlessly admiring her surroundings.
It had been a simple deduction that Ruby would get a great deal of enjoyment out of this, and so far she was right! “Were you a frequent visitor at the workshops in Atlas Academy?” Penny asked.
“Oh, I basically lived there!” Ruby stopped next to an automatic lathe running at full tilt, laying a hand on its side and closing her eyes, listening to the humming of the machine as it carved out a block of metal. “How could I not? It’s where we hone our weapons, perfecting their form and their function and making their mechanisms extensions of our bodies and our souls…”
Penny found the workshop comforting, too. On the rare occasion when she needed to repair herself with a tool she didn’t have in her personal workshop, she came down here late at night with no one else around, just the whir of machinery and various blinking lights for company. She liked to imagine it as a room full of other sentient mechanical beings, people who functioned like her and had similar worries and hopes.
It was very comforting, to think about being amongst people like her.
But she could not say any of that to Ruby. So instead, she simply said, “I like being here, too.”
Ruby smiled at her and straightened, casting a slow gaze around the room. “I guess you could kinda say I did live in the machine shop. Since Atlas Academy was sort of my actual home.”
She stopped, her expression suddenly paling slightly. “…I don’t think I’m supposed to tell you that… But whatever. Anyway! Do you mind if I do some maintenance on Lunar Enforcer right now? I need to check that everything’s okay after the fight.”
“Go right ahead. May I watch?”
“Of course!”
Penny cast a careful, considering look on Ruby as she sat at a table and set down Lunar Enforcer. What Ruby had just said about Atlas Academy being like her actual home… it sounded similar to Penny’s experience at Beacon. She wanted to know more.
Today, Ruby had swapped out her fighting outfit for an Atlesian cadet’s uniform and skirt, but she’d kept the cape and combat boots and fingerless gloves. And the goggles, which were still perched on her head. She gathered tools with a practiced ease, opening drawers that she’d definitely never opened before but finding exactly what she needed almost immediately.
Penny wondered, if Ruby’s home was also an academy, and she felt the need to keep it a secret…were there other things they had in common? She double-checked her sensors, observing Ruby’s heartbeat for a few long moments, the miniscule variations in her body temperature, and the rate of her breathing.
Ruby hummed to herself as she began speedily disassembling Lunar Enforcer, unaware of Penny’s eyes on her. After a few more silent seconds of searching, Penny sat down next to Ruby, making sure to not disturb the work.
“You live at Atlas Academy?” she said, taking a somewhat reckless chance.
Ruby looked up, tilting her head slightly. “Eh… I wouldn’t say I live there, it’s more that, um, my guardian is in the military, so I’ve spent a lot of time there growing up. Where I actually live is the Atlas Military Complex! Because, well, that’s where my guardian lives, and I live with her.” She nodded, apparently having decided she could speak of that after all, and held a loupe up to her eye to inspect a small gear.
“Your entire family was in the military?” Penny found it odd that there wouldn’t have been someone in Ruby’s family who couldn’t have been able to—
“Actually, I don’t have any family. It’s just me and my guardian—she adopted me when I was younger. I’m a war orphan.”
“Oh. I see.” That was not an appropriate reaction to someone telling her that kind of information. But also, Penny still had no idea what counted as an appropriate reaction to such sensitive topics. And Ruby’s tone had been so casual when she said it that Penny felt obligated to match her casualness. Perhaps this was a situation like Yang’s, where it no longer affected Ruby greatly.
Ruby turned to look at Penny through the loupe, leaning so close to Penny’s face that their shoulders almost touched. “You’re not reacting the way people usually do when I say that. They start acting like I’m about to explode in a fireball or something.”
Well, that did not seem like an appropriate reaction, either. “Why would I do that?”
Ruby put down her loupe and grinned at Penny. “I like the way you think.” She held out the gear she’d been inspecting. “Hold this for a second?”
Penny accepted the gear. She always found it funny when people referred to a length of time as a second, because they never meant a literal second. How different would the world be if ‘a second’ was always literal?
…For starters, a lot more things would be dropped on the ground.
“I never had the chance to know them,” Ruby continued, still talking about her family. “So I’m not sad about it. And growing up in the military was fun! And I like my guardian! She’s really nice, even if she’s getting pretty old and can’t do stuff like she used to. But she’s so smart. She taught me how to do stuff like that Ice Dust tornado I used to take down Torchwick’s airship, you know. Wait until you see what else she taught me to do with the hurricane-force winds my Semblance generates!”
“Interesting!” Penny turned over the gear in her hands. It was finely crafted, made of an incredibly high-quality magnesium alloy, its teeth maybe as sharp as the day it’d been pulled from the forge.
“What was it like?” she said. The more Ruby talked about her background, the more familiar it sounded and the more curious she became. “Growing up in the military, that is.”
“Disciplined.” Ruby shrugged. “I know a lot of secret passages and rooms and nooks and spots and things in the headquarters, places I bet not even the General knows about. And I got to handle a lot of weapons way before I should’ve been allowed to.”
Penny stared at Ruby, a feeling of mild horror rising in her. “You were allowed to handle weapons as a small child?”
Ruby blinked, lowering the spring she’d been re-tensioning. “Uh. I guess I shouldn’t have told you that either. Sorry! I just, argh, I’ve never had a friend to talk to about stuff before and I keep forgetting what’s supposed to be classified—”
She dropped the spring mid-sentence and clapped a hand over her mouth, completely ignoring the sproing of formerly compressed metal attempting to launch itself across the room—only for Penny to snatch it out of the air (mechanical reflexes were fun) and place it back on the table.
“PleaseignorewhatIjustsaid,” Ruby said, before taking a deep breath and fixing her eyes on the table in front of her. “So! Yeah! Uh. Wait, did you just catch that spring in midair? That was really cool! I’ve—”
Penny let Ruby’s nervous rambling fade away a little bit as she focused on that one word Ruby had just said. Classified.
The way Ruby talked about herself, especially the way that she’d never had a friend before and didn’t know how to act while also being an incredible fighter… More and more, Penny was wondering… was Ruby somehow like her?
Before she could contemplate the question further, the door to the workshop opened. She and Ruby turned to see Weiss, Blake, and Yang entering.
“Oh, hi!” Ruby let out a very loud sigh of what Penny assumed to be relief at the distraction. “What brings you three here?”
“Um, we were getting some grease for our weapons—”
“Cool! I’ll get it for you! Bye!” And in a burst of silver, Ruby vanished, the only trace of which direction she’d gone being the door to a nearby storeroom slamming open.
Yang blinked, and then looked at Penny. “She seems… nervous?”
Penny shifted in her seat. “She’s nice,” she said, with more intensity than she’d intended.
“Oh, I didn’t mean it like a bad thing at all! Just…” Yang trailed off. “Was she serious when she said she’d never had any friends?”
“I think so.”
That statement was met with total silence. Penny’s teammates shifted on their feet, looking at each other, and then Weiss spoke. “Okay. Now I have to ask. Penny, is Ruby… you know…?” She trailed off, looking at Penny expectantly. What she was expecting, Penny had no idea.
“I don’t understand,” she said.
“Is Ruby a… er…” Weiss glanced in the direction Ruby had gone before bending down and picking up an electrical plug lying on the floor. “Is Ruby a. You know.” She gestured to the plug and mimed plugging it into something. “Like you?”
And only then did Penny realize Weiss was asking if Ruby was also a synthetic person.
“Weiss. Oh my gods,” Yang muttered, burying her face in her palm. “Seriously?”
Weiss huffed. “It’s just! She acts very differently, and she went through a gang of seasoned fighters like a buzzsaw, and I think she has something to hide, and my sister, a high-ranking military officer, is in charge of minding her for some reason, and she’s never had friends before. All of those things together sound a lot like Penny at the start of this semester!”
Blake nodded. “As dense as Weiss can be about people’s identities, I think she might have a point just this once.”
“Thank you—hey!”
Weiss spluttered, and Blake sent a playful smirk at her before continuing in a sober tone. “But really, though. I’m not saying she’s the same as you, Penny, but something’s… different. No first-year should be able to fight like that. I’ve got years of genuine battlefield experience, far more than anyone else in our year, and I couldn’t come close to what Ruby did.”
She did not specify what the battlefield experience was, but no one needed to ask. Weiss looked slightly nauseous for a moment, but in the end all she did was nod in acknowledgement.
“Also, there’s the whole ‘doesn’t know what the word ‘fascism’ means, but genuinely thinks it would solve the world’s problems’ thing, which… if she’s going to be our friend. I really need to talk to her about that,” Blake added.
“I believe that Ruby is organic in nature,” Penny said quietly. Her sensors told her that Ruby was far enough inside the storeroom that she couldn’t hear this conversation. “I can detect her heartbeat.”
“Oh.” Weiss was silent for a moment, before whipping her head around. “Wait, you can detect heartbeats?”
“And quite a few other vital signs! For example, right now, your heart rates are a bit above your usual resting rates—did you take the stairs to get here?”
“Yep, the elevator was broken…” Yang, Blake, and Weiss were staring at Penny in amazement. Which she didn’t understand—this was far from the most impressive of her features. She wondered how they would react when she told them she had radar.
“Wild,” Yang said. “What kind of things can you notice with that?”
“Well—” Suddenly, Ruby started moving on her radar back towards them, and Penny cut herself off just before she would’ve entered back into hearing range and overheard very private things about Penny.
“Hey! Found some!” Ruby said, coming out of the storage room with a can of weapon grease. “I guess I shouldn’t have volunteered to get it when I’ve never been here in my life before, but, uh… here it is!” She handed it to Blake, who took it with a nod of thanks.
“We’re going for the weapon inspection now, Penny—you already did that, right?”
Penny nodded. “Yesterday morning. All set!”
“Okay, see you later.”
Three-quarters of Team BSYP departed, and Penny was alone with Ruby again as she sat down to resume her work. She was suddenly much quieter—was she worried about saying something that she wasn’t supposed to?
As Penny tried to think of a more relaxing topic of conversation, she remembered she was still holding the gear from Lunar Enforcer. She turned it over in her hands, admiring the work. Even for such a simple piece of machinery, it was clear how much work had gone into its creation. And that magnesium alloy really was—
Wait.
Penny activated her internal spectrometer and brought the gear up to her eyes, running a full analysis. When the results appeared, she nearly dropped it.
The alloy which this gear was made of was the exact same alloy used in some parts of her body. An extremely unique alloy Penny had not seen anywhere else in the world besides herself. Until now.
“Can I have that back?”
Penny startled at Ruby’s voice, and then realized she was asking for the gear. She collected herself and dropped it into her outstretched hand, watching as she reassembled one mechanism and immediately began dismantling another. Looking over, she ran spectral analyses of other parts of Lunar Enforcer, and found more of the same alloy.
If Ruby had access to this alloy, could she be synthetic too?
But she had a heartbeat. How could that belong to anything inorganic? But Penny had never seen that alloy before, not even in any other Atlesian technology or weapons. If it was reserved just for synthetic persons… Did Ruby have some sort of technology which let her fool sensors into thinking she was organic?
And then something else perhaps stunningly obvious rose up in Penny’s thoughts: Ruby’s Semblance. She seemed to shed metal dust whenever she used it! And because Semblances reflected the soul… did Ruby have a metal soul, like Penny?
The thought of this filled Penny with a strangely intense thrill. Was it possible she was sitting next to someone like her? Someone who truly understood what her world was like? Someone who wanted to find a similar soul just as much as she did?
She leaned closer, scanning. Ruby had leaned very close to her earlier, so likely she wouldn’t think anything of Penny doing the same. But she didn’t know what she was searching for. Some hint, some trace, something…?
Nothing revealed itself to her, and she pulled back, because even between two socially inexperienced girls there was a limit for how long someone could be in someone else’s personal space.
“You’ve put a great deal of effort into your weapon,” she said, finally settling on a topic of conversation that felt safe but also interesting.
“Yeah…” Ruby said. Her voice was much softer, maybe even wistful. She ran a hand down the staff, making a sighing sound. “Lunar Enforcer is my pride and joy. I had a whole room full of military brains figuring out the most efficient, most versatile weapon that I could possibly wield… months of development, prototypes on top of prototypes—no idea how much metal I went through—and she was the result!” She pulled off one of the blades and examined its edge with her loupe. “Hm. I should sharpen this one… She’s a sniper rifle, she’s a war scythe, she’s a double-bladed staff of destruction, she can be dual-wielded, she takes Dust rounds… she’s the perfect weapon!” She lowered the blade and beamed at Penny and then saluted for no apparent reason. “Exactly what I need!”
Penny resisted the urge to ask, was there a particular reason why you had so many resources and help available? A reason such as being a synthetic girl who needed as much protection as possible?
She needed to be absolutely sure Ruby was a synthetic person before she asked, because if Ruby wasn’t, then Penny would have given away her secret to an organic girl who seemed to have trouble keeping secrets.
She resolved to wait, and gather data to be completely safe. There were far too many unknowns at this moment.
“What about you?” Ruby gave Penny an expectant look. “I’m really curious about the kind of thought process that goes into designing such a big, bold weapon!”
Penny put a hand to Luminous Electra’s hilt, feeling its weight against her back, and offered an answer which did not live up to the grandeur Ruby had described for Lunar Enforcer.
“I thought it would be fun to swing a very big sword.”
But rather than showing disappointment, Ruby nodded energetically. “Yeah! I respect that, too! Sure, it’s a reductive and inefficient way to select a weapon, but… it’s cool!”
She leaned forward, squinting at Lunar Enforcer’s internals. “Oops, that linkage is about to give out. Could you hand me that spot welder, please?”
Penny obliged, and Ruby yanked down her goggles. Sparks flew for a few seconds, and then she was done. “Thanks! I think that’s everything, but who knows, maybe there’ll be a surprise while I’m putting her back together.” She flashed a smile at Penny as she started reassembling it. “Thanks for the help.”
“It is a pleasure!”
“Same here.” Ruby’s tone shifted as pieces clicked back together and nuts were re-screwed back onto bolts. “Weapons are… the easiest thing for me. If you do what you’re supposed to do with them, they’ll do exactly what you want. I wish the rest of the world was like that.”
Penny nodded. “I feel the same way about repairs. There are clearly defined sets of steps to follow, and they will always yield the same results. It’s a simplicity that occurs nowhere else.” What she did not specify was that she was talking about repairs of herself.
“Yeah!” Ruby picked up a socket wrench. “Except maybe combat.”
“Hmm.” Penny had to think about that for a moment. She did find the intricacies of combat much easier to decipher than some other parts of life, but objectively, combat was still complex. It was just a different kind of complex that her processors were more equipped to deal with. “Relatively simple, or completely simple?”
“Completely.” Ruby shrugged. “You fight the bad guys until they stop fighting, or until you can’t fight anymore.”
“That sounds quite dangerous.”
Penny had meant it as an honest observation, but the way that Ruby fell silent, followed by her heart rate immediately picking up, made her worry that she’d somehow insulted her.
“I guess it’s not simple at all for everyone else,” Ruby muttered, staring down at her weapon. “Ugh, I’m doing it again…”
Suddenly, she smacked the socket wrench down on the table and spun to face Penny, her entire body tensing. “Penny, I know I’m not normal. But I… I promise I can be a good friend. It’s just, I really want to be your friend because you’ve been so nice and you’re full of energy like me and you’ve got a nice bright smile and… you feel like a friend and I don’t want to lose that because I don’t know a lot of things yet and…”
She stammered off into silence, turning her goggles over and over in her hands and alternatively pulling the straps taut and then loose. She was squeezing her eyes shut like she was afraid of something. Like she was afraid that Penny wouldn’t want to be her friend.
Penny reached out and gently placed her hands on Ruby’s, hoping that the warmth of her computer-heated skin was reassuring instead of unsettling. When Ruby looked up again, meeting her gaze with eyes full of worry, Penny said, “Don’t worry, Ruby. I am not normal, either.”
“Heh. I guess the zweihander should make that pretty clear.”
Penny giggled. “You have not done anything which would deter me from being your friend. Your enthusiasm is wonderful.”
Ruby made a quiet squeaking noise before jolting forwards and wrapping Penny in a hug, squeezing tightly.
“Thank you, Penny!” she said. “I promise I’ll do my best! Even though…” She pulled back a little. “There’s stuff really really not normal about me. And I shouldn’t even be telling you that, but… I feel like I can trust you.”
“Don’t worry. I think you might be surprised by how abnormal I am, too!”
Ruby got an odd expression on her face, mostly amusement but maybe something else. “Not as much as me, I can guarantee that.”
Penny’s wondering only grew, and for the second time that conversation, she said something somewhat reckless. “You may be surprised.”
“So would you.”
They stared at each other for a moment, and then simultaneously broke into a fit of giggling.
“I guess we’re gonna be abnormal together, then?” Ruby said, catching her breath.
“Ab-so-lute-ly!”
Penny saw the tension disappear from Ruby’s posture, and a feeling of comfortable calm settled over them.
Whatever Ruby was, Penny would not pressure her about it. She deserved to tell Penny by her own choice, just as Penny had the right to tell her teammates only when she wanted to. Until then, Penny was quite sure the best thing she could do was be a sensational friend for Ruby. And if Ruby was a synthetic person, well… Penny would be overjoyed.
“To the abnormal life.” She held up her fist for a fistbump, but was only met with a blank stare from Ruby.
“Are you… about to punch me?” she said.
“Oh, not at all! Are you familiar with fistbumping?”
“Nope.”
A wide smile spread over Penny’s face. The first step on her journey of being a sensational friend to Ruby would be to introduce this social custom to her.
However, before she could launch into an expository monologue on the joys of fistbumping, Ruby’s scroll buzzed.
Ruby glanced down at the screen and sat up straighter. “Oh, my guardian’s calling me. I haven’t talked to her in a while; I should take this. She may be pretty old, but she’s still got enough energy to worry lots about me. So I try not to make her worry too much.” Then she raised her scroll to her ear.
Penny briefly felt a ridiculous urge to eavesdrop on the conversation—perhaps Ruby’s guardian might have something to say which would shed light on the mystery of Ruby herself. But immediately Penny felt ashamed of herself for feeling such an urge. No matter how curious she was or how similar she thought they might be, she did not have a right to eavesdrop. So she settled for only being able to hear Ruby’s side of the conversation.
Ruby turned away slightly, speaking into the scroll now. “Hello!” she chirped, her voice filled with energy. “How’s it going, Fria?”
Notes:
Many people in the comments of the last couple chapters theorized that Ruby’s mystery guardian was Maria! You were all very close; you just had the wrong superpowered old lady with a name ending in -ria!
Also, just a note about when Ruby calls herself a 'war orphan' as part of her cover story: That usage of “war orphan” is intended in the sense of “the war against the Grimm” which most people on Remnant would be familiar with.
Chapter 14: Familiar Faces
Notes:
Yup, that chapter count is the real deal! I have this story thoroughly outlined and mapped out and planned from beginning to end, and honestly that number is a conservative estimate. The story is probably going to be longer than that when everything's all said and done.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Later that evening
“Yang, did you ever figure out where you’d seen Ruby before?” Blake asked as she, Yang, and Weiss returned to their dorm room with three freshly inspected weapons.
Yang shook her head. “Nope. Starting to think I haven’t actually seen her before—she probably just looks like someone else I’ve seen.” She paused, staring off into the distance, and sighed. “But then why can’t I place who she looks like?” After a moment, she shrugged. “I’ll probably figure it out in a few months or something. I’ll ask Dad the next time I’m home. Maybe he’d recognize her.”
Their footsteps, especially the clicks of Weiss’s heels, echoed down the empty hall as they came to a stop at the door to their room. Nothing seemed to be out of the ordinary.
“Is Penny still out?” Weiss said, tapping her scroll against the electronic lock on their door. But before anyone could answer, the lock gave a strange beep.
“What?” Weiss leaned closer, squinting at her scroll, and then suddenly a computerized voice spoke from the lock, making all three of them jump a mile.
“Authorized user. Weiss. Schnee. New security protocols have been implemented. You will be given a sixty-four character alphanumeric password—”
“Sixty-four?” Weiss stepped back reflexively. “I’m sorry, what?”
“—Which you must enter on your scroll each time you wish to gain access to your dormitory.”
“Each time?” the three girls yelped simultaneously.
“Please listen carefully to this audio recording of your password. It will not be repeated. One. One. Three. Eight—”
“Wait!” Weiss fumbled with her scroll to write even as the voice sped up. “Slow down! I can’t—”
“Two. One. Eight. Seven—”
“Is anyone getting that?” Weiss said, having given up already. Blake and Yang shook their heads, and eventually they were just waiting with crossed arms as a string of letters and numbers were listed off in an order they had no chance of memorizing.
“Were you notified of this?” Weiss said over the endless monotone.
“I wish I was,” was Blake’s fruitless reply.
Finally, mercifully, the numbers stopped, and the lock intoned, “Please enter your password now.”
A keyboard popped up on the lock’s touchpad, apparently confirming that they weren’t hallucinating and this was genuinely happening. Yang tried the door, more out of a delusional hope than anything else. Still locked.
“I guess we’re calling student services, then.” Blake pulled out her scroll.
“What kind of security is this, where no one can get in?!” Weiss muttered. And then, as if this situation wasn’t weird enough, the lock answered her question.
“This is the check to confirm that you are a robot.”
“I…” Weiss trailed off as she processed the noticeably different phrasing. Wasn’t it supposed to be confirming that she wasn’t a robot?
Blake lowered her scroll from her ear, realization dawning on her just as the lock spoke up in a very different voice. A very familiar one.
“If you are not a robot, perhaps there is a nearby robot friend who could help you gain access?”
The sound of giggling—a very particular giggling that could only belong to their orange-haired teammate—came from the other side of the door.
“PENNY!”
“No! Vale has fallen! How could you?”
It was high stakes. It was cutthroat. It was a reckoning for each and every one of them. It was a battle for the fate of the four kingdoms. It was war.
“Kneel! Kneel before me!”
It was a board game.
“I’ll make you regret that!” Yang hissed to Pyrrha, who was in the middle of pushing a group of Mistrali troops into what had formerly been Yang’s Kingdom of Vale, until Pyrrha’s devastating invasion.
“I was only ever taking back my rightful homeland,” Pyrrha shot back. “You, the aggressor, left me no choice! And soon Mistral’s flag will fly over everything that the light touches.”
Penny had been under the impression that Pyrrha was a very relaxed person, so seeing her be this intense—even if just for a board game—was quite frankly unsettling.
(“Is she like this with all board games?” Penny had asked Jaune at the game’s outset.
“Yeah,” he’d said, torn between reading his textbook and watching the proceedings with a terrified look. “You should see our team game nights.”)
“Nora, it’s time for your futile endeavor—I mean, your turn,” Yang said.
“Fool,” Nora boomed, sweeping her arm around (narrowly missing Penny) to point directly at Pyrrha. “You may call yourself the king of everything the light touches, but you have failed to reckon with the QUEEN OF DARKNESS! Who shall reign forevermore in Vacuo!” She slapped a handful of cards down on the table. “And I am sending my secret mercenary squad of darkness to strike a deadly blow in the heart of your kingdom… at night!”
“Doesn’t Vacuo get more hours of daylight than any other kingdom?”
“Penny, never ruin a good monologue with little things like facts!”
“Girls, could we ease up a little on the auditory violence? Please?” Blake said from the next table over. “Some of us are trying to read here. Right, Weiss?” Blake glanced across the table. “Weiss?”
Weiss, who was resting her chin on her hand and staring in the direction of the ongoing board game, didn’t notice Blake until the third time she said her name. Then she blinked and looked over, surprised. “Pardon?”
“Never mind.” Blake sighed. “But I am begging you five to take it down a few notches. It’s just a game.”
Yang and Nora gasped theatrically. “No!”
As the two of them descended on Blake to extol the values of Remnant: The Game, Penny followed the path of Weiss’s still-active gaze and found it led directly to Pyrrha.
She frowned. This was a habit of Weiss’s that had continued for the last several months. Was she still somehow envious of not getting Pyrrha for a partner even after all this time working smoothly with Penny? Had something changed? Had she done something recently to make Weiss dissatisfied with her? Was—
“Ruby, Penny, your turn!”
The game had resumed, it seemed. Penny shelved her worries for the moment and refocused on what Ruby was doing. They were technically playing together as a team, but she was more than happy to let Ruby make all of the in-game choices while she concentrated mostly on the computing exercise of trying to mathematically solve the game. The inclusion of chance cards and random events made it a tricky problem, but she believed she was nearing a conclusion.
Ruby let out a quiet chuckle, never taking her eyes off her cards. Wait, when had she put her hood up?
“Amateurs. All of you,” she said. “In all of your petty maneuverings, you failed to reckon with the world-breaking thing Atlas has held in its hands this entire time. BEHOLD!”
She smacked a single card down onto the table. “I deploy… Atlesian Supersoldier! All of my armies now receive bonuses amounting to—”
THUD.
The gunshot-like sound which suddenly echoed through the library made every member of Team BSYP and JNPR jump, Blake the highest of anyone. Penny pinpointed the origin to almost directly behind her and turned, along with everyone else in the vicinity, to see Professor Goodwitch with a large number of books scattered on the floor around her.
And in the moment between Penny seeing Goodwitch and everyone else turning to look, Penny caught sight of an expression on her face which only someone with her reflexes and processing speed would’ve been able to catch before it disappeared: an expression of pure shock.
Glynda Goodwitch was not an easily shocked person.
“Professor, are you all right?” Penny jumped up to help her, but Goodwitch waved her off, reaching for her riding crop.
“I apologize, students,” she said, her tone perfectly normal. She waved her crop and sent the books flying into a neat stack. “I stubbed my toe; I didn’t mean to interrupt your game.”
Penny’s radar told her that Goodwitch had not stubbed her toe on anything; she had in fact been walking 0.4 meters from the nearest stubbable object when she suddenly stopped.
“No harm done, Professor!” Yang said, waving it off. “Glad you’re okay.”
Goodwitch moved closer, pushing up her glasses to peer at the table. “I don’t think I’ve seen this game before.”
“It is a game where you play as one of the four kingdoms in a war for world domination!” Penny said brightly. But then she stopped, and considered too late that perhaps the Great War as a game would not be an appreciable premise to someone as serious as Glynda Goodwitch.
“Hm.” Goodwitch sniffed a bit, but otherwise showed no displeasure. “I’m glad we all live in an age where the idea of warfare between the kingdoms means nothing more than a board game. Who’s winning?”
“Uh… Well, I’ve got almost no territory left, and Nora’s attack on Pyrrha failed, so… I think it’s actually going to be Ruby once her turn is over?”
“You bet,” Ruby said, letting out a little giggle. “I’m about to paint this board in Atlesian blue and white!”
“Oh?” Glynda’s tone had an odd quality to it as she turned to Ruby. “I don’t believe we’ve met, Miss—?”
“Karyatis!” Ruby said brightly, saluting. “Ruby Karyatis, first-year cadet of the Atlas Military Academy, at your service!”
“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Miss Karyatis.” Glynda’s voice still had that strange inflection, and in processing that, Penny added it to the professor’s abnormal pattern of behavior over the last minute. “You’re from Atlas, then?”
“Yup! Born and raised.”
“I thought the Atlesian exchange students weren’t due to arrive yet?”
“Oh, I came here early!” Ruby said. “I wanted to explore Vale and see stuff. It’s the first time I’ve been outside the kingdom! It’s been super fun, and I’ve met some cool people—” She flashed a grin at Penny. “—So I’d say it’s a roaring success! And now I shall complete my march to victory!”
She turned her attention back to the board and began pushing an immense number of troops south while everyone else shuffled frantically through their decks for a counter-move of some sort. “I’m sending two fleets towards—”
“Sabotage.”
“What?” Ruby froze in the middle of placing a miniature model of an airship and looked at Yang, who’d just spoken.
Yang, smiling slightly, slapped a card down next to Ruby’s arm. “Sabotage. It nullifies single-entity attacks, which isn’t much good against your fleets, but your Atlesian Supersoldier has been taken off the board.”
“And with no bonuses on your armies now, I can play this card!” Pyrrha declared dramatically. “Dogmatic Defeat! In which Atlas’s inflexibility score is raised so high that no matter what challenges they face in battle on this turn, they won’t stop or retreat until the other army is obliterated or they’re obliterated!”
“Sh-shouldn’t be a problem,” Ruby said, visibly more nervous than a minute ago. “I still have the raw firepower to take over everything in my path!”
Nora held out her arm, waving a card of her own directly in Ruby’s face. “But do you have the raw firepower to keep it in the face of my Scorched Earth?”
“Oh, no,” Ruby whispered.
“And what does Scorched Earth do?” Glynda said, still watching curiously.
“For the duration of her turn, Ruby does not get any spoils of war from conquering enemy armies or territories,” Penny answered. She did not take her eyes off the board—she was nearly done with her computations, and she could possibly have the game solved before Ruby’s turn was over. In fact, what was playing out in front of her eyes was giving very useful data on late-game strategies.
“Well, here goes nothing,” Ruby muttered, before beginning a very long sequence of dice rolls and moving miniatures around.
“…Done,” she said finally. At the same moment, Penny finished her computations—she’d solved the game.
The game board now had a very small number of Atlesian troops spread across a very large number of newly claimed Atlesian territories.
“…It’s my turn now, but maybe we should call the game here?” Yang said. “Because we’re all so low on population and resources that it’s going to take us a really long time to build up back to the point where we can actually attack each other.”
That suggestion was met with assenting nods from everyone, and Penny was immediately appointed as the one to tally everyone’s score.
Penny did the math in moments and then spent an appropriate amount of time pretending to do the math at organic speeds, and then held up the paper with the final results. She wasn’t surprised—the conclusions she’d calculated before presented this as an unexpectedly likely outcome.
“Well, Ruby, you had the most territory at the end, but you also had by far the lowest population and you’d exhausted your resources,” she said. “Yang, you had nearly no territory but higher resource and population totals. Nora and Pyrrha, you both landed somewhere in between the extremes of Ruby and Yang. When combining all that into your final scores, the end result was… a four-way tie.”
That proclamation was met by a stunned silence, and then Ruby, Nora, and Pyrrha hastily scribbling out their own math—Yang didn’t even bother to check, quite understandable since she knew just how good Penny was at math.
“…I can’t believe it,” Ruby groaned. “My whole campaign, my meticulous planning, my victories… all for nothing.”
“This is a game of war, and yet…” Penny stared at the board, wondering how to best explain what she’d deduced by observing all the score penalties for attacking, and the costly dice rolls for conquering, and the probabilities of attrition, and on and on. “The most reliable way to accumulate points would be to disregard expansion and simply improve your pre-existing territory’s population and resources. In other words, the best way to win at this war game is to… avoid war.”
A strange game, she thought.
Ozpin stood by one of the many floor-to-ceiling windows lining his office, staring out at the Atlesian military airships which were now moored on Beacon’s campus.
He shook his head.
At the sound of a door opening behind him, he turned to see Glynda entering the room, pocketing her scroll.
“I cannot wait to hear why James thought it was a good idea to bring an entire wing of his army here,” she said, coming to stand next to Ozpin.
“Subtlety was never his strong suit,” was all he said in reply.
Truth be told, it wasn’t the unexpected presence of the army which concerned him the most. It was the unexpected presence of Ironwood himself. For a number of reasons. One of them being—
“What are we going to do about Penny?” Glynda said. “It’s inevitable that he’ll see her at some point.”
The question sent a pang of deep sadness through Ozpin. Even with Penny blazing an eminent path for herself as a Huntress, he’d hoped that he could ensure her protection for at least another year or two. But any hope of that had gone up in smoke earlier today when he’d discovered that James was making a surprise visit to Beacon with his Atlesian students. And now, much sooner than he’d ever wanted to, it seemed he might have to reintroduce Penny to the parts of the world that she’d come here to escape from.
And then what? With no way to shield her from the world anymore, what then might happen with her? What role would such a girl play in his eternal struggle?
Those were all questions for another day, though. He pushed them to the back of his mind and answered Glynda.
“I think we have no option but to pre-emptively speak to James about the situation, rather than risk him seeing her without warning,” he said.
“And what do we tell him?”
Ozpin gripped his mug a little tighter, and tapped his index finger against the knob of Long Memory exactly twice. “We tell him exactly what happened to Penny. And what will happen if he tries to interfere with her in any way.”
“Do we tell Penny about her past now?”
“That…” Ozpin finally stepped back from the window with a sigh, and sat down at his desk. “…Is a question which I will contemplate once we have talked to James.” He waited until Glynda had taken a seat across from him and then continued, “How are the Atlesian students settling in?”
“No issues so far,” Glynda said. “Although… This is less an issue, and more of an oddity, but I was so struck by it that I would be remiss not to tell you.”
Ozpin folded his hands together and raised an eyebrow, indicating for Glynda to continue.
“There is a girl amongst the Atlas cadets who is the spitting image of Summer Rose.” Glynda typed something into the projector on Ozpin’s desk, and moments later a student profile popped up, hovering between them. “Here she is. Her name is Ruby Karyatis.”
Ozpin stared at the attached profile picture. There was a startling resemblance in this girl, and almost automatically, he checked her eye color. Brown.
He knew quite well that very few things on this planet were merely coincidences. However… what Glynda had just presented to him was so thoroughly confusing that he didn’t know what else it could be besides a coincidence. Unless he wanted to insinuate some extremely unkind things about Summer Rose’s marital faith.
“I don’t know if there’s anything I can do in response to this except note how strange it is,” he said at last.
Glynda sighed. “That’s the conclusion I arrived at. At least we won’t need to worry about Miss Xiao Long being disturbed by the resemblance—they’ve already met, and I don’t think she’s noticed Ruby’s likeness.”
That bit of news took Ozpin by surprise, and he found himself double-checking the image to make sure what he was seeing really was there. “That so?”
“It makes sense to me; Miss Xiao Long was a young child when Summer died, and it’s been a decade. What she does remember of Summer is an adult, not someone her age. Whereas Summer the teenager is… shall we say, seared into my memory and yours.”
Ozpin nodded. He could believe that. For Miss Xiao Long’s sake, he was glad that she didn’t see the face of her dead mother in one of her classmates. And for the sake of this Ruby girl, he dearly hoped the resemblance to Summer was merely coincidental. If it wasn’t a coincidence… it created a storm of excruciatingly difficult questions.
Ozpin settled deeper into his chair, closing the girl’s profile and casting his gaze down at his desk as Glynda sat with him in silence.
He knew quite well that Summer and Taiyang had a baby who went missing in a Grimm attack. But that baby was a boy. And that attack on the Rose-Xiao Long household had every indication of being her work. And Ozpin knew beyond a shadow of any doubt that she never left silver-eyed individuals alive.
For her to spare the silver eyes, something would need to have genuinely changed. A coincidence may be rare, but for there to be a genuine change in this war after so long was truly unthinkable.
“Good afternoon, sir!”
James Ironwood stepped off the boarding ramp of his flagship and onto the grounds of Beacon Academy, blinking for a moment as his eyes adjusted to the late afternoon sun that shone almost directly into his face. He didn’t need to see the source of the greeting to know who it originated from, though. There was perhaps only one person on all of Remnant who would greet him so energetically.
“Good afternoon, Ruby,” he said, saluting to the girl who was managing to convey a mood of extreme excitement despite holding a salute in a ramrod posture. “At ease. How has Vale been treating you?”
Immediately, Ruby’s posture relaxed and she began jumping around Ironwood, silver dust streaming off her as her Semblance unconsciously activated. “Quite well, sir! It’s a very different place from Atlas. I’ve met so many fascinating people! And befriended several Beacon students already!”
Ironwood couldn’t help but smile at her enthusiasm. It was as if the girl’s gift made her so saturated with power that it naturally spilled over into her behavior, her daily life. A lifetime growing up within the command structure of the Atlas military had not imposed any sort of limits on her effusiveness—only wrestled her wildest edges down into a loose approximation of a soldier. But even as a loose approximation, Ruby was far and away the most powerful force in Atlas.
And she would only grow stronger when she inherited the powers of the Winter Maiden.
It had taken some time for Ironwood to settle on this particular path for the Maiden powers. But he had learned from Ozpin that the powers were capable of going to transgender women, with multiple transgender maidens in the past. And over the years, Ruby had proven to be thoroughly sure of her own identity as a girl, never once wavering. It was more than enough proof to put Ironwood at ease—there was no doubt in his mind that Ruby could and would inherit the maiden powers. And so, some years after Ruby had been discovered, he’d introduced her to Fria. And since then, Fria had watched over Ruby as her legal guardian, helping to train her and forming an emotional bond that would ensure a smooth transition of the Maiden powers when the time came.
Perhaps it was risky to consolidate a Maiden and a silver-eyed warrior into one being, but Ironwood had come to believe that if Salem was an all-powerful being, then what was needed to strike her down was not a numerical advantage, but rather someone who could truly match her in strength.
Ozpin hadn’t informed Ironwood about the truth of silver eyes until years after Ruby was found, long enough that Ruby was already blazing through training with astonishing speed. And once he’d learned of them, Ironwood had decided she would remain a secret until she was ready to be unveiled to the world. There was no sense in drawing her into the spotlight—and into the war with Salem—before she was ready. Especially when silver eyes were a known commodity. And the Maiden powers an even more known commodity. Ruby didn’t even yet know about the Maiden powers, or that Fria was a Maiden—she genuinely believed that Fria’s elemental control was a uniquely overpowered Semblance.
There were times, though, when he wondered if Ruby would inadvertently draw the spotlight onto herself before she was ready. Whether it be because of her inextinguishable drive to do more, achieve more… or because of her growing physical resemblance to Summer Rose, which he had only begun to notice in the last year. It raised questions about Ruby’s true origins that he dreaded exploring.
“That’s good to hear,” he said in reply. “Who have you met?”
“Team Battleship! Blake Belladonna, Weiss Schnee, Yang Xiao Long, and Penny Pallas!” She looked around and then leaned closer before whispering, “This is off the record, sir, but we met that night at the docks when I arrested Torchwick.”
And that escapade at the docks was exactly one example of why Ironwood worried about Ruby’s safety so much. It was not unusual behavior for her, but the docks was another level entirely. Thank the Brothers that there had been another team there that night.
He wasn’t surprised that a team with a Xiao Long was getting into extracurricular escapades such as that, even if it was surprising that a Schnee had been involved. And if this Belladonna was somehow related to those Belladonnas—
Hm. He slowed his pace as his mind came to focus on the last member of that team.
Penny Pallas. That name wasn’t far off from a name which marred his past.
He folded his arms behind his back and started across the grounds towards Ozpin’s office, and towards a meeting. “Tell me more about this Team Battleship.”
“Oh, they’re the best! Blake’s all cool and mysterious and ninja-like and she fights with a katana, and Weiss pretends to be icy and calm and above everyone else but she’s just as fascinating as the rest of them, and Yang’s all fiery and punchy and also really comfy to be around for some reason, and Penny is—is—”
Ruby had a particular habit when she became very excited about something, in which she would trip over her own words and stall out of the conversation briefly, before immediately rebounding with an even faster torrent of words that could drown an unsuspecting listener. It was akin to when a car had a delay between flooring the accelerator and the engine thundering to its maximum revs.
“—Penny is! Is! She just is! The best! She was the one who wanted to be my friend first when I really didn’t know what I was doing and she’s not just trying to be polite or anything, she really means it! We talked about weapons so much and she has so much technological knowledge and you should see the size of the sword she wields, it’s the biggest one I’ve ever seen! And she has a jetpack! An actual jetpack! She figured out how to make one work! And she has really pretty orange hair, and she’s—”
Ruby rambled on, but Ironwood had mostly stopped listening, alarm bells going off in his head. He was putting together the pieces of what Ruby was describing, and it was creating a disturbing picture. A girl named Penny. Immense amounts of strength. Orange hair.
“Oh, and her emblem is a power symbol! I wish I could’ve thought of that, it looks so cool…”
That confirmed it. That emblem could only have one explanation, and it wasn’t a human one.
“Oh shoot, I promised her I’d meet her four minutes ago, she said she had something really cool she wanted to show me—gotta go! Bye, sir!”
And before Ironwood could ask her to stop or provide more information, Ruby was gone in a whirlwind of silver dust, and he was left to try and understand any of what was happening. There was one thing which was perfectly clear:
Ruby was describing the PENNY Project.
Notes:
you know, you could call what ruby did in the board game a
a p
a pyr
a pyrrhic victory
Chapter 15: Machines In The Garden
Notes:
Alright, so I think I'm going to stick to Friday as my upload day going forwards, if that's alright?
And in this chapter I'll be sharing another commission with you all! This one comes from nliast on Tumblr! I am, once again, thoroughly ecstatic with how it came out! It's a really, really beautiful piece and I think it perfectly captures the feeling of the moment! You'll see the art embedded partway through the chapter. (A note: in this artwork Ruby's wearing her flaming rose emblem from the show, but she's not actually wearing that in the scene because she Does Not Know About Summer Rose, that was just artistic license on nliast's part, artistic license I was totally fine with!)
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
“Sorry I’m late!”
Penny smiled as a cloud of silver dust—quickly becoming a recognizable sight—drifted by her, and she turned to see Ruby standing in the narrow hallway, waving.
“But you are exactly on time?” she said, confused by Ruby’s apology.
“Technically.” Ruby shrugged. “But the General always says, if you’re not five minutes early, you’re late.”
“I do not think that makes logical sense.”
Ruby giggled. “It’s an Atlas thing, I guess. Anyway! You wanted to show me something?” She rocked back and forth on the balls of her feet, Lunar Enforcer swaying slightly on her back.
“You mentioned you liked to explore both Atlas Academy and the military headquarters to find forgotten areas. I thought I might show you several such places at Beacon Academy!” With that, she turned and dramatically flung open the door she’d been standing before.
“Whoa! …Uhhh, wait. This looks like a normal storage closet? Just one that nobody’s used in a while?”
“Indeed. But there are secrets within!” Penny stepped forward into the closet, pushing aside some stacks of long-forgotten cleaning supplies. “This wing of the school was renovated at some point in the past, and the hallway we’re in became redundant due to a larger one being constructed further to the west. However, they left this hallway open, and as far as I know, we are the only two people to have gone down it in some time.” She pulled back a sheet of plywood leaning against the wall, and revealed the considerably more dramatic item: a smaller doorway coated with peeling paint, and a rusted doorknob. The only sign of recent use was Penny’s handprints in the dust from when she’d been here previously.
“As such, this door was forgotten completely. I don’t believe this closet was originally intended as a closet—rather, it was a vestibule. The door was locked, but—” Penny broke off as she realized she’d been about to say I used a concentrated radar map from my eyes to make a copy of the key, which was something not at all appropriate to share right now. Thankfully, Ruby finished the thought for her.
“—You picked the lock?” she said. “Cooool. I’ve done that a lot. At least, until Atlas upgraded their locks to electronic ones. I can’t pick electricity. Yet.”
Penny nodded, happy to let Ruby invent a lie for her. Lying was still so hard for her sometimes. How did people just repeatedly… say things that weren’t true?! She could lie, but it was a trial, one that required effort and preparation and consideration and also careful attention to that annoying hiccup reflex. And then some other people could just… lie as easily as they breathed. People were strange.
Penny opened the door. The hinges were old and rusted and squealed tremendously, but the friction of years was no match for her strength as she pushed it open, revealing a steep, narrow stairway.
“Hmm,” Ruby said, squinting into the gloom as they entered. “Mysterious. Foreboding. Dusty. I like it.”
Penny led them up the staircase, which twisted around almost in a full turn before coming to another locked door—this one locked from her side, though, which made it a much simpler matter for bypassing. She pushed open this door, fighting against even more built-up grime and rust, and gestured with a flourish to Ruby. “We have arrived!”
They were in a recessed area of the rooftop, bordered by walls on three sides, and the fourth side being a cast-iron fence which offered a spectacular view of the Emerald Forest that very few other places at Beacon could offer.
“Whoa.” Ruby took in a sharp breath as she stepped out. “What is this place?”
But the view was not the most thrilling feature of this place to Penny—it was the number of wildly overgrown exotic plants which climbed over everything, forming twisting vines and blooms placed at random, creating a scene of wild greenery that was so at odds with Beacon’s orderly layout.
“It seems that someone once created this as some sort of manicured garden,” Penny said, pointing to the remnants of planters and pots which could be seen in every corner. “But just as the academy’s changing architecture left behind the hallway down below, the gardener from decades ago eventually forgot this rooftop garden! Until I rediscovered it!”
“Coooooool,” Ruby breathed as she walked into the middle of the overgrown garden, turning in a slow circle. Her combat boots left barely visible footprints in the thick moss which coated nearly everything underfoot. “There’s no way something like this would be in Atlas. The places I found were dusty old rooms with classified files and scrapped experiments.” She paused, reaching out to a vine hanging down near her head, and wrapped it around her finger. “Still cool, but a different kind of cool from this.”
Penny came to stand next to her, before noticing a bloom that’d fallen from its vine laying on the moss between them. She picked it up, a delicate red rose that must’ve just fallen, given how radiant its color still was. Her modified touch sensors thrummed as she ran her index finger over its petals. So soft.
“Whatcha got there?” Ruby said idly, leaning closer to inspect the rose in Penny’s hands.
“A rose—”
“What’s that?”
Penny brought her speech module to a halt as she processed what Ruby had just said. It was quite rare for someone on Remnant to not know what roses were, given how ubiquitous they were as flowers and their famously deep colors. But even if this was surprising, she would never judge Ruby for not knowing about a common object! After all, there were many such well-known items which Penny was continuing to discover the existence of. Recent discoveries: s’mores, paper airplanes, whoopee cushions. And now Ruby was having one such discovery!
“Roses!” Penny said without any criticism, holding it out to her. “They’re a type of flower found in many parts of Remnant, coveted for their deep hues and poetically favored because of how their sharp thorns contrast with their elegant beauty!”
“Huh.” Ruby took the rose and cupped it in her hands, studying it. “I never bothered with flowers much. They’re pretty! But I had more important things to learn about.”
“Like what?”
“Combat. Fighting. Weapons.” Ruby glanced up at Penny. “Y’know. Stuff I need to know to be Remnant’s greatest warrior.”
Penny nodded, and then lowered herself to the ground, crossing her legs into a comfortable seating position. She ran her finger lightly through the moss—so curiously spongy and firm—and watched a line of ants carrying a leaf towards a secluded corner. Finally, she looked up at Ruby. “I think even the greatest warriors of Remnant should be able to study the natural wonders of nature. After all, if we do not appreciate the beauty of life, how can we protect it with all our hearts and souls?”
Ruby’s mouth fell open a little bit, and she glanced from the rose to Penny and then back to the rose before sitting down heavily next to her, bumping their knees in the process.
“I think that’s the beautifulest thing I’ve ever heard,” she said, her voice thick with emotion. “I guess it wouldn’t hurt to do it a little bit…”
Penny added beautifulest to her internal vocabulary—even if it was a technically incorrect modifier of beautiful, the word sounded too joyful not to repeat—as Ruby held up the rose, tilting her head to observe it from all its angles. Suddenly, she continued in a rush of words. “Fria—my guardian—used to try to get me to paint with her, but I didn’t like doing it because I was bad at it. I couldn’t make the pictures beautiful the way she could, and I kept telling her that, but she kept telling me it didn’t matter, because it’s not the painting itself that matters, it’s why you’re doing the painting that matters. That’s what she always said.” She shrugged. “I never understood it. But… What you just said about appreciating things… do you think that’s what Fria meant?”
Penny poked at the moss underneath for a few moments, and then said, “I cannot speak definitively about the intent of others’ words, but… it certainly seems like a similar sentiment.”
“Yeah. Yeah.” Ruby fell silent.
“Your guardian sounds like a lovely person.”
“Yeah! She’s great! You should meet her sometime, I bet she’d like you—Ooh! Idea!” Ruby broke off and pulled Lunar Enforcer off her back before transforming it to sniper mode. Then she carefully pushed the rose into the muzzle so that it sat in the barrel and wouldn’t be dislodged easily.
“There,” she said proudly, setting the gun on its side in front of her. “The start of my appreciation!”
And her expression was so overwhelmingly enthusiastic that it made Penny giggle, because Ruby was just… delightfully dedicated to everything she did in a way that no one else she’d met yet was.
“This is nice.” Ruby’s voice turned quieter as she flopped down onto her back and stared up at the tangle of plants above them. “Unless you count Fria’s paintings, I don’t think there’s this much green in all of Solitas.”
Penny followed suit, letting her head rest against the moss as she placed both hands on her stomach. They laid there for quite a while, their bodies side-by-side and their heads almost touching. Ruby traced invisible patterns in the vines with her fingers, and Penny attuned herself to the almost-imperceptible vibrations of life in the academy taking place beneath them. They watched the sky changing color, from the afternoon deep blue to something more and more orange as the sun set behind Beacon. It was a shame this balcony didn’t face the sunset, but all that meant was the sunrise could be seen from here.
“How did you find this, anyway?” Ruby said, twirling a leaf between her fingers.
“This nook is placed in such a way that it’s only visible from several of the academy’s tallest towers.” One of which was Ozpin’s office, another of which was Penny’s private repair room. “I happened to see it while I was in one of them, and my curiosity was piqued.”
She gazed at the tower holding Ozpin’s office, and wondered if he ever came here. He almost undoubtedly had seen this from his tower—did it also rouse his curiosity? Or perhaps the headmaster of the academy simply had greater concerns than a little forgotten garden.
At that moment
Ozpin tried not to let a sense of foreboding build up in his office, but there was something inevitable about the mounting sense of weary anticipation he felt as he waited for the elevator to arrive with James aboard.
“Are you going to ask about the Ruby girl?” Glynda said.
“I see no point in stirring baseless curiosity about a girl we know nothing about. At least, not during this conversation.”
Although the content of this conversation would be unique, the tone would be familiar. He’d had similar conversations in past lives with other deputies, conversations where trust might be broken and something uglier might rise up in its place. Sometimes these kinds of conversations ended well, and sometimes they didn’t.
He had no idea what to expect from this one as the door finally swung open and James entered with a smile on his face that didn’t quite reach his eyes.
“Ozpin,” he said after a moment, carefully closing the door behind him. “It’s been too long.”
“Likewise.” Ozpin pushed the coffee urn on his desk towards James, along with an empty mug. “I trust the journey was untroubled?”
“It would be rather worrying if it wasn’t, given what I’ve brought with me.” James let out a halfhearted chuckle at his joke as he began pouring himself a mug of coffee. The chuckle disappeared into the silence of the room, and he stared pointedly down into his mug.
Ozpin studied him. There was something… off about him, even beyond his normal awkwardness in social situations. Was it possible that he’d already seen Penny?
His demeanor hadn’t escaped Glynda’s notice, either—
“Already having second thoughts about bringing your army here?” Her tone was so cutting it could’ve cleaved stone.
Ironwood sighed. “Well, then, if we’re skipping the pleasantries, I need to ask about one of your students.”
Ozpin exchanged a look with Glynda.
“Penny Pallas.”
In a curious change of pace, Ironwood immediately mentioning the subject which had so weighed on Ozpin pulled the tension out of the room, like an overinflated balloon being allowed to collapse just before it reached its bursting point.
“Why don’t we refer to her by the name you know her as?” Ozpin sat forward slightly, allowing just a little bit of his genuine irritation at the situation to show. “Penny Polendina.”
Ironwood’s eyes widened, and he put his mug down, his gaze sharpening as he leaned forward. “How much do you know about her?”
“Enough, I think.”
“She was supposed to be dead,” Ironwood said. “If I’d known she was here the entire time, I could’ve brought her back home, back to her father…”
Ozpin braced himself, and shattered the illusion. “She doesn't want to go back.”
His words hung in the air like the smoke after an explosion, a hundred unreadable expressions working their way across Ironwood’s face.
Ozpin hoped this would be the last uncomfortable truth he had to share during this conversation. “I think that some clarification is in order,” he began slowly. “Let me recount a tale that you should be quite familiar with. Several years ago, Penny Polendina was attacked in a targeted cyberstrike, which resulted in an unknown party hijacking control of her body. The hijacker forced her to steal a bullhead and fly it out of Atlas. You followed after her with your personal ship across the ocean and into Vale, and you caught up to her somewhere over the Emerald Forest. And then, with your ship running out of fuel and fearing that the hijacker might force her to hurt someone, you shot her down. That is the version of events you remember, yes?”
Ironwood nodded slowly. “Are you saying she survived the explosion? But… I verified the presence of her remains in the wreckage. And I brought them back to Doctor Polendina.”
“There was nothing that she had to survive,” Ozpin said. “There was no cyberstrike and no hijacker. Penny was in full control of herself the entire time she was flying away from Atlas.”
More and more color was slowly draining out of Ironwood’s face.
“The body in the wreckage—a decoy, an empty chassis cobbled together from previous versions of her body.”
“So, she escaped the airship by…?” Ironwood trailed off, and then he let out a short chuckle. “Well, that would explain why she apparently has a jetpack.”
“What have you said to her?” Glynda said.
Ironwood held up his hands in an appeasing gesture. “Nothing—I haven’t even seen her, Glynda. I only learned of her presence because one of my students was quite eager to tell me about her new friends.”
“Hm.” Ozpin could hear the arch of Glynda’s eyebrow in her tone, but she said nothing else. And so Ironwood turned back to him.
“So… this was all a deception. But for what?” Of all the emotions that seemed to have run through Ironwood up until now, it was the genuine hurt which now permeated his voice which brought Ozpin the most pain. “Why hide this all from me? You didn’t know I was coming to Beacon for the festival. How long were you planning on keeping this a secret?”
That was really a question only Penny could answer, so Ozpin took a different tack. “Say that there was no deception, James. Say that Penny had come to you and asked to be free. Would you have let her go? And please, don’t lie to yourself.”
There was a long silence as something faded from Ironwood’s expression—whether it was his trust in Ozpin, or his belief in his own ability to govern fairly, Ozpin wasn’t sure. He truly hated how much this felt like a confrontation right now. Perhaps it was delusion to think it wasn’t.
“No,” he said at last. “I wouldn’t. Not when Penny could protect so many people. Not while the war with Salem continues.”
A familiar pang of guilt rippled through Ozpin. He felt it whenever his friends and allies talked about the war with Salem as if it was something that could ever end. “And Penny, the gentle soul that she is, would not have argued.”
Ironwood did not disagree.
“And if she had tried to escape, but in a way that made it clear she was doing this of her own free will, what would you have done?”
“Well, Penny had certainly wandered off on her own many times before, and there were never any consequences—it was a natural instinct for her, to want to explore…” Ironwood trailed off, and Ozpin wondered if he was realizing the absurdity of what he was saying.
“And if she had persisted in such efforts to a degree which made it clear she was not just trying to explore her confines, but actually trying to leave the military, not just explore?”
Ironwood pushed back his chair and rose to his feet, turning to approach one of the windows. He stood there with his hands clasped behind his back, gazing out. Until—
“A soldier who leaves their duty would be charged with desertion,” he said finally, sounding as if even he was not comfortable with the words coming from his mouth. He did not move his gaze from the window as he spoke.
“Even though in order for someone to be charged with desertion, there must be proof that they had some contractual obligation to the military.” Ozpin let a hint of bare irritation into his tone again. “And as I was informed once, the only document tying Penny to the Atlas Military was the contract between the military and Doctor Polendina to develop a new weapon. By your own logic, you could not charge Penny with desertion any more than you could charge a Paladin for running out of battery, or a rifle for running out of ammunition.”
He wanted nothing more than for this conversation to be over. Even if it was only for the purpose of pointing out the flaws in Ironwood’s judgment, he despised comparing Penny to a weapon. But he held Penny’s freedom in his hands, and he would defend that no matter what had to be said.
Ironwood had said nothing yet, and now Ozpin felt this was the right time to ask some of the questions that flooded his mind every time he looked at Penny Polendina.
“James, tell me, what were you thinking? You created a soul for the singular purpose of war. I find that to be an appalling lapse in your judgment.”
Finally, Ironwood turned back, hurt flashing in his gaze once again. “Penny was more than just a soul, Ozpin. She was the next great hope of humanity. Her prowess in combat was extraordinary; she could shoulder a load equal to an entire division of soldiers. She was going to save an immense number of lives. Her—”
“Spare us the publicity speech,” Glynda snapped.
As Ironwood entered into a silent war of looks with Glynda, Ozpin closed his eyes, trying to properly compose a reply to the rather worrying rhetoric that Ironwood was using to describe a person.
“At what expense?” he said finally.
“Pardon?”
“Penny was going to save lives. At what expense?”
“She was designed to be extremely durable—”
Ozpin held up a hand. “I’m not talking about physical harm. I’m talking about the psychological toll that is inflicted upon a soul which is being made to carry the weight of the world on her shoulders and only her shoulders.” Oh, how painfully familiar that burden was.
Ironwood blinked, and looked genuinely taken aback. “She was managing it quite well.”
“Is that so, James?” Ozpin turned his tone dangerously quiet. “Then why did she arrive at my doorstep as a refugee, as someone who was willing to erase her entire past rather than continue on in the conditions she was existing under? As someone who wanted to leave her entire past behind, for fear that it might come back to haunt her again?”
Ironwood faltered, and then at long last, some of the rigidity went out of his posture. “All right. I know a losing fight when I see one.” With that, he returned to the desk, retaking his seat in front of Ozpin, settling himself slowly and heavily, as if he was under great discomfort. “If you are the one guaranteeing Penny’s freedom, then at the end of the day I cannot possibly object to that.”
It wasn’t enough. Ozpin needed certainty in this matter. And so, no matter how thoroughly he might be burning this bridge, he leaned forward and continued. “Promise me this, James. Penny has no memory of her time in Atlas, and I intend to let her continue living her own life for as long as possible. Which means you will leave her alone entirely. And if unavoidable circumstances do bring you to interact, you will not give any indication that you knew her already.”
His tone made his intent perfectly clear: this was not a request. It was an order.
Ironwood was visibly taken aback, but after a moment, he nodded. “I can agree to that.”
An uneasy silence fell. Ozpin wished there could be a more concrete resolution to this situation, a sturdier assurance that he hadn’t wounded Ironwood’s feelings, or any reassurance that Penny would be able to continue charting her own path, but there was nothing. Just promises that felt too fragile, and a lingering sense of dissatisfaction on both sides.
“Did Doctor Polendina have any involvement in this?” Ironwood asked.
And here was where Ozpin needed to tread carefully. It was one thing to tell him that Penny had chosen to do this. It was another thing entirely to tell him Pietro had also chosen this, and assisted Penny’s escape. Pietro, who was much less capable of defending himself, much more entrenched in Atlas, and much more vulnerable to the military’s machinations. Penny could not be charged with desertion, but Pietro could theoretically be charged with theft of military property. That seemed… ghoulishly repugnant even by the standards of this situation, but he would take no chances.
“No,” he lied.
“All right. But, Ozpin—if Penny has no memory of her past, does she even know what she’s capable of?”
Beside him, Glynda crossed her arms. “She doesn’t see herself as a weapon, if that’s what you mean.”
“Oz…” Ironwood leaned forward, placing a hand on the desk. “This isn’t the most opportune moment to bring it up, but I can’t let my concerns sit idle.”
At that moment, Ozpin acutely felt the weight of so many years and incarnations pressing down on him. He pressed a hand to his forehead. “What are you getting at, James?”
“I feel like we’re not doing enough.” Ironwood put down his mug with a little too much force, sending a faint tremor through Ozpin’s desk. “We’ve lost a Maiden, and we’re in danger of losing another. The White Fang is running rampant. Crime is spinning out of control in Vale and imprisoning Roman Torchwick hasn’t stopped it in the slightest. If Qrow’s intelligence is to be believed, Salem has agents inside Vale. Not only am I worried that there’s a cataclysm on the horizon, I’m worried that we’re not doing enough to stop it.”
“And that’s why you’ve brought an army with you?”
“I’m painfully aware of how unexpected it was, but this strength is what Vale needs right now.”
“What Vale needs is reassurance that the peace is as stable as it has ever been. Your army is exactly the opposite.”
“Reassurance is nothing without the means to back it up.”
Ozpin sighed, long and deep, and pinched the bridge of his nose. Already he knew there would be no agreement on this anytime soon, and so for once that day he chose the route of less resistance. “Let’s come back to this some other time, shall we?”
Ironwood nodded, and then offered up a ghost of a smile. “Perhaps this would be a good time for some pleasantries, since we skipped over them before.”
“Well, before I ask about the weather in Atlas…” Ozpin steepled his fingers and gave Ironwood an inquisitive look. “Are there any other world-changing military projects you have going on that I should know about?”
It was a half-joking question, but it couldn’t have fallen flatter, as Ironwood seemed to take it in all seriousness when he answered.
“No,” Ironwood said. “Not at all.”
Ruby yawned loudly, and Penny looked over to see her stretching her entire body out, shaking her head back and forth and making her braid whip around.
“I could probably fall asleep here. If I wanted to. It’s nice.”
She took hold of her braid and pulled it up to her face, inspecting it, before frowning and beginning to undo it.
“What’s living at Beacon like?” she said, her fingers rapidly working their way up the braid.
Penny thought about it for a moment, and then decided to follow Yang’s practice of summarizing a day in one word, except applying it to an entire semester was a fun challenge. “Exciting,” she said after 4.3 seconds of high-speed contemplation.
“Huh.” Ruby unfurled the last twist of her braid and shook her hair loose, letting it drift in the breeze.
Penny watched the flutter of Ruby’s hair, and noticed her internal data compilers were generating a large amount of extra detail as they wrote this moment into memory. That made sense—it was just so interesting seeing Ruby’s hair waving in the wind, so voluminous and wild and such a contrast to the neat braid from a minute ago. If Penny didn’t have a literal photographic memory, it would've been hard for her to believe it was the same hair.
She remained in a fascinated silence as Ruby shook her hair out and ran her fingers through it. It was hard to put into words, but… she was glad her memory of this moment would have extra data. It felt like something worth a special memory.
Ruby gave a few more shakes of her head and sighed happily. “I wish I could wear it down more; it feels nice. But it needs to be in a braid in case of combat situations.”
“You think there would be a combat situation here? On the roof?”
“You never know!” Ruby said. “If a Nevermore swooped down on us right now, I most certainly would not have time to finish a braid!”
“That is a good point.”
Ruby gathered her hair and began doing the braid back up. “Beacon feels like the kind of place where it could happen. Things seem so… unpredictable here.” She cocked her head at Penny. “Do you like that?”
Penny thought about it. It was true. Every day at Beacon, something completely unexpected happened. Such as a flock of wild geese roaming the halls. And quite often, those unexpected things would eventually involve her in some way. Such as befriending the geese and nicely asking them to leave, which they did.
“I like it,” she said aloud. “It’s exciting! And it means we never have a boring day here.” It was also good practice for her internal prediction algorithms, learning to consider more and more outlandish possibilities as things that could actually happen.
“Wild.” Ruby finished her braid, batting it around with her hand a few times. “I can’t believe this place functions. But Beacon turns out Huntresses as good as Atlas, so… it’s a mystery.”
At that moment, Ruby’s scroll went off. She peered at its screen for a moment, and then reached for Lunar Enforcer, jumping to her feet and saluting Penny. “I should go! The General wants to see me.”
As she and Ruby exited the stairway, locking the door behind them, Penny decided that she would depart for the queer club’s meeting now. It was still quite early for that, but Yang would be there setting things up, and would doubtlessly appreciate the help. She replaced the plywood sheet over the door, Ruby pushed open the exit to the hallway, and they both walked out. And immediately stopped short.
Three students were standing in the hallway, conversing with each other in a tight circle, but they stopped when she and Ruby appeared. They had to be exchange students; she didn’t recognize their faces but she did recognize their Haven Academy uniforms.
“Oops, sorry! Bye!” Ruby vanished without another word, leaving a glittering trail in the air as Penny gave the exchange students a bright smile and did her best to act like there was nothing odd about two girls stepping out of a storage closet at the end of a dead-end hallway.
“My apologies!” Penny said. “We didn’t mean to interrupt you!”
Individual one: green hair, red eyes, dark skin. Emotions: sixty percent confusion. Individual two: short gray hair, pale skin, wearing a pair of prosthetic legs under his pants. Emotions: eighty percent annoyance. Individual three: long black hair, pale skin, bright amber eyes. Emotions: one hundred percent… shock?
Oh dear, had they been standing there for very long? “I promise we were not eavesdropping!” she added hastily. “We—”
“Oh, calm down,” the gray-haired one said. “I’ve seen people making out in a closet before, you’re fine.”
“You’ve creeped on random couples? Why am I not surprised?” The green-haired one was talking to the gray-haired one, who responded by punching her in the arm.
Penny’s fans kicked into gear so emphatically it affected her internal balance calculations. Good news: the exchange students were not mad at Penny for intruding! Bad news: they had a completely incorrect idea of what she and Ruby had been doing! “Oh, I—er—we weren’t—she was just—the garden—friend—”
And then the third individual, the black-haired girl who was still looking one hundred percent shocked, finally spoke. And took the conversation in a new direction.
“What’s your name?”
Penny might have interpreted that as a rather blunt attempt at an introduction, if not for how the girl was still staring at Penny like…
And that was when Penny realized, the girl wasn’t surprised by Penny’s sudden appearance. She was surprised by something about Penny.
“Penny. Penny Pallas,” she said, trying to keep the nervousness out of her tone.
As soon as Penny said her first name, the girl took a sudden step forward, another expression flashing across her face that she didn’t have time to parse.
“Cinder?” The green-haired girl put out a cautious hand. “Are you okay?”
Cinder ignored the question, still staring at Penny with a frightening intensity. Her two companions seemed quite unsure of how to handle this, which worried Penny greatly. Was something about her appearance offensive to this girl? Had this girl somehow figured out she was a synthetic person?
She tugged at her hoodie strings and tried her best to meet Cinder’s eyes, which was quite difficult right now. She settled for staring at her black hair which trailed down over one shoulder. “Er, is something wrong?”
“Where are you from?” Cinder said in that same sharp, urgent, unreadable tone.
“Vale,” was Penny’s immediate answer. Cinder did not reply. She only continued to stare, putting a hand on her hip. This conversation was so confusing that Penny was starting to wonder if she’d blown a language processing circuit.
And then something jumped out of her social protocols. Something that explained exactly what was going on, but raised nine hundred more questions. It took Penny much longer than normal to gather her voice to ask this question.
“Do… do you recognize me, ma’am?”
This girl appeared nowhere in Penny’s memory; and there were no matches, not even any near matches, for her face or her voice. Nothing made any sense. That could only mean—was Cinder ever going to reply, or was she just going to stare worryingly at Penny in a way that was making her more and more nervous?
Just as Penny started to wonder if she’d truly angered her somehow, Cinder’s expression smoothed out and she shook her head. “No. I’m sorry; it was a case of mistaken identity.”
Lie detection was not one of Penny’s capabilities, but she felt quite confident in saying that this was not mistaken identity. Even so… she was thankful for the opportunity to disengage.
“It is no problem, and I apologize for the abrupt exit, but I have to be elsewhere,” she said, edging past the exchange students. She would not be scared. She would not be scared. “Welcome to Beacon!”
Had they met in her past? Was Cinder someone she had known before she came to Beacon? Or, instead of actually knowing each other, had it just been an encounter? But if so, it’d clearly been a very impactful encounter, given the severity of Cinder’s reaction. Did this mean Penny was originally from Mistral, since Cinder was a Mistral student? Had it been a good encounter or a bad encounter? Had she hurt Cinder somehow? What did Cinder know about her?
She left as fast as she could without making it appear like she was running away from them.
Notes:
I love the butterfly effect!
Chapter 16: Gaydar, Radar, What's The Difference?
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
“I KNEW IT!”
Penny jumped in fright at the unmistakable sound of Nora’s voice, the chair she’d been carrying falling to the ground with a clatter. She whirled around to see Nora standing in the doorway, pointing at her with a joyous expression.
“Knew what?” she asked tentatively. Had Nora figured out she was a synthetic person? What had tipped her off? Was it—
“I knew you were one of us!” Nora said, stepping into the empty classroom Yang had commandeered for the first meeting of the queer club, still pointing at Penny. “I wasn’t gonna ask, because that’s really rude, but I had a feeling!”
“Nora, you’re actually scaring her,” came the much calmer voice of Ren as he followed her in. Turning to Penny, he added, “She’s genuinely happy and excited for you.”
“Oh.” Penny nodded. “Thank you!” She liked Ren. She didn’t talk with him quite as much as the other members of Team JNPR, possibly just because he was quieter than the rest of his team, but she enjoyed spending time with him even if they were just existing in the same physical space. That was certainly one way to define what friends did together—choosing to exist in the same space! Ren was not the most expressive of people, but he was very good at verbally clarifying confusing emotions that were quite hard for others like Penny to understand. When he was present, Penny found it much easier to understand Nora. Ren would simply state things out loud that others did not, and Penny liked that.
“Sorry…” Nora said, scratching the back of her neck. “I get really excited about these kinds of things. My gaydar was going beep-beep-beep for the entire time we’ve known each other—”
“Gaydar?” Penny blinked at Nora. Was that… was that a portmanteau of gay and radar? Was that an actual technology? That seemed rather invasive, and how would that even work—
“Figure of speech, Penny,” Yang said, nudging her. “I wish it was real, though. Would make dating easier.”
“Oh! I see.” Hm. If or when she revealed her true self to Nora, she could most definitely make some sort of joke about her radar having gaydar capabilities. And Yang would definitely appreciate that joke sometime.
Nora and Ren joined Yang in moving some tables, and Penny stepped aside for a moment to check her scroll, finding an eight-minute-old message from Ruby.
I saw a cat!!!!!
Attached was an extremely blurry picture of a tuxedo cat mid-stride in a hallway, seemingly startled by the presence of Ruby. Penny smiled, immediately recognizing Team DSTE’s emotional support cat even with the blurry picture, and she tapped out a quick reply.
That’s Newspaper! She’s owned by a third-year team, and she’s very friendly. I can take you to meet her sometime!
She pocketed her scroll again just as Blake and Jaune entered, chatting with each other. Doubtlessly, they were talking about Team Leader Things. Jaune looked up, and when his eyes passed over her, he brightened and waved.
Penny waved back, feeling a rush of happiness at seeing another person happy she was here. It was very helpful, given how nervous she still felt. What if she did something wrong? What if she said something wrong?
“Hey.”
Penny startled at the hand on her shoulder, and then realized it was Yang, giving her an encouraging smile.
“You’re doing fine,” she said, squeezing her shoulder gently. With that, she walked over to Blake, leaving Penny to wonder how Yang had managed to know exactly what Penny was thinking. She’d offered some encouragement earlier, too—
“Penny, I am being completely honest when I say this: you telling me and Blake and Weiss that you’re a synthetic person felt exactly like a coming-out.”
It was hard to explain why, but that had made Penny quite happy as well.
Several other first-year students that Penny didn’t know quite as well as Team JNPR had filtered in, and she decided to take a seat at the circle of chairs that’d been set up. It was nearly meeting time. Nervous or not nervous, she would employ the same tactic she’d used on the first day of orientation: hiding her nervousness behind a wall of relentless positivity!
Blake sat down on one side of Penny, and Yang sat down on the other. She gave them each a smile. It was nice to have the physical reminder that her teammates had her back.
Nora was walking to a seat, but she stopped, cocking her head at the three members of Team BSYP. “Where’s Weiss?”
Yang shrugged. “She’s straight.”
Nora’s eyebrows went way up. “She IS? How’s that possible when she turns into a raging homosexual every time she’s around Pyrrha?”
Yang made a choked sound, Blake broke into a coughing fit, and while it took a moment for Penny to understand Nora’s meaning, she realized that answered a great deal of questions she had about some of Weiss’s habits. Such as all the staring at Pyrrha.
Yang caught her breath. “I mean. You’re right. But don’t tell her that yet. She’s still climbing out of her shell.”
“My lips are sealed.” Nora gave them a grin. “Did you know? Before initiation Weiss gave Pyrrha an itemized list explaining why they’d be perfect academy partners.”
No, Penny had not known that. Perhaps she should have found it concerning that her partner had shown such vested interest in choosing someone else as a partner, but that emotion was far outweighed by finding this to be quite adorable.
“Speaking of which. Did Pyrrha figure out if she could make it?” Yang said.
Nora shook her head sadly. “No, sorry. She tried to get her extracurricular training time moved, but no dice.”
Yang nodded in commiseration, and then Nora departed for the other side of the room before Penny could ask what dice had to do with any of this.
She filed it away as probably a figure of speech and then turned to her teammates, making sure to keep her voice at a discreet decibel level. She had a bit of data about Weiss that she was quite sure no one else knew, and it would be good to keep this information inside the team.
“This would explain why Weiss’s heart rate goes up every time she is in Pyrrha’s proximity,” she whispered to Yang and Blake.
“Oh my gods,” Yang whispered, while Blake was just shaking her head.
“Do you think me and Jaune would have the authority as team leaders to lock them in a room together?”
Three minutes later, the meeting began. Team CFVY had arrived, ‘fashionably late,’ as Coco had put it (another phrase for Penny to look up), but with snacks! And now Penny was enjoying the crunch of a handful of corn chips while listening to the introductions.
Blake had made some pride flag buttons for people to take and laid them off to one side on a table, and Penny kept glancing over at them. They were all so pretty, with such bold colors… she would’ve wanted to wear all of them just for the fashion, if not for how incredibly confusing that would’ve been for anyone else to see.
The introductions were simple—name, pronouns, and anything else anyone wanted to say about themselves.
The first two things were not a challenge for Penny. The third one, though… Yang had given her some encouragement in regards to this, too.
“I’m not going to tell you exactly what to say, but… if you want my advice? Talk in abstracts about yourself, like you did the first time we talked about dead parents. You’re gonna find that people can relate to you more than you might think.”
Penny liked that idea. It wouldn’t be lying, just a lot of technical truths.
Blake finished her introduction, and now it was Penny’s turn. She took a deep cooling breath, looked around at faces familiar and unfamiliar while feeling her teammates at either shoulder, and spoke with a little wave.
“Salutations! My name is Penny, and my pronouns are she/her/hers, and… Well, some girls are born, but I was made.”
Up until now, there hadn’t been much reaction to the various introductions, just nods of greeting and collectively murmured hellos, but as soon as Penny was done with hers—
Nora let out a surprisingly restrained squeal and started bouncing up and down in her chair, before pointing to the trans flag button she’d just pinned to her top. “Same!”
And then, to Penny’s surprise, Jaune spoke up as well. “And, uh, well, I’m a boy, not a girl, but… yeah, I’m a self-made boy instead of a born one.” He gave her a smile. “I really like how that sounds. I’m gonna remember it. Thanks, Penny.”
Several other students who Penny didn’t know well, and a few that she didn’t know at all, chimed in with words of agreement. Yang was giving her an enthusiastic double-thumbs-up and an enormous grin. A surge of energy passed through Penny’s entire body, leaving her with a happy feeling that didn’t just feel like it was coming from her consciousness matrices, but from all over, even the parts of her that weren’t supposed to feel emotions, like her elbows and her knees.
“Thank you!” she said.
She hadn’t expected this kind of reaction. The others weren’t just accepting her, they were identifying with her. And it did not feel like she was lying to them. It felt like she was telling them an honest truth, and it was something they shared.
Her smile grew. This was beginning to feel very much like a place and a group where she belonged.
Nora accosted her in the hallway after the meeting, her face full of emotion.
“We’re sisters now,” she said. “Can I hug you, Penny?”
Penny truly wanted to say yes, but as always with Nora, there was one very important thing that made her hesitate. Nora must’ve noticed the hesitation, because she added, “Totally fine if you’re not comfortable with a hug! I know they’re a little scary sometimes!”
“No, it is nothing wrong emotionally or conceptually,” Penny said hastily, not wanting to offend her. “It is just…” How could she possibly explain this without hurting Nora and without revealing things about herself she wasn’t ready to reveal?
Eventually, she decided that blatant honesty would be the safest route. “…Is there any danger that your Semblance might discharge when you hug me?”
Nora blinked, looking genuinely surprised for a moment, but it was gone immediately.
“Oh, definitely not, my Semblance is an active thing, if I wanna put electricity in something else, I need to be intentional about it.”
Behind Nora was Blake, who’d clearly overheard Penny’s question and was now making a face of… surprise? Shock? Understanding? All of those things? Well, she did have insider information about Penny. She was likely realizing what that question meant in the context of Penny asking it.
“But if it makes you feel better, I can get all my latent electric charge out right now! I shouldn’t have much, but…” Nora dug around in her pocket for a moment and then pulled out a portable power pack. She jammed her finger into the charging port, and after a moment the battery indicator on the side jumped from one-fifth full to four-fifths full.
“Okay! I’m grounded, and now definitely safe for—”
Penny didn’t let Nora finish her sentence before jumping forward and wrapping her in a hug for the first time ever. And to her relief, no catastrophic electrical overloading occurred.
“Thank you!” she said. “I feel much more at ease now.”
“Sorry! I didn’t know you were afraid of electricity!” Nora paused, shifting in Penny’s grip to hug her back, and then added, “You know you’re really good at hugging, right?”
Penny nodded happily. She was very happy for her algorithms which allowed her to compute the best hugs possible for each person she hugged. Of course, it still required some fine-tuning, but as the semester had gone on, she had less and less ‘I need to breathe, please’ incidents with the targets of her hugging!
“Penny Pallas, hug machine extraordinaire,” Nora said.
Penny’s eyes flew open. Oh, if only Nora knew how accurate that wording was.
Nora didn’t notice her momentary reaction as she stepped back and gave Penny a proud look. “Sisters! And Jaune’s your brother! Us trans people, we’ve got to stick together. There’s a lot of stupid people out there in the world who don’t like us. A delicate flower like you needs to be protected!”
“Delicate?” Penny, Jaune, and Blake all said at the same time.
“Uh-huh!” Nora set her chin defiantly. “Sometimes, no matter how tough or strong someone is or seems to be, they’re still delicate on the inside and need protection. That’s you!”
That made Penny give Nora another hug.
“So can I just ask why you didn’t feel comfortable telling me anytime sooner?” Nora said. “Because I haven’t made any secret of me being trans—I mean, you saw the giant trans flag I have pinned up in my room, right?!”
“Well, I… er…” Penny actually didn’t know how to explain to Nora that she hadn’t known what the trans flag was until today when she looked it up on the CCTnet two minutes before the queer club started. If she told Nora that, then Nora would want to know how she’d been trans without knowing about the flag, and then she wouldn’t have had a good excuse for that. As for Nora’s flag tapestry, Penny had assumed until today that the pink-blue-white striped flag was some sort of obscure territorial flag used by a remote village.
“I’m not annoyed at you or anything for not telling me sooner, by the way. I just want to know if I was making you uncomfortable or nervous somehow. I know I’m a lot to be around sometimes! But you have my support, one hundred percent, and I hope you feel safe around me!” Nora said.
“There is nothing to worry about. I was simply not ready to tell anyone until very recently.”
Nora nodded slowly. “Okay. Got it!”
And then Jaune had to ask Nora something, pulling the conversation away from Penny. She took the opportunity to check her scroll again, and found that Ruby had not replied to her most recent message. Which was an oddity—during their numerous text conversations over the last several days, Ruby had replied to every single one of Penny’s messages within two minutes of it being sent. It was an incredible level of responsiveness for a human. Even more regularly responsive than Penny, in fact! Because Penny always made sure to vary her response times to texts so as not to unsettle others.
Still, even though it’d been more than an hour since she’d sent the message, Penny was not concerned about Ruby’s delayed reply. There were myriad reasons why anyone would be unable to reply to a message. Perhaps Ruby’s meeting with General Ironwood was a very important one.
The next night
Penny looked at the screen in front of her, watching as hundreds of lines of diagnostic readouts scrolled past, too fast for anyone except her to read. The computer terminal blipped busily as it went about its job of searching for issues that Penny’s inbuilt sensors might miss. She was in her workshop to perform maintenance on herself. And Team BSYP would be joining her soon.
It would be the first time that Penny had shown them her workshop in the tower. It would be the first time showing them the undeniably, fundamentally different aspect of her life. It would be the first time showing them her charging equipment. It would be the first for so many different things. The section of her life which she’d taken so many pains to keep hidden from everything else… and she would be letting her team into it. Figuratively and literally.
What if this was too much for her teammates? What if… what if they were okay with her being a little different, but not okay with her being a lot different? Penny’s workshop was the place where she was the most different. What if the reality of what was under her skin, all the metal and wires and circuits and servos and capacitors, was just too alien for them? What if they wouldn’t see her as a person after this?
Her scroll buzzed. Penny looked down, and saw a message from Blake informing her they were at the elevator.
Just like when she’d been about to tell her team, it occurred to Penny that it was not too late. She could still refuse them entry, tell her teammates that she was not yet comfortable sharing this part of her life with them, and her teammates would understand.
But just like when she’d been about to tell her team, she could feel the yearning inside herself to be known. To be understood. To be perceived fully. And, if anything, that desire had only grown stronger since telling her team. More bearable, too, but somehow stronger. It was an extremely confusing feeling. Regardless… Penny was going to listen to it.
She tapped out an authorization for the elevator, opening its doors for her team down below. A few moments later, another message from Blake came in, confirming that they were all in the elevator. Followed a few moments later by Yang sending a selfie (selfie was another delightful word in Penny’s opinion; it was such a cute thing to say) of the three of them, with her and Blake smiling broadly, and Weiss clearly forced into joining the picture but also visibly attempting to look cheerful. Likely for Penny’s sake.
The picture sent a wave of happiness through Penny’s circuits, even as she hoped that happiness would stay intact in the following minutes. She sent the elevator on its journey upwards, and then turned on the security camera in the elevator to make sure that the journey was without a malfunction. The audio feed came online just in time to catch Yang saying, “Come on, Weiss! You could’ve smiled a little better, Penny’s going to think you don’t want to be here!”
“I am excited about Penny,” Weiss said in response. “I am not excited about taking ridiculous and poorly lit photos of myself.”
Penny smiled again. Oh, Weiss. What a strange girl she was, dedicated to her teammates and friends in ways that made Penny feel safe, and yet Weiss was still somehow reluctant to ever show it directly.
She unplugged herself from the diagnostic computer and reattached her bow just as the elevator door let out a pleasant ding, and a moment later, the doors opened. Blake, Weiss, and Yang stepped out. Their first reaction was a near-simultaneous gasp, which made Penny fiddle nervously with the strings on her hoodie. What did that signify?
“Penny, when you said you had a private workshop for yourself, I didn’t think you meant a fucking penthouse,” Yang said, her tone full of awe as she looked around the space.
That word was new to Penny, and she had to look it up in her internal dictionary. Well, it did seem semantically fitting. “I am very grateful to Headmaster Ozpin for providing me this space,” she said. Her teammates were still standing in a cluster in front of the elevator, as if they thought they needed permission to venture further into the workshop—
Penny blinked. That was probably exactly what they thought, actually, since this was an intensely private space for her. “You are free to look around!” she said quickly, gesturing to her surroundings. “I trust you all completely in this place! I am not even worried if you break anything, because I can likely repair anything in here myself.”
Finally her teammates moved out a little bit. Yang made a beeline to a workbench lined with machining tools, while Weiss edged toward the staircase, and Blake came to stand next to Penny, turning in circles to take everything in.
“I can’t remember if you’ve mentioned this—how long have you lived at Beacon? Months? Years?”
“Years,” Penny said. The exact length of time was up for debate, depending on whether or not she counted the fairly significant period of time spent in her lowest-power state at Beacon prior to her reawakening. Because technically, that was living there, but Penny did not remember any of it.
“It really is your home, then,” Blake said. Her gaze came to rest on one of the walls where Penny had put up a collection of posters and decorations—interesting photographs of nature, diagrams of cool machinery, a sheet of metal Penny had laser-engraved with the Tale Of Pallas The Warrior. She’d done the engraving herself. The most recent addition was a picture of Team BSYP, the four of them (even Weiss, since it was a formal picture) smiling at the camera and posing with their weapons. Penny thought they were a very photogenic team.
“This is the tallest tower at Beacon besides the CCT?” Weiss’s voice came from above—she was on the second-floor balcony, staring out the plate-glass windows.
“Correct!” Penny said.
“The view is gorgeous,” Weiss said. “It reminds me a little of my favorite scenic overlook in Atlas.”
“Forget the view, Weiss, have you seen the equipment Penny’s got in here?!” That was Yang, who was staring at one of Penny’s computer-numerical-control metalworking stations. “You’ve got a twelve-axis CNC machine up here! The one in Beacon’s machine shop is only a six-axis!” Yang’s eyes were roving everywhere, in a behavior oddly reminiscent of Ruby seeing Team BSYP’s weapons at the docks. “I designed Ember Celica from the ground up, I can take apart and reassemble Bumblebee with my eyes closed, I’ve customized my prosthetic enough to kill any warranty in a fifty-mile radius, and there’s still some tools I don’t recognize here.” She threw an excited look at Penny. “Girl, you’ve been holding out on us.”
Yang’s words—so easily and genuinely calling Penny girl with the full knowledge that she was synthetic, made Penny do a happy wiggle, as she sometimes had to do when her happiness got so big it felt like it was going to jump out of her.
“Thank you,” she said. “If you would like… we could gather here more often?”
“Please,” Yang said.
“I would greatly enjoy that,” Weiss said, coming back down the stairs.
“Yes, and speaking of which,” Blake said, turning around, “Penny, can you reopen the elevator? We left some things in it.”
“Oh, of course.” Penny pressed the elevator-open button, thoroughly confused as to what—
She stared as Blake and Yang retrieved armfuls of stuff from inside. “Why do you have sleeping bags and pillows?” she said. It was a question she couldn’t help but ask, even if the answer was quite obvious to her logic core.
“Your repairs sometimes take most of the night, right?” Yang said as she unrolled her bright yellow bag, which had been designed to look like a banana.
“Yes…” Penny said. Her logic core was fully aware of where this was headed now, but her emotional side was still struggling to believe her teammates would be this kind and accommodating of her difference—
“Naturally, we’re staying here with you,” Blake said. Her sleeping bag was brand-new and had the Beacon Academy logo on it—she’d probably just requisitioned one from the student equipment warehouse. “You shouldn’t be alone just because you’re different.”
“And you won’t have to worry that you’re keeping us up unnecessarily, because we’ll be sleeping here,” Weiss added. Her sleeping bag was covered in a snow camouflage pattern, and there was one section that had been entirely covered in duct tape. If Penny had to make an inference, that tape was covering up a Schnee Dust Company logo.
“I…” Penny’s language processors tripped over themselves for a few seconds, and she had to settle for just rushing forward and hugging the nearest person, which was Blake.
“Thank you!” she finally managed to say, pulling back again. “Um, if you do not mind, then, it would be a good idea for me to start soon. I project this maintenance session will take at least several hours.”
“Your call,” Yang said, and Weiss and Blake nodded in agreement.
“All right!” Filled with joy and encouragement and validation, Penny turned and marched over to the first tool she would need. “Would it be helpful if I explained what I was doing?” she said over her shoulder as she began the powerup process.
“Please,” Weiss said. “Otherwise, I think I would be mildly concerned just because, well, you are essentially about to perform surgery on yourself.”
Penny nodded. “That is a good analogy! My diagnostics have reported that there are several parts in my left elbow joint which need replacement due to damage likely sustained during the fight at the docks. In order to do that, we first need to cut through my synthetic skin.”
She turned around, assessing the expressions on her teammates’ faces, searching for any sign of disgust or fear, and to her absolute joy, she found none—just gentle curiosity, and in Yang’s place, genuine excitement. They had settled onto their sleeping bags to watch and appeared quite physically comfortable as well. Thus reassured, Penny continued.
“This is the laser cutter I use when I need to remove part of my skin! It is tuned to the exact power needed to cut my skin without damaging what’s underneath, and the laser is so precise that the cut’s width is measured on the atomic level, and the resulting cut will not be visible to human, Faunus, or synthetic eyes.”
“Whoa,” Yang said quietly, her voice full of admiration.
Weiss was shaking her head now, which briefly brought back all of Penny’s nervousness, until she spoke. “I cannot believe I ever considered you a clumsy oaf. There I was on the first day of orientation, complaining about the destruction of my Dust supplies, and if only I’d known that you had an entire room full of precision tools you take care of.”
Blake nudged her with an elbow. “So are you finally accepting it was an accident and not Penny’s fault?”
Weiss opened her mouth quickly, as if to fire off some sort of rebuttal, only for her to sink down a little bit and then sigh. “...Yes.”
“Don’t worry, Weiss!” Penny said. “I forgive you. After all, you have clearly learned not to judge a book by its cover or a girl by her shoes!”
That sent the entire team into laughter, Penny included, and the last bit of fear inside her faded away as she realized this felt just like any other night with her team. Just in a different location. They were choosing to spend time with her. She had not asked them to sleep here, and yet they were.
Penny, for the second time that day, truly felt like she belonged.
Penny sealed up the last cut in her skin and placed the combiner down, turning to her team with a triumphant look. “Finished! My elbow is in peak condition again!”
Blake, Weiss, and Yang responded with a round of applause. Penny wondered if it would be overly self-aggrandizing to acknowledge the applause like a stage actor might after a magnificent performance. This was entirely routine for her, after all. Although, her teammates were seeing this for the first time, and so it was as impressive to them as a performance in a theater.
So Penny curtsied to her team, the smile which had not left her face all night becoming even bigger. It was definitely past her team’s bedtime, which made it all the more an honor that they’d stayed up for her.
“Alright, I guess we bunk down for the night now!” Yang said. “Penny, there’s a sleeping bag for you by the—”
“Oh! Wait! My apologies, there is one more thing I want to show you.” Penny skipped over to the other side of the room and picked up the piece of equipment which had been the source of so much anxiety earlier that evening. “My charging equipment! Setting it up at my bunk should be a simple process—I will just need to plug the power converter into the wall and make sure it is calibrated correctly, arm the surge protector, and after that, all I will have to do is plug myself in! So I will be able to charge myself in the dorm room!”
Then old fears flared up in her once more, and she fidgeted with the strings of her hoodie as she hastily added, “If that would be okay with you all, that is.”
“Yes,” came the simultaneous reply from all three of them, as Penny’s logic core pointed out that she had asked this exact question to them during the conversation after her initial revelation. And received the same answer.
Penny unrolled her sleeping bag, fluffed it up, and then, before entering it, reached up to her bow where there was only a moment’s hesitation before she unlatched it from her head, revealing the data/charging port. And then, in a movement she’d done hundreds and hundreds of times before, she plugged herself in.
Her teammates did not shriek in horror and flee the tower, and she suddenly felt quite silly for being worried. Her logic core felt like it was taking a victory lap through all her circuits.
“May I ask… what does it feel like?” Weiss asked.
“I feel a slight tingle around the port when the connection is first activated, but after that…” Penny shrugged. “My default state is to have electricity flowing through my body, so it doesn’t feel different.”
Weiss blinked. “I suppose I should have thought of that.”
And then Blake spoke up. “Penny, I’m asking this from a purely logistical perspective—from the fact that you need to charge, I’m inferring that you have a battery life. May I ask if you know approximately how long it is? Some of our team missions in our later academy years are going to involve lengthy field deployments where we won’t have access to electricity.”
“Well, with more casual activity such as what we’ve been doing at the academy for the past semester, two weeks. However, in a field situation with heavy combat, it is three days.” Seeing the worried look on Blake’s face, she hastened to add a very important mitigating factor. “But I have a workaround for that! I can effectively recharge my battery in the field by ingesting Dust crystals.”
Yang stared at Penny. Blake blinked rapidly. Weiss, who had been burying herself in her sleeping bag, suddenly popped upright again.
“You can eat Dust?” Weiss’s voice was full of… either awe or disbelief. Probably disbelief.
Penny found it odd that this was what seemed to surprise them more than her plugging herself into the wall or the circuitry underneath her skin or any number of things she’d shown them tonight, but sometimes things were just like that. “I can ingest it in any form, but I greatly prefer the raw crystals to the powders found in ammunition. The intact crystals are pleasingly crunchy!”
To punctuate her point, she reached into a supply cabinet within arm’s reach, drew out a small electric Dust crystal she normally used for testing circuits, tossed it into her mouth, and bit down with a crunch. As always happened when she ate a Dust crystal, there was a pleasing popping sensation from all the little energy reactions that happened as she ground it down with her teeth into something easier to incinerate.
Yang had the same look on her face that she’d had when Penny flipped Junior over her shoulder during their first meeting. “Only you, Penny. Only you,” she said.
“It’s not as efficient as plugging in, but with a backpack of crystals to take into the field, I would have about a month’s worth of charge!” Penny could also theoretically recharge by eating another consumable fuel such as wood, but there were pragmatic issues with eating twenty-two fully-grown oak trees.
“Are you secretly behind the Dust robberies, then?” Yang waggled her eyebrows at Penny. “Making a stockpile for yourself?”
Penny was thankful for the eyebrow-waggling, which told her conclusively that Yang was joking and was not actually suspecting her of a crime spree. But then she noticed Blake. Who had pulled her knees up to her chest upon hearing Yang’s joke, and was now looking at the floor with an absolutely miserable expression.
“Are you okay, Blake?” she said quietly.
“I’ll be fine,” Blake said, which did nothing to assuage Penny’s concerns. “I just… I can’t stop thinking about the White Fang. What are they doing with all that Dust? And how many of my friends are involved in that?”
“The girl you talked to at the docks,” Weiss said. “You knew her?”
Blake looked up at Weiss and hesitated for a moment, stiffening slightly before replying. “Yes.” Her eyes closed for a few moments. “She was a close friend. And she was high in the ranks. The fact that she’s here means the Fang is planning something big.”
“How did you become friends?” Weiss said.
Blake gave a helpless shrug. “Proximity, I guess. You spend enough time in the Fang with anyone and they become your friends, your family. I used to dream with Ilia about stealing all the Dust the SDC had, and bringing it to Menagerie to provide free energy, but… I don’t think that’s what they’re doing now. I feel like they’re planning something much worse with all that Dust.”
“Is there anything we can do now?” Penny said. “We’ve captured the obvious target. Should we let the ones who are supposed to be in charge of protection do the protecting?”
“I guess.” Blake didn’t say anything for a moment, and then she added, in an even quieter voice, “Ilia’s a good person. She’s… she’s just angry at the world. Even angrier than I was. And I don’t blame her one bit.”
“I believe you,” Weiss said.
Blake’s eyes widened. “You do?”
“When she fled, she had her weapon and a functioning Aura. We all had no Aura, and we were injured, and she was right in front of us. She could’ve killed any one of us without a second thought. But she didn’t.”
“That’s…” Blake trailed off. “Gods, you’re right. I miss her.”
Yang reached over to put a comforting hand on Blake’s shoulder. “If you really think she’s a good person? I think she’ll figure things out.”
“I hope so. I’m going to sleep now. Good night.” With that, Blake burrowed into her sleeping bag, signaling the suspension of the discussion.
“Good night, Team Battleship,” Penny murmured, pulling her sleeping bag up to her chin.
“Good night, Team Biceps,” Yang said.
Penny heard a thwump, and it took her a moment to realize the sound came from Weiss throwing a pillow at Yang.
Turning her attention inward, she picked up her scroll, opening it to the messaging app as she laid on her side, her head sinking into her pillow. One last thing to do before she entered low-power mode.
And there was, in fact, a reply from Ruby!
A series of replies.
11:47 PM: hey penny, really sorry about this but
11:48 PM: uh
11:59 PM: I’m sick and I’m gonna have to quarantine myself aboard the airship. I’m not gonna be able to leave or interact with anyone else for the rest of this semester.
11:59 PM: I’ve got mononucleosis
Two minutes ago, that last message had come in. Penny immediately sent a reply, concern rearing up inside her.
Oh no! I hope you have a fast recovery! Is there anything I can do to help you out? At least we can still communicate through text!
Penny waited for twenty more minutes before going to low-power mode, but there were no more messages from Ruby.
Notes:
In-universe, there’s no significance to why Ruby picked mononucleosis as her pretend illness. She just randomly picked something that sounded scary when she searched “diseases” online.
Out-of-universe, however, if you haven’t figured out why I picked mononucleosis specifically,
go check out its Wikipedia page and take note of what it is colloquially known as!
Chapter 17: The Girl In The Airship
Notes:
If you want to reblog the artwork I commissioned from nliast for Chapter 15, here's a link to the tumblr post!
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Several weeks later
Penny was supposed to be helping the rest of her team clean the dorm room, but she was finding it very hard to focus right now. Her attention kept being drawn to the windows, which offered a clear view of the massive Atlesian airships moored near the school, and which was the subject of a very pressing issue. She had not heard from Ruby in weeks. No one had.
Their last contact remained the message informing Penny that she was sick, without any replies from her afterward. Penny was deeply worried—it just did not seem like Ruby to completely cease all contact.
The obvious explanation was that she was gravely ill, but then why were Ruby’s teammates unconcerned, and regularly bringing her classwork and notes? She’d overheard them asking professors for extra copies of worksheets for their teammate. So Ruby was seemingly well enough to keep up with her studies, but then what was preventing her from talking to Penny? Or anyone else, for that matter? Trying to ask Ruby’s teammates to pass on a message from Penny had just resulted in… polite but unflinching refusals. They said they wanted to respect Ruby’s privacy, but Penny wasn’t sure they’d ever even asked Ruby if she wanted messages from the outside world. It was like… it was like Ruby was a prisoner, except nobody seemed to be willing to acknowledge it. And no one else at Beacon knew anything. Mystifyingly, all the Atlesian exchange students seemed equally in the dark—no one in Ruby’s year from Atlas knew anything about her beyond the fact that she was a strange, nervous, and excitable girl who missed a lot of classes but still had great grades and had a habit of fleeing social interactions in the middle of a sentence (and sometimes in the middle of a word).
It was all extremely concerning. And also… familiar.
Penny would understand if Ruby no longer wanted to be friends, but… Ruby had seemed so genuinely happy to have made a friend! Right up until she stopped communicating. It made Penny even more concerned. Was something preventing Ruby from being able to talk freely? Was she having her freedoms restricted? Was she actually in trouble for what had happened at the docks?
She looked down at her scroll. She had sent the occasional check-in message, sparse enough to not scare Ruby, with the last one being sent eight days ago. It was a strange feeling, knowing Ruby was right there in one of the airships moored on campus, so close that Penny could fly to them in seconds. And yet, her friend felt impossibly far away, completely out of reach. Was there even anything she could do?
“Penny, you’ve been dusting the same spot for five minutes. Are you okay?”
Penny jerked her feather duster away from the now-very-clean bedpost, and gave Blake an apologetic smile. “I am sorry! I just… had other things I was thinking about.” And then, knowing her teammates may have been wondering, she quickly added, “I promise it was not a glitch of some sort.”
“No, Penny, I completely get it.” Blake straightened from where she’d been changing the sheets on their bunks and sighed. “I’ve got too much on my mind, too. I have no idea if I’ve been doing a good job cleaning.”
Yang poked her head out of the bathroom. “Well, I can tell you Weiss hasn’t. Because she’s supposed to be using a clean rag to wash the window. And yet…”
Weiss flushed a deep red as she stepped away from the window, lowering the dirty rag she’d been using. “Yang, I’m trying! I apologize, it’s just that… growing up, I never actually had the chance to do any of this for myself!”
Yang chuckled. “Don’t worry, you’ve got plenty of time to learn everything.”
Weiss retrieved a fresh rag from their pile of communal cleaning supplies, fidgeting with it. “Maybe we should… talk about what’s on our minds. It’s not like we can get this done any slower!”
She turned to look at Blake, who went back to yanking the sheet off her mattress, but kept talking. “Well, criminal activity hasn’t slowed down since Torchwick was caught. In fact, it’s intensified. And the police can’t seem to do a single thing about it.”
Weiss blinked. “You can’t possibly be suggesting we do another stakeout.”
“No… I think whatever’s going on is too complex for us to solve just by waiting for them to walk into a trap. Besides, there’s the other half of the mystery.” Blake nodded in Penny’s direction. “I’m guessing that’s what you’re thinking about?”
“Pardon?”
Yang leaned out of the bathroom again, pointing the scrubbing brush in her hand at Penny. “Who else could it be? Little Miss Super Soldier. You’ve had the worry written all over your face ever since she dropped off the face of the planet.”
“Written?” Penny brought a hand up to her face, feeling at her artificial skin. Had someone repeated the permanent marker prank played on Yang’s father, but with her? How had they managed to get past her passive sensors and—
“Sorry, figure of speech,” Yang added with a grin. “Sorry. It just means your feelings about the situation are really clear.”
“Oh.” Penny nodded and added the phrase to her vocabulary. It was delightfully descriptive. “You are correct; I have been quite concerned for Ruby.”
“And with good reason.” Blake dumped her armful of used sheets into a pile in the middle of the room. “Weiss, can you get me some linens from the closet?”
“On it.” The glow of one of Weiss’s glyphs appeared inside the open closet, and a moment later a pile of clean sheets flew out, landing neatly in Blake’s arms.
“Thanks. As I was saying… Ruby shows up, demolishes an entire criminal operation, and then a few days later the Atlesian army arrives in Vale and she hasn’t been seen since. It’s circumstantial, but I feel like these events have to be linked.”
Finally done with dusting, Penny moved to help Blake with the fitted sheets. “When you describe it like that, it seems as if she’s already in the military. What if they sent her on a secret mission?”
Weiss shuddered. “She’s a first-year student! And her conduct is completely unbecoming of any sort of official position! Atlas has standards!”
“Okay, question for you, Weiss,” came Yang’s voice from the bathroom. “What do you think is more important to Atlas, some standards, or bending the rules a little for a seventeen-year-old who looks like she was born to fight?”
“Welllll…” Blake made a humming noise. “I don’t know about that choice, Atlesians care about their protocols a frightening amount.”
Weiss looked as if she didn’t know to be more insulted by what Yang was saying or what Blake was saying. “Well, if we could just find Ruby, it would be a lot easier to answer this question!”
“Wait. Hold on. I think Nora—” Yang pulled open the door to their room and disappeared into the hallway. A moment later, Penny could hear her knocking on Team JNPR’s doorway. A conversation ensued, one which Penny could have eavesdropped on if not for the fact that eavesdropping was rude, and then Yang came back in with all of Team JNPR in tow.
“Okay, Nora might be able to help us out. Share.”
“Yeah! So there’s this really cool Atlesian girl named Neon!” Nora said, pulling out her scroll and showing a selfie of the two of them. “She invited me and the rest of the team to a party on one of the big airships!”
“Aren’t the airships being used as actual restricted military barracks?” Blake said.
Nora shrugged. “A little illegal trespassing only makes a party cooler.”
Jaune spoke up. “So, the plan, if I’ve got this right, is once we’re on the ship, Nora, Ren, and I sneak away from the party and look for Penny’s missing friend? Or any information about her?”
Blake tugged the last sheet into place and then crossed her arms, giving Team JNPR a careful look. “Are you sure? I don’t want to make you all get in trouble.”
“Honestly? It’s fine. It’s been a boring semester. Even I want some excitement,” Jaune said.
Weiss had been rubbing her chin in thought, but suddenly she looked up. “Wait, you didn’t mention Pyrrha. What’s she going to do?”
“Well…” Jaune gave an apologetic shrug. “She… really doesn’t do well with parties.”
Three pairs of eyes and one pair of photoreceptor arrays turned to Pyrrha. Penny was mildly surprised—Pyrrha was usually quite willing to go along with a wide variety of things. But now she appeared quite visibly upset at the idea of attending a party.
“If it’s to help someone in trouble, I can go—” Pyrrha started to say hastily, only to be cut off by Nora.
“Ah ah ah nope! We’re not making you suffer, and we’ll probably keep a lower profile without you there!”
Literally and figuratively, Penny thought. Even without her reputation, Pyrrha was quite an imposing figure.
“Well, I’d invite you on our adventure, but… sorry, I don’t think it’d be up your alley either,” Yang said.
“Our adventure?” Blake said.
“Yeah, well… I figured we should be doing something too so we’re not just sitting around while Team JNPR sneaks around in a confidential military area, and I know a guy who fancies himself an information broker. I was thinking we’d pay him a team visit, see if he knows anything that could help us. And hopefully not start any fights.”
“That sounds intriguing—” Pyrrha started to say, only for her face to fall when Yang added, “He runs a nightclub.”
“Ah,” Pyrrha said.
Wait. A nightclub? Penny stared at Yang, retrieving a memory. “Would this be the same establishment in which we met?”
“…Yeah.”
Blake sighed deeply. “I’m sure this will go well.”
“It’s worth a try! If they start shooting, we can leave.”
“Oh, gods,” Weiss muttered. “If news gets out that I was in a nightclub, let alone a brawl at one, my father might disown me.”
“Actually…” Blake turned slowly to Weiss, and then snapped her fingers. “Okay, if you don’t mind taking a side mission, I think you might be more helpful doing a little corporate espionage.”
“Pardon?”
“The SDC’s anti-theft division, which is basically a paramilitary force, must have an enormous dossier on all these thefts. Especially since it’s the White Fang. Do you think you could get access to any of that information?”
“Well…” Weiss frowned in thought. “It would be highly classified, but I could try.”
“Perfect.” Blake put her hands on her hips and surveyed the group. “So, Jaune, Nora, Ren, you’ll be sneaking away from the party and trying not to get arrested. Yang, Penny, and I will visit this information broker and try not to get arrested. Weiss, you’ll be stealing confidential corporate intelligence and trying not to get arrested.”
It was a good thing that Beacon had a bail fees fund for situations exactly like this, Penny thought. And an equally well-funded legal defense team.
“Actually, wait. Pyrrha, why don’t you go with Weiss?” Blake said. “Then you won’t be left out.”
Pyrrha lit up. “That would be lovely!”
At the same time, Weiss’s eyes went very wide. “Great! Yes! Wonderful! Can I call a private team meeting? Thank you!” she said, before proceeding to essentially herd Team JNPR out the door and quickly close it behind them. Then she rounded on Blake.
“Why did you do that?” she hissed.
Yang stared at her in disbelief. “Weiss, I thought you’d be thrilled to partner up with Pyrrha for once!”
Exactly what Penny was thinking. She was thoroughly confused by Weiss’s reaction. Did this have anything to do with her rumored attraction to Pyrrha? Attraction worked in strange ways.
“What if I disappoint her?” Weiss said. “She’s the most important person in our grade—the best fighter of our generation, even—the perfect example of what a Huntress should be—a shining star for all of us to aspire toward—”
“Weiss. Weiss. Weiss.” Blake stepped forward, taking Weiss by the shoulders, and gently shook her. “Weiss, are you forgetting that she’s also, you know, our friend? And an actual person?”
Penny stepped forward and put a hand on Weiss’s arm, hoping to calm her teammate’s racing heartbeat at least somewhat. “And I believe you are quite familiar with the concept of other people being too starstruck to interact with you in a natural way.” Weiss was the rare individual who could match Pyrrha’s level of celebrity, after all.
Weiss’s already-pale face turned even paler. “Oh, gods. You’re right; I’m talking about her like some disturbed fangirl.” She took a deep breath and rubbed her forehead, muttering to herself. “I need to clear my head. I didn’t get enough sleep last night. Will anyone object if I take a shower right now?”
“Wait.” Yang raised her scrubbing brush. “I’m not done cleaning the bathroom.”
“What?” Weiss turned and opened the bathroom door. “You were in there for two hours, what could you possibly—good gods, Yang! This bathroom is cleaner than the ones in my mansion!”
“What?” Then Blake and Penny were peering over Weiss’s shoulder, and while Penny did not have an exhaustive grading criteria for bathroom cleanliness, she was quite confident that it was rare for a bathroom to literally sparkle.
Yang shrugged and sidled past the three of them, returning the scrubbing brush to its holder in the corner. “What’s the big deal?”
“How did you get so good at cleaning?” Blake said.
“Well, my dad tried to give up on life after my mom died, so I had to learn to clean the house myself because he wouldn’t get out of bed for a few months.”
Complete silence greeted that statement. Penny wondered if this was how the others had felt when she’d first said that her parents were dead.
“What?” Yang crossed her arms. “It was a decade ago, it’s ancient history now. I just never lost those skills.”
“Yang…” Blake said quietly. “I know we all agreed to be chill about each other’s strange messed-up pasts, but…” She made a helpless gesture.
Yang gave a little laugh. “Okay, fair enough, but I think it’s funny that the heiress to the biggest company on the planet, the ex-revolutionary leader, and the girl made of actual metal are all looking at me like I’m the weird one! I’m the most normal person on this team.”
“You have a metal arm connected to your neural system, Yang,” Penny said. “By the definition of the word, you are a cyborg, which qualifies as very not normal.”
“Huh.” Yang raised her arm and looked at it carefully, a realization of some sort dawning on her. “Well, shit. We’re all undeniably weird, then.” She paused. “Hell yeah.”
The group hug they somehow ended up in after that lasted for a long time.
Later
Blake didn’t feel good.
It wasn’t anything that could be explained by a physical ailment, and yet it sat in the pit of her stomach like a cannonball, weighing down her entire being. She wished she could just vomit up the awful feeling and be done with it. But guilt, sticky and cumbersome and churning, was never something that left her easily.
She’d hoped she would be done with guilt when she left the White Fang, but the last few weeks had proven her terribly wrong. And it was the same guilt which had wracked her in her final months with the Fang—that gnawing feeling of am I on the wrong side?
And now she was having the same feeling after switching sides. Would she ever make a decision that felt right? Or was she just doomed to endlessly run from her problems and never—
“Blake?”
Blake startled at the sound of Yang’s voice, and looked up to see her partner staring at her from further up the street, giving Blake a careful look filled with concern. She was standing directly under a streetlight, the orange glow of the sodium lamp illuminating her hair in such a way that she appeared like an ethereal goddess of light and heat.
For a moment, Blake’s breath was snatched away, and all she could do was stare at Yang. This was not the first time she’d experienced a moment like this, where it seemed to hit her all at once that Yang was stunningly beautiful.
And the frequency of these moments was slowly but surely increasing. Blake knew what that probably meant for her feelings about her fiery partner, and… she was going to confront them at some point. Hopefully before they graduated.
For now though, she pulled her thoughts away from Yang’s lilac eyes in the night and the sleeves of her jacket which accentuated her biceps so well and the mesmerizing tumble of her golden hair, and concentrated on listening, because Yang was saying something else.
“Something’s bothering you,” she said. It wasn’t a question—rather, a statement of concern.
Blake sighed. “You’re right.” Yang knew her too well for this to stay hidden. She moved to catch up with her, and they began to walk side-by-side again, each brush of their shoulders against each other making her heart skip a beat. Thank goodness Penny was scouting from the rooftop up ahead and not next to them. There would be no keeping romantic secrets from a girl who could sense everyone’s heartbeat in real time.
“Do you remember what Ilia said to me? At the docks? About being a cop?” When Yang nodded, she continued. “I can’t stop thinking about that. I… I don’t want to be something like that. The kingdoms’ police forces are horrifically biased against Faunus. Remember when Ruby thought Penny was White Fang because she wore a bow?”
Yang let out a half-chuckle. “How could I forget?”
“Well, that’s standard profiling for every police force except Vacuo’s, and the only reason Vacuo is different is because so many people in that kingdom wear head-related clothing that they just can’t assume head coverings equals White Fang because then half the kingdom would be White Fang.” She paused. “Then again, that’s what some people actually think Vacuo is.”
“Sad but true.”
“Point is. Even if I’m no longer White Fang. I don’t want to be a friend of the police. They commit some truly horrific crimes in the name of maintaining… order.” Blake spat out that last word with all the repulsiveness she felt when she thought about all the times she’d heard it. “But whose order is being upheld? It’s hard to fight for your rights in a world where negative emotions can get you and others killed. Because when you try to change the status quo, the people in power will say disrupting order creates negative emotions, and then suddenly you’re being blamed for Grimm problems even though the SDC creates more negative emotions in a single week than the White Fang did in two years.”
Yang winced. “Speaking from experience, huh?”
“So much.”
They fell into a brief silence, the only sounds around them the faint drone from a nearby highway and the hiss of a steam pipe somewhere letting off excess pressure.
Finally, Blake continued. “That’s one of the reasons I became a Huntress. It’d be easier to make the world a better place, and I’d be able to choose to help people who need the help. But… am I just going to be maintaining the same state of affairs that’s slowly killing people like me?”
She glanced over to Yang, wondering if she had any answers on her tongue, but she only inclined her head, indicating for Blake to continue. So she did.
“The Huntress system has been around for decades, and it hasn’t been able to fix the SDC’s exploitation, or widespread racism, or societal inequality or… or any number of things. It’s like—oh gods, at the docks, we were protecting an SDC shipment.” Blake couldn’t suppress the violent shudder that passed through her. “Fuck. That’s the exact opposite of what I wanted to do, but what other option is there? What is there besides the Huntress system? I can’t go anywhere else, but sometimes this world feels so broken like there’s nothing I can ever—”
“Hey, Blake?”
Blake didn’t realize how close she was to hyperventilating until Yang’s gentle voice cut through the haze of despair flooding her mind and she realized her chest was so tight she was on the verge of keeling over.
Yang had taken Blake’s hands in her own and was holding them gently, the sturdy fingers of her prosthetic pressing into Blake’s palm with a sureness that restored some stability to her thoughts.
“I’m not gonna pretend Huntresses are some perfect, infallible institution of justice and virtue,” Yang said. “Some really, really terrible people have become Huntresses. And did terrible things with their skills.” She paused, glancing upward. “Like my biological mother.” Then she quickly added with a grin, “And don’t say you’re sorry about that.”
Blake snapped her mouth shut, pulling back the predictable word on her lips. Guilty as charged.
Yang’s fingers closed just a little more tightly around Blake’s hands. “But all this doesn’t have to stop you from trying to make things better in this fucked-up world we were born into. Whatever you’re doing, you’re not making the wrong choice as long as you’re really trying.”
“Thank you, Yang.” Blake squeezed her partner’s hands just a little more tightly, and allowed herself to look into Yang’s eyes. “I need to remember that.” And somehow, she just knew Yang saying it would make it easier to remember.
They stood there in silence under the streetlamp, still holding onto each other’s hands, as Blake grew more and more aware of her own breathing. She decided to ask another question before she had the chance to say or do something utterly reckless.
“Do you think we’ll ever figure out where the Grimm come from? Or how to eradicate them completely?” Because if they ever did… the excuses a lot of people made for trying to prevent change would suddenly ring much hollower.
“Huh.” Yang tilted her head, thinking. “Couple months ago, I would’ve said I don’t know, but now… we know someone like Penny can exist. And she makes me feel like anything’s possible.”
“…I see what you mean.” Blake considered the wonder of Penny’s creation—conclusive proof that life and soul could be made from electricity and metal, and knowing that… well, maybe all the other ideas that only seemed to exist in fairytales could come true in real life.
Yang pulled back, looking at something behind her. “And speaking of Penny…”
Blake looked up just in time to see Penny dropping soundlessly from the sky ahead of them—she must’ve cut off her thrusters mid-flight to avoid making noise when she touched down. The landing, however, was not soundless. Blake saw a crack appear in the sidewalk under Penny’s knee where she hit the ground and heard the crunch of the pavement.
Penny jerked upright immediately, looking around with wide eyes before she noticed Blake and Yang, and then she smiled sheepishly and gave them a wave.
“Salutations! It is a good thing that I have conclusively proven we have a clear path to the nightclub; otherwise that would’ve been an extremely costly mistake!”
Blake smiled as she hurried to catch up with her effusive teammate. Penny was like no one else in the world, in so many ways. And she was very glad for that.
“I am excited to be returning here!” Penny led the way with a spring in her step, her voice light and bright. “It is where I met Yang! My second friend ever!”
“Huh. You know, I don’t think you’ve ever mentioned—who was your first friend, Penny?” Yang said. “A Beacon student?”
Penny did not reply immediately, and Blake glanced sideways to see a shadow crossing her face like something was worrying her. Her hands went to clutch at the hem of her skirt, as she usually did when she was concerned.
“…I think it would only be right to talk about my first friend if I had her permission.”
Hm. That made Blake wonder a great many things. She shared a look with Yang.
“However, to receive her permission, I would need to see her again,” Penny said, her voice growing quieter. “And I have not seen her since before the academic year began.”
An uneasy silence fell as Blake tried to make sense of what that could mean. But then Penny spoke up again, springing forwards.
“Please, do not let my personal matters distract us from our mission!”
Yang was shaking her head as soon as the words were out of Penny’s mouth. “It’s a missing friend, Penny, that’s pretty important, too.”
“That is true, but my first friend can be addressed later. The nightclub needs to be addressed sometime in the next few minutes, unless we want to rouse suspicion due to our excessive standing around with weapons.”
Well, Blake couldn’t disagree with that. They continued on towards the nightclub without another word, shelving the issue for sometime in the future.
Penny knew that she and Yang had made quite the impression on Junior Xiong’s nightclub the last time they were here, but really, the burly bouncer at the door screaming and fleeing inside the building as soon as he recognized them felt like a little bit of an overreaction. He didn’t even try to check their IDs.
After exchanging uncertain looks, the three of them shrugged and pushed open the doors at the same moment that the pulsing music from inside stopped abruptly, along with any other kind of noise.
“Salutations!” Penny said cheerfully to the several dozen weapons pointed directly at her. “I promise I am not here to start any fights!”
“Sounds like what someone who wants to start a fight would say,” one of the sunglasses-clad henchmen shot back, before being hit over the head by another henchman, presumably to prevent him from talking further.
“We’re here on business,” Yang said, holding up her hands—which did nothing to allay any suspicions since her shotgun gauntlets were affixed to her hands.
Penny looked around, and noticed that several of the guns pointed at them were in fact not loaded. Which suggested their arrival had inspired a truly acute state of panic.
Her radar picked up someone from further inside approaching at high speed, and moments later, the bearded bartender who Penny had previously knocked unconscious was pushing his way through the crowd toward them, hastily loading his bazooka.
“What do you two want?” Junior growled, but his attempt at a menacing air was somewhat foiled by him fumbling two of his Dust rounds to the floor a moment later.
“We’re only here for information,” Blake said.
“Yeah, and the last time Blondie was here for that, she put three of my people in the hospital and Stupid Sword Girl gave me a concussion.”
“Only three?” Yang said. “Huh. They’re tougher than they look.”
“Yang,” Blake whispered in a despairing tone, before speaking to Junior again. “Just—I promise we’re not here to start trouble. I’d promise it on my authority as team leader, but I don’t think you care about that…” Suddenly, a look passed over her face, and then Penny noticed Blake setting her jaw ever so slightly.
“I promise it on my authority as an ex-criminal.”
Junior snorted. “What, a Beacon kid’s anything less than an insufferable paragon of virtue? I’ll believe it when I see it.”
Blake suddenly shadow-cloned towards a wall, drawing Gambol Shroud before anyone could react, and etched into it three quick, sharp lines diagonal to the ground. She glanced back at Junior. “Does that mean anything to you?”
“Oh, shit.” Junior lowered his bazooka, staring at Blake. “Ex-Fang, huh? I’ve heard word that they’re looking for a defector. Is that you?”
Blake grimaced, and nodded. “And in exchange for you not telling them about me, we’re not going to wreck your business.”
“…Fair enough.” Junior nodded to his ‘employees,’ and there was a slow, reluctant wave of weapons being holstered or slipped back under jackets. The nightclub’s patrons, who had been staring at them with wide eyes, now returned to their previous activities.
The music resumed as Junior led them to the corner of the bar and leaned against the counter, adjusting his tie with a heavy sigh. “Okay, I’m only talking to you.” He jabbed a finger at Blake. “And make it quick, I only have so much patience.”
Penny raised a hand.
Junior swung to her, putting his hands on the counter. “What did I just say—”
Penny placed a five-lien note on the counter. “I would like to purchase a bag of chips, please.”
Junior stared at her.
It was a proven psychological phenomenon that asking for a small item from someone made them more likely to be friendly with you, so Penny had calculated that there was no risk in trying this right now. Besides, she liked chips. They had an exquisite crunch.
Junior continued to stare at her, until finally he grabbed the note, turned around, yanked a bag of chips off the shelf behind the bar, and tossed it to Penny without looking at her.
“Thank you! Please keep the change,” Penny said.
Junior’s only reply was a grunt, and if that ploy had been successful, there was no visual evidence of it yet. But Junior did still turn back to Blake and give her an expectant look, so they weren’t in trouble yet.
Then, just as Blake began talking, Penny’s scroll vibrated. She discreetly pulled it out, seeing a text from Weiss—
Confusion filled her said as she read the text. Her prediction algorithms gave the digital equivalent of a helpless shrug—she had not seen this coming in the slightest.
Penny, can you make a computer virus? And if so, how fast can you do it?
Sit straight. Chin up. Eyes wide, but not too wide. Smile, but not too broadly. Don’t show any teeth. Artfully drape your ponytail over your shoulder. Has your eyeliner smudged? Keep your eyes centered on the screen. Don’t look to one side. But too much eye contact is worse. Are your lips chapped? Keep your thoughts in line. Don’t think about a cold and empty home. Don’t think about what awaits failure. Don’t think about how much of your future is trapped in his grip. Don’t think—
“Weiss?”
Weiss’s eyes flew open, the sound of Pyrrha’s voice piercing the haze of stress and self-recrimination building up inside her skull. She allowed herself to slump down in her seat, and let out a quiet groan. Thank goodness there was no one else around to see it. It was late enough that she and Pyrrha were the only ones in the CCT’s communications center, even though it was open twenty four-seven.
“Sorry,” Weiss said. “I was… lost in my thoughts.”
Pyrrha made a sympathetic noise. “I don’t mean to presume, but… You’re trying to put on the, ah, the right face? I know the feeling.”
Weiss blinked and sat up a little straighter, really looking at Pyrrha for the first time since they’d stepped into the CCT’s elevator together. There had been small talk, and exchanges of information about their mission, but this was the first time tonight that they were… talking about something of actual substance.
“Yes,” she said. “That’s exactly what it is.”
There was only one chair in the booth, and so Pyrrha was leaning against the dividing wall, and something about having her towering over Weiss gave her an inexplicable feeling of dizziness. As if there wasn’t already enough difference in height between the two of them. Akoúo̱ was strapped to her forearm instead of her back, as if she expected a fight to break out at any moment.
The only fight tonight, hopefully, would be Weiss against herself. She took a deep breath and tapped the connect button. If it was late here, it was the dead-quiet early hours of the morning in Atlas. And that was exactly what she wanted. A sleep-deprived graveyard shift operator at the SDC headquarters would be much more likely to comply with whatever the Schnee heiress wanted, no matter how sensitive the request.
The unmistakable Schnee glyph appeared on the screen almost immediately, but there was no change after that—just a slowly rotating symbol, and an inoffensive yet somehow still bothersome hold music trickling through the speaker.
“Busy signal,” Weiss said. She didn’t relax her posture. Almost as an afterthought, she kept talking. “As the Schnee heiress… there are certain things that will always be expected of me in public. Which perhaps would not be too suffocating a problem, if not for how much of my life has been public.” She paused, looking around at the deserted center, and then added, “This might be ludicrous to say, but my time as a Huntress—sharing a room with three other girls and living in a dormitory—has been the most privacy I’ve ever had.”
“Honestly? I feel the same way.” Pyrrha raised herself onto her tiptoes and stretched, and Weiss forgot she was supposed to be facing the screen as the cords of Pyrrha’s musculature flexed and rippled under her letterman jacket and around her frame, and—
No, Weiss! she silently chided herself, doing the mental equivalent of a smack to the face. Why was she always such an obsessed fangirl around Pyrrha? She wasn’t like this with anyone else; what was it about Pyrrha that just kept her so firmly lodged in her mind?! She was doing a steep disservice to her actual partner. Penny was a wonderful teammate and the two of them were excelling together in all aspects of their training, so why couldn’t Weiss stop thinking about Pyrrha? Was it because her drive to be perfect resulted in fixations that were much harder to let go of?
—Never mind that. She could interrogate herself later. Pyrrha was still talking.
“It’s a relief to be somewhere where I don’t have to be perfect. Where I don’t have the world watching me.” Pyrrha arched an eyebrow, and then began tracing the ornately stitched ‘JNPR’ lettering on her letterman jacket. If Weiss recalled correctly, a whole set had been custom-stitched and sent from a tailor in Argus who was an old family friend of Pyrrha’s. “I think that’s why I get so… intense when it comes to board games. It’s a manufactured environment with no stakes amongst friends, where there will be no real repercussions for the choices I make or the things I say. It’s so nice to just… lose myself in something small and insignificant, instead of always looking to the future.” Pyrrha stopped there, sighing heavily.
“Oh.” Weiss thought back to that day in the library when she’d watched Pyrrha playing that board game with Penny and Ruby and Nora and Yang. She’d been startled by how different Pyrrha acted during that game, but also… the energy she’d carried in those moments, bantering with the rest of the table and trilling with triumph whenever the dice fell her way… it was enthralling to see. Maybe, she realized belatedly, that was closer to the real Pyrrha than anything else she’d seen.
A sudden pinging startled both her and Pyrrha, and they looked at the screen to see that the Schnee symbol had disappeared, replaced by a loading symbol.
“It’s time,” Weiss said, and reluctantly she pushed herself into the proper image and leaned forward. “Pyrrha,” she said suddenly, still looking straight ahead. “I’m about to act in an extremely unpleasant manner. But I promise that it’s just an act. Please don’t believe that I have any desire to be like this.”
Pyrrha gave her a questioning look, but before Weiss could offer any further clarification, a slightly rumpled operator appeared on screen, a pair of glasses set askew on her head and an air of immense exhaustion permeating her, something that couldn’t be hidden by the screen.
“Welcome to SDC World Headquarters. You have reached—Oh! Miss Schnee!” The operator’s eyes went very wide, and she sat up straighter, her voice pivoting from monotonous droning to terrifying peppiness. “How can I—”
“Do you know how long I’ve been waiting for my call to go through?” Weiss interrupted, compressing her tone to pure ice and hating every second of it.
“I apologize, Miss Schnee, but it’s late at night here in Atlas, and—”
“Yes, and the Schnee Dust Company should strive to provide exceptional communications at all hours of the day. The Dust business never sleeps.” Without waiting for a reply or a question, she plowed on. “I need access to these files.” She tapped at the screen, transmitting her list of requested data across two continents and an ocean, and a moment later the operator was peering at her screen. Her eyes widened even more, and then she looked up at Weiss.
“The entirety of the anti-theft division’s intelligence database? Um… do you have the clearance to be looking at these, Miss Schnee?”
“It is for my studies as a Huntress.”
“Er, I really should check with my supervisor first, since you’re technically not even an employee of the company—”
Weiss forced a nasty edge onto her words. “I am set to inherit the company. And I can promise you that I will remember the low-level paper-pusher who couldn’t tell if she was supposed to give me access to the files of my own company.”
The operator gulped so loudly that it was audible through the speakers, and then she nodded once. “Understood, Miss Schnee. Giving you the access now.”
Weiss gave a curt nod. “Thank you.”
A few moments later, her scroll pinged, and she looked down to see a new library of files appearing in her browser, names and folders flashing by faster than the eye could see.
“Is there anything else that I can—”
Weiss disconnected the call and, as soon as the screen was dark, she buried her face in her hands and allowed herself to wallow in shame.
“I hated every second of that,” she muttered.
Pyrrha put what was probably meant to be a comforting hand on Weiss’s shoulder, but all it did was make her feel like her skin was on fire where her hand landed, even through a layer of clothing. “Well, at least it worked?”
Weiss nodded. They now had access to some very confidential information that should’ve been impossible for even herself to get. “I’m making sure that woman gets a raise. Or a promotion. Both, actually.” She sat up, collecting herself, and plugged her scroll into an external monitor while handing a tablet to Pyrrha. “Now for the hard part. We’ve got to sift through all this data.” Thank goodness it was properly indexed, at least.
“What are we looking for?”
“Anything to do with Vale over the last six months.”
It was not an easy process, as it turned out, because there were quite a lot of things in this database about Vale in the last six months. Weiss was spending a majority of time clicking through ledgers of absolutely no significance, of reports about the most ridiculously mundane and random things, information that seemed to only be collected for the sake of paranoia. Really, why did the SDC need to have constant updates on the military movements of every kingdom? That seemed a bit like… overstepping boundaries. Legal boundaries, even.
After some interminable amount of time, she heard a loud sigh from Pyrrha. Weiss looked up from the report she was reading about a silent, successful holdup at an independent store called From Dust Till Dawn, and saw Pyrrha rubbing her forehead.
“Why does this company have so many spies?” she said. At some point, she’d dragged over a chair from one of the adjourning booths, and now she was draped over it. “I feel like I’m going to find a dossier on myself. Weiss, I mean no offense to you, but I’m starting to wonder what’s more accurate to call your homeland—the Kingdom of Atlas, or the Kingdom Of the Schnee Dust Company.”
“None taken.” Weiss went to the next folder, and tried to stop a column of numbers from swimming endlessly before her eyes. “This is exactly what I want to stop when I take over the company.”
“Good luck. You’ll need it.” That was probably an attempt at humor, but it fell flat in the silent room.
“We can’t possibly finish this all in one night,” Weiss said a few moments later. “But as soon as I disconnect my scroll, we’ll lose access to the database, permanently.” She pushed her chair back from the desk, wracking her brains for a solution.
“You can’t download the files?”
“I only have viewing access—no permission to copy or download anything. I wonder...” Weiss trailed off. And then the solution hit her like a bolt out of the blue. Well, hopefully the solution.
She stood up so fast she nearly dropped her scroll. “Penny!”
Pyrrha blinked at her. “Penny?”
“Penny! She might be able to write a computer virus or something which I can send through my scroll, and then…” She hastily composed a message and sent it to Penny. Hopefully, this wouldn’t interrupt whatever in the gods’ names was going on in that nightclub.
Then Pyrrha said, “I didn’t know Penny had that kind of skill,” and belatedly Weiss realized she was mortifyingly close to unintentionally revealing Penny’s secret.
“Yes,” she said lamely, casting about for an explanation. “She does. She’s a… computer person.”
She winced a moment later at her choice of words. At least it was true for Penny, albeit if in the most literal sense?
She was saved from having to blunder through further ‘explanations’ by the arrival of a very confused reply from Penny. Now Weiss took the time to actually explain her request, and in short order Penny sent another reply:
Stand by! I am writing a program which should do the trick and cover our tracks.
“Well, she’s doing it,” Weiss said. Was Penny writing it in her head? Did she have tabs that she could open and close? “It may take a while. But now at least I don’t have to do that act again.”
“Fantastic!” Pyrrha went silent, scrolling through her files, until she put her scroll down in a quite-deliberate movement and fixed her gaze on Weiss. “Do you… ever feel like your whole life is an act?”
“Pardon?”
“I wouldn’t just ask anyone this. I’m asking you, Weiss, because you might be one of the only people in the world who understands how I feel.”
Something about the sudden intimacy of the question sent a shiver down Weiss’s spine, but before she could offer a response, Pyrrha went on.
“It’s like I’ve… I’ve lived in such a way that I was made to be perfect. A perfect fighter, a perfect Huntress, a perfect personality, a perfect beauty.” Pyrrha crossed her arms, an absolutely miserable look coming over her face. “I don’t know what I am without those things. I’ve only ever defined myself by the standards I’ve met in pursuit of perfection.”
“That sounds quite familiar.” Weiss could’ve called it a fairly accurate description of her experiences, except that Pyrrha was… Weiss wouldn’t say perfect, but she was far closer to perfection than Weiss. And she wasn’t satisfied, either? Would anyone be? With any level of it?
Well, Weiss did know someone who was perhaps capable of attaining perfection: Penny. Sometimes Weiss wondered if she would be better off being made of metal like Penny—she’d be able to calculate her movements and words and appearances with far more precision than the human brain could ever hope to obtain. Penny had a perfect memory, perfect recall of every word she’d ever said and heard, and every image of her life was stored away in her memory where it could be replayed like a movie. Hearing all those things had made Weiss jealous, as strange as it might sound. But even with all that at her disposal… Penny made no apparent effort to be perfect. Yes, she worried immensely about what others thought of her, but Penny personally seemed more satisfied with herself than Weiss could ever hope to be with her own self. She spoke without fear of saying the wrong things; she acted without restraint; she unabashedly threw herself in so many directions that she was full of unevenness and unpredictability, and yet she wasn’t afraid of any of it. Weiss wished she could have that luxury.
Pyrrha nodded. “I hoped it might.” She drummed her fingers on the table, and then her tone took an odd, affected air, like she was reading off a script.
“I am Pyrrha Nikos. The Invincible Girl. The pride of Mistral. The four-time champion of the Mistral Regional Tournament.”
Pause.
“I want to do more than describe myself in terms of what other people see me as.”
Weiss’s head whipped up. She knew exactly what Pyrrha was talking about, and she knew just how to reply, too.
She took a deep breath, and met Pyrrha’s eyes. “I am Weiss Schnee. The heiress to the Schnee Dust Company. The Ice Queen. The award-winning singer.”
“Sounds familiar.” Pyrrha cracked half a smile.
“I want to be more than just a name and the face of a company.”
“Perhaps we could figure out how to be ourselves together?” Pyrrha said.
“I think that would be superb.” After a moment of indecision, Weiss held out a hand, and Pyrrha accepted it immediately. They shook hands, and it felt… nice.
“Perhaps you could show me some board games,” Weiss said. “I don’t believe I’ve ever actually played one.”
“Really?” Pyrrha let out a small, disbelieving laugh, and why oh why did Pyrrha’s laugh make Weiss’s insides feel that way—
Weiss’s scroll vibrated. Infinitely grateful for the interruption from her own thoughts, she picked it up and found a reply from Penny.
Hello, Weiss! Please click on this very normal and very secure file attachment.
It was a file that was genuinely titled NOTAVIRUS.exe.
“Really, Penny?” Weiss murmured, rolling her eyes fondly before going against every tenet of basic technological safety and clicking on the file.
A smiley face emoticon flashed briefly on her screen, and then… nothing.
How do I know it’s working? she sent back to Penny.
Everything is proceeding perfectly! I am monitoring it using the hardware I have available. I only need you to keep your scroll connected until I say it’s safe to disconnect.
Weiss sighed with relief and put down her scroll. “Well, it’s out of our hands now.”
Pyrrha had gone back to looking through the files herself, and she didn’t seem to have heard Weiss—she was staring at something on her screen with wide eyes.
“Pyrrha?”
“Weiss, there’s a file on you in here.”
“What?” Weiss jumped to her feet as Pyrrha turned the screen towards her, and—that was definitely an old picture of her—
“Shows a questionable temperament… Further evaluation needed to determine if qualified to inherit the company… Stated desire to become a Huntress may complicate matters,” she read aloud from a summary at the top of the page. “What.” Her temperament was questionable?
“It seems they really do keep tabs on everything,” Pyrrha said.
“This feels wrong.” And then a thought struck Weiss. If there was a file on her, were there files on any of her teammates? The perhaps-obvious one to search was Blake—she typed in ‘Belladonna’ and was about to hit search when she remembered. Pyrrha was here. Who had no idea of Blake’s heritage.
“Can I look at this? Privately?” she said.
Pyrrha nodded and turned away, and Weiss finished her search. And sure enough, an enormous file popped up immediately, and—
Weiss blinked. Oh. Blake had been very active.
Suddenly, she understood what Blake had meant when she’d told Weiss on Patch that it was harder to change an organization from the top than one might assume.
She stared at a list of alleged crimes that, if printed out, would’ve been longer than her ponytail. Maybe if she’d seen this months ago, she would’ve been incensed. But now… she remembered the look in Blake’s eyes that night, the way her voice had vibrated with a righteous fury but also a belief and a hope, and that felt far more important to her than anything on this list.
She closed the tab, and was about to search for Yang and Penny when she noticed something else.
“Pyrrha?” she said. “You’re from Mistral, right?”
“Yes. Why?”
“Is ‘Belladonna’ a common name there?”
“Er… no, I don’t believe so. At least, not in Argus, where my home is, but I traveled all over the kingdom for the regional tournaments and I never encountered anyone by the name of Belladonna…”
“Oh,” Weiss murmured. “Well, that’s interesting.”
“Why do you ask?”
“Just wondering something.” Weiss closed the tab before Pyrrha could notice the profile of Ghira Belladonna, chieftain of Menagerie. Then her thoughts turned to the next most likely person to be in this database.
She’d already wondered if Penny’s origins were in Atlas. It was the most technologically advanced kingdom, after all, and Penny was most definitely a miracle of technology. But, given a lack of actual evidence for her theory, Weiss hadn’t voiced it. Baseless speculation about her past was the last thing Penny needed when so much of her life was already complicated. Now, however…
She took a deep breath, searched “Penny,” and—
—Found a cavalcade of budget reports, all of which apparently saw fit to mention the word ‘penny,’ as in the actual coin.
Weiss let out a deep sigh, swiped fruitlessly through several pages of search results, and was about to give up when she noticed one document which did not look like a budget report; it was simply titled ‘Moonrise.’ She clicked on it, and—
“I think that’s Ruby!” she gasped, staring at the picture which greeted her on the first page.
Pyrrha was looking over her shoulder now. “The girl you’re searching for?”
“Apparently so.” Weiss began skimming the page. Moments later, her jaw dropped.
Pyrrha, also reading over her shoulder, made a quiet noise of disbelief. “What in the world…?”
Weiss came to an immediate decision. The inclusion of this document in the search for Penny appeared to have been entirely accidental thanks to a usage of the phrase ‘pennies on the lien,’ but it was just as important for Penny to see this.
Penny, Yang, and Blake were just arriving back on campus when she received two messages. One from Weiss, and one from Jaune.
She opened the one from Jaune first, reasoning that communications from the friend who was sneaking around restricted military property were higher-priority right now.
No luck, Penny :( we snuck away three different times and didn’t find anything, party’s still going but we nearly got caught last time.
Penny sighed. That was to be expected, though. There was only a one-in-three chance that the party would happen in the same airship as Ruby.
At least Blake had extracted some useful information from Junior! There was going to be a White Fang rally in two days’ time, and it was rumored that important things would be afoot there.
Penny turned her attention to the message from Weiss.
Penny, I don’t know where you’re downloading all the files, but you need to look at the one titled ‘Moonrise.’ It’s about Ruby.
Penny was actually downloading the files to her body. Some may have thought it dangerous for her to have a direct connection to the CCTnet, but this was no ordinary connection. Any attacker trying to use her CCTnet connection as an attack vector would need to get through multiple layers of unparalleled encryption, virtual machine architecture, and cloaked access networking. Her encryption was based on a random number generator sourced from her consciousness matrix—the combination of sentience and raw computing power had developed a truly unpredictable random number generator, something which was perfect for cybersecurity. Who would have thought that the best way to make a hard-to-breach computer was to make that computer a person?
And of course, every incoming file underwent a full security sweep and scrub—essentially a virtual decontamination—before she viewed it. She opened the decontaminated database now, and searched for the aforementioned file—
Ruby.
The picture on the first page of the document was blurry and pixelated, but there was no mistaking her braid, or the outline of her weapon, or the cloud of anomalously bright pixels dotting the image which had to be from Ruby’s Semblance. Penny stared at it for a moment, and then began reading.
On several occasions when the SDC has requested the intervention of the Atlesian military at particularly Grimm-heavy sites in remote locations, Atlas has deployed an otherwise unknown asset that they refer to as Moonrise. Little is known about the asset, but the SDC has found a 100 percent reduction in Grimm at ALL sites where Moonrise was known to have been deployed. More recent occurrences of Moonrise have shown an astoundingly low level of collateral damage to the surrounding environment. Little else is known about Moonrise beyond this, but this asset, if made more freely available to the SDC, could drastically lower the cost associated with opening new mines, possibly for pennies on the lien compared to current expenses. The military has not responded to any requests for information on Moonrise, and it seems to be under the direct oversight of General Ironwood. The only known direct surveillance of Moonrise is one still frame taken from a surveillance camera at an abandoned mine. The frame is pictured above, and appears to show a teenage girl. It is unknown if this girl is Moonrise, or simply someone associated with it. Further research is needed.
“Ruby…?” Penny said quietly, her astonishment only growing as she scanned the rest of the document. High-ranking contacts within the military report no knowledge of Moonrise… Start date unknown… Recommend exploration of any connections to rumored [POSSIBLY SPURIOUS] Project Battle Angel…
There was also a timeline outlining known incidents involving Ruby, and its chronology went back years. More years than should’ve been even remotely possible for a first-year student. What was she doing, clearing out Dust mines as a twelve-year-old?
Once again, that curiosity churned energetically in Penny’s processors. Was Ruby somehow like her? If she was being sent out on missions that no one her age should be going on… had she been built to withstand much more than a human could? And Penny’s worry only grew. Did that mean Ruby was being used the way that other people wanted to use her?
And then she came to the most recent entry in the timeline, the final line in the document:
Moonrise confirmed to be present in Vale aboard General Ironwood’s flagship, the AKN Pandora.
She lowered her scroll and looked skyward to the three giant airships. The one in the middle had Ironwood’s personal light cruiser docked to its side. That had to be the flagship.
“Penny?”
Blake and Yang had noticed she’d stopped walking, and were watching her with mild concern. Penny made several calculations. Her planning algorithms warned her that this was an extremely risky course of action that would likely result in arrest.
Penny ignored the algorithm, and activated her flight mode. “I need you two to make a distraction,” she said.
Yang, the wonderful, trusting, ride-or-die friend that she was, immediately said, “What kind?”
“Something that will keep me from being noticed when I fly up to the middle airship.” At the same time, she texted a similar request to Nora.
“On it!” Yang cocked her gauntlets. “Blake, want to have a fight?”
“Friendly sparring match, of course.” Blake pulled Gambol Shroud off her back and held it in front of her. “One which we’ve decided to do in the middle of campus. In the middle of the night. Beacon students can be so unpredictable, after all.”
Penny smiled at them. “You are sensational teammates. Thank you!”
With that, she activated her thrusters and rose into the air as the sound of gunshots broke out directly beneath her. At the same moment, she noticed smoke pouring out one of the windows of the left-hand airship—Nora’s distraction, most likely.
She waited a few moments for the chaos to saturate, and then she accelerated hard in a straight line, rising to an empty docking bay in moments. That would most definitely set off some sort of radar alarm, but hopefully any guard on duty would be too occupied with the smoke and gunfire coming from elsewhere.
She squeezed past a row of deactivated Knights and pulled herself up a ladder, hopping onto a narrow catwalk. Hmm—a map would be helpful right now—wait! She pulled out her scroll again, searching through the stolen files, and… Bingo, as Yang would say.
The full blueprints of any vehicle in the Atlesian military were contained in these archives! Including every Atlesian airship.
Thank you, Schnee Dust Company Anti-Theft Division, for your extreme paranoia, Penny thought, before scanning the blueprints into her navigation systems. Right. To get to the living quarters: Up, left, straight, left, up, up, up, right, straight, straight, right. And then General Ironwood’s office would be down the hall, and—
A blaring alarm flooded the hallway. Something had been noticed, and now the question was, was the alarm for the distractions, or for Penny?
She took another turn, and then her radar warned her of incoming persons, forcing her to duck into a side hallway just as a squadron of guards ran through an adjoining intersection. The alarm seemed to be all over the ship—if Ruby was here, she could most definitely hear it. And Penny was quite confident Ruby would not sit idly by during a general alarm. So where would she go in all of this, while still maintaining a covert position?
Her logic circuit supplied an answer a moment later. Ruby seemed to have a habit of preferring to hide in elevated positions. And on an airship, one could not be more elevated than… the roof.
The path to the roof was decidedly simpler. Up, up, up, left, up, up, up, and—
There was a roof hatch that definitely should have been closed, but it’d been propped open, and there was a faint shimmery trail fluttering in the vortex of air created by the open hatch catching the night breeze, one that dissolved just as Penny saw it.
Penny hopped up and immediately saw a small cloaked figure standing at the far end of the airship’s roof, turned away from her and watching the smoke billowing out of the neighboring airship. In one hand the figure held a war scythe.
A thrill ran through her. She’d done it! She’d found Ruby!
“Ruby!” she called.
Ruby spun to face her, and it was Ruby, her eyes gleaming conspicuously in the moonlight as she turned Lunar Enforcer on Penny. A moment later, her eyes went wide with recognition.
“Penny? What are you doing here?!” she half-shouted, before stiffening. “I mean. Uh. You need to go. I’m. Um. Sick. I have a disease.” She punctuated that with what might’ve been the poorest attempt at a fake cough that Penny had ever heard.
She shook her head with great emphasis. “Ruby, I’m—my whole team—we are all worried about you! I cannot leave without at least having some reassurance that you are okay!”
Ruby’s stance wavered. “W-what?”
Penny held out her hands a little, hoping that she appeared friendly and open and curious. Why was body language so hard? “Are you being held against your will? Do you need help?”
Ruby lowered Lunar Enforcer slightly. “...You were worried about me?”
Her voice was so quiet Penny was positive she wouldn’t have heard it without her auditory detection abilities.
“Of course!” Penny said. It seemed safe enough to take several steps towards Ruby. “Nobody heard from you for weeks, and your teammates wouldn’t talk about you, and… you just seemed so excited at first, so I couldn’t understand why you’d break off contact…”
The wind picked up, buffeting Penny’s hair and making Ruby’s cape dance around her as they stared at each other, and then Ruby tensed up again.
“You really shouldn’t be here…” she said, and Penny detected her heart rate picking up. “I’m sorry, Penny, I just… there’s a lot more going on right now, more than a lot of people know, and… and… the General told me that it’s not safe for me to be out, not when—” She stopped herself, wincing. “I—I can’t—I need to be the best—I need to follow orders—” She stopped there, giving Penny a truly miserable look. She’d lowered Lunar Enforcer completely by now.
“It is okay if you want to keep to yourself,” Penny said slowly, taking another step towards her. “But it seems like you do not want that.”
The distant hiss of fire suppression systems, followed by a sudden change in the color of the smoke, signaled that the fire was being put out. And the sounds of Blake and Yang’s ‘impromptu sparring match’ had stopped. They wouldn’t have much more time.
“I want friends!” Ruby burst out. “I want to go to classes and meet new people and do new things and I want to do ordinary teenage girl things and I…” Her posture slumped. “I just can’t do any of that because I’m—”
Again she stopped, and Penny desperately wanted to know what Ruby had been about to say.
“I said too much about myself before. I shouldn’t have done that! I might accidentally do it again! I shouldn’t be telling anyone anything,” she continued finally, her words coming out in rapid, shallow gasps. “The General says my life depends on it. I can’t let my guard down, he says even if I tell anything to someone who’s a friend we don’t know who that friend knows or what that friend might accidentally say or—” She broke off, fully hyperventilating, and finally cast a scared look at Penny. “I’m sorry. I need to stay secret. I need to stay secret. It’s my orders. It’s for my safety.”
Penny took one more step, and now she was close enough that the distance between them was only one full Luminous Electra-length.
“Ruby,” she said softly, before taking a chance. An enormous chance, but one that felt worth taking. “I know what it feels like to hide everything about yourself from the world. I do that every day.”
Ruby let out a little gasp, and then her eyes darted from side to side, as if she expected something to jump out at them from the shadows. Penny waited for her to speak.
Suddenly, Ruby disappeared in a burst of silver dust, and then she was right in front of Penny, grabbing her hands and squeezing them tightly. She was leaning in, staring at Penny’s face—specifically her eyes—squinting at them like she was looking for something.
“It’s not safe to talk to you here,” she whispered, before leaning in even closer. “In two days, General Ironwood is giving a technological demonstration in Vale. I promise I’ll be there—I’ll convince him to let me go. Find me there, and I’ll talk to you then, about—about—not everything, I can’t, but something. I promise.” She clutched Penny’s hands even tighter, never wavering from eye contact. “Are we still friends?”
“Of course.” Penny meant it with all her soul.
They stood like that for a long moment, neither of them moving or looking away from one another. The night had gone silent again, the distant alarms ceasing, but Ruby’s heart still thundered in Penny’s sensors. How long would it be before someone came to check the roof?
The moon came out from behind a cloud, catching Ruby’s face fully. Whatever her real eye color was under her contact lenses, it was luminous.
Finally, Ruby stepped back—still holding onto Penny’s hands, though. “I should go,” she said, with obvious reluctance. “Before someone starts looking for me.”
Penny nodded. She activated her flight mode again and prepared to take off, giving Ruby one final wave. Which Ruby returned with a tentative salute.
“I will see you again,” Penny said as her thrusters hummed to life. “I promise.”
Notes:
I want to talk about this story's timeline. In terms of in-story chronology, it's definitely been moving faster than BryonNightshade's version. But I think that can be partly attributed to the two big timeskips (the ones between chapters 7-8 and 16-17), and really, the big reason behind both was "I don't want to go too long without Ruby in the story." So, with Ruby back in the fold, I can guarantee there won't be any more big timeskips for a while! I still think overall my story will inherently be moving at a faster pace than Nightshade's, because of different writing styles, but I'll be doing my best to avoid mine moving TOO fast. I don't want it to feel like I'm missing important things.
You might be wondering how that high chapter count is possible, and that's because, regardless of pacing, this story has a LOT of ground to cover. And that's all I'll say about that for now, because spoilers.
I'm so excited for next week's chapter. For the first time, you'll be getting Ruby's POV!
Chapter 18: Fairytales Come True
Notes:
The commission at the end of this chapter comes from the wonderful artistry of rubyfunkey on Tumblr! It was a wonderful person to work with, and I'm super, SUPER happy with how the comic turned out. Her style felt just right for the scene being portrayed!
Also, I feel the need to mention that I'm a big Star Wars fan. No reason for that, just wanted to bring it up :)
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
“Good soldiers follow orders.”
It was a mantra that Ruby Karyatis whispered to herself a lot, loud enough so only she could hear, to remind herself about how to fulfill her destiny, how to save the world. It was comforting. Protecting the world was hard. But following orders was easy. And as long as she remembered her mantra, saving the world didn’t feel hard at all!
“Good soldiers follow orders.”
And now Ruby whispered it to herself as she stood at the edge of the park, watching the holographic form of the General pace the stage and present the latest and greatest achievements in Atlesian technology.
Of course, the latest and greatest achievement in Atlas wasn’t on stage. It was in the crowd. Wearing protective goggles and an Atlesian cadet uniform and twisting its braid around in its hand, tapping a finger against Lunar Enforcer (so sleek, so deadly, nothing for the enemy but a flash of light in the night, exactly like the rest of Ruby) as it covertly scanned the crowd.
“Good soldiers follow orders.”
Ruby knew that from the bottom of her heart. She knew it in all the different ways she’d learned it over the course of her training. And she knew she needed to be a good soldier if she was going to save the world. And it had to be her who saved the world, because there was no one else who could laser-beam Grimm with their eyes!
She tried her hardest to be a good soldier. She was Moonrise. She had to be good.
And she thought she was good at following orders! She’d never had a problem with one before. Sure, sometimes she got too excited and she didn’t listen to an order like There’s a lot of them, don’t get ahead of yourself, or Slow down, stay with the main group, or Retreat! and on and on and on. But with all those disobeyed orders, she was still following the most important orders, to complete whatever mission she was on! And Ruby Karyatis, the girl who was born to save the world, wouldn’t ever leave a mission unfinished.
She was always pushing past what the General thought was possible, always pushing past the limits of her training, always figuring out some way to surprise everyone who knew about her. Sometimes that meant breaking an order, but she still followed all the important orders.
But now…
Ruby had an order which didn’t have anything to do with a mission, or with saving the world. It wasn’t one that she could break in the name of following a bigger, importanter order. It was just an order all on its own. It wasn’t even that hard.
Don’t leave the airship and don’t talk to anyone other than your team or members of the military.
She understood why she’d been given that order, too! There were enemies in Vale! They were plotting sabotage and doing their best to spread strife and chaos! And they were killing people! And no one had any idea who they were! It could be anyone—a student in the academy, even! Or any of the thousands of random passerby she’d seen… and it was dangerous for her because of that. The General said Ruby would be their primary target, if they knew she existed. It made sense. Killing the number-one Grimm-killer on Remnant would be an extremely efficient way to cause strife and chaos.
So there was a very good reason for this order.
But.
But Ruby still didn’t want to follow it.
She wanted to see Penny. She wanted to talk to Penny. She wanted to hang out with Penny. Her first friend ever. Just looking at her made Ruby feel like she was going to explode with happiness. Maybe because of all the happiness in Penny. Residual happiness. Her smile was so big and bright! How was it possible for someone to have such a nice smile? Ruby didn’t want to stop seeing her. But Penny wasn’t on her team, and Penny wasn’t in the military, and therefore, Ruby wasn’t allowed to talk to her. That wasn’t fair.
And usually when something wasn’t fair, Ruby could make it fair by hitting it with the business end of Lunar Enforcer. (Well, every end of Lunar Enforcer was a business end. But still.) But she couldn’t do that this time, because the General wouldn’t like being hit, even if it was Ruby doing the hitting.
She’d tried so hard to follow the order! She stayed on the airship and trained and did her classwork and didn’t answer Penny’s messages and watched the sunrises from the roof of the airship and didn’t answer Penny’s messages and read all the intelligence reports about the White Fang and didn’t answer Penny’s messages—
And then Penny had appeared on the airship’s roof behind Ruby, charging into a fully secured airship without a second thought because she thought Ruby might need rescuing—
She never wanted to make Penny that unhappy and worried ever again.
Ruby didn’t need rescuing. Ruby didn’t need help. She didn’t need anything, actually. The military provided her with everything she needed. But… she wanted something.
She wanted a friend.
She scanned the crowd again for Penny. It was seven minutes to their planned rendezvous time.
What a soldier wanted wasn’t important, Ruby knew that. But this want felt different from all the other wants she’d had in her life. It was like a pressure in her chest for something or somebody or just… just… She wanted someone to talk to about anything she felt like talking about! And that was what friends were, right?
Her teammates weren’t her friends. They were just there to not get in her way, and not ask her questions, and make her look like an ordinary girl on an ordinary team with ordinary amounts of battlefield experience. That was fine! She hadn’t expected them to be her friends, and she appreciated how good they were at their job! They didn’t even know about her eyes, and they’d never heard the words ‘Project Moonrise.’ They only knew that she was a military secret, and that was all they wanted to know!
But Penny was, without a doubt, a friend. And Ruby wanted to be around her. She’d never felt this much want before. The pressure in her chest for friendship was a million times stronger now that she’d met Penny and she knew what a friend could feel like. The pressure made following orders harder. Especially this order, to stay alone and not make any friends.
But Ruby, despite it all, had followed the order! She’d been a good soldier. Until Penny appeared like her own flash of light in the night, those green eyes as luminous as Ruby’s. Until Penny had reached out to her, connecting a distance that felt like it was a thousand miles and poles apart. And then she’d said something which stole away all of Ruby’s breath.
“I know what it feels like to hide everything about yourself from the world. I do that every day.”
There was one other thing Ruby wanted in a friend. More than wanted, actually. It was something she wished for, wished for on the stars every night.
Ruby wished for a friend who was like her. The General said she was unique, that there was no one else like her in the world. But Ruby never stopped thinking, what if there was? What if there was someone else on Remnant who was born to save the world, another soul that burned with otherworldly purpose just like hers? Fria was kind of similar to her, what with how she was also a secret, but her elemental stuff, as powerful as it was, was just a Semblance, the random chance of soul. Ruby’s eyes were not a Semblance. They were not by chance. They were by design.
What if there was someone else who wasn’t made by chance? What if there was someone else who was by design? What if there was someone else who knew just what it was like to carry the weight of the world on her shoulders? Knew what it was like to be made for something, not born?
That sounded really, really, really nice. Ruby would never feel alone again if she had a friend like that, no matter how far apart they were in the world. So Ruby wished on the stars for a friend like herself. She’d wished for that so many times on so many different stars. She’d once read a fairytale where stars granted wishes, and Ruby was a fairytale made real, so why couldn’t other fairytales come true?
And now Penny was here, and she was starting to feel like a fairytale come true.
Was Penny like her?
“I do that every day.”
Just like Ruby. It was only a feeling, but a really strong feeling. Penny’s eyes were really bright and really really pretty, and when Ruby had leaned in to look at them on top of the airship, she’d noticed something interesting about them—the pupils weren’t quite circles, but rather many-sided polygons. Maybe that meant she was wearing colored contact lenses like Ruby did!
But also… Ruby could not tell Penny any of the secrets about herself. The General had made that crystal-clear—she couldn’t tell anyone about herself, because even a friend might know someone who wasn’t a friend. Loose lips sink ships, they said in the military. And Ruby would be a loss they could not afford. A loss the world couldn’t afford. Ruby knew the importance of staying secret until she was ready; it would mean the difference between hundreds of thousands of lives saved or lost.
Keeping herself secret wasn’t just an order, too. It was a fear. What if Penny wasn’t a Grimm-vaporizing supersoldier, and then Ruby told her about herself, and then Penny was put in danger? There were people who would kill to know things about Moonrise. And Ruby did not want to put Penny in danger.
She wanted to tell Penny and she also didn’t want to tell Penny. How was it that she could want something so badly while being so terrified of it at the same time?
Suddenly, Ruby spotted what she’d been looking for in the crowd this entire time. That bright orange hair with the pink bow perched perfectly on top.
Penny.
For the first time ever, Ruby was going to disobey an order just for herself. Not for the greater good or anything. Just for herself, because she wanted to talk to Penny.
Ruby turned off her thoughts and started making an escape plan. Penny was milling around uncertainly at the edge of the crowd, and her partner Weiss was next to her. Both of them seemed quite serious and concerned. But then Penny, also scanning the crowd, saw Ruby with surprising speed. Their eyes met, and Penny smiled brilliantly, waving. What could Ruby do except smile back?
Okay. Ruby was breaking this order not to talk to others. But that was okay, as long as she never broke the most important order—the order she’d known for as long as she’d been alive, the one she’d never even had to be told, the one that came to her as easily as breathing, the one that was as constant as the moon rising and setting, the one that might as well have been the blood flowing in her veins and the light dancing in her eyes. That order:
Save the world.
Saving the world wouldn’t be any harder because she’d made a friend.
“She’s here!” Penny whispered, zooming in her vision and focusing on the outline of Ruby, checking every vital sign (normal), and triple-verifying her identity (definitely Ruby).
“Where?” Weiss craned her neck, scanning the crowd. She followed the path of Penny’s gaze, and then froze. “Oh no.”
“What is it? Is there danger?” Penny put a ready hand on Luminous Electra.
“No, it’s—it’s not that—Winter is with her.” Weiss’s hand moved rapidly, coming to rest on Penny’s sword arm like she was worried Penny might still try to draw it.
“Oh!” Penny quickly checked her databases and then analyzed the Atlesian standing next to Ruby. Hair color: white, identical shade to Weiss’s, tied up in a bun. Eye color: blue. Height: six feet one inch. Outfit: an Atlesian military uniform, with a Specialist’s badging. “Your sister?” she said.
“Not so loud!” Weiss hissed.
Penny gave her a confused look, because they were on the other side of the crowd from Weiss’s sister, and there was absolutely no chance their conversation could be overheard. Even Penny was having trouble picking out sounds over a greater distance due to all the ambient noise. “Weiss, if she can hear me from where she is, that would mean she has higher-quality hearing than me. I don’t think that’s possible in humans or even Faunus.”
“Yes—I know—just—” And now Weiss was acting even stranger, smoothing out nonexistent wrinkles on her outfit and straightening Myrtenaster’s position on her side and repeatedly looking over at Winter.
“Are you okay?” she said.
Weiss didn’t stop fussing with her appearance. “Winter’s presence requires a certain… decorum.”
Penny looked down at herself. Did light-up sneakers qualify as decorum? Knowing what she did about Atlas (and Weiss’s upbringing), definitely not. Oh, well. They had more pressing concerns now.
“We need to distract her.” This would be slightly easier if they had Blake and Yang with them, but Blake had decided on a ‘divide and conquer plan’ earlier that day for two different missions—Weiss and Penny would find Ruby, and Blake and Yang would scout out the location for the White Fang rally and make preparations, so it would have to be a two-person distraction.
Weiss stared at her, shocked. “Why would we ever attempt that?”
“She is Ruby’s supervisor. Given that Ruby is being kept under a close watch, I’m quite sure that she won’t let us near her. And Ruby cannot use her Semblance to get away because the silver dust her Semblance manifests is trackable.”
“...Fair point,” Weiss said. She crossed her arms, looking thoughtfully at Winter. “However, my sister is not some hapless civilian security guard. She is a rising star in the Atlas military, and she has a spine of steel—apologies, Penny, figure of speech—and it will take more than setting a garbage can on fire to distract her.”
They fell silent, contemplating the next step. The onstage hologram of Ironwood currently seemed to be giving an in-depth history of Atlesian technological achievements.
Penny turned back to Weiss. “It’s a good thing that we have the best possible distraction for her, then!”
“What?” Weiss looked around as if expecting something to pounce on her. “You aren’t planning something even more illegal, are you?”
When she turned back to Penny, Penny slowly and deliberately poked Weiss in the collarbone. Weiss looked down at Penny’s finger, and even with Penny making it as clear as she possibly could with nonverbal-only cues, it still seemed to take a moment for Weiss to comprehend the implication.
“Oh no,” she said faintly.
Why was Weiss doing this?
She was sure she was about to make an utter embarrassment of herself. There was no way in which attempting to distract her sister from her duty would ever end in anything but complete humiliation for herself. She was about to take all those good impressions she’d worked so hard to build up in Winter’s eyes, all the proof that she was living up to her older sister’s lofty expectations, and she was going to shred all of them. In no universe should she ever have agreed to this, no matter what was at stake.
But then Penny had made the most ridiculously sad eyes at her and promised that she’d do all of Weiss’s laundry for three weeks.
And now here she was, walking slowly through the crowd, moving closer to Winter and Ruby.
Weiss did not enjoy doing laundry.
But really, it was impossible to ignore how Penny’s eyes had lit up when she spotted Ruby. How she seemed to act with an extra bit of urgency around her. Weiss could tell Penny cared about Ruby. And Ruby needed help. After all, wasn’t that one of the tenets of being a Huntress? Helping others who needed it, even if at one’s own expense. Penny did so without a single reservation, and Weiss needed to live up to her example.
So she swallowed down all of her pride while hoping she had the stomach for it, and closed the last few meters to Winter. She approached from the side Ruby wasn’t on—theoretically, she could at least make Winter turn her head— and said, more loudly than necessary, “Winter?”
Winter did indeed turn her head, and her eyes widened. “Weiss? What are you doing here?”
But then, without missing so much as a beat, Winter sidestepped so that she could keep her gaze trained on Weiss and Ruby at the same time.
“Isn’t that a more appropriate question for me to be asking you?” Weiss replied, while internally cringing. Oh gods, she was going to die before this conversation was over. “I do not recall you informing me that you’d be visiting with the Atlas delegation for the festival.”
“I didn’t,” Winter said, and that was her entire reply.
Meanwhile, Ruby (who Weiss was trying her best not to gawk at—she didn’t know what was going on with that girl’s fashion sense) must’ve immediately understood Weiss’s intent, because she was rapidly scanning the crowd in the opposite direction.
“Will you be here during the tournament as well?” Weiss said.
“Unknown.”
Weiss spotted a flash of orange hair in the crowd—Penny was coming closer, taking care to stay out of Winter’s field of vision, but at some point Weiss was going to have to actually—
She threw caution to the wind, and went straight to her most potent option.
“I have achieved usage of my summoning glyphs,” she said, which was a complete lie.
Winter’s eyes widened further than they had when Weiss initially made herself known, and for the first time, she seemed to actually shift the majority of her attention away from Ruby.
“With consistency?” she said, raising an eyebrow.
Weiss nodded once. At least that wasn’t a lie. Constant failure was still consistency, after all.
“Well done,” Winter said, and there was the slightest note of something rich in her tone which Weiss had long ago learned to recognize as pride. “Your time at Beacon is serving you well.”
“I would like to demonstrate for you,” she said. Before Winter even had a chance to respond, Weiss was casting a summoning glyph on the ground to the extreme left of Winter. And this time, Winter turned fully, and suddenly her back was to Ruby and all her attention was on the glowing white symbol on the ground.
Yes!
Penny and Ruby were clearly prepared for this moment, because as soon as Winter stopped moving, Ruby sprang silently away, and at the same moment Penny materialized out of the crowd again. Then Ruby was pulling Penny by the hand into the crowd as the two of them shared silent giggles and eager smiles.
Weiss had wondered if there would ever be someone who could match Penny’s energy level. Well, she had an answer now.
She flicked her eyes only the barest distance necessary to ensure the two were out of sight, bound for parts unknown with Winter none the wiser. Then she let a small smile course over her face as she lifted Myrtenaster to rest directly against her forehead, perfectly in line with her nose. Whatever happened next with her summoning glyph did not matter, because her mission was already accomplished.
Slipping furtively through the crowd, Ruby led Penny down a side street. She kept looking from side to side even after they were out of the crowd’s sight, eventually leading her to a cafe with outdoor tables covered by big bright pink umbrellas, the color of cotton candy. She sat down and pulled her goggles off, setting them on the table next to her.
“I don’t want to go too far,” she said, wrapping her braid around in a coil on her head and pinning it in place with a hair clip produced from one of her pockets. “Lieutenant Schnee’s going to notice I’m missing at some point, and I don’t wanna make it too hard for her to find me. That stresses her out. She doesn’t show it, but I know when she’s stressed because this one muscle in her neck gets all tense.”
Penny nodded, waiting for Ruby to continue. The way Ruby had her braid wrapped around her head instead of hanging loose—it was striking. Penny found it to be reminiscent of royalty. She didn’t know why she was noting this. Perhaps it was simply because there were a lot of things about Ruby which were worth noting.
“So. Um.” Ruby chewed her lip and then dipped her head before letting out a long sigh. “I’m sorry, Penny. I really didn’t want to stop talking to you, it was just… those were my orders. Can’t talk to anyone and can’t leave the airship.”
Penny stared at Ruby. The start of this conversation was not doing anything to allay her concerns. “Are you under house arrest?”
“No, it’s for my own safety, I promise. I—” Ruby cut herself off as a waitress approached them. “Triple espresso, please!” she said brightly. “Want anything, Penny?”
“Thank you, but…” Penny had been about to decline when she registered a row of gorgeous frosted cookies in a display case inside. “Actually, may I please have one of those frosted cookies?” she said. “Surprise me with the design!”
Ruby watched the waitress retreat to a safe distance before continuing. “…I know it doesn’t look good, but there’s a really important reason why I need to hide. I’d like to tell you, but. I can’t. Orders.”
“Oh.”
“I can’t tell anyone,” she added hurriedly. “Not just you. It’s… there’s people out there who’d want to hurt me. If they knew what I was.”
Ruby’s choice of words did not escape Penny’s notice. She hadn’t said who she was—she’d said what she was.
…Was it the same what as Penny?
Penny looked down at Ruby’s hands again. They were mostly covered by her fingerless gloves and they looked like normal hands, but then again, so did Penny’s hands. And in the little gap between the end of Ruby’s gloves and the hems of her sleeves, it looked like normal skin, albeit with more scars than she’d expect.
Actually, Ruby had a lot of scars. A few along her chin, and then a long, thin one on the back of her neck that Penny had spotted while following her here, and then one on the bridge of her nose, just under where her goggles normally rested. And that was just what Penny could see. How many more did Ruby have? Why had she been fighting for so long?
“Who would hurt you?” she asked. “The White Fang?”
“No—” Ruby broke off her reply so violently she twitched, and then she winced. Her voice was much quieter now. “I wasn’t even supposed to say that much…”
“I promise I won’t tell anyone,” Penny said immediately.
“No, it’s…” Ruby shook her head frantically. “I don’t want you to get hurt, Penny, you or any of your friends!”
“These people you’re talking about… they could overcome your Huntress training?” Penny replayed Ruby’s performance at the docks in her mind, and struggled to conceive of someone with enough prowess to kill Ruby.
“I… maybe I could beat them, I don’t know, but—” The waitress arrived with Ruby’s triple espresso and Penny’s cookie at that moment, momentarily pausing the conversation.
Penny’s cookie turned out to be a heart-shaped sugar cookie, with pink icing the same color as the cafe’s umbrellas and delicate red frosting inside tracing a beautiful spiraling flower pattern. It was lovely, and Penny filed away the thought that she should bring her team here.
She watched Ruby taking a sip of her espresso, and she made a quick calculation. “I must ask, is that a safe level of caffeine intake for you?”
Ruby shrugged as she took another sip. Then she put down her cup, still looking quite sad. “I need to hide myself from the world. I can’t take a risk putting myself in danger until I’m ready. It’s… it’s… the world can’t risk losing what I have.”
Penny pored over Ruby’s words in her mind, and picked out one question out of many created by that statement. “Ready for what?”
Ruby stared down into her cup. And then she whispered something so quietly that Penny wondered if she was meant to hear it at all.
“To save the world.”
Penny had mused on the concept of saving the world before. It was a common topic amongst Huntresses, to contemplate the fact that they might need to do exactly that someday. But most of them couldn’t imagine needing to do that now, and how could they? They were in a time of unprecedented peace. Historians claimed that this was the lowest tensions between the kingdoms had been in centuries.
But Ruby made it sound like there was something terrible happening right now, something she was afraid she wouldn’t be ready to fight against.
“I don’t understand,” she said. “Does the world need saving right now?”
“The General says it’s needed saving for a long time.”
Penny might’ve interpreted that as a joke, if not for how utterly serious and earnest Ruby was right now. Something about those words made her prediction algorithms start reshuffling themselves. And at the same time… it felt familiar. Had she been built for a world that needed saving, too?
She wanted to know. She wanted it so much that her processors kept attempting to process the want as a need. Just how alike was she to the girl sitting across the table from her?
Penny closed her eyes for a moment, thinking of her teammates, and decided it was time to take a leap of faith. One that felt a little easier, after having done it once before. She still felt like she was standing at a cliff’s edge just like the day she’d told her team, but now the drop felt shallower and less unknown.
Penny opened her eyes, looking directly at Ruby, and took a deep breath.
“Ruby…” she said quietly. “Were you created to save the world?”
Ruby’s cup clattered back into her dish.
A splatter of coffee flew across the table, but she took no notice of it as she stiffened, her entire posture going ramrod straight. Her eyes were very, very wide, and she pushed her chair back from the table in several jerky motions as her heart hammered so clearly in Penny’s sensors that she briefly wondered if she was hearing it.
“I—I—” she gasped. “No, I’m a normal girl! With normal eyes!” And then she went even paler, as if she’d just said something dangerous, and then she added in a rush, “And, um, normal ears! And normal teeth! And—and normal elbows! And normal knees!”
Suddenly, Ruby was gone. A single particle of silver floating above the table the only trace of her.
Oh, no.
Penny jumped to her feet, grabbed Ruby’s goggles (she’d forgotten them), dropped a twenty-lien note on the table (the waitress would have a very nice tip), activated her flight mode (thank goodness she’d remembered to wear her fake jetpack), and took off, her processors racing as she tried to make sense of everything.
She skimmed low over the rooftops, identifying a glimmering trail to the west, one which ended abruptly at an intersection. Penny ran an immediate pathfinding program, considering Ruby’s likely speed and destination and the layout of the city beneath her—
The program supplied the highest-priority search vector to Penny, and she executed a sharp turn to the north, switching to infrared vision. Almost immediately, she spotted Ruby’s form in an alleyway directly ahead, sprinting back towards the park where Ironwood’s speech was taking place.
Penny resisted the urge to call out to Ruby or land in her path—if she cornered Ruby in an alley, she was quite sure that would put her in an even more panicked state of mind. And calling out would make Ruby feel like she was being chased.
…Well, Penny was chasing Ruby, but she had no malicious aims!
So she followed at a reasonable distance, until Ruby burst out onto the edge of the crowd and came to a stop on the grass, looking around rapidly. She was clearly still in a state of distress, but her less-sudden movements suggested that she was no longer operating on solely fear-motivated choices.
Penny hovered in the air for a moment before dropping down, not even taking the time to retract her wings.
“Ruby?” she said cautiously, trying to make her voice sound as friendly and non-threatening as possible.
Ruby whirled around at the sound and took a huge, shuddering breath as soon as she saw Penny. She took a step back, and some mechanism in Penny’s midsection clenched painfully at the sight of Ruby so clearly afraid of her.
“How did you know that?” Ruby said, her voice quavering violently.
She had to be referring to Penny’s question about being created, but before Penny could compose a reply, the crowd broke into a round of applause. She and Ruby both turned their attention towards the stage.
Ironwood’s hologram was gesturing grandly towards two rows of AK-130 robots on either side of him onstage.
Penny magnified her vision, focusing on the stage. This was her first chance to see Atlesian robots up close! She knew they weren’t supposed to be sentient, just advanced programs, but she was still extremely curious! Would there be any build similarities between them and her, or perhaps—
“But... the kingdom of Atlas is a kingdom of innovation, and ‘fine…’ Well, that's just not good enough, is it? Presenting... the Atlesian Knight-200!”
Suddenly, two doors slid open behind the two rows of AK-130s, and Penny realized that wasn’t the back of the stage but rather a holding chamber of some sort as a new group of robots stepped out, taller and less angular and—
The new robots kicked over the AK-130s, and Penny could not hold back a gasp of dismay. Her discomfort only grew when the new robots planted their feet atop the backs of the old robots, hard enough that she could hear the sound of metal crunching.
Penny pulled in a little bit on herself, trying not to react any further even as applause filled the air around them. Why didn’t anyone else notice what felt so very wrong with this?
Why are they being so mean to them?! What if there’s a soul in one of them? What if one of those robots is also a person who’s being treated like that?
Penny was living proof that a soul on Remnant could live inside a metal body, and she fully believed that there could be others. An Atlesian robot certainly seemed like a worthy candidate for developing its own sentience, too! After all, they incorporated complicated computation programs along with quite powerful hardware. It was still unlikely for them to develop sentience, but…
“Better to treat matter as soul, than to treat soul as matter,” she murmured to herself.
“Smarter, sleeker, and admittedly, a little less scary,” Ironwood continued. The Knight-200s were posing and showing off their improved mobility, but Penny turned away, unable to bear the sight of the fallen robots any longer.
“These models will become active later this year, but they won't be alone! Now, the Atlesian Military has always supported the idea of removing men from the dangers of the battlefield.”
Ruby turned back to Penny. She still looked every bit as scared as before, but then she drew herself up, closed her eyes, and took a deep breath.
“However, there are still many situations that will undoubtedly require a human touch—”
At that exact moment, several things happened in very quick succession. Ruby took a step towards Penny, opening her mouth as if to say something. Only for her to trip over something in the grass mid-step, causing her to pitch forward—directly into Penny’s arms.
Ruby’s foot yanked up whatever it’d been caught on, and just as Penny noted it as a thick electrical cable of some kind, the stage lights went dark and Ironwood’s hologram blinked out of existence.
With her reaction speed, Penny had no trouble catching Ruby, but as she landed heavily in Penny’s arms, something flew off her face.
For a moment, everything was quiet. Ruby blinked up at Penny, all of her weight pressed against Penny’s arms and Penny unsure how to react to the warmth of Ruby against her—until a murmur broke out in the crowd as several of the soldiers moved towards the stage to investigate the malfunction. Then Penny felt Ruby’s breathing speeding up yet again, along with her heartbeat rising at an alarming rate.
“Ruby—”
Before Penny could say anything else, Ruby jumped backwards like she’d been burned, squeezing her eyes shut.
“No, no, no,” she muttered, dropping to her hands and knees, frantically searching in the grass for something. “No, no, no—”
She reached up to her head—for her goggles—but froze when she realized they weren’t there. “No no NO—”
And then she was gone again, this time leaving a stream of silver dust behind her so thick that Penny wouldn’t have needed any specialized vision to see it.
As Penny blasted off in pursuit of Ruby again, she reviewed her memory frame-by-frame and confirmed her initial assumption: The object which had flown off Ruby’s face had actually been two objects—her contact lenses.
Ruby didn’t return to the cafe where she’d talked to Penny and probably left her goggles behind. Instead, she kept running.
She’d failed. She was supposed to keep herself a secret and she’d failed.
She’d failed. She’d lost her goggles and her contact lenses which meant that anyone could see she had special eyes now, she was vulnerable to the enemy, what if they saw her—
She’d failed. Somehow Penny knew what she was. She’d put it together from all the bits and pieces Ruby kept saying out loud when she really shouldn’t have. She just couldn’t keep her stupid mouth shut! If Penny knew, she was in danger too now! Penny didn’t have years and years of training to protect herself or some special superpower that she could use, she was just a wonderful happy friend who didn’t know how much was wrong with the world—
She was just Penny, and that made Ruby so happy, and Ruby wanted to protect her so much, wanted to stand guard in front of her with Lunar Enforcer and vanquish whatever evil might imperil her, but what if she couldn’t do that? What if she wasn’t strong enough yet? What if she needed more time which she no longer had because she’d failed and let her secret get loose—
She wasn’t even using her Semblance now. She was just running down streets and alleys, not caring where she was headed. She just wanted to get away get away get away—
From everything. From the failure. From losing the disguise which shielded her. From the—no, not Penny.
Did she want to get away from Penny? No. Never. Of course not. Penny was awesome, cool, and terrific all at once. But she had to stay away for Penny’s safety. Maybe Ruby couldn’t make herself stay away from Penny for her own sake, but she sure could make herself stay away from Penny for Penny’s sake! That was much easier.
Ruby was dangerous. She was too weird. Too different. Too special. Too much of an asset. Too much of a target. She never should’ve wished for a friend. All it would do was hurt anyone who tried to be one.
She kept running.
Maybe she really was supposed to be like the moon. Hidden half the time, just a shining light in the darkness that would forever be far away from everyone.
She wanted to run for the rest of her life.
Penny wasn’t trying to approach Ruby now. Any appearance from her would only make things worse. So the only thing she did was follow Ruby, just close enough to make sure Ruby was safe, while just far away enough to avoid Ruby noticing her.
What exactly was Ruby afraid of?
Penny turned slowly to track Ruby as she sprinted down another alleyway. She wasn’t looking over her shoulder to see if she was being followed. She was just… fleeing.
Maybe it was the same thing Penny had been afraid of when she told her team the truth. That feeling of sinking into a terror that was completely immune to any kind of logic. The feeling of not knowing what would happen when the truth was out there, thinking only of the worst.
Maybe there was a scenario where Penny would have run away, too, after telling her teammates.
Suddenly, her prediction algorithms threw a very urgent warning at her, and Penny abandoned all ruminations as she recognized what was happening.
The alleyway Ruby was running down was narrow, and opened directly onto a one-way street, with no sightlines.
The road was largely empty, except for a large delivery truck driving down it at forty-four-point-two miles per hour towards Ruby’s location.
Ruby was set to emerge from the alleyway at the exact moment that the delivery truck’s path would intersect with hers, and with no other oncoming traffic to alert her to the danger present, she was running towards a collision.
And Ruby’s Aura was not up.
Penny knew this for a fact because of her Aura-detecting vision—normally Ruby’s Aura was a lovely red shimmer, but it was completely absent right now except for the faint glow of passive Aura at her chest.
If Penny did not intervene, eighty-nine percent of predicted outcomes involved Ruby being hit by the truck at full speed with no Aura.
All of this, Penny processed in the time it took for Ruby to take one stride, but that was one stride closer to disaster. Now she scrolled through her options—
She couldn’t fly down and pick up Ruby. That was unequivocally not an option because Ruby would panic even further. She couldn’t try to warn Ruby by shouting—she would be likely to completely ignore it. She could land in front of Ruby and stop her, but doing so would require a burst of speed from her thrusters which would be clearly audible to Ruby, and perhaps that would result in her taking evasive maneuvers into the truck’s path. She couldn’t put herself between her and Ruby to stop the truck dead-on because that would injure the driver—
—And Ruby was another step closer in the time it took for Penny to dismiss all those options.
She reconsidered, and then with a pang of despair, chose the least worst option. She sent more power to her thrusters and dove.
Ruby burst out of the alleyway, and too late, she saw a speeding block of gray in her peripheral vision. As it bore down on her, her frazzled brain collapsed into a scattered mess of conflicting reflexes that tried to do too many things at once and accomplished none of them at all except a useless scramble of limbs and—
And then she heard the roar of a rocket from behind her, and an instant before metal would’ve met flesh, strong arms closed around her, and the roar kicked up about twenty notches and then she was being yanked forward away from danger by—
Ruby turned her head just enough to see Penny’s freckled face, eyes fixed firmly on the truck passing just centimeters from their bodies, her hair fanning out around her head from the suddenly turbulent air around them, and they flew clear with such a narrow margin for error that the truck tore off a small scrap of fabric from Penny’s skirt as it passed, but she did not flinch and the tightness of her hold on Ruby did not weaken.
The truck passed. Ruby was still alive. Penny slowed to a hover on the other side of the street, and then gently, so gently, set Ruby down on her feet.
All of Ruby’s urge to run vanished. Instead, she stared at Penny as she landed. Amazed. Kind of in shock. Wondering if that really had happened.
Penny retracted her wings and took several steps back, clasping her hands in front of her. Neither of them said anything. Until Penny held out something to her.
“You forgot these at the cafe.”
It took Ruby a moment to realize Penny was holding her goggles. She stepped forward, still avoiding eye contact with Penny, and took them back. She went to pull them down over her eyes, only to hesitate.
She could go back to keeping her eyes secret. Keeping them safe. All she had to do was put on the goggles, and then that ever-so-important shield between her and the world would be back. She could go back to the airship and get another pair of contacts. She could pretend this had never happened. Moonrise would stay a secret and Penny would be safe.
Or…
She could feed the curiosity, the hope, which pounded stronger in her head than ever before. She could see if maybe there really was a similar soul out there in the world. She couldn’t hold it in anymore. She wanted an answer.
Ruby lowered her goggles. Clipped them to her bandolier. And looked up, meeting Penny’s eyes for the first time since her contact lenses had fallen off.
Two glittering silver eyes met two luminous green eyes.
“Penny,” Ruby said slowly, feeling how the name came off her tongue. She’d been crafted in a laboratory as an experiment to save the world, but somehow this felt like the most important thing she’d ever done. “Are you like me?”
Penny gasped.
The question she’d wondered for weeks hung in the air between them, asked not by her, but by Ruby. According to all of her sensors and analyses, Ruby was human. But…
She looked around, and then took Ruby by the hand, leading her back into the alley she’d just emerged from.
Once assured they would have at least a modicum of privacy, Penny leaned in, looking at Ruby’s newly-revealed irises.
Silver. Not gray. Silver. A color that, according to her databases, did not exist. And it could not even be called a light shade of gray—there truly was no way to describe her iris’s hex code as anything other than silver, the exact color of liquid silver. Were Ruby’s eyes somehow made of liquid metal? Was that why she was so desperate to hide them?
There was no information in Penny’s sensors to support that theory, but then again… she was starting to think that she should just ignore whatever she inferred about Ruby from the outside.
And Ruby’s Semblance… the silver dust which had a luster that she’d only ever seen on metals. As if Ruby was a girl made of metal, too, and her Semblance was an unconcealable expression of that.
Ruby showed no reaction as Penny leaned in—she followed her every movement with her eyes but said nothing as she tapped her fingers against Lunar Enforcer’s hilt. Her heart rate, if it was actually a real heart rate, was still very elevated.
At last, Penny spoke.
“Ruby. I think you are like me.”
Now it was Ruby’s turn to gasp and lean in to study Penny’s eyes, squinting. “…And what exactly is it which makes us alike?” she said, checking over her shoulder.
“I do not know if this is true for you, but…” Penny considered her options, and went back to a now-very-familiar saying.
“Some girls are born, but I was made.”
And every time she said it, it felt even better.
Ruby’s mouth fell open.
“Me too,” she breathed, and the eagerness returning her tone in full force was like seeing the sun chase away a dark cloud. “Made in more ways than one. Were you made to save the world, too?”
Well… Penny could not say for sure, but why else would she have such a durable chassis and so many abilities? It was the best single explanation.
“I believe I was, yes,” she said.
Ruby nodded frantically and took a step closer, reaching out to Penny. “Do you have a power no one else has?”
“Very much so.”
“Are your origins a mystery?”
Penny nodded and lifted her own hands, taking hold of Ruby’s. She cradled her callused fingers in her synthetic palms, and the two of them stared into each other’s eyes, wondering if this was really possible. The rest of the world felt like it was falling away from Penny’s notice, relegated to lower-priority processing. Could the answer be anything else besides what she thought?
“There are people out there who want to hurt me, too,” Penny whispered.
Ruby nodded. “Do you know anything about the person who created you?”
“Nearly nothing.”
“Are you afraid what other people will think about you when they do know the truth?”
“So much.”
A sudden gust of wind rushed through the alleyway, ruffling their hair and setting Ruby’s cape aflutter.
“Ruby?”
“Penny?”
“I think we are talking about the same thing.”
Penny was going to need to ask how Ruby was replicating a heartbeat and an accurate body temperature and so many other biological signs which Penny couldn’t do. But all that was for later. For now…
“Say it at the same time,” Ruby said, talking so quickly she nearly jumbled the words together.
Her processors whirred and buzzed, her fans kicking into high gear as her breathing sped up. Every sensor in her body felt like it was on high alert, and… it didn’t feel scary. It felt… sensational.
They leaned closer to one another, their foreheads nearly touching, excitement bubbling up in Penny like the best kind of overflow error and Ruby’s breath speeding up—
“Three,” Penny said. Was this truly happening? Or was it some sort of strange digital dream that she’d be waking up from in a few moments?
“Two,” Ruby whispered.
“One.”
Penny nearly spoke then, but she processed Ruby saying ‘zero’ just in time to hold her words back until she was finished.
“Zero.”
Penny timed her words perfectly with Ruby’s.
“I am a synthetically constructed mechanical girl with the world’s first artificially generated Aura!”
“I’m a genetically-engineered supersoldier that was grown in a lab to laser-beam Grimm with my eyes!”
Pause.
They pulled back from each other, both of them processing (one figuratively, one literally) the words that they’d just heard.
“What?”
“What?”
“You are not a mechanical person?” Penny said, tilting her head in surprise.
“You don’t have silver eyes?” Ruby said, mirroring her expression.
“You can fire lasers at Grimm with your eyes?”
“You’re made of metal?”
Just as Penny was starting to think this was a ridiculous number of questions with answers that they already knew, they fell silent, staring at each other. And then, with that unexplainable yet fascinating synergy which was developing between them, they both broke into giggles.
“Oh my gosh,” Ruby said finally, catching her breath. “How was I so right and wrong?!”
“Likewise!” Penny studied Ruby again. “It did not ever occur to me that there was more than one way for someone to be a synthetic person!” Genetic engineering and laboratory embryonics… that was most definitely a synthetic way to create a person!
She came to a decision at that moment. Even though Ruby wasn’t mechanical, she was still like Penny. She felt like Penny. And that was enough.
“And I thought that there was only one world-saving secret superpower that someone could have! I guess we’re gonna be saving the world together?”
The shock and the surprise was fading away, and Penny found herself with a glowing happiness spreading through her chassis, and many, many questions. She was sure Ruby had just as many. Suddenly, it felt silly to be hiding in an alleyway when there wasn’t anything to be hiding from each other.
“Shall we keep walking?” she said brightly.
Ruby nodded, and they stepped out of the alleyway together, their shoulders brushing against one another. And they made sure to look both ways before crossing the street this time.
Notes:
So, remember back in the first chapter how Pietro theorized that Ruby was lab-grown? Well, over the years, it stopped being a theory and turned into Atlas's accepted version of events. And now Ruby gets to have all sorts of fun issues because of that!
Also, there are some slight differences between the comic and the written version of the scene, but that's really just because of the translation between written and comic format not quite being one-to-one, and also trying to keep the number of panels/pages from getting too high.
I didn’t plan for this chapter to be released during Pride Month, but my goodness it sure does feel fitting. Happy Pride Month!
Chapter 19: Come And Fly Away With Me
Notes:
If you'd like to reblog the comic from last week's chapter, it has been posted on Tumblr!
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Thanks to her internal positioning system, Penny knew they were near a lovely park, and after a few minutes’ walk, they were sitting down together on a bench tucked amidst a grove of cherry blossom trees.
Penny set Luminous Electra down against the bench as Ruby did the same with Lunar Enforcer, and then they turned to face each other, brightly colored flower petals drifting down around them.
“We’ve probably both got a million questions…” Ruby said, rocking back and forth in her seat. “Oh gosh, where to start? We could be here all day and all night—” She winced. “And Lieutenant Schnee’s definitely noticed I’m missing by now…”
Penny in fact only had four hundred and seventy-six questions instead of a million, but she wanted to be considerate of Ruby’s time. “I will take full responsibility for drawing you away from her side.”
“Please don’t, you will get arrested for kidnapping.”
“Even though you wanted to come with me?”
Ruby shifted in her seat. “With this kind of stuff, the decisions that get made aren’t about what I want, they’re about my safety.”
Penny stared at Ruby. Suddenly, a great number of facts started to assemble into a situation she really, really did not like. She should have noticed this sooner—
“Ruby?” she said, infusing her tone with caution. She knew this was a dangerous subject, but she needed to know. She had to know if Ruby needed help. “Did you… have a choice?”
“Huh?” Ruby blinked at her.
A cherry blossom petal floated down, and Penny caught it in a palm, inspecting it for a moment before letting it continue its fall. “Did you choose this way of life? Were you given the chance to be something besides a powerful soldier?”
Ruby’s eyebrows went very far up. “Penny, I was given a power that could save the world! How could I ever be anything but a soldier?”
“But did they? Did your superiors ever ask you if you wanted to become this?”
Ruby shrugged. “Does it matter? I was built for it. I want it. I’ve wanted it my whole life.”
“It… it does matter.” Penny reached out and placed a hand on Ruby’s shoulder, giving a soft squeeze. “Ruby, even though you have special powers, even though you were created this way, even though there are a great many people who could be helped by you… You are still a person. And people deserve choices.”
All Penny could think now was that Ruby sounded like she was going through exactly what situation Penny had escaped, exactly the thing Penny had erased her memory to escape. She sounded like she was being used. Just like the people who had wanted to use Penny. And how could Ruby be happy about it? How did she not want to escape?
Something about it made Penny a little afraid somewhere. But not afraid of Ruby. Afraid of what had happened to her, and how it’d happened, and…
She couldn’t tell Ruby any of these things right now. She would just… try to help Ruby, in whatever way she could, while still being her friend.
Ruby stared at her in silence, mouthing the last three words Penny had said. Another cherry blossom petal floated down between them, landing on Ruby’s nose. She blew it off with a little puff of breath.
“Well… if they gave me a choice right now, I’d still choose this.” She seemed to think on it for a moment, and then nodded emphatically. “Yeah! I like being the savior of the world! It feels right. It’s my destiny.”
“…I do not believe in the concept of destiny,” Penny said. She did not want to argue with Ruby, but… how could anyone just accept the life that’d been set out for them, while… while the whole world was out there? “What if there are other things out there in the world which you would rather be, but have never looked for?”
“Huh. Interesting.” Ruby turned her head, looking at the sky to the northwest, where some of the tallest buildings of downtown Vale were plainly visible above the horizon. “…I guess I haven’t seen much of the world. I’ve never really had time for it.”
“I can help you!” Penny leaned forward, grateful that a disagreement had been avoided, and put a hand on Ruby’s knee, letting all of her eagerness show. It was so nice to have a friend who was just as energetic as her—it meant she didn’t have to worry about showing too much emotion. “I can show you all of the interesting and varied things Beacon and Vale have to offer!”
“Yeah!” But suddenly, Ruby wilted. “But I can’t. I’m still stuck in the airship. Probably even more stuck after today.”
Penny kept smiling, minimizing the surge of worry that Ruby’s statement caused. “Then let us see how many wonders of the world I can show you in one afternoon!”
“Yeah!!!” Ruby jumped to her feet, pumping her fist. “Mission: Explore Vale! What’re we doing first?”
Before Penny could suggest anything, Ruby’s stomach grumbled loudly. She blushed deeply and pulled her cape’s hood up, covering half her face. “Sorry.”
Penny giggled. Her body had less intrusive ways of informing her it needed energy, but she thought it was so cute that organic digestive systems literally mimicked noises of vocal dissatisfaction to alert the body to a need for food.
She stood up and held out a hand to Ruby. “If you would like something to eat, I know of a lovely noodle stand nearby.”
Ruby scrunched up her nose in thought. “Is a noodle stand one of the wonders of the world?”
“Yes. The world has many wonders, after all, big and small!”
Ruby brightened, pulled her hood back down, and took Penny’s hand. “Okay! Lead the way!”
They started off towards a nearby bus stop, chattering away again, hand in hand. Two unique souls, more alike to each other than to the rest of the world. It felt sensational.
Earlier
Winter had already raised the alarm, but she had no confidence Cadet Karyatis would be found anytime soon when the search area was the entirety of an unfamiliar, sprawling, densely populated city.
She tapped out one more order on her scroll, one more communication with General Ironwood, and then she turned back to Weiss and fixed a stern gaze on her younger sister. “You were a distraction.”
A distraction for Karyatis to run off with Weiss’s orange-haired teammate, a girl who wore light-up sneakers and had an impractically large sword. And also had a jetpack with a level of compactness that was supposed to be physically impossible with even the most advanced of Atlesian technology.
Weiss’s only response was to put Myrtenaster away while looking like the cat that ate the canary.
Hm. She’s standing up for her teammates and refusing to back down when challenged about her judgment. That is admirable, even if it was done in service of contravening a matter of national security.
“I could have you arrested for aiding and abetting.”
“Aiding and abetting what exactly?”
The answer to that question was ‘going absent without leave,’ but Winter couldn’t tell that to Weiss. It was not normal in the slightest for an Atlesian cadet to be charged with such a thing—teenagers had a habit of running off without warning, after all—and part of Winter’s job was to ensure Ruby Karyatis appeared as nothing more than an ordinary cadet and an ordinary teenager.
So, rather than imply to Weiss that Ruby was a powerful military asset, she answered with a question of her own. Textbook deflection.
“And how did you and the rest of your team come to know Cadet Karyatis, exactly?”
Weiss stiffened, and Winter suppressed a smirk. Beacon was doing her sister good, but it seemed that there were some things that never changed. Such as Weiss being quite subpar at hiding things.
“I believe I can guess. Cadet Karyatis had help that night at the docks. An entire team of help, to be specific.”
Weiss didn’t say anything, which was all the confirmation Winter needed.
“Be careful with your extracurriculars, Weiss. I already have to constantly tell one future Huntress not to get in over her head in extremely dangerous situations. I don’t need my sister developing anything resembling a reckless streak.”
“It is not a reckless streak!” Weiss said quickly, a faint blush coming into her cheeks. “It was simply… a carefully-judged act of independent civil action.”
“Vigilantism,” Winter countered.
But there was no real venom in either of their words, which was understandable. Winter was preoccupied trying to figure out how to go about reeling back in a wayward superweapon. And Weiss was… Well, she had her own preoccupation. An understandable one, too.
They both found themselves looking down again at the summoning glyph on the ground which Weiss had cast earlier.
Winter let the tiniest of smiles play across the corners of her mouth. It had taken until the end of her first year in the academy to cast a successful summon.
A small, shimmering figure of an armored knight stared back up at the two Schnees, its sword planted on the ground. It could’ve fit in the palm of Winter’s hand, but it was unmistakably a summon. Weiss’s summon.
She had never been prouder of her sister.
Present time
An hour ago, Ruby was panicking at the thought of Penny knowing the truth about her. Now, though… it was maybe the best thing that’d ever happened to her! Second best, actually. The first best was meeting Penny. This was a very firm second, though!
Penny may not have had silver eyes, but she knew what it felt like. That was the important thing! Ruby had a friend who knew how she felt, knew what her life was like… Penny was someone she could talk to about anything!
And she didn’t have to worry about Penny getting hurt because of her, either. She was even stronger than Ruby! She could literally shake off getting hit by a truck without even a flash of Aura. How did she ever think Penny wasn’t just as capable of protecting herself as Ruby?
Honestly, Ruby was jealous of Penny. She wanted a body made out of metal! She wanted to be near-indestructible! She wanted limbs that could just be replaced if they were broken! She wanted… Well, however many features Penny had built into her, she wanted those! Did Penny have radar? She wanted radar.
For that matter, how did Penny work? Would she be willing to tell Ruby? Because she had so many questions.
“You’re so cool,” she said, gazing at Penny as they walked towards the noodle place. “Just, like… I can’t believe I’m talking to someone like you.”
Penny gave Ruby a bright smile. “The sentiment is mutual!”
“And I thought I was a living weapon…” Ruby looked down at her hands, and then over at Penny’s undoubtedly-much-stronger-hands. “But you! You could literally make a weapon part of you if you wanted to! Have you ever considered doing that?”
“Well…” Penny kicked at a pebble—and sent it flying across the street, where it bounced off a metal garbage barrel with a clang, leaving a noticeable dent. She winced, and then continued. “It could be interesting, but I imagine it would not be conducive to the secrecy of my identity if I suddenly began integrating swords and guns into various parts of my body.”
“Aw. Okay. Good point.” Ruby looked around just to re-confirm that they were alone before continuing. “Staying secret is stupid. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve wanted to do something cool but couldn’t because people would start asking questions.”
Penny nodded. “I’m lucky that I can use my wings, and even then, that requires convoluted concealment contingencies. And I have had some close calls!”
“Your wings…” Ruby glanced at the impossibly-small jetpack on Penny’s back, and realized something. “That’s not a jetpack you can take off, is it? Is it a, um, a beep boop beep boop nuts-and-bolts kind of feature?”
“Indeed, nuts-and-bolts!” And then Penny deployed and retracted her wings just for effect.
“Whoa. So no incredible technological breakthrough with jetpacks, then…” Ruby wanted wings, really badly. Or just the ability to fly. Her Semblance could sort of let her fly, but it probably felt way different from normal flying, since in her Semblance she was a massless cloud of dust which moved at speeds far too fast for sightseeing of any kind. It wasn’t the fun kind of flying. But Penny’s was. And maybe if she could see the design for Penny’s wings, she could figure out how to make a jetpack for herself!
“Could I look at your blueprints sometime?” she asked eagerly.
Penny went silent, and Ruby thought she heard a faint whirring noise—was that coming from Penny?
“Well…” She looked away, folding her hands together, and then looked up at the sky, then down—really, everywhere except at Ruby. “My blueprints are, er… They are not the sort of thing I usually show to other people.”
“Oh, okay! That’s fine!” Ruby wasn’t sure why Penny seemed so embarrassed about it—maybe she just wanted to keep some secrets, which was fine. She’d just have to make do with imagining the inner workings of Penny’s body.
“Here it is!” Penny chirped, back to her cheerful demeanor as they rounded a corner. She indicated a food stand ahead which bordered the sidewalk, built into the first floor of a taller residential building. “It may appear unassuming, but my teammates have given enthusiastic reviews of the food.”
Ruby hopped up onto the stool as Penny waved to the cook behind the counter. “What about you?” she said. “Do you like the food?”
“Well…” Penny hesitated. “I have eaten it, but I do not know how qualified I am to give an endorsement. I do not have taste or smell sensors, so my experience of foods is based entirely on texture, consistency, and general feel.”
“Oh, another way you’re like me!” Ruby caught the cook’s attention—she didn’t even need to look at the menu; she didn’t most of the time. “Could I please have the hottest, spiciest bowl of ramen you’ve got?”
The cook stared at her for a moment, probably sizing up whether or not Ruby was overestimating her spice tolerance (answer: she never was), and then she nodded and turned to the pot bubbling behind the counter.
“What do you mean?” Penny said, scanning the menu.
“I don’t really have a sense of taste. Or smell. Or touch,” Ruby said. “It’s probably because—” At that moment, she remembered that there was a cook standing five feet away from them, and then leaned in closer to Penny to whisper into her ear.
“—Because the scientist who made me did something to me which dulled my senses except for sight and sound to make me better in battle. Cool, huh?”
Penny pulled back a little so she could stare at Ruby, and she looked quite worried now. “That does not seem ethical?”
Ruby didn’t see what the big deal was—Penny was a girl who had also been built without a sense of smell or taste, so why did this seem surprising to her?
“Eh. Maybe.” The cook chose that moment to disappear into a door leading to a backroom, so Ruby felt safe talking at a normal volume again. “The scientist who made me, he got in big trouble with the Atlesian military and he killed himself before he could be arrested, so I think he wasn’t a great guy, but I don’t mind what he did to me! I barely feel things like hot or cold or pain, and that makes me an awesome soldier!” Then something very important occurred to Ruby, and she pointed a finger at Penny, who still looked uncomfortable. “I hope you don’t feel sad or less-than-a-person about missing out on those sensations.”
Penny smiled again, and Ruby’s heart skipped a beat. Mission accomplished! She’d made Penny less sad!
“Not at all!” Penny said. “I have learned to enjoy the world greatly through the sensations that I do have the capacity to process, and it brings me just as much joy as anyone else in this world!”
“More, I think. You’ve got more joy than anyone else I’ve met. I bet you’ve got more joy in you then you’ve got wires in your whole body.”
Penny blinked and tilted her head like she was thinking about something else. “Well, given that if you added up the total length of every single wire in my body—”
Ruby listened, rapt, as Penny dove into an explanation of just how much wiring she had, paired with a musing on her (unsuccessful) attempts at assigning a physical quantification to emotions. Anyone could see there was something special about Penny—but now Ruby knew just how special. And cool. And pretty. And smart. And energetic. And wonderful.
Penny cut herself off abruptly upon the return of the cook, so Ruby asked another question on her mind. “So your teammates like it here,” she said, propping her chin up on her hand, “But I want to know, what’s the exclusive Penny Pallas review of this place?”
Penny smiled again, but a different kind of smile that was smaller and quieter and yet it made Ruby’s heart squeeze in the strangest way.
“Well, I have found this establishment’s noodles to have a pleasing springiness,” she said.
At that moment, Ruby’s order was placed down in front of her, and she looked down into the steaming bowl of ramen, inhaling the ever-so-faint traces of something tickling the back of her nose.
“You know, some customers can’t even handle how spicy the smell is,” the cook said. She was leaning against the countertop and watching Ruby curiously. “Usually Atlesian tourists getting their first taste of real street food,” she added with a chuckle.
Ruby nodded, and then dug into the noodles, pulling up her Aura so her tongue wouldn’t be burnt. Aura blocked burns, but it didn’t block the pain of high temperatures, but Ruby didn’t have to worry about pain. She slurped up a bundle of noodles, chewed thoughtfully, and then vibrated with delight.
“You’re right!” she said to Penny around a mouthful of noodles. “They do have a pleasing springiness!”
The cook was staring at her now. “You’re not even going to wait for it to cool off—?”
“Nope!” Ruby swallowed another bite. She could feel a little bit of warmth and a trace of spice, which definitely meant it would be turning anyone else’s mouth into a raging inferno. “It’s good stuff!”
The cook was silent for a few seconds, and then she tossed a wink at Ruby. “Well, I know a fellow Mistrali transplant when I see one.”
“Nope, actually, I’m Atlesian!” Ruby said brightly.
“Huh.” The cook gave her a weird look, but she didn’t say anything else, and a few seconds later she was disappearing into the back to work on Penny’s order.
“Wonder what that was about… But anyway! People say it’s sad I don’t sense tastes or smells, but I don’t think it’s sad! I think it’s just a thing that makes me different!” She leaned in closer. “And it means I don’t even blink at stuff in battle that most soldiers take years to get used to.”
Because she couldn’t really feel pain, when she had her Aura up, she was invincible. There wasn’t a single hit that could rock her. A Megoliath trying to run her through with one of its tusks? She wouldn’t come close to flinching.
“Hmm.” Penny tapped her chin. “The closest thing I have to pain is a system that alerts me to damage around my body, but I can dismiss the alerts, and they do not actually impede my function any more than the actual damage impedes the performance. So I’m not sure if it can be accurately called pain.”
“Huh. Maybe it’s like, our own kind of sensation. Like, I can still feel some things, if I’ve got a gaping wound I’ll know it’s there. I can sort of feel the stool I’m sitting on right now. Sort of like you, that’s an us thing. Y’know, a born to save the world kind of thing.”
A thing that only they shared. Like they were a secret club. Or a dynamic duo. Or a…
“You know what we are?” she said, abruptly deciding to borrow one of Penny’s favorite bits of vocabulary. “We’re sensational!”
That seemed to confuse Penny. She mouthed the word, and then looked at Ruby. “Well, we most certainly are sensational in the usual meaning of the word, but in terms of actual senses… wouldn’t we be the opposite of sensational?”
“Well, yeah. But it’s ironic. We’re sensational and also we’re ironically sensational.”
“Oh.” Ruby could almost see the gears turning in Penny’s head (wait, did she have actual gears that turned in her head?), and then she nodded, smiling. “I understand now! Sadly, I am still learning the intricacies of irony.”
At that point, the cook came out with Penny’s ramen, and for a few minutes, there wasn’t much talking, just eating, because Ruby needed the food. She didn’t really feel hunger, either (unless she went days without eating), so she relied on a regular schedule and also the sounds her stomach made to know when she needed food. And stomach grumbling that loud meant being really hungry.
When she was halfway through her bowl, she stopped and turned to Penny, just watching her eat for a little bit before she said something that was kinda obvious but also something she just wanted to say over and over and over again.
“I’m really glad I know you, Penny.”
Penny slurped a wayward noodle into her mouth and gave Ruby another bright smile. “And I am delighted to give you a place of honor in my memory banks, Ruby!”
Oh gods, Penny was doing the thing where she said something that made Ruby feel like she was seeing fifty different sunrises over the Atlesian tundra at the same time. Penny was really good at doing that.
“I just wish I could spend more time with you…” she muttered. “But I’m definitely not allowed to leave the airship after this. I don’t even know if the General will let me participate in the Vytal Tournament at this point.” Which was kind of the entire reason why Ruby had come to Vale. If that wasn’t a possibility anymore, maybe she could request a transfer back to Atlas before the semester was over, where she’d have a lot more free roam. She wouldn’t see Penny anymore, which would be sad, but maybe Penny could come to Atlas! Maybe—
“Hm. About that.” Penny put down her chopsticks and looked off into the distance, pursing her lips. “I may have a solution.”
After a half-day of exploring Vale with Ruby, Penny decided the best way to conclude their outing was at the docks, watching the sunset. And this was where she explained her plan to Ruby, the two of them sitting on the edge of a pier, their feet dangling over the undulating ocean waters.
“If you are supposed to be a secret, I believe you can use that to your advantage.”
Seagulls circled overhead, their cries echoing in Penny’s audioreceptors. The sound mingled with the distant blasts of a ship’s horn from somewhere far off shore, still trying to find its way into the safety of the harbor before nightfall.
“If you unexpectedly show up to classes explaining that you’ve recovered from your illness, the General cannot force you back to the airship without attracting an undue amount of attention from the Beacon faculty. Which will be the opposite of what he wants.”
Ruby turned to stare at Penny, her eyes going wide. “So he’ll need to let me keep going to class so I can seem like a normal student with normal eyes!”
Penny nodded. “Precisely!”
“That’s brilliant—but…” Her shoulders slumped, and she turned her gaze down on the murky water. “I still gotta sneak off the airship. How do I do that?”
“Don’t get on it.”
“Huh?”
“You are currently not on the airship. If you continue to not be on the airship for the next twenty-four hours, you will be able to attend classes tomorrow.”
Ruby’s mouth fell open.
“Oh my gods,” she whispered. “That’s perfect…”
“You can sleep over in our dorm room!” Penny added. “We would be happy to have you!” There was the small matter of the rest of her team not knowing about this yet, but Penny was quite confident they would let Ruby stay over!
“Oh my gosh, this might actually be happening…” Ruby started to swing her legs energetically, looking out towards the horizon. “I could make more friends! And I could spend time doing ordinary teenage girl things! Like… like…” She paused, and then looked towards Penny. “What do ordinary teenage girls do for fun?”
“I am not entirely sure I’m the best authority on that topic.”
Ruby giggled, and registering the sound sent a strange surge of power through Penny’s legs. If she’d been standing, she might’ve momentarily stumbled. Hm. She would have to investigate that potential glitch later.
“Okay, what do extraordinary teenage girls like you do for fun?”
“Well…” Penny thought for a moment. “I like to fly.”
“Oh.” A look of awe and something else unidentifiable came over Ruby’s face. “I’ve always wished I could fly. Just, high over the tundra, nothing in sight except me and snow and mountains that just seem like they go on forever, and…”
She trailed off. Suddenly, Penny believed she’d identified the other emotion in Ruby’s expression: Jealousy. And longing.
“What’s it like?” Ruby said. “When you do it, I mean.”
“It feels like…” Penny looked out over the glittering water as the blazing orange circle in the distance kissed the water’s edge, beginning its slow descent into the water and the night. “...Freedom. Like I can go anywhere, or do anything. Like nothing in the world could ever hold me down.”
“That sounds so beautiful…”
“It is also a wonderful reminder of the things that are special about me, the things that make me, me.” Penny placed both of her hands over her chest, directly over the location of her Aura generator, and squeezed one hand tightly inside the other. She wasn’t sure exactly why she was doing this, but it felt right. “If anyone else wanted to see the world from above, they would need an airship. But I can see the world from above any time I want, because of who I am. And that makes me proud. There are times when my difference from everyone else feels scary, but soaring above the world and seeing everything all at once… it is the opposite of scary. It is sensational.”
Penny had never said something like this out loud, and it was intimidating and exhilarating all at the same time. Which was a confusing combination of emotions that didn’t feel like it should be possible. Was Penny allowed to be proud of her difference? Did it make her less of a person because she liked that she was different from everyone else?
Almost immediately, she had an answer. Blake or Velvet or any other Faunus she knew would tell her yes. They’d tell her that celebrating her difference was one of the most important things a person could do. And Nora and Jaune and Yang and Blake and Ren and Coco and—well, every member of the queer club—would tell her that taking pride in difference was wonderful. They’d tell her it was one of the best emotions a person could feel.
And Penny was quite inclined to agree, given the feeling of warmth that was coursing through her body right now which couldn’t be explained by the fading sunlight on her face or even the presence of a friend next to her.
“That’s awesome,” Ruby whispered. She was still staring at Penny, her eyes flicking back and forth between her face and her wings.
And then a wonderful idea occurred to Penny. She activated her wings with that familiar ka-chunk and stood up, holding a hand out to Ruby. “Would you like to experience it for yourself?”
Ruby gasped, and then jumped to her feet so fast it activated her Semblance, silver shimmers streaming off her. “Yes! Yes! A million yeses!” She reached out and grabbed Penny’s hand, as if she was afraid Penny might suddenly change her mind, and looked up into her eyes. “Oh my gosh, I… You’re sure? I’m not gonna like, make it too hard for you?”
“Not at all!” Penny pulled Ruby a little closer to her, scanning her shape and calculating how to best carry her in midair for aerodynamic purposes. “The carrying capacity of my thrusters far exceeds your weight.”
Ruby nodded, and then her eyes went to Penny’s wings again. “You’ve got enough battery for it?”
“I would certainly hope so, given that the fuel for my flight mode is me!” Using her wings did significantly cut down on her battery time, so she tried to use it sparingly, but she’d charged last night, so she didn’t have to worry. Unless they wanted to fly to another continent. “Are you ready?”
Ruby took a deep breath, hopped from one foot to the other, and nodded. “As ready as I’ll ever be!”
“Prepare for takeoff!” Penny reached out, turned Ruby around, and then wrapped her arms around Ruby’s waist so that she was hugging her from behind (this would give Ruby the best view while still holding her safely) and then fired her thrusters, slowly lifting into the air. Ruby let out a little gasp as they took off, and although Penny couldn’t see her face, she had to imagine her silver eyes were as wide as she’d ever seen them.
“Whoa…” she breathed. “This is incredible.”
Penny giggled. They were barely seven meters off the ground, and she hadn’t even started moving on the horizontal axis.
She leaned forward, upped the power to her thrusters, and they soared out over the water, flying towards the blazing neon colors of the sunset. Ruby fell silent, and Penny could see just enough of her face to see that she was taking in everything, agape.
Penny rose higher, higher, until they could see Vale sweeping to the horizon in one direction and the ocean swallowing up the sun in the other direction. With no airships nearby, they were alone in the sky. Two simple souls in bodies that were anything but simple, doing something that no one else in the world could do.
Ruby put out her arms like she was a bird and laughed, a full-on laugh that Penny hadn’t heard until now, a sound of pure joy that she wanted to write into her memory again and again.
“Fria likes painting sunsets, she’d love this one! Maybe I should try painting this for her, I never imagined in my life that flying would look like this and feel like this…” she said, her voice barely audible over the rushing wind. “I want her to see what I’m seeing. All of it. Every color… the way it feels…” Then Ruby twisted her head to look at Penny, and she fell silent, a strange expression coming over her face.
“Is something wrong?” Penny said, checking her vitals and preparing for a rapid descent just in case—
“Nope! Everything’s fine, I just…” Ruby trailed off, still looking at Penny, and it was a few seconds before she found her words. “Your hair is the color of the sunset.”
“Oh! Thank you…” That made all of Penny’s processors jump, which in turn kicked her internal cooling fans into gear. Was it her favorite compliment she’d ever received? Maybe.
“Maybe I should paint you, too,” Ruby said, and Penny might’ve considered it a joke if not for how serious Ruby’s expression was as she said it.
“Penny, I…” Ruby swallowed hard and then looked back to the sunset. “I know I just said I like having a destiny, but… You’re making me realize it’d be nice to see what else is out there in the world, too, while I’m saving it. What you said in the garden! I need to know what I’m protecting! I want to see more, and I want to do more, and I want to meet more, and I want to… I just want to… more.” She shrugged helplessly. “But that means I have to disobey orders! I have to go against everything I believe in as a soldier!” She looked back to Penny, and there were tears in her eyes now. “How do I choose between what I want to do and what I need to do?”
Penny was silent for a moment, thinking over her answer as the wind rushed around them with a faint roar.
“That is a question I struggle with quite a bit,” she said finally. “And over and over again, the answer I calculate is that it’s impossible to do all of what you want, and it’s impossible to do all of what you need. And it would not be good to have too much of one and not enough of the other. So I do some from both. And I think happiness is found in choosing your balance.” She thought about it for a little longer, and then decided to say something that was maybe a little risky, but she did not like keeping things from her friends.
“Ruby, it seems to me that you have spent much of your life disregarding what you want to do,” she said. “So I think you have the margins to pay more attention to the things you want, while still being an excellent soldier!”
Ruby was silent for a long time, the oranges and reds and yellows of the sunset washing over her face, the wind whipping her braid around. Finally, she looked back to Penny and nodded once.
“Penny, I think you’re right, and, um… I’m not just glad I know you. I’m glad I know all of you.” She reached out and poked Penny in the collarbone.
Penny beamed right back at her. “And I am so glad that I know you fully, Ruby.”
On the other side of the city
“All right.” Blake pocketed her scroll. “The distractions are primed and Bumblebee’s ready to go in case we need to make a quick getaway, and I’ve got our masks…”
“…And the rest of the team is on speed dial,” Yang finished. She shook her arms, shrinking her gauntlets down to their travel size, and pulled the sleeves of her jacket down to her wrists. “You’re sure they’re not going to figure out I’m a human?” she said as Blake handed her a White Fang mask.
“There’s plenty of Faunus with invisible characteristics. Not as many in the Fang, but that’s the assumption they’ll make.”
Yang had to look down for a moment to adjust with the straps of her mask, so by the time she looked up, Blake had her mask on already, and—
Her heart skipped a beat. She wouldn’t say this out loud because it was definitely something Blake wasn’t proud of, but good grief, seeing her in that mask was making Yang feel something.
Then Blake gave her a strangely amused half-smile, and Yang realized to her complete embarrassment that she must’ve made that reaction pretty clear just now. Well, at least Blake didn’t seem insulted?
“Either that, or they’re going to think you’re a lion Faunus.”
“What?”
“Your hair.” Blake’s smile widened a bit. “Honestly, Yang, sometimes I think it’s so beautiful that I can barely believe it’s human.”
“Oh. Um. Thanks.” Yang jammed her mask on before Blake could see her blush. A lion’s mane… oh gods, she was going to be replaying this conversation in her head for a month.
She straightened her mask and blinked. “Huh. It’s easier to see out of than I thought.”
Blake tilted her head, looking at Yang, and then stepped closer, reaching a hand up to her face.
“Shame you’re not a Faunus.” She tapped her fingers along the side of Yang’s face and gave the mask one final adjustment. “It looks good on you.”
With that, she turned away and nodded in the direction of the rally, leaving Yang’s heart hammering in her chest for reasons that had nothing to do with the mission.
They walked side-by-side out into the street and joined a group of other masked people filtering into a buzzing warehouse. It seemed they’d arrived just in time—inside, a beefy man with a booming voice on a makeshift stage was greeting everyone.
And by ‘everyone,’ Yang really did mean a lot of people. More than she’d expected. But no one seemed to be taking notice of her, and she found herself able to relax a tiny bit. Blake kept scanning the crowd slowly, and Yang wondered if she was looking for the ponytailed girl from the docks.
There was an Atlesian Paladin on stage, with a White Fang logo spray-painted onto it. Oh, that wasn’t good at all.
“—And for the new recruits, you’ll have the chance tonight to meet our leader!” the lieutenant onstage was saying now.
Suddenly, Blake stiffened, and with her bow off, Yang could clearly see Blake’s ears going flat against her head—she’d never seen them pinned this far back, ever.
“Blake?” she whispered, moving a little closer to her. “What’s wrong?”
Now Blake was clearly trying to say something, but all that was coming out of her mouth was a choked gasping.
“Give him a round of applause now!” the lieutenant boomed, and cheers broke out as a lanky, redhaired man with a sword affixed to his side sauntered out from backstage, giving the audience an assured wave. Simultaneously, Blake latched onto Yang’s arm with a deathly tight grip.
“A—A—”
“Blake?” Yang whispered again, leaning closer to her just to try and make out anything she was saying. “Please, just tell me what’s going on!”
And finally, Blake seemed to find a voice, but it was so quiet and shaky that Yang could barely believe it was Blake saying the next word. Or rather, the next name.
“Adam.”
Notes:
Well, with Torchwick still in jail, someone high up on the food chain had to be at the White Fang rally!
For the scene of Penny taking Ruby flying, please imagine this song playing over the scene.
Chapter 20: Ghost In The Machine
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
Before Yang could ask what Blake meant, she was turning away from the stage, yanking at Yang’s elbow, pulling her towards the door.
“We need to get out of here. Now.”
She was hyperventilating—Yang could feel her breathing so fast she might be about to pass out, and she wasn’t looking at Yang, just the exit.
“Blake, what—”
The world turned red.
Yang’s Aura was up—she’d had it up from the moment they stepped into the building—and that was the only reason why, when a massive force slammed into her from behind like an enormous knife hacking at her, it didn’t cut her in half. But she felt her Aura vibrating and flexing around her as it pushed back the viciously sharp blow and she was knocked to the ground. She knew she couldn’t take many of those hits.
People around her were screaming. Yang pulled herself up into her knees, trying to get back the wind knocked out of her, and put her hand out—putting it right into something hot and wet and sticky.
Blood.
Whose blood?
The screaming was only getting louder.
She forced her attention away from whatever she’d just put her hand in, and raised her head to see Blake ahead of her—unharmed, thank the gods—on her back and scrabbling backwards towards the door, her mask knocked askew, revealing just enough of one eye to show her pure terror.
Yang finally took a breath and heaved herself to her feet, oxygen and adrenaline coursing through her veins, and risked a look over her shoulder. There were people lying on the ground. People who must’ve been standing next to them and got hit by whatever hit Yang and Blake. People who didn’t have their Aura up, or didn’t have unlocked Aura.
There was too much blood. The screaming was getting louder, the crowd dissolving into chaos.
The red-haired leader with the sword was shoving slowly through the crowd towards them, a faint sneer the only part of his masked face visible, and the sight of that, along with his sword which was glowing the same shade of red as the air around her right before she’d been hit, was what finally jolted Yang into action.
She leapt forward, trying not to look at any of the wounded around them, and grabbed Blake by the shoulder, hauling her up as she ran towards the exit, which was mercifully close. Blake staggered outside with her, slowly shaking off her terrified stupor, but Yang didn’t know how long the chaos inside would prevent Tall, Red, And Evil from chasing them.
“Blake!” she whisper-shouted, shaking her with what she hoped was an appropriate balance of gentleness and urgency as the two of them stumbled down the street. “Blake, we need to get out of here! Are you okay?”
Blake glanced over her shoulder. “He shouldn’t be here—what’s he doing here? Why is he—is this all—” She broke off as her eyes focused on Yang for the first time, and she took a deep, shuddering breath before hanging onto her a little tighter.
“Run,” she hissed.
They did.
Yang glanced back once and saw a crowd spilling out of the warehouse, but she couldn’t tell if they were chasing them, or if it was just… people fleeing a scene of chaos. It didn’t matter, though—a few seconds later, they reached Bumblebee’s hiding spot.
Yang slung a leg over the front as Blake jumped on behind her, wrapping her arms around Yang and pressing her body against her back with… maybe a lot more strength than was necessary.
She tossed her mask off and looked back as she started the engine. She could feel Blake’s heart thudding in her chest like a drum, and her ears were still pinned flat against her head. “Are you okay?”
“No,” Blake gasped out.
Suddenly, an enormous crashing and crunching of metal echoed in the distance, like a wall had just been knocked down. Blake threw a frantic look over her shoulder, and then met Yang’s eyes. Her pupils were just tiny dots of black in her amber eyes. “Go. Go.”
Yang kicked the bike into gear and twisted the throttle hard. Bumblebee roared in response, and they burst out of the alleyway, spitting dust and gravel behind them as they screeched through a near-ninety-degree turn, flames spitting out the exhaust. Yang buried the throttle again and they took off down the street.
“Where are we going?” she shouted over the wind.
“Back to Beacon! This mission is over! We just need to get to safety!”
“Got it.” Yang slowed down just enough to make their next turn onto a main road, narrowly missing a collision with a truck, which showed its displeasure by blasting its horn. Yang ignored it as she started plotting their route back—gods, being like Penny and having a map of the city in her head right about now would be perfect—
The truck was still blasting its horn, which made no sense, because Yang had left it in the dust already. Along with several other cars. In fact, why were so many cars honking—
“Yang!” Blake shouted, squeezing her waist even harder. Yang risked the briefest of backward glances—
They were being chased by the Atlesian Paladin that’d been on stage at the rally, and it was stomping over and through everything in its path, kicking cars out of the way like they were made of cardboard.
“What the fuck?” Yang said, before whipping Bumblebee around a stopped van just before they would’ve crashed into the back.
“Concentrate on driving! I’ll call Penny and Weiss!” Blake said, and Yang was immensely relieved to hear the determination returning to her partner’s voice, even if she still sounded a little shaky.
Yang jammed her motorcycle goggles onto her face—she hadn’t had time to put them on until now—and urged Bumblebee onward, weaving between cars and trying to ignore the sound of the rampaging Paladin getting nearer.
“Weiss is meeting up with us in a few minutes!” Blake said a moment later. “And Penny’s ETA is—”
Yang heard a familiar whine from her left. A moment later, Penny flew into view alongside them, flying low and dodging cars without even looking. She waved happily to them, like they weren’t being chased by a giant military mech right now.
“—Right now,” Blake finished.
“Yang!” Penny called. “There is a block of condemned warehouses scheduled to be demolished zero-point-three kilometers away! If we lead the Paladin there, we can fight it in an advantageous environment while also minimizing civilian casualties!”
“Perfect!” Blake shouted immediately. “Can you lead us there?”
Penny nodded and shot forwards before executing an impossibly sharp midair turn down an intersection. To follow, Yang had to hit the brakes hard and slide through the intersection at a red light, narrowly missing three different cars before she was pointing in the right direction again, accelerating so fast Bumblebee pulled a wheelie. The street they’d just turned onto was, thankfully, much less busy.
“You good?” she said over her shoulder to Blake.
“Mentally? No. Physically? Yes.”
That would have to be enough for now. Yang followed Penny under a highway overpass and towards a fenced-off building, and when Penny flew over the fence, Yang crashed straight through it.
Penny touched down next to them and drew Luminous Electra as Blake and Yang hopped off their bikes, cocking their weapons. The distant thudding of the Paladin grew louder.
“How quick did you say Weiss was getting here?” Yang said.
“Four seconds ago!”
“Oh, sweet. Wait, what—”
Weiss dropped down from the sky next to them, Myrtenaster drawn in a guard pose. “You know, Yang, there are more ways into a place than breaking down the front gate.”
Yang decided she would think of a snappy rebuttal later, when they weren’t fighting for their lives. She turned to Blake, whose breath was speeding up again, coming dangerously close to hyperventilating. Penny must’ve noticed, too, because she was watching Blake with concern.
But before anyone could ask if she was okay, the building beside them exploded.
Team BSYP scattered to avoid the rain of debris as the Paladin burst through the wall, turning it into nothing but rubble in seconds. Yang and Blake took cover behind some sort of small outbuilding, while Penny lifted up into the air, and Weiss ducked behind the corner of a warehouse.
For a moment, there was no sound except the whining and clanking of the enormous machine as it stomped into the open space, weaponry lasers on its body flashing in all directions.
And then an unfamiliar voice rumbled through the air. Well, unfamiliar for Yang. Blake let out a gasp and flattened herself against the wall as soon as she heard it.
“Blake, Blake, will you come out from wherever you are? Or will you keep running and hiding instead of facing your responsibilities, like you always do?”
It took Yang a moment to realize it was coming from some sort of loudspeaker on the mech. And Blake was… Well, between her reaction at the rally and the pure fear that kept bubbling up in her every few moments, and now this fucker directly addressing her…
“I’m guessing you have a history with him?” she muttered, risking a peek around the corner. Whoever was in the mech—the Adam guy, probably—seemed content to wait for them to attack. Or maybe he wanted to play more mind games.
Blake gave a single nod in reply to Yang, and then the loudspeaker crackled again with a voice that was getting annoying fast.
“Do you know what you’ve done to me by leaving the way you did? Do you know how hard it’s been to keep going, ever since you ripped my heart out to satisfy your little warped conscience?”
…Oh. That kind of history.
“I assume the three girls with you are your teammates. Can you imagine what they’ll think of you when you fail them, just like everyone else you’ve failed in your life?”
Blake started to rise to her feet, but Yang caught her shoulder. “Blake. Is it a good idea for you to be in this fight?”
She gave Yang an unfocused, disbelieving look. “Do we have any other choice?”
“Well… he’s dangerous, but he’s also getting under your skin. If you just go charging in trying to shut him up, you’ll be playing right into his hands. Which might turn out even worse than if you just stayed here and took a few minutes to breathe.”
“Oh.” Blake, who had been on the verge of doing exactly what Yang was warning against, pulled up suddenly and stared at her. “I… okay, that’s a really good idea. Thank you, Yang.”
She gave Blake a comforting smile. “Happy to help. It’s what partners do.”
“You’re sure you’re going to be okay without me?” Blake said. “I… I don’t know how long it’ll take for me to feel normal again, and Adam… he’s… he’s dangerous. He enjoys hurting people.”
As a response, Yang reached forward and slowly, gently hugged Blake. Blake tensed up at first, but then Yang felt her rapidly relaxing. When she made a little sigh from somewhere in her throat, the sound bursting with emotion, Yang added, “I won’t put Weiss and Penny in over their heads. We’re just going to shut him up so you can hear yourself again. You’re gonna be fine. We’re gonna be fine.”
Blake took a deep, shaky breath, squeezed Yang once more, and nodded. “Good luck. And—”
She stopped talking, but leaned forward slowly like she wanted to… wanted to…
At the last moment, she pulled back, and instead of whatever she’d been about to do, she brought up a hand and cupped the side of Yang’s face with a tender touch that made her feel like her face was on fire, and then she stepped back.
“I’ll join in as soon as I’m ready.”
Yang nodded and burst out from behind her cover, sprinting towards Weiss’s position as the mech swung to track her, a spray of machine-gun fire erupting from one of its arms. Penny swooped down to them just as Yang reached Weiss, and the three of them dodged back behind cover.
And then Adam had apparently lost patience with waiting for an attack, because he started stomping towards them, and one look at the walls of thin corrugated metal blocking its path told Yang this would not be viable cover for much longer.
“Run!” she said, and the three of them broke into a dash just as the mech flattened the wall with a single stomp of its foot and walked right over the wreckage.
“Inside!” Penny pointed towards a nearby open door. “If we force it to follow us through an entire building, it may take damage from the sheer amount of debris!”
Well, worth a shot. They barreled through the door and then another one, and moments later the mech followed in an avalanche of sound.
“Is Blake alright?” Weiss called, glancing back.
“She’s got a really bad history with this guy! I told her to stay back and catch her breath because fighting in the middle of a panic attack is gonna get her hurt.”
Weiss barely avoided a ceiling collapsing behind them, brought down by a giant metal fist punching through out of nowhere. “I don’t mean to sound callous, but that makes our chances of victory even worse!”
“We just need to buy some time! Penny, how does your strength compare to that thing?”
“How do I put this?” Penny dodged a flying I-beam which impaled itself in the ground next to her. “I would lose an arm-wrestling match with it!”
Yang heard Weiss mutter, “We’re going to die,” just before they ran out into—well, the warehouse part of a warehouse, meaning big open space. The exact opposite of what they needed.
“Don’t worry, Weiss! We have help!”
Yang had just enough time to wonder what Penny meant by that before the mech burst through the wall, leaving a gaping trail of destruction all the way to the outside.
“Our help has arrived, actually!” Penny, looking upward as she said that, sounded entirely unconcerned by the mech bearing down on them.
At the moment she spoke, Yang noticed a shimmer of silver in the corner of her vision.
A Paladin-290. Bristling with the most advanced weaponry on the planet. Strong enough to out-punch an Alpha Ursa. Built with advanced tracking systems, automatic target lock, and 360-degree turret capacity. It would be an unthinkably formidable foe for most people.
But Ruby Karyatis was not most people, and fighting Paladins was how she trained.
She dropped down from the catwalk she was perched on and landed in the mech’s path, interrupting its march towards Penny and Weiss and Yang. With her goggles over her eyes, the familiar red tint of the lenses doused the visible world in the color of blood, just like she was going to paint this mech in its own hydraulic fluid and also the blood of its pilot.
“Would you like to surrender now, or do you need a curb-stomping first?!” she shouted, drawing Lunar Enforcer and transforming it into dual-wielding mode.
The mech responded by swinging one of its enormous metal arms at her. Ruby semblanced out of the way, but not sideways—up. And when she fell out of Silver Storm, she landed on top of its still-swinging arm, anchoring herself with her Aura. Before the mech could try to shake her off, she stabbed one of her blades down into a gap where the arm-mounted machine gun articulated, and she was rewarded with a thunderous crackle of electricity as she sliced through some very important wires. Of course, the electricity arced down her weapon and around her hand, enough of it to make a seasoned Huntress yell in pain even with their Aura up—but Ruby Karyatis was not most seasoned Huntresses, and all she felt was a slight tickle.
Score one for her broken sensory systems.
With the machine gun now flapping uselessly around, she vaulted up onto the top of the mech, stopped just long enough to tauntingly smack her weapon on the heavily armored piloting compartment, and then semblanced up towards the roof. She landed back on the same catwalk she’d just left, and a spray of gunfire from the one still-operative machine gun told her she’d successfully focused the mech’s attention on her and her alone. Now to bring the building down on it.
Penny and Yang weren’t idle, either, darting in to hack and punch at the mech’s legs while it unloaded all of its weaponry. Of course, it wasn’t doing much because they were hitting at the most heavily armored part of a Paladin, but Ruby couldn’t blame them for what they didn’t know.
She ran down the catwalk, staying just ahead of the mech’s hail of gunfire, and then abruptly swung off the catwalk right as she heard an extremely ominous groaning sound—exactly what she’d hoped for.
She dropped down onto the ground and grinned at the mech, which was currently trying to stomp Weiss into dust.
“Not dead yet!” she shouted, giving it a little wave and sticking her tongue out.
The mech took one thudding step towards her, and then the roof collapsed on it.
A Paladin could easily shrug off a collapsing warehouse roof with nothing more than a few scratches of paint. But what it could not shrug off was a twenty-five-ton air conditioning unit mounted on said roof falling directly onto it. There was a reason why Ruby had scoped out the ground before joining the fight, after all.
There was an almighty crunch, and Ruby was on the mech again before the pilot could even think about recovering, leaping up onto a crushed, sparking shoulder joint and plunging both of Lunar Enforcer’s blades straight down into it. The same crackle of electricity told her she’d struck gold, and she jumped back before she could be thrown off.
Now the Paladin looked a little punch-drunk, staggering forwards in an uneven path and one side of it decidedly lopsided where the air-conditioning unit had landed. It had one arm with no weapon and one arm it couldn’t move, and for Ruby that was blood in the water.
When she launched herself over Yang at the Paladin one more time, turning Lunar Enforcer into its sniper mode, she didn’t even try to conceal the move. Just straight in, guns blazing, Atlesian-style takedown.
She was Moonrise. And she couldn’t be stopped any more than the moon could be stopped from ascending.
Blam. Blam. Blam.
She was already unloading every bullet in Lunar Enforcer before she landed, aiming for the seams on the cockpit that were concealing the pilot. She knew whoever was inside would be barraged with alarms right now, unable to figure out which way was up—desperation. Weakness. Mistakes. She could almost taste what was about to happen next. Just like how Fria had taught her to harness the wind her Semblance generated, how to make it her ally. How could anyone fight something as overwhelming as the wind?
Fria must’ve been a truly terrifying warrior when she was younger. Maybe as terrifying as Ruby planned to be.
As the Paladin began to stagger into a too-sharp turn, she dove off it and into her Semblance, the world fading to the nearly featureless blur of Silver Storm as she circled the Paladin too many times to count in the blink of an eye, stirring up not just a storm but an entire tornado, throwing the Paladin even more off-balance. Ruby popped out of her Semblance just in time to see what remained of the warehouse’s roof come down on it and finish the job, slamming the teetering machine facefirst into the ground.
For a few moments, there was nothing but silence and the sound of violently buzzing electricity as the dust settled and Ruby scanned the scene. Yang, still standing. Weiss, still standing. Penny—
“Where’s Penny?” she said.
Weiss, gaping at her, blinked and shook herself. “She was next to the Paladin when it went down—”
CLANG.
The cockpit hatch launched itself off the Paladin like it’d been shot, and from inside emerged a red-haired White Fang soldier with a sword that looked quite nasty. He also looked entirely too calm for someone who’d just had his ass kicked. And he was staring directly at Ruby.
“I know an Atlesian attack dog when I see one,” he spat. “All bark, no bite, hiding behind—”
That was as far as Ruby let him get before she started shooting.
Annoyingly, he was blocking every shot with his sword—and absorbing them somehow, she was going to have to figure out how he was doing that—but it shut him up, at least. And gave her time to realize who she was fighting.
Deep red hair, White Fang mask, red sword… this had to be Adam Taurus. One of the most wanted people in Atlas.
Her pulse quickened at the thought of hauling him in, too. Between him and Torchwick, would this be the most successful semester for an academy student, ever? Moonrise, the slayer of Grimm and the destroyer of crime? It had a nice ring to it.
Suddenly, Taurus was looking at something behind her and scowling.
“I don’t need your help, girl!” he yelled.
Who was he talking to—
A flash of pink and brown and white crossed Ruby’s peripheral vision, and then a short girl with an umbrella was landing on the ground next to Taurus, and throwing a dirty look at him. His only reply to that was a growl, but he seemed to have accepted her presence there, and dirty looks aside, they looked like allies.
Oh, well. One more criminal for Ruby to haul in tonight. She tightened her grip on Lunar Enforcer, getting ready to—
“Adam.”
That voice ringing out made everyone whip around to look at the source.
Blake Belladonna stood above them on the edge of the destroyed roof, her weapons in hand and glaring down at Taurus like a vengeful goddess, her hair fluttering in the night breeze.
Ruby nodded. She always appreciated a Huntress with a flair for the dramatic. It was one of the more underrated parts of the job.
“Letting everyone else do your dirty work and then showing up to claim the glory, Blake?” Taurus growled, lifting his sword so its tip pointed directly at Blake.
“No. I’m here to finish this.” Blake leapt down, landing gracefully between Weiss and Yang as Ruby backed up to Weiss’s side, forming a line with the other three. One wanted and highly dangerous criminal. One unknown girl with a very sharp umbrella. Three Huntresses-in-training. And Moonrise.
“If you insist on digging your own grave, I will make you lay in it,” he snarled.
As Ruby lowered herself into an attack position alongside Weiss and Blake and Yang, she couldn’t stop herself from checking their surroundings over and over again for the missing member of their side. Where was Penny?
Penny could not move.
She was quite capable of moving, but if she moved, she would run the risk of catastrophic electrocution. The kind of electrocution that could overload her body’s circuits and shut her down, or worse, corrupt her memory. Although she’d escaped damage from the falling roof, the debris trapping her was highly electrified due to the damaged mech laying partly across it and discharging lethal amounts of electricity from its damaged joints.
She locked her limbs in place—any attempt to even just shift her position could be catastrophic—and tried to gauge the course of the battle from the sounds she picked up.
She could still hear Blake and Yang’s weapons, and the chiming of Weiss’s glyphs, and the rushing wind associated with Ruby’s Semblance, but beyond that… nothing but clashes of metal, grunts, and the occasional explosion. And then, Blake’s voice—
“Be careful! His Semblance lets him use his weapon to store energy from your attacks and throw it back!”
Penny filed that information away as a cold laugh echoed through the warehouse, and then suddenly the color of the air shifted to something akin to blood. Her visual color-correction protocols were thrown into pandemonium, and she found herself having to disable them entirely as a shockwave shook the ground beneath her.
“Blake!” The fear in Yang’s tone could only mean one thing; that Blake had been hit. Hard. Penny had no idea if Blake was still fighting, or injured, or worse, but—
A cry of pain. From Weiss.
The sounds of the fight were moving farther away. Was that good? Penny didn’t know what was happening. Her radar was blocked by debris, the arcing electricity nearby was wreaking havoc on most of her other sensors, the only thing she could see was a slab of metal, and—and—
She wanted to scream. She wanted to slam her fists into the ground and punch away everything blocking her. What if—what if this was what made her teammates lose faith in her? What if they never trusted her in a fight after this because she had a body that could be stopped by something as simple as electricity? What if they decided she wasn’t good enough to be a Huntress? What if someone got hurt and they blamed her for it? What if someone died and they blamed her for it? What if—
Her frustration and fear mounted, along with the urge to move even though she couldn’t possibly do so right now. She just needed to—just needed—
Something flashed a bright green in Penny’s vision too fast even for her photoreceptors to parse, and then—and then—
She was in darkness. And silence. There was nothing. She couldn’t even tell if there was a world around her anymore.
What?
Her first thought was that this was another one of her erased memories of the past, being rewritten into her conscious storage, but… this didn’t feel like a memory. It just felt like… existing.
Where was she? She tried to turn her head to look for something, anything, but with a growing terror she realized there wasn’t anything for her to move. She didn’t have a body so much as a… presence. She felt as indistinct as a cloud, or a ghost. The only hint she had was the faintest impression of a green glow from somewhere, but where—
She pushed. She didn’t know what she was pushing with; she only knew she was pushing out, filling the space she existed in, finding shape and matter and—
INPUT DETECTED: ATLESIAN PALADIN-290. Hardware detected. Visual input detected. Sensory input detected. Hardware detected. Movement controls detected. Weapons array detected.
Sensation flooded Penny. She was… in the cockpit of the mech? How had she moved herself here without electrocuting herself? Was the sudden loss of sensation a symptom of electrocution?
She turned her head, trying to regain her bearings, only to find the mech’s cockpit turning with her.
Wait.
Penny turned her head. Once again, the mech turned with her. She tried to look down into the cockpit at herself. She couldn’t. She might as well have tried to look at the inside of her head.
That was all Penny needed to see to realize—she wasn’t in the mech’s cockpit. She was in the mech somehow. It was now her body.
But how? Her consciousness did not have any kind of wireless connection! The only wireless connections her body had were not designed to handle nearly the amount of bandwidth needed to perform a remote-access maneuver! And this machine wasn’t designed to house a soul; it had no Aura generator, no type of—wait, what had happened to her body?
Penny tried to turn the mech’s head in the other direction to see, and that was when she remembered it was on its side and partially destroyed.
She needed to get up. Could the mech still move at all? She swung her legs up, and it was bizarre to see the legs of the mech responding as if there was a wired connection between them. She felt no extra weight in the movement; as if these had been her legs all along .
She was starting to feel a definite, piercing sense of panic. Was she trapped here? Was this a sign that she somehow wasn’t a person? Would her teammates think this made her less of a person somehow?
Think about it later. Moving the legs caused the mech to shift onto its back, and now she was looking—or was it that the mech’s cameras were looking?—at the sky. Progress.
Penny still didn’t understand what was going on, but at least the chassis was responding to her commands. However, when she tried to move her left arm, a status report informed her it was immobilized. Right arm—yes. It could move. It’d lost some range of motion, but if she calculated this right—
Penny stopped, realizing something very peculiar about what she’d just done. She still had access to all of her body’s systems—as in, her body, the one with orange hair and freckles. She could run a calculation on her body’s hardware and get back a result as if she was still sitting in her own head, and how was that possible? In fact, the more she concentrated, the more she had the distinct sensation of being in both bodies at the same time. But she felt far more… present in this one, even if that made no sense at all when she thought about it. How—
Never mind! She could think about this later, when her friends weren’t in danger! And however much she might be scared of the implications of this, she still had control of a somewhat-operative military mech! And she was going to do something!
She shoved the one operating arm back, and with a tremendous groan the entire machine jerked forwards, rising onto its knees and then, with another shove, she was upright.
She needed a status report, but she had no idea how to access this system’s—
As if the mech was listening to her, a flood of status reports flew through Penny’s stream of consciousness—most of which were extremely obvious malfunctions or things she could ignore—wait, there was a warning about an unauthorized incursion in the firewall.
Penny blinked. At least, she blinked internally. This mech didn’t have a blink function. That firewall incursion… was that her?
Once again, she would figure that out later! For now: Fight. Somehow.
Penny sent the mech forwards in a limping, thudding march, concentrating on visuals (frankly, her body’s visuals were better) and searching for the fight. The mech lumbered through one, two walls like nothing was there, and then she emerged into a courtyard between buildings, where exactly 1.7 seconds after emerging, she caught sight of the umbrella-wielding girl and Ruby locked in a fierce duel. Umbrella Girl had her back to Penny, and so it was Ruby who saw the mech approaching. Umbrella Girl must’ve taken the look of immense surprise on Ruby’s face as some sort of attempt at a trick, because she didn’t turn around. And so, when Penny flung the one operating mech arm at her, Umbrella Girl couldn’t have been caught more blindsided.
Her Aura flashed violently as several tons of metal slammed into her back at high speed, launching her astoundingly high, high enough to clear the highway pass looming above them. Where she was promptly rammed by a truck traveling at full speed just before she would’ve touched down.
Penny winced internally. She had not been intending for the hit to be that severe.
“Penny?”
Somewhere in the fight, the mech’s audioreceptors must’ve been damaged, because the voice came through in a crackle, but nonetheless Penny instantly recognized Ruby’s voice.
She swung the mech to look at Ruby, and that was when she remembered the cockpit hatch was wide open, meaning that it was quite obvious no one was piloting it.
“That is you, right?” Ruby said, tilting her head. “I mean, I don’t know why else a Paladin would turn its operating lights green and punch my opponent into the next continent…”
Loudspeaker, loudspeaker, loudspeaker, where’s the loudspeaker?! Wait, what if she just tried talking—
“Yes!” Penny said, and then almost jumped at the sound of her own voice blasting from the mech’s loudspeaker. “I am controlling the mech remotely, even if I have no idea how I am doing it!”
“Wow!” Ruby’s eyes bugged out, and she took a step closer, squinting like she might see Penny hiding somewhere in the mech if she looked hard enough. “Is it because of your beep boop stuff?”
“It doesn’t seem possible. I—” At that moment, Penny realized something quite important. If the mech was here, that meant the debris previously trapping her was no longer dangerously electrified, which meant she could move her body again!
…And how exactly was she going to move herself back? She didn’t even know how she’d left!
But before panic could set in, her own body’s logic core reminded her of a very important fact. She could still feel her own body. It was distant, but it was there, and if she jumped towards it…
Suddenly, Penny was no longer in the mech, but she was most definitely not back in her own body, either.
INPUT DETECTED: WRENCH.
What? What was she doing in a wrench? How was that even possible? How did her sensors know this was a wrench?
She tried to focus again on leaving the… wrench… and just trying to go somewhere else, and with that same instantaneous flash, she found herself in—
INPUT DETECTED: RUBY.
What? Ruby? As in her friend Ruby? Ruby the person with squishy guts? She had vision, and audio, but they were nothing like her normal vision and audio, and when she turned to try and parse her surroundings with a suddenly nonexistent radar array, her head—
“AH! Penny?! Are you in my head?!”
Penny was not the sort of person to ever be taken by surprise, but now, with none of her instruments available to her, and in completely unfamiliar territory, she shrieked, because that voice had come from—
She looked down at herself just long enough to register Ruby’s Atlesian uniform, and then she was pushing herself outward again with every bit of effort she had, trying to get out of here, get out of someone else, get back to her own body—
Suddenly, like a rubber band snapping back to its original position, Penny was finally back in her own body, a jolt of electricity surging through her.
She gasped on instinct. There was that same strange green flash at the corners of her vision, and then she was sitting up, running diagnostics on every corner of her body and trying to figure out how that had happened. Her Aura generator had registered multiple brief power spikes with each… transfer, but aside from that, everything seemed normal. So she shoved aside the debris pinning her down and stood up, shaking dirt and grit loose from her body, and picked up Luminous Electra. It was such a relief to have radar again.
She turned, and that was when she noticed a large wrench lying on the warehouse floor not too far from her. Well. That answered one of her questions, even if it was one of the much less important ones.
“Penny! You’re okay!”
Penny turned at the sound of Ruby’s voice, just in time for her to appear and bury Penny in a hug.
“Why wouldn’t I be?” she asked, returning the hug as Ruby pressed her face into Penny’s shoulder.
“Well—um—” Ruby pulled back, a blush blooming on her face. “I guess it’s kind of stupid, now that I think about it for more than two seconds, but the mech just collapsed and all the light went out of it, and I… I guess for a second I thought you’d died.”
“Oh.” Penny was really going to need to investigate this phenomenon further. “Don’t worry, Ruby! It will take more than that to kill me!”
If Neo had to predict how she would die, not in a billion years would she ever have said that her cause of death would be ‘falling off an overpass after getting punched into a speeding truck by a haunted mechsuit.’
And yet. And yet.
Here she was, hanging off the edge of a highway by her one uninjured hand, out of Aura and with no help coming as the strain in her fingers grew increasingly more unbearable.
She’d long accepted that she probably wouldn’t die of old age. It came with the territory of being a crime lord, after all. But this? THIS? This was how she was going to die?! From a lucky shot taken while bailing out Stick-Up-His-Ass Taurus from a mess of his own godsdamned making, fighting some baby Huntresses for a cause she really didn’t understand or care about beyond the promise of money and power?
…This was how she was going to die?
For nothing?
Alone?
Another passing truck shook the overpass, weakening Neo’s grip that much more. Her other arm wasn’t getting any less mangled.
She’d at least hoped Roman would die by her side. Dying would’ve felt a lot better if he was here with her, hanging off the ledge with no Aura and making some idiotic wisecrack about how he wasn’t expecting the gods to come collecting their dues so soon.
But no. It was just Neo. Alone. Roman was rotting away in a jail cell somewhere. He might not even know she was dead for weeks. Months, even.
She wasn’t letting go until her aching-burning-melting-into-magma muscles made her, but she knew she didn’t have much time.
Suddenly, she heard a different sound from the rumble of traffic and the whistling of the wind. It was… it was—the drone of a rocket?
And then the orange-haired baby Huntress with the giant fucking sword (and now a pair of WINGS, for some reason) landed on the highway directly above her, and held out a hand.
“Can you grab on?” she said, looking at Neo with the utmost genuine concern.
Neo stared for a moment, wondering if this was some sort of hallucination conjured up by her dying brain while she laid on the ground below in a crumpled heap of blood and broken bones.
Moments passed. The burning pain in Neo’s arm muscles moved slowly from the ‘churning magma’ stage to the ‘boiling plasma’ stage. She continued to stare up at Carrot-Top, who leaned closer, an expression of worry on her face. Neo decided this was not a hallucination. She was being rescued by the baby Huntress, who she was supposed to be fighting.
How embarrassing.
And now she had a new challenge: her arm which Carrot-Top was trying to grab was broken. Broken badly, and she apparently hadn’t realized that. Neo gave her a look that would hopefully convey that Carrot-Top was missing a key piece of information.
However, a few moments later, Carrot-Top must’ve realized Neo’s predicament, because she made a little “oh!” noise and then fired her rockets, lowering herself to a hover directly next to Neo.
“I am going to grab you around the waist! Is that alright?” she called.
She really didn’t have a fucking choice, as borne out by Carrot-Top immediately wrapping a pair of weirdly strong arms around Neo, gripping her tightly. And then, finally, Neo could let go of the bridge. It took her a few seconds longer than it should’ve; it felt like she’d forced her brain to forget how to move her fingers in order to hang there for as long as possible, and now she had to rebuild an entire part of her neural system in the space of a few seconds. But she did pry those fingers loose, and Carrot-Top didn’t drop her.
Carrot-Top flew down slowly, her rockets humming like a storm in Neo’s ears, and landed in a different part of the warehouse complex than where they’d been fighting. She sized up Neo for a moment before placing her down against a wall. She put a hand on her giant sword (seriously, how did she wield something that fucking big) and pulled a pair of handcuffs from somewhere.
Neo took the opportunity to use her uninjured arm to laboriously fingerspell a question that’d been pounding in her head from the moment Carrot-Top showed up.
Why did you help me?
Carrot-Top gave her a very confused look before saying, as if it was the simplest thing in the world: “Because you needed help!”
With that, she bent down, clapped the cuffs on Neo faster than she could blink, and flew off.
For a moment, all Neo could do was stare.
What an odd girl, she thought finally, before setting about the business of picking her handcuffs’ lock.
Notes:
In the most recent chapter of Nightshade's War Machines: Team BXPS fights Neo and the White Fang in a warehouse, with an assist from Ruby.
In the most recent chapter of my War Machines: Team BSYP fights Neo and a member of the White Fang in a warehouse, with an assist from Ruby.
I SWEAR this was accidental on both of our parts. And this isn't even the last time we'll end up having a funny-and-completely-unintentional coincidence between our stories!
All just the fun of these being sister fics, really.Current state of my backlog: The story is entirely written through Chapter 39; between the chapters posted and the chapters not yet posted, I have 268,000 words of War Machines written!
Chapter 21: Deep Cuts
Chapter Text
Every part of Blake hurt. Her head. Her arms. Her stomach. But most of all, her heart.
Because she wasn’t going to be strong enough to change anything. Again.
She’d listened to Yang, calmed herself down, found her focus again, and prepared to fight Adam as a team leader, not as a girl running scared. And what had all this progress gotten her?
Fighting a losing battle. Adam was too powerful. Weiss’s Aura was down, and now she and Yang guarded her, trying to defend their vulnerable teammate from Adam, and that was the worst position to be in against Adam—immobile, protecting someone else, having to defend themselves against his attacks. Which only added more and more energy to his Semblance. Penny was still nowhere to be seen—and for that matter, where was Ruby? She’d been fighting the silent girl, but at some point that duel had disappeared from view.
When Blake’s Aura dissolved on a hit from Adam, her self-recrimination intensified a hundredfold. She hated that she’d lost to him, hated that he was going to kill her with a satisfied smile on his face, all this running from her past, all this haunting by bad choices all just… for nothing.
But there was one member of her team still fighting. Yang stood her ground in Adam’s path, breathing heavily, her gauntlets raised and ready as he prowled around them, waiting for an opening. At some point during the fight, a stray shot had ruptured an aboveground steam pipe, causing a blanket of hot, wet mist to spread over the area, obscuring everything and reducing Adam’s form to a blurry shadow. The mist condensed on Blake’s skin, sticking to her clothes and making her feel as if she was breathing in mud.
“Even after all this, you can’t ever stop disappointing me, Blake,” Adam said, his cold, smug voice cutting through Blake like a freshly sharpened blade. “What a team you’ve gathered for yourself. You’re allied with a Schnee, and a simpleminded girl who ran off at the first sniff of danger, and a bimbo with more chest than sense.” He held his gleaming red blade out to one side, like a matador baiting a bull. “This is what you chose over me? How the righteous have fallen.”
Yang gave a slight shake of her head, and her hair ignited, that breathtaking volcanic glow erupting from it which meant her Semblance was active, which meant she was about to try to unload it all on him.
No.
“Yang,” she called as the burning light shining from Yang’s hair diffracted into the mist, wreathing her head in a glow like the sun emerging from a midday storm. She had to tell Yang to pick up Weiss and find Penny and run—it was Blake that Adam wanted before anyone else, after all. Even with no Aura, she could hold him back for long enough for her team to reach safety. And then Blake would be swallowed up by her past, and she’d die a failure of a Huntress and a traitor of the White Fang, with nothing to show for it except a team that’d just lost its leader.
“Run,” she said.
But Yang only shook her head.
“Nope. Not leaving you.”
And then she lowered herself into a crouch, getting ready to fire her gauntlets, and Blake sucked in a breath to scream at Yang to run, and then—
And only then did she register the thrum of rockets, the sudden rush of wind which meant—
A green streak of light flashed across her vision, and slammed into Adam at full speed and kept going, and by the time Blake’s brain caught up to her eyes, Penny was standing in front of her, leveling Luminous Electra at a spitting and cursing Adam who was rising to his feet.
“Are there any other hostiles?” Penny asked without looking at Blake. Her sword’s circuit board pattern glowed in the mist with a spectral intensity, the green dots looking almost like eyes flaring with light.
“No, just him—”
Something shot through the mist further away. Blake didn’t actually see what moved—all she saw was the afterimage in the air, a small shining vortex pulling up a miniature storm behind it. She had a good idea who that was, though.
Adam, whose attention was focused entirely on Penny and Yang, never saw it coming. Ruby smashed into him with what had to be every inch of force in her body, and if his Aura hadn’t been up, he would’ve been stabbed straight through the heart by her war scythe.
But then Ruby did what no one else in the fight had done up to that point: get in a good follow-up hit on Adam. Moonslice made him fast, but… Ruby was just faster. She was using her Semblance to get behind him over and over again, forcing him onto the defensive, pushing him back towards Yang and Penny. Ruby was switching her Semblance on and off so fast it seemed like she was blinking in and out of existence, kicking up a storm of silver dust around Adam.
As Blake watched, she gradually became aware of something else: Ruby moved so fast that it wasn’t possible for anyone else to join the fight. Yang and Penny were hanging back, circling at the edge of the action, but unable to do much more for risk of getting caught in Ruby’s crossfire. Ruby was an overwhelming storm of movement and blades, but that storm would be directed at everything.
Exactly the kind of fighting style that the format of Huntress teams was supposed to discourage. And once again, Blake found herself wondering what the fuck had happened to Ruby. Because all signs pointed to this girl being a child soldier. So what was she doing, pretending to be a student?
“Blake?”
Yang had apparently given up on trying to intervene, and was doubled over next to her, breathing heavily.
“Yes?”
“Does Adam have a way he likes to, uh. Take down people?”
Blake wished the answer didn’t come as easily to her as it did. “He always goes for the weapon arm first.”
“Huh.” Yang held up both arms, staring at her twin gauntlets. “I guess that doesn’t help me. Would—”
Suddenly, the air took on a slight chill that made the hair on the back of Blake’s neck stand straight up—she recognized that sensation all too well.
“Look out!” she screamed at the moment Adam lit up in that deathly glow, but Moonslice came down all the same, directed at—
Penny.
Who couldn’t yet project her Aura over herself. Who hadn’t seen Moonslice used yet. Who didn’t have her guard up. Who didn’t know just how merciless Adam was—
Who took it fully in the face and her upper chest, the impact clanging off her not-fully-raised-sword. She’d been positioned apart from everyone else, the mist shrouding her just enough that Blake couldn’t see Penny’s face, only her outline as she stumbled backward.
“No,” Blake gasped, her voice mingling with several simultaneous cries as her worst nightmare played out in front of her eyes—her past destroying her present.
But then, Penny didn’t fall.
She caught herself, turning the stumble into a twirl which ended in a ready stance, Luminous Electra held in front of her again like nothing was wrong.
Adam made a choked noise, and he was so thoroughly stunned that he took no notice of Ruby abandoning the fight to run to Penny’s side. “What? How?”
Then Blake realized. That clang of impact; it hadn’t just been created by the impact against the sword. It’d also been created by the impact against Penny.
“You will need to try harder if you want to hurt me!” Penny called out. “I am made of stronger stuff than you might think!”
And then, despite the gravity of the situation, despite the terror that still pounded viscerally in her head, Blake laughed. She still couldn’t see Penny’s face in the mist, but she had to imagine right now Penny was looking very pleased with herself for making that joke.
Adam started to move.
So did Yang.
Blake’s laugh died, catching in her throat like a splintered fishbone as she registered the path of Yang flying through the air with a bullet-propelled flight, straight towards Adam who undoubtedly still had some energy left for Moonslice, rearing back a fist—
No, she thought, knowing the end of this tale with a nauseating certainty, at the same moment that the world turned red.
Adam’s strike was precise, surgical, right into the crook of Yang’s arm. Blake watched in slow motion as Yang’s Aura shimmered and then shattered, and then the blade sliced into her jacket sleeve and into—
Into the metal of Yang’s prosthetic arm.
With a tooth-rattling screech of metal biting into metal, the blood-red blade stopped, halfway into Yang’s prosthetic as she landed directly in front of Adam and Moonslice ran out. And then Blake realized that with Yang’s long-sleeved jacket and biker’s gloves, it was impossible for an observer to tell she wore a prosthetic.
For the second time in a minute, Adam said, “What?”
Yang smirked. “Gotcha.”
Her other fist slammed into Adam’s chin, a gunshot and something else crashing against Blake’s eardrums as Yang unloaded an almighty punch. It didn’t matter in the slightest that her Aura was down and she couldn’t use her Semblance anymore. Two things shattered: Adam’s Aura, and his jaw.
His sword stayed embedded in Yang’s arm when he went flying backwards, landing in a crumpled heap against a wall. He did not move.
Yang lowered her arms and let out a sigh of relief. “That was close.”
Close. The word seemed so ludicrously understated that Blake couldn’t help but let out another laugh, this one much more hysterical and worrying to anyone who heard it. She’d almost watched her entire team die. She’d actually seen her worst nightmares playing out exactly the way they unfolded in her sleep, and then… they’d won.
They’d won. Adam was lying on the ground, unconscious, his face disfigured, blood dripping from his mouth. Blake didn’t know this was possible. She didn’t know the universe would allow this kind of victory.
She rose unsteadily to her feet, looked around, and then ran straight for Yang, hugging her before she even knew what she was doing.
“Whoa! Blake, you okay?”
Blake managed a frantic nod and then pressed herself deeper into Yang, closing her eyes and savoring that radiant, comforting warmth she gave off even without her Semblance.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered.
“Hey, why are you apologizing? We won!”
“But I panicked—I couldn’t lead the team—this was all my fault—your arm—”
“Nope, absolutely not, this isn’t your fault. It’s that fucker’s fault for having a personal vendetta against you, and… look, people have frozen up in battle for a lot less than you. And you came back. That’s what really matters!”
Blake wasn’t going to cry right now, no matter how much she wanted to. She wasn’t, she wasn’t, she—
The soft thunk of something landing nearby caught her attention. At the same moment, Yang said, “Oh. Uh. Problem.”
Blake pulled back, her hand going to her weapon, and was greeted with a group of White Fang, with Ilia at the front, leveling her chain-whip at them. They’d formed a defensive circle around Adam.
“Go ahead. Try us,” Ilia growled as the biggest of the White Fang members heaved Adam’s unconscious body over his shoulder.
Blake didn’t move. What could she do, with no Aura? She met Ilia’s gaze all the same, leaning on Yang and watching as the White Fang departed with Adam in tow. However, just before Ilia would’ve disappeared around a corner, she stopped and looked back. Her mask had been repaired.
“No bow tonight?” she called over, her voice dripping with derision. “Because for once, it was convenient for you to show off your difference, right? So you could sneak into a White Fang meeting. But now you’re just going to put the bow back on and go back to being invisible now that being a Faunus isn’t helpful anymore.”
Blake winced. Yang shifted her position, ever so slightly putting herself between Blake and Ilia.
Ilia still hadn’t left; she was staring at Blake like she wanted a reply.
“Ilia,” Blake said finally. There was really only one thing that she could summon to her mind right now. “Are you happy?”
For a few moments, there was no sound except the unceasing hiss of the ruptured pipe. Until—
“Are you?” Ilia said. And then she was gone, slipping off into the night.
The question lodged itself in Blake’s mind, and even as the tension left her body, she knew those words would be echoing in her mind for weeks.
She would be concerned later about Adam managing to get away. For now, she was just overjoyed that they’d all survived. Weiss was getting up slowly, a black eye starting to form on her face, but otherwise mostly unharmed.
Yang was detaching her prosthetic arm. “They forgot something,” she said, holding out the metal arm to Blake—which still had Adam’s sword embedded inside. She tugged experimentally at the handle, and then sighed. “Well, that’s not coming out anytime soon.”
“Wait.” Normally, Blake wouldn’t be able to focus on anything except Adam’s sword and all that it symbolized, but something more pressing was taking up her mental bandwidth. “Where are Penny and Ruby?”
Ruby knew something was wrong when Penny activated her rockets while Adam was flying through the air from Yang’s hit. She didn’t seem like the kind of person who would leave a battle before it was clearly over. Ruby’s first thought was maybe Penny was hurt, but it looked like she’d handled the hit from Adam just fine! Still, she hadn’t actually gotten close enough to tell for sure before Penny flew off.
She tracked the trail of Penny’s rockets down a nearby dead-end alley, and once she was sure the battle was over (Taurus was unconscious, bleeding, out of Aura, and disarmed), she activated her Semblance, following her.
“Penny?” she called quietly, holstering Lunar Enforcer and looking around. A whimpering sound alerted her to Penny’s position, and she turned to see her sitting atop a small stack of pallets, her hood pulled up and her back to Ruby. Luminous Electra was laid across her knees.
She pulled up her goggles and took a step closer. “Are you okay?”
Penny showed no sign of surprise at Ruby’s sudden appearance, which made sense, given the whole robot girl thing she had going on. She probably had radar or something awesome like that! However, she did turn so that she was more fully facing away.
“Yes,” Penny replied. And then she hiccuped.
“Penny? Ruby?”
The voice from the mouth of the alley pulled her attention away; Ruby pulled her goggles back down just as the rest of Team BSYP caught up to them, looking battered but not seriously injured. And Yang had a sword stuck in her arm, but she didn’t really look bothered by it.
“Oh, thank goodness, I was starting to get worried—” Blake stopped as she noticed Penny’s position. “...Penny? Are you hurt?”
“No.”
Penny’s tone was clear, but a moment later, she hiccuped again, followed by a whimper slipping out of her mouth, sounding anything but okay.
“It… doesn’t look that way,” Yang said carefully. “Um, I know that maybe being hurt is different for you because of your, um—” She cut herself off, glanced hurriedly at Ruby, and then hastily finished, “Your composition, but whatever you need, we won’t judge!”
Penny didn’t reply, only hunching down even further. From somewhere in the alley, something dripped loudly and steadily, the sound plunking against Ruby’s ears with an unexpected sharpness.
“That’s a promise from all of us,” Weiss added.
Penny’s shoulders were shaking now, like she was starting to cry.
And suddenly, Ruby realized that three-fourths of Team BSYP was staring directly at her with a weird wariness. Like…
“Um, Ruby, could you…” Blake made a vague gesture, and then put a hand to her face. “Okay, there’s no polite way to ask this—could you give us some privacy? We need to talk to Penny, as just a team.”
Ruby nodded, but just before she could activate her Semblance, Penny spoke.
“It is okay, Blake.” She’d straightened again, still looking directly away from the four girls, her hands squeezing at the hem of her skirt. “Ruby knows about my synthetic nature.”
The answering “What?” came from three different voices, while Ruby perked up.
“Oh, you know she’s a robot too! I was wondering!” Okay, she knew she absolutely couldn’t tell anyone else besides Penny about being a lab-grown Grimm destroyer, but Penny’s teammates seemed like they could be trusted with that information! They were protecting Penny’s secret, after all. And the weird thing was, telling one person the truth hadn’t satisfied Ruby’s desire to be known. It just made her want more. So suddenly, she found herself wanting to tell Yang and Blake and Weiss.
“I’d ask why, but I believe we have more pressing concerns right now?” Weiss said.
All eyes swung towards Penny again. She was still shivering, and now Ruby could hear a faint whirring sound coming from her. Like… like a computer that was running too many programs at once.
“We’ve seen you do plenty of repairs in your workshop,” Yang said, much less visibly tense than a moment ago. “We’re used to it! Not that we ever had to even get used to it, I mean. Just—whatever the damage is, we can handle it!”
“No. I do not want you to see me like this,” Penny said. “My synthetic skin has been damaged in a very particular place.” She paused, then added, “On my face.”
Ruby heard Blake letting out a little “oh,” like she’d just figured out something really important. Why would it be such a big deal if Penny’s skin was damaged? As far as Ruby knew, she didn’t bleed like humans, so what would—
It clicked, and a purpose seized Ruby. She stepped forward, litter crunching underfoot—but Penny inched away, pressing herself against the wall of the alley, and even so Ruby continued until she was in front of Penny.
With a quiet noise of fear, Penny pulled her hoodie down over the front of her face. Ruby lowered herself to one knee so they were at eye level with one another—or would’ve been, if not for the hoodie hiding Penny’s face.
Penny’s hands were folded in her lap, and Ruby reached out, putting her own hands on top. She startled a little when their hands touched, but she didn’t pull away. “Ruby…?” she said, her voice quivering.
“Remember when I lost my contact lens?” Ruby said slowly. “How scared I was? How much I thought would go wrong if you knew the truth about me?” She held Penny’s hands tighter. “And then when I told you, it turned out better than I could’ve ever hoped for!”
“It is… different for me,” Penny said with clear difficulty. “I look… very different under the skin of my face. It is not just a change in color. It is… it is an inhuman face underneath.”
“Maybe not as much as you think. After all, there’s nobody else on Remnant with eyes like mine. And maybe there’s no one else on Remnant who looks like you do under your skin, but I don’t think it makes you any less of a person!”
Maybe Ruby shouldn’t have been saying this stuff about her eyes in front of other people, but helping Penny was the more important thing right now. She’d worry about spilling state secrets later.
“I think it is worth pointing out that humans look quite unpleasant underneath their skin,” Weiss said, her expression pinching. “It’s gory, and… I had a facial wound once, and it was hideous to look at. If anything, Penny, I think I’ll have less of a reaction to your wound than I did to my own.”
Penny didn’t say anything.
“Hey.” Yang raised her prosthetic arm. “Maybe you’re thinking of the people out there in the world who might actually dislike you because you’ve got metal in there. I’ve encountered a couple of those people because of my arm, you know. People who accused me of ‘ruining the perfect design of the human body’ or whatever. People who told me that my ‘crude metal imitation’ was desecrating the will of whatever wacko god they prayed to. People who told me that all my arm did was make me closer to the Grimm because they thought there was no life or soul in it.” She paused, tilting her head, as Blake shot a very concerned look at her. “...You know, I should probably talk to someone about that. I think that actually may have fucked me up a little bit.”
Then Penny whimpered again, and Yang snapped her gaze back to her. “But that’s not important right now! I’m sorry Penny, I’m doing a terrible job of actually trying to say what I wanted to say. Point is, the people who think these kinds of things, the people who told me these things—the people who would think badly of you—you’d never want those kinds of people to be your friend, even if you were something they didn’t hate! They’re still going to be really unpleasant people no matter what.” She moved closer, putting her metal hand on Penny’s shoulder. “You know, I usually punched those kinds of people. So how about this? If we react badly to your injury—if we so much as recoil one inch in disgust—then you have our complete and unconditional permission to punch us.”
Weiss looked tremendously unsure about that declaration, but said nothing.
Penny let out a very small laugh, and for the first time a little bit of energy came back into her body language. Ruby’s heart sped up. They were doing it! They were making her feel better! Quick, what was something she could say to make Penny feel better?
“It’s also a lot harder to repair a human!” Ruby added brightly. “I wish I could fix parts of me with an arc welder! That would’ve made some of my recoveries a lot easier!”
A few moments later, she wondered why everyone except Penny was staring at her. What was the big deal? Huntresses-in-training had injuries all the time! So what if she’d had a few extra.
But then Penny let out a little giggle, and thankfully that pulled all the attention back to her before Ruby had to figure out how to deflect more questions about her past.
“I would not use a conventional arc welder for most of my repairs,” she said, some real happiness or at least humor apparent in her voice for the first time in what felt like forever. “That would be far too imprecise for most of my components.”
“Oops. Sorry.”
“It’s okay!” Penny straightened, took a deep breath (Ruby wanted to know how she did that), and then raised her hands to her hood. Ruby’s heart nearly jumped out of her chest as she realized what Penny was about to do.
She pulled the hood down and turned to face Ruby and the others, her face illuminated by the silvery moonlight filtering into the alley.
“Penny,” Ruby said reflexively, not even sure why she was saying it, just, she felt the urge to say her name.
A gaping diagonal gash had been cut into Penny’s skin, starting on her forehead and then slicing down through one eye, across her nose and catching the corner of her lip before going down one cheek and her chin. When Ruby looked further downward, she could see where it kept going, slashing through her clothes, across her collarbone and shoulder where the sword hadn’t been able to block it. There was no blood, but through the wide gap in the skin, gleaming metal was clearly visible.
Ruby didn’t know what she’d expected to see. Penny’s face was smooth on the outside, so she’d thought the metal underneath would be smooth. But… no, under her skin, Penny’s face was intricate. As she shifted her face slightly to look at each person around her, the metal shifted and rolled almost like water, and it took Ruby several long seconds to realize that under the skin, Penny’s face wasn’t one single piece of metal—it was thousands of tiny metal hemispheres that all seemed to be capable of moving independently from each other, and move they did. Like waves, like muscles flexing and relaxing. It was entrancing. She had so many questions about how it worked.
“Would it be surprising if I say that the most complex mechanism in my body is my facial articulation system?” Penny said. This close to her, Ruby could see that the movement of her mouth sent everything on the surface into a frenzied, yet somehow orderly movement. “The ‘uncanny valley’ phenomenon is very well-documented, and to surpass it, my father had to build something unprecedented.”
She started to shy away again, her hands going for her hood once more. “I… I would understand, if you think it is uncanny, or creepy, or scary, seeing me like this—”
“Penny.” Four different people said that, but it was Ruby who kept talking, getting in her words before anyone else. “I’m uncanny!” she said. “Sometimes I think I don’t know how to be a person, and I feel like I’ll always be a fish out of water, but you… you’re the most alive person I’ve ever seen. You could never be uncanny.”
And she must’ve done a good job with those words, because Penny’s eyes brightened. Literally. Well, one of them did. The eye which had been caught in the blade’s path was only flickering faintly. “You don’t mind that I look… less human?”
“Not at all!” Ruby said immediately. She reached out, and then a wild thought occurred to her. “Penny, can I, um…” She looked down for a moment at the cracked, crumbling concrete underfoot. “Can I… touch you?”
Penny looked confused by that, but she nodded once.
Ruby took a deep breath and raised a hand to Penny’s cheek, tracing the path that the blade had taken with her index finger, running it slowly over the too-many-to-count metal pieces, over the chips and cracks from the impact with the blade. A strange longing sensation came over her, and Ruby found herself wondering if Penny smelled like metal. Sure, she didn’t know what metal smelled like, but she’d been told it did have a faint but unobtrusive aroma, especially when warm. That sounded nice. Maybe it was how a forge smelled. She wondered if it was comforting. For maybe the first time in her life, Ruby wished she had a sense of smell.
“It’s you!” Ruby said finally, letting her hand drop back to her side. “You’re not Penny despite the metal. You’re Penny because of the metal! Just like how I’m not Ruby despite my eyes, I’m Ruby because of my eyes!”
A very loud whirring noise came from somewhere inside Penny, and then she jumped forward and hugged Ruby.
“Thank you, Ruby because of your eyes,” she whispered.
“You’re welcome, Penny because of your metal!”
Ruby closed her eyes and savored everything. Penny gave the best hugs. Like, the best hugs of all time. Not that Ruby had much experience with hugs before now. But she was pretty sure even after she’d hugged a lot of other people, Penny would still be her favorite person to hug. She was just so strong, strong enough that Ruby could actually sort of vaguely feel a little bit of the hug! Which had never happened before! And—and—well, Ruby couldn’t actually tell if Penny was warm or not, but computers generated a lot of heat! So Penny definitely had to be warm!
…And now for the first time in her life, she was wishing she had a sense of touch. What was it with Penny and causing her to want things she’d never wanted before? Never mind. There was a hug going on!
When Penny finally pulled away, she turned to look at her teammates without the slightest bit of trepidation, and then Blake spoke up.
“Penny, I’m going to say something that might sound kind of strange, and it’s honestly a little controversial even in Faunus circles, but…” She leaned forward, gesturing to her bow, which twitched correspondingly. “Looking less human can be a good thing. It can mean being true to yourself.”
It was at that moment, with an embarrassingly long delay, that Ruby realized Blake hadn’t been wearing her bow during this fight, and the triangular things on her head were actually… her cat ears. Her bow was nowhere to be seen. Oops.
Penny looked up at Blake and blinked, her damaged eye blinking more slowly than her undamaged one. “But then… why do you wear a bow?”
Blake winced, and immediately, Penny was tripping over her own words, adding in a rush, “I am sorry, that is a question I had no right to ask—”
“No. It’s a good question.” Blake took a deep breath, closing her eyes as her hand clenched into a fist. “It’s… it’s because of fears. Fears a lot like yours.”
“Oh,” Penny whispered.
Suddenly, Blake jammed a hand into her pocket, rooting around for a few seconds, before she drew out a black ribbon that Ruby recognized as being the actual bow which, as it turned out, was Blake’s camouflage as she’d originally thought. As she watched, Blake balled the ribbon up into a wad and flung it into a nearby dumpster.
“Fears I’m not going to listen to anymore,” Blake said as she turned back to them, her tone rock-steady even as her entire body shook and tears welled up in her eyes. “That’s a promise.”
With the same speed that she’d hugged Ruby, Penny jumped forward and hugged Blake, who let out a startled yelp before hugging Penny back. And then Yang was putting an arm around Penny and an arm around Blake, and then Weiss was jumping up to join the hug, standing on her tiptoes to fully attach herself to the group hug.
And now it was just Ruby, staring from the outside at a team group hug. She wasn’t going to call this feeling bubbling up in her stomach jealousy, but… she wanted to be part of a team hug, too. Her team didn’t do hugs. But she couldn’t just ask—
And then Penny lifted her head, meeting Ruby’s eyes.
“Would you like to join the hug, Ruby?”
Ruby’s eyes widened, and with a little squeal of happiness she performed an extremely unnecessary Semblance-jump to join, putting one arm around Penny and the other around… Yang, it turned out! She tried not to vibrate too much, because that seemed like a great way to end a hug, but it was just so exciting! Her first group hug ever! There was just so much happiness and comfort and care and… and… everything. She couldn’t even imagine what this hug would feel like to the people involved with an actual sense of touch.
Too bad teams couldn’t have five people, because… Ruby liked the sound of Team Battleship Plus One.
Chapter 22: The Body Electric
Notes:
Sorry for the double upload notification if you got it, I accidentally hit the post button before I was ready the first time lol
Chapter Text
As impossible as it was, Penny wanted this hug to last forever. To just be cocooned in warmth and love until the end of time. But eventually, she had to pull back and confront a very pressing problem that still faced her.
“How am I going to get back to my workshop without being noticed?” she said. “I can repair myself once there, but…”
“You could wear my motorcycle helmet with the visor down?” Yang offered.
Penny made a noise of alarm. “I do not want to put you at risk for injury!”
“It’s fine, I have Aura—” Yang stopped, seemingly remembering that she did not have Aura at the moment. “…Um. I could walk Bumblebee back?”
Penny didn’t want to cause Yang that kind of trouble, either.
“Is there a machine shop nearby? Maybe they’d let us borrow a welding mask?” Ruby said.
“Maybe if we put a blanket over—”
“Wait!”
At Weiss’s excited tone, everyone turned to see her staring thoughtfully at Penny.
“Penny…” she said slowly. “Have you ever considered that you might be able to use your Aura to repair yourself?”
Penny blinked. “Would that be possible?”
“Active Aura heals one’s body, and I don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t work for you. After all—” She reached out and poked Penny in the shoulder. “This is your body. And Aura would certainly be capable of healing a deep cut on someone’s own body.”
“I… I do not know if that makes sense,” Penny said, devoting a large amount of her processing capability to that question. “Aura has only been proven to work with organic materials, and even people with prosthetics have not been able to use their Aura to repair damage to the metal.”
“Yeah, but for you, you’re not wearing a prosthetic. You’re just… you,” Yang said. “My arm’s interchangeable, like a piece of armor. Your body isn’t.”
“Aura doesn’t even make sense for humans, Penny,” Weiss added. “Anyone who’s tried to study it has just gone in endless circles. So… if you could heal yourself, it would make as much sense as everything else about Aura does.”
Penny nodded, still aware of perhaps the more pertinent issue with this tactic. “I would need to project my Aura in the first place.”
Ruby put her hands on her hips, striking a determined pose. “Easy. We’ll help you unlock it!”
“I’ve… tried.” Penny tried to keep her shame out of her tone. They had. Multiple times over the past semester and a half, with Weiss and then Blake and then Yang, trying different Auras to see if one would be the key to unlocking Penny’s. But nothing had worked, not even when the team combined their efforts. Penny knew her Aura was in there—she’d seen her own Aura generator, she’d seen the bright green energy that churned inside it, she could feel it tingling when her teammates tried to help her unlock it, but… it just wasn’t reacting.
“I have an idea.” Ruby put a hand on Penny’s shoulder. “May I try something?”
“Of course.”
The five of them ended up in a sort of group hug, this time with just Penny at the center, and after a moment Penny felt a tingling all over her body emanating from the palms on her shoulders. If she closed her eyes, she could see colors somehow, the color of each of their Auras… passing over her? Around her? Through her? The feeling defied classification. But this wasn’t new. She had felt similar things during each of her previous attempts, and this was as far as they could go previously.
“So there’s a thing I know to say, Fria taught me it, it helps people channel their Auras into this—just breathe with me and follow my words, okay?” Ruby leaned in, maneuvering herself so that she was looking directly into Penny’s eyes. Silver eyes gazed into green as she spoke in a quiet, reverential tone.
“For it is in passing that we achieve immortality. Through this, we become a paragon of virtue and glory to rise above all, infinite in distance and unbound by death…”
Ruby edged a little closer, placing a hand on Penny’s chest as she spoke the last line of the litany. “I release your soul, and by my shoulder protect thee.”
She closed her eyes, and Penny felt drawn to do the same as the tingling grew suddenly stronger, and then—and then—
In that mysterious void that she could somehow see, two souls touched, red Aura brushing up against green with the utmost gentleness. At the moment of contact, a wave of electricity surged through Penny’s body, setting her sensors aflutter, her suddenly overcharged body thrumming as she instinctively gasped.
She opened her eyes as the feeling only grew stronger, and now there was a green glow ringing her vision and reflecting off of Ruby’s joyful eyes. When she looked down at her hands, she saw an undulating pattern of green dancing over them. It was unmistakable.
And the feeling…
It was like the first rays of the sun rising and warming Penny’s body after a long, dark night. It was like the first tingle of plugging herself in, magnified a thousandfold. It was like rising from a long, particularly refreshing sleep cycle. It was like those first moments of initiation, flying over the Emerald Forest with her rockets at full power and feeling like anything in the world was possible. She felt unlimited.
It was her Aura.
“What was that?” she said to Ruby. “Those words…”
Ruby shrugged. “Like I said, Fria taught it to me! And it could be really useful in battle, if you’re in an emergency situation and you need to unlock someone else’s Aura, it’s a really good way to focus and do it quickly! So I always made sure to remember it in case I needed to unlock a civilian’s Aura in the middle of a battle. You’re not a civilian, but I figured it would work!”
And work it had. Penny couldn’t stop staring at the green glow washing over her body.
But after a few breathless seconds, nothing seemed to be happening with her face—at least, nothing that could register on sensors.
“Is… is anything happening?” she said, bringing a hand up to her face. The cut still felt the same as before.
Her teammates and Ruby leaned in closer, looking. But their expressions—and the ways they were trying to hide their expressions—told Penny that nothing was happening.
“It’s not working,” she said finally, trying and failing to keep the despair out of her voice. “I should’ve known. The human body can repair itself on its own, and Aura simply accelerates that process, but my body cannot repair itself on its own. So of course trying to heal myself by Aura would be useless.”
“No, you’re not useless!” Ruby said insistently. “You’re magical!”
“I wouldn’t even call you magic,” Blake added insistently. “You’re just… undeniable life, Penny. Maybe Aura doesn’t have the same effect on your body, but you’re still making everything work in your own way.”
“But it’s not working.” Penny disliked being upset. She especially disliked being upset like this, where she felt this… this horrible urge to disagree with her teammates, because surely they were just trying to make her feel better and shield her from the sad truth that she didn’t even want to think about—
Her logic core interjected so forcefully into her thoughtstream that it startled her.
What sad truth?
It didn’t matter, did it?
Her logic core reminded her quite strongly that leaving a fear unnamed was the best way to give it power over her.
Well. Fine. If logic was going to be like that, then. The sad truth was that she wouldn’t ever be as good a Huntress as the others since she couldn’t heal herself with her Aura—
…And now that Penny was actually thinking through those words and their meaning, they felt quite ridiculous. Being unable to heal herself hadn’t held her back when fighting the Geist!
If it was possible for a facet of her neural network to act smug, she was sure her logic core was doing that right now. She was still upset, but not in a way that made her want to curl up into a ball and hide.
All of this, she processed before anyone else had a chance to reply to what she’d just said out loud. As it turned out, it was Yang who replied first.
“Hey, but now that you can project your Aura, you don’t have to worry about taking damage like that!”
“Unless I run out of Aura.”
“That's not just a You Thing, though, running out of Aura’s bad news for any Huntress.”
“Oh.” Penny’s runaway thought processes crashed to a halt as she realized she’d overlooked a very important detail. Mainly, that any Huntress with no Aura left who took a hit like she did… would be dead right now, and not worrying about their appearance.
“And if your Aura’s out, you’ve probably got bigger things to worry about!” Ruby added. “Usually, people who are trying to kill you don’t really care what you look like while they’re killing you!”
“Right.” Also a very good point.
Penny held up her scroll to inspect her face again and sighed. “But now I still need to figure out how I’m getting back to Beacon unnoticed.”
“And I’d like to figure it out soon,” Blake added, glancing down the alleyway. “Before the police show up and arrest me for being a Faunus.”
“Easy!” Yang clapped a hand down on Penny’s shoulder. “You’re wearing my motorcycle helmet, and I’m riding Bumblebee—”
“Yang!”
“—Only until I’m out of range for being arrested by the cops, and then I’m calling a tow truck.”
“Can you afford that?”
“Not really, but my dad can.”
Later
Even after having known about Penny’s workshop for weeks and hanging out there four or five times a week, Yang was still having a hard time getting over the fact that Penny just had a private tower in the school. Which, to be completely fair, she needed it for complete privacy for her workshop, but… private tower. She was like… the Princess of Beacon, or something.
Yang leaned over the balcony’s railing, brushing her hair out of her eyes and watching Penny’s self-maintenance down below. She was sitting on a stool in front of a large mirror ringed with bright lights—honestly, if Yang squinted, it could look kind of like a vanity mirror. Except that instead of putting on makeup, Penny was deftly soldering her own face. And she was surrounded not by beauty materials but by various specialty tools that Yang had only seen in the most high-end of machine shops. Although, that was really just Penny’s version of beauty materials, wasn’t it? She really wanted to know how Penny had gotten her hands on a ionizing plasma fusion combiner that size—she didn’t think one that small existed.
…Now that she thought about it, Penny had probably custom-made it herself.
“Ruby, could you bring me that actuator clamp?” Penny said.
“On it!” Ruby dropped the clamp into Penny’s hands, who took hold of it without looking. Once assured that Penny wouldn’t need any other immediate help, Ruby returned to her previous position on a workbench, swinging her legs and her gaze darting rapidly around the workshop but always returning to Penny doing her repairs. She hadn’t taken off her goggles once in the several hours since the fight.
Yang still couldn’t quite believe that Penny had told Ruby. It was nothing against Ruby! It was just… the excitable Atlesian girl didn’t necessarily seem the best at keeping secrets, and she’d found herself wondering if Penny would be safe.
Well, there was one good way to figure that out—take a page out of Penny’s playbook and go for being direct.
“So, Penny, how did you end up telling Ruby?” she called down.
Penny took a moment to carefully place her plasma combiner in its insulated holder before looking up at Yang, adorably confused. “Tell her what?”
“About being synthetic.”
“Oh! Well—” Penny swiveled to look at Ruby, as if she was looking for permission to say something. After a moment of looking extremely conflicted, Ruby nodded.
“Ruby and I have a unique similarity which made me feel quite comfortable with telling her!” Penny sounded as if she’d carefully picked every word of that sentence to avoid something very big.
Ruby nodded rapidly in agreement.
Dead silence. A few moments later, Weiss and Blake came up to the railing alongside Yang, devoting their full attention to the girl, and the three not-mechanical members of Team BSYP stared at Ruby, trying and failing to have any kind of subtlety about what they were wondering.
“So you are a robot?” Weiss asked, which was immediately followed by Blake and Yang violently elbowing her from either side.
Ruby, however, was completely unfazed by the question. “No, I wish! But, really though…” She glanced sideways at Penny, a small smile playing across her lips. “Well, Penny told me that she’s a girl who was made, and I… I…” She stopped, and looked over at Penny. “They’re—I can trust them, right?”
Penny nodded. “I trust them more than anyone else in the world.”
Penny’s words, utterly serious, sent a pulse of warmth through Yang. Of course she knew Penny trusted them, but to hear her say it so plainly and confidently, it made a fierce pride resonate through her. She was winning at being a big sister figure!
“Okay. Cool.” Ruby swallowed and nodded, but didn’t say anything else immediately. Instead, she kept looking at Penny, who smiled encouragingly as she uncapped a tube of epoxy.
Yang watched as the two girls’ gazes lingered on one another. She really was amazed at how quickly Penny and Ruby had fallen into trusting each other with… well, probably everything. But from where she was standing, it didn’t look careless. It looked like… like there really was some deeper connection between Penny and Ruby.
Huh.
Innnnnn-teresting.
It was way, way too early for her to say anything out loud about it, but she was going to brush up on her wingwoman skills just in case Penny came to her in a few weeks or months with questions about wooing.
(There was the small matter that Yang had never wooed anybody in her life before, but Penny wouldn’t have to know that if she asked for help)
“Okay.” Ruby looked up to the balcony again and took a deep breath, straightening her posture. Yang waited patiently for whatever world-shattering news would be shared.
“I’m a genetically-engineered lab-grown supersoldier designed to be the best Huntress in all of history!”
Yang’s brain crashed and restarted four times in a row.
Good gods, Blake’s speculation was right. Ruby was a child soldier. She didn’t think anything could be a more unexpected revelation than what Penny had told them, but wow, Ruby was coming close. Lab-grown? Did that mean this girl didn’t have a family? Well, she’d mentioned having a guardian, except actually it was kind of concerning that she always used the word guardian instead of something like… well, mom.
And now Yang was imagining a little kid growing up in a laboratory, gestated in a test tube and surrounded by scientists who just cared about their experiment going right, and just… how overwhelmingly lonely that would’ve been for her. The thought of that filled Yang with an immense sadness. No wonder Ruby was so… unnerving.
Ruby was watching them expectantly, shifting her weight from one foot to the other and definitely expecting a reaction of some sort. As Yang tried to marshal her features into something more polite, Blake spoke, her tone thick with absolute horror.
“Do you have legal rights?”
Ruby deflated. “I mean—yeah, probably? Um… Why are you acting like I’m a bad thing? I was designed to help people…” She looked so sad now, like a kicked puppy, that Yang suddenly felt bad for how visibly melancholic her reaction to Ruby’s admittance must’ve been.
“You—” Blake had to momentarily stop to go through what looked like the five stages of grief. “…Okay,” she said finally. “I’m sorry, Ruby. I have so many concerns about what the Kingdom Of Atlas is doing to you, but it wouldn’t be fair to throw all my concerns at you when none of this is your fault.”
Ruby turned her gaze downward, scuffing her foot lightly on the ground “Okay…”
“But… how exactly did… what did they engineer?” Blake said. “You… you said something about your eyes at the warehouse.”
Ruby froze mid-scuff, her foot hovering in the air, before she raised her goggles-clad face to look at Blake. “Oh. Um. I said that?” she said, speaking so slow it was as if her words were made of molasses. She glanced back at Penny, apparently looking for confirmation. Penny nodded.
Yang remembered it pretty clearly. I’m Ruby because of my eyes! Ruby had said in the alleyway to Penny. It had been so adorable, but also, yeah, it really made Yang wonder. If Ruby was comparing her eyes to something as significant as Penny being made of metal, then what in the name of the broken moon was going on with Ruby’s eyes? And clearly, Penny knew.
“Okay,” Ruby mumbled. “Yeah. Um. I probably shouldn’t have done that…”
“Why?” Blake’s voice was as sharp and guarded as Yang had ever heard it. She looked over, and saw Blake’s hand tightening on the railing of the balcony like she was about to snap it in half.
“I know I told Penny, but she—she’s—this is different for her. I can—I trust you all knowing I’m special, but not my eyes. I can’t tell anyone else about my eyes.” Ruby threw another look at Penny, her voice so soft and vulnerable that it made Yang wonder how this girl could ever be the same girl as the one that’d arrested Roman Torchwick, taken down a Paladin, and fought Blake’s evil ex to a standstill. “I… My eyes are a secret secret. I only told Penny by accident—I’m really happy I did—but I can’t… I can’t tell anyone else. Not on purpose!”
“And who says it’s a secret?” Blake said.
“Me,” Ruby said immediately.
Blake squinted fiercely at Ruby. Yang recognized that squint. It was the same one she’d made at the docks when she’d sighted Torchwick. The same one she’d made in Junior’s bar when he told her about the upcoming White Fang rally. It was the patented ‘Blake Belladonna Will Find The Truth Whether The Rest Of The World Likes It Or Not’ look.
But also, Yang recognized something in Ruby’s body language. The way she was edging away from Blake and Yang and Weiss. The way she was starting to tilt her head in different directions like she was looking for something. The way her muscles were tensing up.
Suddenly, Ruby was reminding Yang of a cornered animal. And it was all too easy for Yang to think of the (too many) times in her childhood where she’d felt that exact way.
“It’s okay!” she said quickly, managing to get those words in before Blake could reply. “We respect secrets, Ruby. We’ve had a few of those on this team, things it took us a long time before we were comfortable sharing. So, if you don’t want to tell us about your eyes, that’s okay. We’ll stop.”
Ruby relaxed visibly as soon as the word okay was out of Yang’s mouth, and she knew she’d done the right thing. Even if Blake was giving her a very clear and very dubious Look right now.
“Trust me on this,” Yang whispered to Blake. “You can’t push her too much right now. The last thing we wanna do is make her feel like she’s been backed into a corner. If that happens, she’s way more likely to run back to Atlas than tell us everything.”
Blake’s eyes widened slightly. She nodded once, the urgency leaving her face.
“Can we, um… can we still be friends?” Ruby said from below, thankfully not noticing any part of that little exchange. “I promise I’m not like, trying to be mean…”
“Of course,” Yang said. Gods, this girl needed friends so badly. Needed friends just as much as Penny must’ve needed friends when they first met! It wasn’t going to solve any of the other things wrong with her, but it would at least give her a little bit of normal in her life. Yang was going to temporarily shelve her concerns about Ruby’s autonomy and attitude (and also her eyes) and just give this girl some human connection, damn it. “You’re fun to be around, you’re energetic, you and Penny are two peas in a pod—that’s an idiom, Penny, sorry—and don’t worry, we’re all weird on this team, so you fit right in.”
Ruby squealed, disappeared into her Semblance, and reappeared in front of Yang before immediately wrapping her in a hug while shedding a storm of silver dust. “Yay!”
Blake still looked reluctant, but at the very least she wasn’t pressing further.
“I can see how you and Penny have so much in common,” Weiss said with a raised eyebrow as Ruby attempted to hug the life out of Yang.
Huh. Maybe that was why Yang had the feeling she’d seen Ruby before. She definitely reminded Yang of Penny in some ways. A lot of ways, actually. It still didn’t feel completely right, but it made more sense than any other explanation she’d come up with so far. Ruby was just full of mysteries like that, apparently.
Ruby yawned. It was just her and Penny in the tower for the next few minutes—Penny’s teammates had gone back to their dorm room to get some pajamas and blankets and pillows for Ruby. They’d realized an issue with having Ruby sleep over in their dorm tonight—mainly, that there really wasn’t much space for a fifth person in their room. So, Plan B: They were having a slumber party in Penny’s tower! It had a couch Ruby could sleep on, and it was much more spacious! Ruby’s first slumber party ever!
It was sort of a celebration of a successful mission, although Ruby couldn’t call it a full success since they hadn’t actually captured any criminals. Taurus had been rescued by White Fang, and the umbrella-wielding girl (who she was pretty sure was an associate of Torchwick) had picked the lock on her handcuffs and escaped. At least it was a moral victory!
“Please don’t worry about whether or not my team likes you.”
Ruby spun at the sound of Penny’s voice. She was using a very small paintbrush to apply epoxy to the cut in her skin, looking thoughtfully at her.
“They are just concerned for your wellbeing. They had similar questions for me when I told them I was a synthetic person.”
Ruby nodded. She still didn’t understand why something like this was such a big deal. Maybe there were a lot of people who didn’t like having a destiny. But Ruby liked having a destiny! She liked that she was born to save the world. She liked that she was engineered in a laboratory to have a power no one else had. She liked that she grew up with every part of her life carefully planned and monitored to maximize her potential. It meant she was way better at helping people than she would’ve been otherwise! So what if she didn’t have a birth certificate. She was still a person, and she was right here! That was the important thing!
“What was it like?” she said to Penny. “Telling your team, I mean.”
A slow smile spread over Penny’s face. She lowered the brush, gazing off into the distance. “…It is hard to describe, but… It felt like I had found a home. It is hard to say for sure since I’ve never felt it before, but I feel safe with my teammates regardless of location, in a way that I never felt as strongly with any particular place by myself. And seeing as how some definitions of home suggest that it can be transient, based on an idea or a group rather than a physical place… It feels accurate.”
Home. Ruby had never given it much thought because her home was Atlas, of course! It seemed like a silly question. All of Atlas, really, since she’d been moved around various locations in the military complex a lot as a kid. Maybe home was wherever her guardian was, since Fria sometimes moved places, too.
“Cool!” she said aloud.
Penny hummed. “By which you mean the complimentary adjective and not the temperature, I assume?”
“Yup.” It was always good to check. Ruby had never really understood why cool was a word that meant a good thing. If someone was cool, temperature-wise, in Atlas, that wasn’t a good thing at all. You needed to be warm. Hot. Resisting the bitter cold that never stopped pressing in on them, never stopped trying to freeze them where they stood.
Suddenly, she realized she had a perfect chance to ask a question that’d been on her mind all day.
“By the way, where are you from?”
Penny didn’t answer immediately. She lowered the paintbrush and reached for a laser of some sort, which she held up to her face at the same spot she’d just applied the epoxy. For a minute or so, the only sounds were the faint beeps coming from the laser—beeps which Penny seemed to know the exact meaning of. Ruby was more than happy to wait, though. Repairs were important!
“That’s odd,” she said, putting down her laser and leaning closer to her reflection in the mirror. “That’s the fastest that the materials have ever cured. Usually, it takes far longer for everything to bond properly, but it’s already finished.” She prodded at her cheek a few more times, and then turned to Ruby.
“To answer your question—currently, I live at Beacon Academy,” she said. “However, I believe you are asking me where I originated from. That, I don’t know.”
Ruby stared at Penny, before scootching closer on the workbench to her. “Huh?”
“I have no memory of my past.”
“Um. Did someone erase it, or did you just, like… bonk your head?” She tapped her temple to show what she meant. After a moment, she saw a small smile grace the corners of Penny’s lips for a moment, and that seemed completely at odds with what she said next.
“I erased it myself, actually.”
Ruby blinked. “Eh?”
“It was to hide myself from people in my past who wanted to… take advantage of my abilities, for their own aims. In a way, I’m hiding here, for my own safety.”
“Ohhhhhh.” Ruby nodded, understanding immediately. “Like how there would be people who’d come after me if they knew what I could do! Don’t worry, Penny!” She put a hand on Lunar Enforcer and posed dramatically, making the noblest expression she could think of. “I’ll protect you from whoever’s trying to use you! And that’s a promise!”
Penny giggled. “Thank you, but hopefully I won’t need much protecting.”
“Same for me! But there sure are a lot of people who want to protect me anyways.” Like the entire military apparatus of Atlas. And General Ironwood. And Fria. “I’ll protect you! And you can protect me!” she added. “And then no one else will ever have to protect us because we’re both so strong!”
Penny prodded at her cheek again and then smiled widely at Ruby. Whatever the combination of epoxy and laser had done, there was no trace of the cut on her face now. “That sounds sensational!”
For real though, with Penny’s super strength and Ruby’s super speed, there was a chance no one could ever beat them if they fought together. The thought of it gave Ruby a thrill, knowing how much their fighting styles complemented one another. Could they be invincible together? Was this destiny? Were they meant to be side-by-side as the perfect weapons the world needed?
Just thinking about it gave Ruby a sneaking suspicion about Penny’s origins.
“I bet you were built by somebody in Atlas,” she said decisively. “It’s the greatest kingdom! It’s also the kingdom that made me, so if it can make me, it can make you!”
Honestly, she might’ve been a little jealous of Penny. Because Penny was the Atlas creation that got to have the super cool metal body, while Ruby was the Atlas creation just stuck in a boring old organic body. How come she didn’t get to have radar, and infrared vision, and all the other awesome things Penny got to have? She would be so much better at fighting.
But Penny still sounded unsure as she pulled off her hoodie and rolled up the sleeve of her blouse. “I don’t know… The only clue I have to my origins suggests I was built in Mistral.”
“Mistral?” Ruby stared at Penny. There was nothing wrong with Mistral, but it just couldn’t hold a candle to Atlas’s technological capabilities. “Why?”
Penny popped open a panel on her exposed shoulder, plugging a cable in. “One of the Haven students has seen me before. And I have no memory of her, so logically we must have met before I came to Beacon.”
“Ooo—maybe she’s your long-lost sister or something!” Ruby wiggled her eyebrows. “Why don’t you just ask her?”
“Well…” Penny turned to look at Ruby again, grasping an elbow with her other hand and not quite meeting her eyes. “This may sound strange, but the further along I get in my Huntress training, the less I’m sure I want to know about my past.”
“Wait, why?”
“What if I was built to hurt people?” Penny’s eyes dimmed a little bit. “I would not want to know that. I don’t want to think about the possibility of being made to hurt people. And yet… sometimes, I cannot dismiss the thought from my mind.”
“You know… I can kinda relate.” Ruby propped her chin up on one hand and raised the other hand to study it, turning her palm over, analyzing every pore and divot in the skin which had maybe been planned by a madman. “The guy who made me… apparently wasn’t a good guy. He made me in secret, and I was only discovered by Atlas by accident. The General thinks I was made to save the world, but… I don’t know. Sometimes I think maybe it’s possible that scientist was going to use me for way worse things. Like, he was still experimenting on me when he died. What else was he going to do?” She lowered her hand. “I don’t have any memories of him, and he’s dead, and he took a lot of secrets with him when he died, so… I’ll never know, and I try not to think about it.”
“Oh. Would you…” Penny tapped at her arm for a few moments before reaching some kind of internal resolution. “Would you like a hug?”
“Ha, I was gonna ask you the same.” Ruby hopped off the workbench and wrapped her arms around Penny, taking care to avoid knocking loose the cable still plugged into her shoulder.
“I guess it’s scary, thinking maybe we could be hurting people if our lives were a little different,” Ruby mumbled, resting her chin on Penny’s shoulder. “That’s why I’m so glad I’m in the Atlas Military. I know I’ll be doing good.”
“For the same reason, I’m thankful to be training at Beacon!”
“Mhm!” Every time Ruby found another way she and Penny were alike, it made her heart go pitter-patter in a way that she didn’t really understand, but it felt really nice. This was one of those times.
She pressed herself a little deeper into Penny, trying to feel something from the hug. Just knowing she was being hugged was plenty of comfort, but…
“Penny?” she said. “You can sense temperatures, right? And you can feel touch?”
“Yes, small variations included.”
“Could you… could you tell me what hugs feel like?” For the third time in her life, she was wishing she had senses that worked right.
“Oh! I can try. I am not sure how good I am at translating sensation into words, but…” Penny trailed off, shifting her position a little bit. “...It feels like safety. Being surrounded physically by one who I care about, in a gesture of warmth and closeness… I suppose it’s like the feeling of home I get from being around my teammates, but more. I think maybe there is a metaphorical electricity to it, too—something passing between the huggers by way of emotional connection.” She paused for a moment, and then added, “Although, if there’s an imbalance of static electricity between the two huggers, sometimes it is a literal electricity as well.”
Ruby smiled into Penny’s shoulder. “It sounds pretty nice.”
“My friends say I am good at giving hugs.”
“It’s true.” Ruby held onto her a little tighter. Penny was definitely good at giving hugs, because being hugged by her made feelings dance in Ruby’s chest that she’d never felt before.
It was 4:46 A.M., and Penny was not asleep.
The issue was not the common organic one of being unable to sleep—she could drop into sleep mode at any time she wanted; it was a simple matter of running a command. The issue was that she didn’t want to sleep.
She raised her hands in front of her face and summoned her Aura, watching the green shimmer fluttering across her skin. If she had an Aura, then logic suggested she could have a Semblance. And perhaps she’d already discovered it.
What other explanation was there for how she’d… possessed the mech, for lack of a better word, like that? The sudden appearance inside the mech and the wrench and Ruby, and the accompanying flashes of green light, and the complete lack of any rational explanation for it…
She sat up more fully and looked around, a quick vitals check of the group informing her that she was the only one awake. She shifted, moving soundlessly into a kneeling position, and let her hands rest on her knees as she considered herself. A single beam of moonlight from the window shone through the room to lay diagonally across her face, tracing almost the same exact path as her earlier wound.
Her Aura was curled up inside her, pulsing inside her generator, and she closed her eyes, focusing on pushing it outward again. Like throwing a coat over herself—she really was getting better at similes—her Aura spun out easily to cover her entire body, responding to her internal commands as easily as if it was just one more part of her chassis, and moved through her like electricity would through her wires.
Penny closed her eyes, and replayed the day’s events in her memory, searching for clues, slowly beginning to put together a theory—
Suddenly, she detected Blake’s heart rate spiking rapidly. Penny spun to check on her, and found her writhing inside her sleeping bag, her Faunus ears pinned flat against her head. When a quiet whimper slipped out of her mouth, Penny couldn’t stay still any longer. She reached out and shook Blake’s shoulder as gently as possible while still being firm enough to wake her quickly.
“Blake? Blake?”
Blake shot upright, thrashing wildly for a moment like her bag was on fire, her hand scrabbling for something at her side which wasn’t there—her weapon?
“Blake?” she whispered again.
Blake whipped around, her eyes wild and unfocused, but after a few moments, she seemed to comprehend where she was, and some of the tension slipped out her body.
“Were you having a nightmare…?” Penny said.
It took forty-four seconds for Blake to reply as her terrified gasping slowed to a more normal rhythm. Finally, she met Penny’s eyes, and even in the low light she could see tears welling up in them. She nodded. “I… there’s a lot I should tell you—the team—about Adam. I…” She shivered again. “He was—I’m—I’m scared of him, Penny. I’m scared of what he’ll do to—to—to everything.”
“Would you like a hug?”
“No.” Blake shook her head rapidly, and then added, “Sorry. Just… I can’t handle touching right now.”
“That’s okay! Would you like me to sit with you, then?”
“Yes, please.”
Penny sat down next to Blake, taking care not to disturb the others, and folded her hands in her lap. Blake’s heart rate was still elevated, but much less so than before. She watched her team leader carefully, looking for any signs that her emotional state was worsening.
“I’m sorry,” Blake said. “Did I wake you up?”
“No, not at all! I was awake, contemplating some things.”
“Oh?”
“Well—”
A sudden confused mumble from beside them interrupted Penny, and she and Blake turned to see Yang stirring in her sleeping bag. She raised her head to look at them, her hair obscuring most of her face. “Wha’s g’n on?”
And then, from the other side of them, almost at the same time:
“Please don’t tell me you all decided to do the party part of a slumber party right now,” Weiss said groggily.
“Oh.” Blake slumped down as she realized all her teammates were awake. “I… I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to wake you all.”
“Hey, at least Ruby’s still asleep?”
“Nope!”
The voice came from above, and Penny swung her gaze upward to see Ruby’s infrared outline perched on the balcony above.
“Sorry! Reflexes!” she said, waving to Penny. “I’m an extremely light sleeper, and if something wakes me up unexpectedly I evacuate the vicinity on instinct! Good for being a soldier, bad for sleepovers.”
“Great,” Blake muttered, her ears drooping. “I woke everyone up.”
“If it makes you feel better, Blake, I started all this by waking you.”
Blake blinked. “Huh. What were you doing, Penny? You said you were thinking about something?”
“Well. Yes.” Penny considered whether or not it was a good idea to mention this—she wanted everyone to get a good night’s sleep! But also… She wanted to tell them so badly she wanted to do it right now, and the risk of sleep deprivation felt far less significant—
She was going to say it now. It was just too exciting.
“Ruby. Weiss. Blake. Yang,” she said slowly, hardly believing the words she was about to speak even though she’d worked through their logic. “I believe I have discovered my Semblance.”
Chapter 23: Control
Notes:
Content warning for this chapter (click this text to reveal the warning):
Discussions of taking away someone’s autonomy, and discussion of forcing someone to kill themselves.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
As soon as Penny announced the potential discovery of her Semblance, there wasn’t a single person in the tower who had any interest in getting more sleep that night. Team BSYP and Ruby sat in a small circle on the amalgamation of sleeping bags and blankets that they’d pushed together, and Penny was the center of the discussion.
“I’m guessing this has something to do with you jumping into a mech and then my head?” Ruby said.
Weiss stared at Ruby. “Your head?”
“And a wrench!” Penny said.
“A wrench?”
Ruby made a thoughtful face. “Socket wrench, monkey wrench, lug wrench, torque wrench, or other?”
Penny decided that it would be best to explain things further before Weiss suffered some sort of mental implosion from confusion.
“From what I have been able to observe thus far, I believe that my Semblance allows me to temporarily inhabit other things besides my own body.”
Her teammates and Ruby stared at her with wide eyes, processing that information, and it was Yang who spoke first.
“Are you saying your Semblance is that you can possess things?”
Penny looked at Yang in confusion. “I do not gain ownership of them.”
“Oh! Whoops, I meant. Uh. Like how in stories, a ghost can move into other things and people and control them; that’s called possession.”
“Ah, I see.” Penny added the new definition to her vocabulary, while thinking to herself—ghosts. Hmmm.
She looked around the room, looking for a suitable object to test her theory on, and eventually settled on a nearby cabinet.
“Observe!” she said, and focused on the cabinet, thinking of going there, of going into it, while she sent her Aura outward—
INPUT DETECTED: CABINET
Now Penny was literally in a cabinet. She couldn’t see anything or hear anything or sense anything, but that wasn’t a problem right now. Time to try out the next part of her theory!
Through her own body’s audioreceptors, she could hear the concerned voices of her teammates—she would have to ask them how this appeared from their perspective—but their sounds were muted and distant, like the signal was being transmitted over a very long distance. Which, she supposed, was exactly what was happening. Any distance was a long distance for her body which had only ever been intended to transmit wired connections. So was it her Aura which was acting as a signal transmitter? What was the bandwidth? There were so many fascinating questions!
“Uh, Penny, are you…?”
It took a moment, but after those words, Penny registered the sensation of someone tapping lightly on her body’s head.
Oh. Yes. She should hurry before her teammates became any more concerned. Now, how to—oh, this was interesting, her internal file systems seemed to have created a sort of temporary file system and a command shell specifically for the cabinet she was in. Which meant—making the cabinet door open and close by itself could be as simple as running a command!
Yang hadn’t been far off her own idea when she talked about possession. Just as ghosts were said to be able to make doors open and close by themselves… Penny could, as well.
And that was exactly what she did. The cabinet had been closed before; now it was open. She wasn’t sure how she knew it exactly, but it was right there as a status in the command shell, telling her the cabinet’s current status. Now to repeat that several times, and now—
She jumped back to her own body, said “Salutations!” in a bright tone, and then realized everyone was leaning in close to look at her, clearly worried. Several startled shouts overlapped as everyone toppled backwards in surprise, landing in a heap.
“Oops, apologies!” Penny said as her teammates untangled themselves from one another. “Was my test successful?”
Yang was rubbing her head, working herself back upright. “Were you making the cabinet glow green and open and shut by itself?”
“It was successful!” Penny jumped to her feet, unable to contain her excitement in the slightest bit as she wrote the information into her planning algorithms. “I inhabited something else besides my own body, and I controlled the function of that item!” And clearly her Semblance wasn’t just for electronic items like the mech—it included inanimate objects without the slightest bit of electricity in them, like cabinets or wrenches. What were the limits? How many things could she inhabit? She needed further testing!
“It is an undeniable fact now! I have a Semblance!” All of Penny’s previous disappointment at her Aura’s lack of healing ability vanished, replaced by elation. A Semblance! A Semblance! Her soul was everything! Well, she knew that already, but now she knew it even more! Her soul was expressing itself in a way unique to herself!
“You were right, Yang!” she said, bolting forward and hugging her teammate. “It is like a ghost!”
And that, she decided, would be the name of her Semblance.
Her name was Penny Pallas. She was a real girl. She had a soul. She had an Aura. She had a Semblance. And her Semblance’s name was Ghost.
Penny was magical.
Ruby just couldn’t say it enough, and it was especially true now, watching the bright green glow that marked Penny’s presence appear and disappear from various objects around the workshop as they tested out Penny’s Semblance. And the glow wasn’t the same for everything Penny jumped into—sometimes it was brighter, sometimes it was dimmer, and if the thing she was in had lights on it already, the lights would turn green.
“Test number four,” Penny said from her own body, placing a pencil and a scissors on a nearby table. “Weiss, are you ready with the Aura-detection camera?”
“Ready,” Weiss said, aiming it at Penny and fiddling with the screen.
“Ready!” Penny said. And then, she just… went still. Her eyes were still open and she was still blinking and breathing, but she was no longer actually responsive to anything. Which meant she had activated Ghost—what a cool name for a Semblance!—and was actually now somewhere else. It was a little strange, seeing Penny not at home, but it was also kind of cool! Penny had explained the blinking and the breathing were the automatic routines her body’s hardware ran for her, because it would take up too much conscious processing power to keep remembering to blink and breathe in a manner that mimicked organics. And since they were automatic, they ran even when Penny was elsewhere! This was… this was like Penny in screensaver mode!
Then the pencil lit up with a green glow all around it, the same exact color as Penny’s Aura. They’d experimented with the glow—trying to see if Penny could possess something without the glow showing up, and the answer was unfortunately no. So, stealth possessions were a no-go, then.
After a few seconds of nothing else happening, the glow disappeared from the pencil and reappeared around the scissors. And then, without warning, the scissors opened and closed by themselves, as if being guided by an invisible hand. Penny’s hand.
Ruby had already seen the cabinet door open and close by itself, but even so, she couldn’t help her mouth falling open in amazement as she watched the scissors moving. Magical. Penny was magical.
Then the glow disappeared from the scissors, and—
“Data has been acquired!” Penny said, speaking from her body again. “My control of an object seems to encompass just the inherent functions built into it. I can make these scissors open and close by themselves, but I cannot make something such as a pencil stand up and write by itself.”
“Even so, that’s still… an incredible Semblance,” Blake said, picking up the pencil and turning it over in her hands, as if trying to see if there was something different about it.
“You could just make a lock open!” Ruby’s mind was whirling with the possibilities. “Any weapon with mechashift, you can completely disable it, which might make you kind of unbeatable in a fight—Except, oh, wait.” Some of Ruby’s excitement fell away as she remembered that Penny’s body became a stationary target whenever she used her Semblance—terrible strategy, never ever stay still in a fight, she knew that from the bottom of her heart. “Never mind.”
“Well, perhaps…” Penny tapped her chin and then looked over to Weiss. “What does the Aura detection show?”
Weiss pressed on the screen a few more times, and then turned it around, showing a replay of the just-completed test. “It seems like all of your active Aura moves to whatever you’re possessing, while your passive Aura still registers as being in your own body…?”
“That makes sense,” Penny said. “My Aura generator is in my body, after all, and not in this pencil, but something has to move there!” But then her playful expression dimmed. “However, since all my active Aura moves to whatever I am semblancing into, that makes me even more vulnerable whenever I activate Ghost. Stationary and unshielded. My body is quite durable, but it is still thoroughly inadvisable to make myself…” She looked over to Yang. “...A sitting duck? Is that the right usage of the idiom?”
Yang nodded, giving her a half-smile. “Sure is. Also, you’re right. My Semblance literally relies on taking hits, but even with that I try not to stand still and soak up hits. Too many ways for that to go wrong.”
“Couldn’t you create… an autopilot function, or something along those lines, for your body so it can keep fighting even while you’re possessing something else?” Weiss said.
“You’re not good with tech, are you?” Ruby said.
“Excuse me?”
Ruby thought Penny was also thinking Weiss’s question was ignorant, but then again, Penny was probably too polite to say it was stupid. Instead, she said, “It is not that simple, unfortunately. My body is quite possibly the most complex piece of machinery on the planet.”
For reasons completely incomprehensible to Ruby, there was something about the way Penny said that which made her feel… dizzy. Weird. Was she… sleep-deprived or something? She barely ever got dizzy.
“An autopilot program would be fundamentally unable to manage the affairs of my body as one united entity,” Penny went on. “Automation can run simpler processes within me such as blinking, or calculations, or algorithms, or any number of things, but fighting… There would be far too many processes and functions and variables for any form of automation to handle! The only entity which is capable of managing that is a true, sentient artificial intelligence with proper processing capability and a soul.” She pointed at herself. “Me!”
Her! “How does that work, anyway?” Ruby said, propping her chin up on her hand and studying Penny. “You’ve got an Aura and a soul, we’ve all seen it, but how does your artificial intelligence—the really beep-boop stuff—factor in?”
Penny turned to the hologram projection table behind them, tapped a few buttons on it, and suddenly Ruby and the others were looking at a holographic projection of… Well, Ruby had no idea. It looked like a giant seething mass of three-dimensional glowing dots. “I have a soul, and an Aura, and an artificial intelligence, and a consciousness matrix, and a logic core—” As Penny said each of these things, a different dot in the cloud lit up a brilliant blue. “—and one thousand one hundred and thirty-eight other systems with smaller degrees of significance.” As the word eight left her mouth, a wave of light passed through every dot in the holograph, and then the cloud began to shift and morph, reforming itself into something entirely different.
“It is impossible to determine where any one of those things ends and another begins. The best way I can summarize it, without taking several months, is to say that I am a merging of all these things.” And as Penny said that, Ruby realized she was no longer looking at an indistinguishable cloud. The dots had rearranged themselves into the rough outline of a humanoid shape. A Penny-shaped shape, actually.
Penny paused, gesturing to the holograph, and then added with a small smile, “And that is what’s needed to run my chassis effectively in a fight! Which an autopilot is not.”
Okay, there was the dizzy feeling again. Whenever Penny talked about herself like that—like an incredible artwork or something—it made Ruby feel like she was going to fall over.
Yang broke into applause. Penny gave her an embarrassed smile and shut off the projection table, bowing her head.
“Thank you… I, er, have had that graphic prepared for the last several months in case any of you asked me what Ruby just did.” Her eyes flicked to Ruby. “Thank you.”
“Could you…” Ruby gestured with her hands like she was disassembling a rifle. “Could you just, I don’t know, tell your consciousness matrix to handle the defense while your soul is elsewhere? It’s not part of your Aura, but it’s still conscious, and even if it’s not as good as having your soul there to do the heavy lifting…” She shrugged. “A shitty defense is still better than no defense, right?”
“Theoretically, yes. But…” Penny looked at the others, shifting and then clutching at one of her elbows. “That has an entirely different risk.”
Silence greeted that as the four other girls present tried to work out what exactly Penny was referring to.
“This is a vast oversimplification, but… if there’s one part of me doing one thing in one physical container, and another part of me doing another thing in another container…” She trailed off there, looking expectantly at her teammates, and it was Blake who caught on first.
“That sounds like how to accidentally create a new person,” she said slowly.
“Precisely!” Penny clapped her hands together. “One of the benefits of having my sentience linked to artificial intelligence is that I believe I can recognize the signs and circumstances of another artificial sentience coming into existence! Partitioning my higher-order decision-making in such a way to effectively split it is a high-potentiality method for creating a second independent consciousness!”
Weiss’s eyes widened. “Wait, are you saying you could make a sentient artificial intelligence if you wanted to?”
Ruby’s adoration of Penny grew ever-larger as Penny started to nod energetically, before stopping herself and amending it to a shrug. “It is only a theory. However, I would prefer to avoid testing it unless I want the responsibilities that accompany creating new life. I think those responsibilities would interfere with being a Huntress!”
“Sometimes you say things with ramifications that could irrevocably change the fabric of the world, and then I have to carry on with my life like normal, as if nothing’s changed,” Weiss said faintly.
Penny tilted her head curiously. “Thank you, but nothing has changed? My Semblance is still not viable in combat. I shouldn’t leave myself dangerously exposed, and I certainly should not make another person.”
“Yeah, don’t do that,” Yang finished, poking at Penny’s forehead. “I’m glad you don’t want to be a teen mom, Penny. Could you imagine actually having an entire other soul sharing a head with you?”
“It would probably be quite crowded,” Penny said after a moment’s contemplation.
Suddenly, something occurred to Ruby. Sharing a head— “Wait!” she said. “You did that already, Penny!”
Penny blinked slowly at her. “I… What?”
“Two souls in a head! You already Semblanced into my head! Remember? During the fight!”
“Oh.” Curiously, Penny’s face fell. “...I was hoping to avoid ever thinking about that again…”
“What?! Why?! Forget vulnerability, Penny—if you’re fighting someone else, you could just end the fight immediately by semblancing into their body!” Ruby tilted her head, her mouth practically watering at the thought of being able to end a fight before it even started. “You could just make your opponent kill themselves!”
Maybe Penny could make someone’s heart stop beating, or suffocate them by paralyzing their diaphragm, or overload every nerve in someone else’s body, or turn off their brain, or maybe she could pull down their Aura and make them fall on their sword, or compel them to drink poison, or—
Penny froze, and not in a using-her-Semblance kind of way, but a terrified-out-of-her-mind kind of way where her eyes went wide while her camera-shutter-pupils went so small Ruby could barely see them. And Blake and Weiss and Yang… didn’t really look that much less disturbed than Penny.
“Um.” Too far? Ruby would take any opportunity she had to finish a battle! And Penny’s Semblance could end battles without ever having to fire a single bullet! Which was like a tactician’s dream come true! But… yeah, most people didn’t think like her. Most people weren’t a silver-eyed beacon of destruction. She needed to make it sound better. “Of course, you should only do it to really bad people!” she added hastily.
That… did not lessen the discomfort in the room.
“I would never do that to anyone,” Penny said with unexpected ferocity. “It could be the most cruel, most vindictive person on all of Remnant, the most callous and vile sentient being in all recorded history, and… I would still rather die than do such a thing to someone else.” She pulled away from the others, stumbling backwards and sitting down heavily on a workbench. “I—I would never even take control of someone else’s body, not for anything.” She wrapped her arms around herself, her face twisting with despair. “I cannot take away someone’s autonomy. It is… every person in existence deserves that, no matter what they’ve done. It’s… it’s their own body. What kind of person would I be if I violated that?”
“I mean, what if it was the only way you could save the world?” Ruby said. “Like, what if someone was about to push a button that would destroy the world, and you could only stop them by taking control of their body? What about that?”
Ruby thought it was an important question that needed answering, but Penny’s expression dissolved into utter misery. She let out a whimper of despair and then pulled her knees up to her chest, burying her face in her arms.
“Oh. Penny? I, um… Sorry…” Ruby stepped back instinctively, acutely aware that she’d done something terribly wrong but also not entirely sure what. “I… I didn’t mean to scare you…”
Yang and Weiss had moved to Penny’s side, and now they were rubbing her back slowly and talking quietly to her, while Blake turned to Ruby.
“That was too far,” she said, crossing her arms.
“I know! I know!” Ruby said. She felt sick to her stomach just thinking about the anguish in Penny’s face. “But… I don’t understand. Why?” Was this another thing she didn’t understand because she was different? Clearly this mattered, but why?
Blake’s expression softened as she stared at Ruby. “Losing your choice—physical choice, or mental choice, or social choice, or any way a choice can be made—is unbearable for most people, Ruby. It’s the—it creates a feeling of hopelessness like nothing else in the world can. But… that’s just normal for you, isn’t it?”
“Well, yeah. With all the power I’ve got, there’s no choice, I have to save the world.” It seemed pretty obvious to her—that was how it was with Fria, too, after all, what with her overpowered Semblance and all. But Blake was saying it like it was some horrifying discovery. “But I’m not a slave or anything! I’m just a soldier!”
Now all of Team BSYP was staring at her in horror, even Penny.
Blake shook her head with a weirdly focused look in her eyes. “I have so many problems with what you just said.”
“Um. Okay?” Ruby edged away from her, just a little. “I’m happy where I am!”
“I just don’t understand,” Yang said. “You’re a lab experiment, your body got messed with, you were raised to be the perfect fighter, but for what? This goes beyond just being a soldier! Why treat a person like a weapon?”
It was clear that all of Team BSYP was waiting for a reply to that, and Ruby had a feeling she couldn’t just say ‘classified,’ because that felt like a great way to lose all her new friends. But what could she say? The General had always told her that there was far more going on behind the scenes than the rest of the world knew, that there was a hidden enemy against whom a secret war had been waged for longer than any of their lives. And that was all he’d told her. Fria knew more, too, but she never told Ruby any of it. Ruby operated on a need-to-know basis, and right now, that was all she needed to know to train. When she became a real fighter, when she was actually unleashed on the world, that was when the General had promised he’d tell her everything. Until then, though… nothing. Certainly nothing she could tell Team BSYP. It would probably just sound like a twisted fairytale. Especially when she didn’t even know the name of this enemy.
“There’s something big out there,” she said finally. “Big enough that it doesn’t matter what you’ve got to do to fight it. Big enough that I don’t care what happens to me. Big enough that the world really does need to be saved.”
She hoped she sounded sincere. She hoped Penny and Blake and Yang and Weiss would still want to be friends with a weapon. A weapon that was already being aimed at something, the safety being clicked off and the firing hammer being pulled back, ready to fire what would not be the first bullet of a war, but hopefully the last.
These four definitely wanted to be friends with Ruby. But would they want to be friends with Moonrise?
No one had replied yet, and it was starting to make Ruby nervous. “How different is it from being a Huntress?” she said. “You’re being trained to fight evil, too! I’ve just trained a lot more!”
Finally, it was Penny who replied, letting out a quiet sigh. “In a way, you are right, Ruby. There someday might be a day when I have to choose between… violating someone’s bodily autonomy, or letting something much more terrible happen. I wish that day never comes. I hope that I will never need to make that choice. I will do everything I can to avoid doing such a thing. But… it might happen. And it would be naive of me to avoid considering it.”
“Exactly!” Ruby nodded happily. All was well, they were on the same page again! “Which is why you need to figure out what you can do with your Semblance! So you’re gonna try it on me!”
Penny had been looking down at the floor, but as soon as Ruby said try it on me, her head whipped up, all of her previous worry returning. “Ruby, are you…?”
“Yup! I’m giving you permission to try controlling my body! I’m the one who had the idea in the first place, so it’s only fair I let you try it on me.”
Weiss, Blake, and Yang were back to their facial expressions from a minute ago. Penny was starting to shrink away again, the previous quaver returning to her voice. “Ruby, I can’t… I can’t do that. I cannot just… invade you.”
“Nope! Not an invasion! My body is my home, right? Well, I’m inviting you into my home, because I trust you not to hurt me!” Ruby spread her arms like she was about to ask for a hug. “I thought it was pretty cool the first time you did it. I don’t mind you doing it again.”
“...You’re sure?” Penny said. She was clutching Yang’s arm now, making her Aura shimmer like liquid gold around her forearm from how tightly she was squeezing. “I—I don’t want to hurt you. I don’t want to…” She trailed off.
“I promise!” Ruby gave her an encouraging nod. “Better me than someone else, right? Besides, there’s no one else I’d trust more to let inside me.”
Penny nodded, and then rose slowly to her feet, gazing into Ruby’s eyes. “I need to hear you give consent,” she said firmly. Her expression had turned from despair into a stony resolve. “I need to hear an unequivocal yes from you before I intentionally attempt this. The first time was an accident, but now I promise this: I will never, ever enter someone’s body or mind without their explicit consent.”
That was kind of the opposite of what Ruby had been trying to get Penny to realize, but that was fine! Sometimes promises had to be broken, and she was sure Penny would break a promise if it meant saving a life. Or the world.
“Yes,” she said, looking right back at Penny.
“Then…” Penny looked around at her teammates, giving them a questioning look. Ruby wasn’t sure what she was looking for, until the other three members of Team BSYP gave slow nods. And only then did Penny continue, as if she’d been waiting for their approval.
“I will attempt it now.”
She went still, and then… It was hard to say what changed exactly. Ruby could feel something in her head, but not in an unpleasant way—just in a way that made her think, huh. Something’s different. It was a very slight pressure at the back of her head, almost as if there was someone standing directly behind her.
“You in there, Penny?” she said, tapping a fist against the side of her head. “I don’t know if you’ve got a way to show it, or—”
Suddenly, Ruby’s mouth was forming entirely different words, words she absolutely wasn’t intending to say.
“This is thoroughly strange.”
And then Ruby had control of her mouth again. “Whoa!” she gasped, reflexively whipping to look to one side even though there was no way for her to see Penny right now. “That was you, right?”
“I believe so?” Ruby’s mouth was talking again. “I can see through your eyes, and…”
Ruby’s head moved back and forth seemingly of its own accord, followed by her arm lifting itself up—apparently, Penny wanted to inspect Ruby’s hand.
Yang had her arms crossed, an inscrutable expression on her face. “I’m watching two people have a conversation in one face,” she said, blinking at Ruby (and Penny). “And it actually looks like two people, somehow. That’s… that’s trippy.”
“Trippy?” Penny said through Ruby’s mouth.
“Psychedelic,” Weiss answered.
“Ah.”
Blake squinted. “You’re not giving off, uh… Penny’s green possession glow.”
“Oh, how strange. I wonder—Ruby? Could you please walk over to the mirror?”
“Sure!” Ruby crossed the room, coming to a stop in front of the mirror which Penny had sat at to repair her face earlier. “But also, you know you could’ve just done that yourself, right?”
Penny didn’t reply to that. Instead, she asked, “Could you take your goggles off, please?”
“Um, sure.” She was facing away from the others, so she wasn’t really worried about them seeing her eye color as long as she leaned in close to the mirror—
“Whoa!”
Okay, never mind, she didn’t have to worry about her eye color being on display right now at all. Her eyes were glowing a bright green, like Penny’s eyes did at night but exponentially brighter, and there was no way to tell they were silver right now.
She spun to face the others, who were not prepared at all for that given the abject surprise on their faces. “Check it out!”
“Penny, the name you picked for your Semblance just gets more and more fitting,” Yang said in an awed tone.
“So what can you do?” Ruby said to Penny.
“Do?”
“Y’know…” Ruby gestured vaguely, and then mimed choking herself. “How much can you make me do?”
Penny went silent for a long time, long enough that Ruby started to worry she’d done something wrong again.
“Don’t actually kill me, though,” she added to reassure Penny. “I’m too valuable to lose.”
More silence.
“I would like a moment,” Penny said finally, before Ruby’s hands reached up unbidden and pulled her goggles back down over her eyes, and then the feeling of a presence somewhere in the back of Ruby’s head was gone.
At the same moment, Penny’s body became animated again as Penny returned and gave a little shake of her arms, looking down at herself but not saying anything.
Blake was staring at Ruby in a way that felt really weird. Ruby couldn’t decide if it was a murderous look, or a protective look. Maybe both.
Yang came over to Penny’s side and stood there, talking to her in a voice too quiet for Ruby to hear, until suddenly she snapped her fingers.
“Wait. Wait.” Yang looked from Penny to Ruby, and then back to Penny. “If you can see and hear through someone else’s eyes and ears, does that mean you could taste things through someone else’s tongue?”
Penny blinked very slowly and looked up and to the left at nothing in particular, like she was performing a calculation in her head. Which was probably exactly what she was doing, since she was Penny. “...Possibly?”
“Only one way to find out!” Yang said. “Forget the scary stuff, how about the fun stuff of hitching a ride in someone else’s body? Ruby, you wanna show her the magic of taste?”
“Um, I can’t,” Ruby said. When three-quarters of Team BSYP sent questioning looks her way, she elaborated: “I don’t taste things. All my senses except sight and hearing were dulled to near-nonexistence to make me more effective in battle! Cool, huh?”
…Unfortunately, the looks on Blake and Weiss and Yang’s faces suggested that they did not think that was cool.
“...I’m going to rejoin the White Fang.” Blake’s tone was deathly flat. “And then I’m going to commit acts of terrorism against the Atlesian Military. And then I’m going to overthrow Atlas. With extreme prejudice.”
Ruby laughed nervously. “You’re joking? Please tell me you’re joking, right. Because I would have to arrest you if you’re not.”
“Legally, a joke. Emotionally, though—” Blake shook her head.
“Just so you know, it wasn’t actually the Atlesian Military who made me this way! It was one rogue scientist breaking the law , and then the military just found me and raised me! It wasn’t their fault I’m like this!”
“Because that’s so much better.”
“Okay! OKAY! Can you just STOP? PLEASE?” Ruby stomped her foot, hard, hard enough that a trail of silver tumbled off her. Blake stepped back, shocked.
“Can you please not act like I’m some awful tragedy or something?! I’m not a bad thing! I’m not a malfunction! I’m not a victim! I know you think I’m a prisoner or a lab rat or whatever, but I’m happy! I don’t care how I got here or why I was made, I just care about helping people! And I’m going to be the best in the world at it! I don’t know how many extra lives I’ll save with the full-decade headstart I got on training, but I know it’s a lot! I care about that a lot more than I care about what happens to me!”
Ruby fell silent, breathing heavily, and tried not to look too hard at the four expressions of shock directed at her, because suddenly she was terrified she’d just ruined it all, they wouldn’t want to be her friend after this—they wouldn’t want to talk to her—they wouldn’t want anything to do with her—
She activated Silver Storm and reappeared on the balcony, sitting crosslegged with her face nearly pressed up against the window, yanking her hood down over her face and doing her best to block out the outside world.
It didn’t last long, of course. She heard two sets of footsteps on the stairs, coming to a stop a respectful distance behind her. Penny’s voice reached her, careful and gentle.
“Ruby? Blake has something she would like to say to you, if you are receptive to apologies at the moment.”
“Go for it,” Ruby mumbled, not turning around.
“I’m sorry,” Blake said. And she really did sound sorry. “Ruby, we’re… from pretty different situations, to put it lightly, but I know a thing or two about not wanting people to fixate on my background. So, I think I understand what you’re feeling right now. At least a little.”
Huh. Ruby was empathizing with a former member of the White Fang. Chalk that up in the ‘things she never thought she would do’ category. She pulled her hood back down and turned her head, doing her best to smile cheerfully. “Um, thank you… You’re not mad at me, right?”
“Not at all. Just please keep in mind that the things which seem normal to you are the opposite of what many other people want, and you can definitely make people uncomfortable by talking about it like you do. And I will take issue if you make me uncomfortable.”
“Oh. Okay.” She still didn’t really understand all that, but for now everything was fine so she was fine again! “Got it!” she said, saluting Blake.
Penny took a step forward, offering a hand to Ruby. “Yang has given me permission to try tasting things through her, if you’d like to observe?”
Penny was looking at herself. Not figuratively, not with a mirror—literally, she was looking at her own body from the eyes of someone else. She was seeing herself, her body, standing with her hands folded politely in front of her.
…Her hands? Its hands? What were the proper pronouns for her body when her consciousness was elsewhere? Because, in theory, she was the she that others would refer to, meaning that her body would be an it, but also… it did not feel right to refer to her body as a simple object. That was her home! A very nice home with lots of cool features and things that made her happy to be the way she was! Her body deserved appreciation and respect! So maybe her body was also a she!
Then again, she’d met someone at the queer club who used it/its pronouns alongside she/her for itself, and that person was proof that Penny could refer to her body as it but in a positive way! It was just a question of which felt better. She would have to think further on this.
She’d never thought that discovering her Semblance could lead to an internal debate on semantics, but Penny’s life was full of surprises that way.
“This is strange, seeing myself from an outside perspective,” she said aloud. And what was also strange was speaking words and hearing them come out in Yang’s voice, since she was inhabiting Yang at the moment. So many things were strange.
“You think?” Yang said, taking back control to speak. “Meanwhile, I’m feeling my own mouth saying words that aren’t coming from my mind. I think this is the second weirdest thing I’ve ever experienced.”
“What was the weirdest thing?” Weiss said.
“Private,” Yang said immediately. “...Wait, Penny, can you see my memories?”
“No,” Penny said immediately. And she was thankful for that. She already felt like enough of an intruder. “Not in the slightest. And I have no access to your thoughts.”
“Oh, thank goodness,” Yang said. Her heart rate, which had briefly spiked, dropped back to normal. Penny knew this not because she’d detected Yang’s heart rate with her sensors, but because she could feel Yang’s heartbeat right now. It was… disconcerting, honestly, feeling it pounding away like that when it had spiked. If Penny were to feel something like that in her own body, she would’ve thought something was terribly wrong.
“So! Anyways!” Yang slapped a hand down on the workbench and reached into her pocket. “Your first-ever taste of something is gonna be…” She glanced at the wrapper. “Tickled Pink brand bubblegum!”
“Interesting!” If it was possible for Penny to put all her anxieties about hijacking other people’s autonomy aside… she actually was curious about this experience.
Yang unwrapped a stick, tossed it into her mouth, began chewing, and—
Nothing. Penny waited patiently, wondering if perhaps this was just a matter of waiting for things to synchronize. But as the seconds dragged on and Yang kept chewing…
“Well, I’m definitely tasting it, can you?”
“…No. Not even slightly.” She wasn’t going to say she was disappointed, because she had gone in with very low expectations, but… it still felt disappointing, somehow. “I am not sure why.”
Ruby raised a hand. “Um, I have an idea? Maybe? You know how computers need device drivers? Like, if you plug a piece of hardware into a computer, they can’t communicate with each other unless you’ve got the device driver. Maybe Yang’s tastebuds are the hardware being plugged into you, and you just don’t have a device driver for taste? But like, whatever the equivalent of a driver is for you.”
Weiss looked thoroughly mystified, Blake looked thoughtful, Penny couldn’t tell what Yang’s reaction was because it was difficult to see Yang’s face through Yang’s eyes, and Penny’s reaction was…
“You may be right!” she said thoughtfully. “All of the things that I have done through my Semblance are things that are analogous to something I can do in my own body—movement, sight, hearing, touch, sending electric signals—but I have never been able to taste in my own body. Which means, if I wanted to taste through someone else… I would need to first build taste sensors for my own body.” Which perhaps defeated the purpose of tasting things in someone else’s body.
Ruby jumped closer. “I’ll help you!” she said, grinning. “You’re gonna build yourself sensors for taste and smell, and because you’re a robot, you can turn the senses on and off whenever you want, so you’ll get the best of both worlds!”
She had a small, sincere smile that Penny didn’t doubt for a second. She’d done plenty of work with modifying the existing sensors in her body, but to design entirely new ones was unprecedented territory. If she combined her skills with Ruby’s… maybe they could do this!
“Hey, Penny, before you skedaddle back to your body…”
“Yes?”
“Wanna try out the whole ‘overriding someone else’s will’ thing on me?”
Penny tensed. And it was strange to feel Yang’s squishy human muscles tensing instead of her servos locking in place.
Yang noticed the tensing. “I’m strong. I can handle it, I promise. And besides…” Her voice turned softer. “I think it would make you feel way better, if you actually knew for sure what your Semblance could do, instead of having it be a big scary unknown.”
…Yang made an extremely compelling point. The unknown was always scarier than the known. And Yang was… Penny felt less scared of hurting Yang than she was of hurting Ruby, somehow. She knew what Yang was capable of.
Still though, Penny once again looked to her teammates to make sure they were okay with this, and received a nod from Blake and Weiss.
Yang gave Unoccupied Penny a pat on the shoulder, paused, and then gave herself a pat on the shoulder. “...I don’t know where supportive pats should go right now.”
“Either is fine. It’s the thought that counts!”
“Alrighty.” Yang gave her another pat, this time both on Penny’s body and on Yang’s shoulder. “So… what if we do it like an arm-wrestling match? I try to move my arm to the left, you try moving it to the right?”
“Okay,” Penny said, and then Yang raised an arm, which Penny took as the signal to begin. She tried to move Yang’s arm, and—
She met resistance. It was like a servo going stiff in her arm. If she tried to push harder—
“Wait! Wait! Something’s happening!” Weiss said, freezing both of them.
Penny (and Yang, by default) looked up at her. She’d been aiming the Aura-detecting camera at them, and now she was staring intently at it. “Penny, your Aura’s draining faster.” Weiss was also talking to Penny’s unoccupied body instead of where Penny was right now, which was an understandable mistake.
“Really?” Penny semblanced back to her own body, just long enough to run a few calculations and check her prediction algorithms. Wait…
She reappeared in Yang’s head. “Yang, I want you to fully resist my movements. With everything you have. I promise I won’t hurt you, but I want to see what happens when it is an all-out battle of wills.”
“Sure thing!”
Penny started to move Yang’s arm, but then Yang tensed, a shiver passing through her entire body as she flexed her muscles with the effort of stopping Penny, and Penny steadily increased her push—
“Oh, it’s dropping like a rock now,” Blake said, leaning over Weiss’s shoulder to watch the Aura display.
“Yang,” Penny said, her excitement rapidly growing. “I want you to try ejecting me from your head.”
“Um. How?”
“Just think about how much you do not want me in there!”
“But I don’t do not want—”
“Just try it! Please?”
“Okay.”
And then Penny felt something pushing on her, like a massive gust of wind trying to lift her off her feet and sweep her away, but if she really concentrated, she could keep herself anchored in Yang’s head as if she was clinging to a handhold, even as the pressure grew stronger—
There was a flash of green light the color of Penny’s Aura, and then quite suddenly, she was back in her own body and seeing Yang look around in confusion.
At that moment, Penny’s scroll, tucked in her pocket, vibrated warningly. She knew what she would see even before she took it out and saw the notification: She was out of Aura.
“…What just happened?” Blake said.
Penny let out a joyous laugh as she stared at the out of Aura warning flashing on her scroll’s Aura monitor. “Ghost has limits!”
“Did I just kick you out?” Yang said.
“Yes!” Penny bounced up and down, unable to contain the sheer relief spilling out of every circuit in her body. “The more resistance there is to what I am doing with my Semblance, the more Aura I must expend to exert control! And if there is enough resistance, I will burn through my entire Aura, and therefore my Semblance, in seconds!”
“So… no using it against someone in a fight?” Ruby said. “Because they’ll resist it?”
“Absolutely!” Penny said with glee. “Even someone who trusts me was able to drain my Semblance in moments just because I asked her to try and stop me! Someone who is actually, intentionally opposed to me would be able to push me away easily! I don’t even know if I would be able to get into an enemy’s body at all!”
She punched a fist into the air and then leapt forward, wrapping Yang up in a giant hug. “I couldn’t destroy someone’s autonomy even if I wanted to! —Which I do not want, of course!”
“I’ve never seen someone so happy to know her Semblance can’t do something,” Yang said, and Penny knew it was a joke because she ruffled Penny’s hair as she said it.
“I wonder if it extends to inanimate objects, too?” Penny said, her processors whirring at full speed. “If I tried to make a piece of technology do something which went against its programming, would that be more difficult?” She was excited to say that she had no idea what the answer to that question was! “We need to do even more testing! Although.” She noted the time. “That will have to come at a later date.”
“Oh. Right.” Blake glanced outside with a look of confusion, as if just noticing the sunrise. “We still have to go to classes after all this.”
“That is the second time you have said that this year,” Penny said.
Several minutes of relative quiet passed as the five of them began cleaning up the workshop and getting ready to re-enter the academic part of their lives, until Yang caught Penny’s attention again.
“So, Penny.” Yang put a hand on her hip and gave her a playful grin. “Aside from not getting tastes and the terrifying possibility of hijacking someone’s autonomy, how did it feel to hitch a ride in a bag of meat?”
“Must you refer to it that way?” Weiss said, pinching the bridge of her nose.
“Well…” Penny stayed silent for a few seconds, trying to think of how to answer Yang’s question politely. Finally, she decided Yang would appreciate blunt honesty. “Would it be insulting if I said I much prefer my own body?”
Yang burst out laughing. “Not at all!” she said once she’d composed herself again, and then suddenly she sounded much more serious. “Actually, I’m glad you like your body. Everyone should.”
“Oh, thank goodness.” Penny looked down at herself, folding her hands together. “Because, well, I do greatly prefer mine. I had no idea organic vision was so… limited.” She had found it disconcerting to be unable to zoom in on anything.
“That’s fair!”
There were a great many other things that Penny could list. “And my auditory sensors. And my radar. And my diagnostic program. Especially my diagnostic program, actually! Do organic beings not find it stressful, having almost no idea of what is going on inside your own body?”
“What do you mean?” Blake said, her facial expression simultaneously amused and respectful, which was an interesting combination to analyze.
Penny gestured at herself. “I know how much electricity is going through any wire in my body at any given moment. But Yang, I had no idea where any of the blood was in your body, and I didn’t know what kind of processing capacity your brain was operating at, and—and—I didn’t even know if you were breathing correctly!” Actually, the more Penny thought about it, the more stressful it felt. She liked having detailed status reports from her body. When something went wrong with Penny’s body, she could immediately pull a data log and understand the problem, whereas organic bodies relied on the terrifyingly vague reporting system that was pain. The extent of the usefulness of pain, from what she understood, was usually along the lines of, ‘Something’s wrong with your stomach, figure it out.’ And Penny was quite glad to not need to figure things out in that way.
“I can tell you I’m least breathing right,” Yang said, letting out a little chuckle and patting her own shoulder. “Us organics just… kinda do it automatically?”
“I have automatic processes too! But I have a database and a monitoring system where I can keep track of them, and given what I know about organic brains, I’m quite sure you don’t have that.” Penny shook her head. “It clearly doesn’t bother you that your bodies are almost entirely separate ecosystems from your consciousness. And it doesn’t bother you that you have only the barest amount of control over said ecosystem. Organic beings are very strange.”
But then as soon as those words were out of her mouth, she was worried she’d gone too far. She glanced around at suddenly unreadable faces, anxiety building up in her processors. Would her friends take offense at being called strange? After all, she would not want to be called strange—
And then Ruby began to laugh.
“You’re right, Penny. We are weird. If anyone ever tries to be mean to you for being a robot, you should just tell them all the stuff you just told us!”
And then Yang joined in, followed by Blake and even Weiss, and soon Penny was laughing too. One thought came to her, short but resonant:
Life is strange.
Notes:
Some notes on Penny’s Semblance:
In the scene where she first discovers her Semblance and accidentally semblances into Ruby’s head, I genuinely did not mean to imply there were computers or implants in Ruby’s head. The way I intended that scene was, at first it seems like technomancy because Penny ends up in a mech, but then she ends up in a wrench which is really just a hunk of metal, which expands the scope of the Semblance to inanimate objects, and then her semblancing into Ruby was only intended to demonstrate that the reach of her Semblance extends to organic things. I only chose Ruby for the flesh-and-blood example because, well, I thought it would be romantic to involve her in the first appearance of Penny’s Semblance! I apologize for any confusion I caused there.
I’ve tried my best to make Penny’s Semblance not OP, while still making it something that investigates themes of control and choice, both of which felt quite topical for Penny, while also being something that I could have fun with writing. I hope I’ve done a good job balancing it—having her body be entirely vulnerable and Aura-less when using it seems like enough to prevent it from being an instant end to a fight. And having difficulty/Aura expenditure scale with opposition to the possession seems like it’ll keep things fair for everyone else. And of course, there’s still much more to find out about her Semblance’s intricacies!
Also, I was genuinely unaware of the existence of the video game "Ghost Trick" when I created and named Penny's Semblance and wrote these chapters. It sure is a hell of a coincidence, though!
Chapter 24: Thought Experiments
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
After all the incredible occurrences of the last forty-eight hours, it felt quite incongruous to Penny that they were now sitting calmly in a classroom.
She leaned over to Yang, who looked like she was on the verge of falling asleep, and whispered, “Is it normal to feel like I should be doing something more exciting right now?”
Yang glanced over to her, but her first attempt at a reply turned into a slow, gaping yawn. “Totally,” she said once she’d collected herself. “Let me tell you, back at Signal, nothing dragged on like a Monday morning class after spending the weekend murking Grimm in the forest.”
Penny was not entirely sure what ‘murking’ signified, but given the context Yang was using it in, she could hazard a guess that it meant ‘to kill with extreme prejudice.’
“…Still though, some of my complete inability to stay awake right now might be due to getting, uh… forty-five minutes of sleep last night—for a worthy cause!”
“Would you like me to poke you regularly to keep you awake?” Penny said.
“…That would be really helpful, thank you.”
Penny poked Yang in the elbow as a starting poke, and then returned to her own relaxed pose, her chin propped up on her hand as she listened to Professor Carmel’s lecture. She was not sleepy, as her posture might have suggested—even if it was good upkeep for her to regularly sleep, she did not feel tired in the same way as organics did when she didn’t sleep. Rather, the reason for her posture was that she had long ago realized sitting in the same posture for the entirety of a class tended to draw strange looks from other students. So, she varied her position throughout class, doing her best to appear like someone who had things like muscles which required occasional movement to stay limber.
It was somewhat tiring, in a way, having to constantly pay attention to her positioning and her movements. It was computing power being thoroughly wasted. If everyone around her knew what she was, then she wouldn’t have to devote so much energy and resources to hiding it.
…Sometimes, Penny wondered what would happen if she just told the world what she was. Yes, there would be people who were afraid of her and people who wanted her dead and people who thought she was evil… but… Team BSYP and Team JNPR, and Ruby, and the professors at Beacon, had taught her that there would likely be plenty of people who accepted her for what she was without issue. Maybe enough people for her to actually live as herself, without having to pay attention to things like how still she was being or how stiff her posture was. That sounded nice.
But Penny wasn’t ready for that, and she didn’t think she would be for a long time. So for now, she sat in this lecture, and kept processing power devoted solely to making her appear normal.
This was what was usually required in lecture-style classes. It wasn’t that Penny disliked lectures—on the contrary, she enjoyed them! She loved learning new things, and listening to her professors’ stories, and interacting with the perspectives of other students from so many different parts of the world. It was just that… she didn’t enjoy lectures as much as the other, more interactive styles of classes at Beacon. However, studying to be a Huntress was not all about fighting and weaponry. The furthest thing from it, in fact. There were many parts of the curriculum which were not related to combat in the slightest.
Being a Huntress meant having a deep understanding of the world and its cultures, and at Beacon there were many such classes devoted to cultural, civic, and social education. Some of them were taken as electives, and it was one such elective which Penny found herself in this afternoon with the rest of her team and Ruby.
Ruby wasn’t technically even supposed to be in this class—she was just tagging along with Team BSYP. She had even said that her own team wouldn’t mind, which was perhaps a little concerning, but Penny was glad no negative consequences were being dealt for Ruby spending time with them!
This elective was FYC 1138: The Great War In Film, Literature, and Beyond. A class which examined the Great War’s impact on Remnant’s successive generations through the numerous forms of media inspired by it. It was by far the most difficult class for Penny, because when analyzing media, there was no one objectively correct answer. It wasn’t just that there were multiple interpretations to be had amongst different students in class—it was that sometimes Penny found her own interpretation changing over and over again when she talked about it in this class. Which was extremely confusing. And Professor Carmel seemed to encourage confusion.
“All right. I think we’ve hashed out Landing At Point Rain as much as we possibly can. Remember, kids, if you committed crimes against sentience and got away squeaky clean, don’t make a movie about how great it was, because that’s how you end up dead by mob justice.”
Still, Penny liked Professor Carmel. She was delightfully unique, a first-generation Huntress who’d been born in the midst of the Great War and was already retired from that profession for decades. With an unruly shock of white hair and a rumpled tweed jacket, she perpetually appeared as if she’d just rolled out of bed. Despite having a body made frail by age, she talked with energy, waving her arms and gesturing and pacing the room from one side to the other, and sometimes she brought in giant replica weapons as entirely unnecessary visual aids for whatever they were discussing in class that day. And she had a way of explaining what they were watching or reading in a way that made so much sense to Penny, even if Carmel always told them to not take her thoughts as law and look for their own interpretations.
Unlike most of the Beacon faculty, Carmel didn’t know about Penny’s true nature, due to being a visiting professor from Vacuo, but also… the way she spoke about some things was comforting. She never used the word humanity, instead relying on sentience or personhood when she needed to communicate something of that meaning. Penny knew that was likely intended as Faunus-inclusive language, but it was nice to imagine being included in her view of the world!
“Right,” Carmel said, hurrying over to where her computer was hooked up to the projection screen. “So. If you all watched the assigned viewing like you were supposed to, then we’ll be discussing Silent Spring for the rest of today!”
Penny blinked. She did not know what Carmel was talking about. What assigned viewing…?
Suddenly, a data packet popped out of her memory, alerting her to a very rare occurrence: Penny had forgotten something.
What?
For a moment, Penny wondered if she was glitching. Forgetting things was extremely hard for her to do, on account of how her memory worked—unless she did something to the memories herself…
She ran a hurried diagnostic scan, and a few moments later, she realized where she’d gone wrong.
She’d been planning to watch the assigned movie after her information-gathering mission to the nightclub with Blake and Yang. But then she had found Ruby, and she’d muted all other priorities in favor of helping her. And, it seemed, in her haste to mute priorities and help Ruby, she had accidentally sent the ‘homework for FYC 1138’ priority back into latent storage. Meaning that it would not be recallable into conscious memory until she was reminded of it externally.
And now, too late, she was being reminded of it externally. Oops.
Penny looked to the rest of her team, and found similarly dismayed expressions.
“Just give me a moment to get my presentation up,” Carmel said, peering over her glasses at the screen. “If technology could play nice with me just this once—”
“Did we all forget to watch this?” Penny whispered to her team.
“How fast do you think I can read the CinePedia page for this movie?” Blake muttered, frantically tapping at her scroll.
Weiss buried her face in her hand. “We’re going to fail this class.”
“Isn’t that a little bit of an overreaction—” Yang cut herself off, staring into space and furrowing her brow. “Wait. I think I’ve heard of this movie…”
Penny noticed Yang’s heart rate picking up, at the same time that Blake, still looking at her scroll, made a noise of alarm, her ears going flat against her head. “Penny—”
“Got it!” Carmel announced, smacking a key on her laptop. Moments later, the opening of a slide show flickered into existence on the projection screen, and Penny was greeted with an image of an enormous, hulking machine with glowing red eyes and blood dripping from almost every corner of its frame. Carmel strode back to the center of the classroom and struck a pose with her pointer stick like she was about to shoot the machine on screen. “Students, are we prepared to talk about killer robots?!”
The wave of complete dismay which erupted in Penny was so strong that her automatic processes were immediately convinced that physical harm must have been accompanying that feeling, and on the pure reflex triggered by that, she hunched down, shrinking in on herself. Processes meant to shield her from physical damage.
Logically, Penny knew that in works of fiction, robots were often portrayed as… villainous, and thoughtless, and destructive, to put it lightly. She knew what that might mean for what greater society would think of her. But, aside from the moments just before coming out to her team, she had been able to avoid ever contemplating that directly. Until now.
“This film was a commercial flop when it released,” Carmel said, and even though she couldn’t possibly have known what was wrong, the easy, casual inflection of her voice scared Penny. Had she ever considered that people in here might not like talking about this?
“But really, that can be blamed on the studio for not understanding what they had. They marketed it as some popcorn-gobbling turn-off-your-brain action blockbuster, so of course audiences expected that, and… that’s not what they got. At all. Instead, they got a movie that—yes, it’s a war movie with plenty of explosions, but in a lot of ways, it’s almost unwatchable for how unflinchingly grim an image of war it paints. And then, the ending. Of course we’re going to talk about the ending. It’s pretty easy to imagine theater-goers having their expectations ground up just like how the robots in this movie senselessly shredded everything in their path.”
“Penny,” Blake whispered, putting a hand on her arm. “Do you want to leave? You don’t have to listen to any of this.”
It was all Penny could do to shake her head in reply. If she left, that would make people suspicious. Because why would someone leave a discussion about killer robots unless they were a robot as well? And if the rest of the class figured out that she was a robot, then they would assume she was an evil robot. And then they would be afraid of her. She had to stay. She had to stay to prove that she was a real person.
“Silent Spring.” Carmel paused her pacing and spun to face the class again. “It was the silence of the spring which heralded the destruction of all living things. If it wasn’t already painfully obvious that this movie was written and directed by a Vacuo veteran of the Great War, substitute oasis for spring and you should get a much clearer picture of what kind of personal experience fueled the creation of this movie. It’s no wonder it caused a minor international crisis.”
Penny accessed her CCTnet connection and pulled up a link to the CinePedia page for the movie. In the time it took for her to read the page, her mood plummeted to depths previously unexplored and she sank deeper into her seat.
Silent Spring is a Vacuan action-horror film in which the fictional kingdom of Strata, entrenched in a decades-long war, develops killer robots capable of repairing themselves and running indefinitely by harvesting organic matter and converting it into fuel. However, the machines soon begin to replicate themselves and run rampant, and too late the foolhardy scientists of Strata realize that their gruesome creations consume not just the enemy, but EVERYTHING.
“Now, the film’s director plainly stated that he intended this as a biting criticism of the Former Kingdom Of Mantle’s usage of weapons of mass destruction during the Great War.”
Penny was not a weapon of mass destruction. Penny was not a gruesome creation. Penny was a girl made of metal and wires who did not want to hurt people.
“That’s not what we’re looking to discuss today, because I’m quite sure a rock could extract that level of meaning. I’m more interested in… What is the takeaway of everyone in this classroom? You’ve all grown up in a world at relative peace, with the Great War only a distant horrifying tale, no more immediate than this movie. So, does the message still ring true, or do doubts creep in? Do you think that we might have learned from our mistakes when we make better, smarter instruments of war that can do so much more than even the most powerful machines used in the Great War? Can weaponry this powerful be trusted simply because we are pointing them at the Grimm instead of at each other?”
Carmel fell silent, and Penny, still staring down at the floor, wondered if the professor was looking right at her. After all, Penny was surely the only person in the class having this reaction, making her immensely noticeable.
The worst part of all this was that Penny understood perfectly the message of the movie. The danger of too-powerful weaponry was all too real. Learning the history of the Great War had emphasized that lesson over and over again. More powerful weaponry might be useful when wielded against the Grimm, but when turned on other people, as was all too easy to happen…
It was very true! Penny agreed with that! But… but… why did this movie have to illustrate that point with robots? Was there a way to deliver that message which did not make her feel awful about herself?
Penny forced herself to look up again, upon which she found that Carmel was not looking at her. In fact, she was looking at the other side of the classroom, folding her arms behind her.
“Let’s start… with the ending. The final scene of the movie.” She waved a hand at the projector, and the slide onscreen changed to another image of a hulking machine, this one crouched in front of a pond and drenched in… Penny did not want to think about what that robot was drenched in, actually.
Her entire team was watching her with deep worry now. Yang was putting a protective hand on Penny’s leg as if she could shield her from everything happening. Distantly, Penny noted something else: Ruby looked… confused. She kept tilting her head back and forth, as if she was trying to make sense of the lecture. But that was very far from being Penny’s main concern right now.
“One of the machines comes to a stop in front of the spring which we’ve seen throughout the movie, and starts sucking up all the organic matter it can find, converting it into an unrecognizable slurry to fuel itself. As it annihilates the pond, a little butterfly lands on the nose of this enormous thing, and it just sits there. And that’s the last shot of the movie. This enormous, soulless weapon, looking down at one of the most fragile and beautiful forms of life on this planet, uncaring and uncomprehending, only working mindlessly to serve its fractured programming. And if you were to watch the director’s commentary of this movie, it’s right here that you’d hear the creator say, War does not know or care what it fights for or against.”
Penny could not take this. She raised her hand, ignoring the stunned looks from her teammates. She had spent the last several minutes speed-reading the script of the movie, and now she felt at least informed enough to say something. And she had to say something, before all of her courage blinked out like a battery dying.
“Yes, Miss Pallas?” Carmel said with her usual wide smile she had when she was listening to a student. She had no idea that anything was wrong.
“Professor, why did… why did no one in the movie try to talk to the robots?”
Carmel paused for a moment, and then said, “Well, seeing as how the robots stopped responding to commands of any kind, I don’t think anyone would’ve been successful.” She gave a small laugh at the end of her sentence, but now she was watching Penny with a new curiosity.
“I do not mean in the sense of sending commands or orders. I mean, in the sense of… talking to them. Asking them to stop.” Suddenly, it was as if a linguistic faucet had opened in Penny, unleashing a torrent of words. “If they are capable of acting and improvising independently without outside input of any kind, that might be called some sort of sentience. Is sentience not something which might respond to the right communication, which might be convinced to stop?”
Even with her teammates still by her side, the dead silence now permeating the classroom did not feel encouraging in the slightest. And… there was a change coming over Professor Carmel’s face. Something that set off alarms in Penny’s facial recognition. Displeasure. More and more of it with each passing second.
“The robots aren’t sentient in any sense of the word, Miss Pallas. Unless you think a cancer cell is sentient. They cannot bargain. They can’t be reasoned with. They do not feel, or think, or wonder, or anything. They simply carry out a function. What you’re calling sentience is just a bit of broken programming.”
Penny almost felt… she did not want to call it anger. Maybe the better word was passion. “What if the robots were alive and just didn’t realize how bad what they were doing was? What if they didn’t understand that they were hurting people? They were created as weapons! No one gave them an understanding of the world because they were just supposed to be weapons and their only understanding was destruction and killing! What if they were just doing what they thought they had to do to survive? What if they could be convinced that there are other purposes? What if they could’ve been convinced to stop killing and embrace a peaceful existence?!”
“Well, it would be nice if weapons could grow a conscience,” Carmel said, tapping her pointer sharply against the ground. “But that’s pure fantasy, and while a plague of killer robots may be another fantasy, the destruction wrought by detached, dispassionate weapons of war is not fantasy. The bombs dropped on Vacuo by the Former Kingdom Of Mantle, Miss Pallas—do you think, if a sweet little face was drawn onto the nose of each bomb, that those bombs could be reasoned with, just because they had something that might be called a face? Do you think that the Knights built by the Current Kingdom Of Atlas senselessly keeping the underpaid workers of the SDC in line are something that could be your friend just because they happen to have the physical shape of a person?”
A snicker came from somewhere in the classroom, and it might as well have been a sharp point of a sword driven directly into Penny’s Aura generator. She muted a sound that would’ve otherwise come out as a choked wail, and gathered what words her language processors could manage right now to say, “N-no, I agree… trying to personify or humanize tools of oppression and hurt only benefits the oppressors.” Her words were so stilted she was afraid it would draw even more suspicion—because in fact, she was reciting a sentence she had written in an essay two weeks ago for this very class. A sentence that she believed! It was just that her ability to generate new combinations of words was nonexistent at the moment, disabled by emotional stress.
Carmel nodded once, no trace of cheer visible anywhere in her expression. “Then why, pray tell, are you trying to sympathize with those things?”
Something painful and terrified and desperate and sad welled up inside Penny, so strongly that she knew she wouldn’t be able to keep it in for long, with no idea what would happen when she had to let it out. She summoned every last bit of resources not devoted to modulating and shaping her emotions, and reallocated it all towards her language processors, to express one final thought. “I—I just think th-that, when faced with an enemy, no matter what kind of enemy, a different enemy or a strange enemy or a new enemy, we should still try to treat them like people, because… because, what if, maybe there’s a chance they could be friends instead? And what if we’re hurting them by refusing to see them as people? What if someone else is tricking us into not seeing them as people? There was—there were, during the Faunus Rights Revolution, humans who justified despicable massacres by saying they weren’t killing people, only things—”
As soon as that last sentence was out of Penny’s mouth, Carmel’s face abruptly snapped to shock, as a few gasps echoed around the classroom. And now Penny could not withstand any of this for another second.
She ran.
Out of the classroom, trying not to listen to the voices chasing her into the hallway, leaving all her things and her team and Ruby behind, not even sure where she was going, just away away away—
When Penny’s panic receded enough for her to map her surroundings again, she was in a storage closet, location unknown, and she’d backed herself into a corner, surrounded by brooms and mops and her arms wrapped tightly around her knees. She stared at the dusty floor for a moment, and then buried her face in her knees. Finally, that painful feeling building up in her reached a breaking point, and it felt like a linkage somewhere inside her was snapping as loud, stuttering wails spilled out of her. She felt like she’d lost all control of her vocal functions, and the force of her noises was making her entire body shake. Or maybe she was just shaking with fear.
Did everyone now think she was an evil soulless disgusting unfeeling uncaring killer bloodthirsty uncontrollable thing? Why had she decided to speak up in defense of unstoppable killer robots out of all things that she might speak up in defense of?! There were plenty of nice robots in fiction, too! What did this say about her as a person? What would her teammates think of her now? What would Ruby think of her now?
She disabled conscious access to her internal chronometer, not wanting to know how long her breakdown was lasting, and so it was an undetermined amount of time later when she heard a soft knock on the door.
“Penny?” The door pushed open a crack, just enough to show a line of golden hair and a deep lavender eye. “It’s me, Yang. Can I come in?”
From the concern apparent in her voice, Penny could reasonably infer that Yang still wanted to be her friend. She nodded once.
The door opened all the way, and Yang slipped into the closet, crouching down next to Penny. “Do you want a hug?”
Penny nodded again.
Yang folded her arms around her immediately, pulling her against her chest and holding her there, saying nothing. Just holding her. Penny closed her eyes and concentrated on her internal cooling, taking deep, slow breaths to bring everything inside her back down to a more sustainable temperature. Yang was good. Yang was very good.
Several minutes passed like this, until Yang shifted a little bit and said, “Blake’s outside, by the way. Do you want her to come in, too?”
Penny nodded again.
“Okay. Hey, Blake—”
Blake must have been listening, because almost immediately, the door opened and she padded slowly inside before kneeling down next to Penny’s other side.
“I’m really sorry, Penny,” she said, and although Penny’s eyes were closed, her radar map told her that her Faunus ears were in a downcast position. “We should’ve just left as soon as we realized what the movie was about.”
Penny did not know what to say in reply to that, so she settled for nodding again.
“If you’re wondering where Weiss is, she stayed behind to talk to Professor Carmel. She won’t reveal anything about you, of course, but someone had to at least explain to her that you were distressed.” She paused, and then sighed deeply. “And Ruby is… Well, she’s kind of having a crisis of her own right now. I think something in that, um, discussion, rocked her worldview. Which is good, but she’s a little shell-shocked.”
Penny nodded again. She hoped Ruby would be okay.
“I could give you a hug too, if you want,” Blake said carefully. “But it’s okay if—”
Penny nodded so hard she accidentally bonked Yang in the chin with her forehead, and without another word, Blake’s arms slid around her. Hugs were the best thing in existence.
“By the way, Weiss says that Professor Carmel wants to apologize. She dismissed class early and she can apologize right now. If that’s something you want.”
Penny thought about it for a moment, and then nodded slowly.
“Alright, I’ll text Weiss.”
Several minutes passed in silence as Penny slowly restored order to her processing, and her ability to speak was slowly returning. The first words out of her mouth were—
“I’m sorry,” she whimpered into Blake’s arms, fighting to keep her voice register at optimal levels.
“There is absolutely nothing you need to apologize for, Penny—”
“I… I compared the situation of the Faunus to robots.” Penny squeezed her eyes shut extra tight. “I should not have done that. It was disrespectful and demeaning to Faunus.”
“Penny.” Blake’s voice was firm, but not frighteningly so. “You didn’t compare us to those things in the movie. You compared the Faunus to yourself. And you were so right to do that. The struggle of the Faunus and your struggle are the same. We’re both fighting to be recognized as people in the face of other people who think that we’re inherently dangerous.”
At those words, Penny finally opened her eyes to read Blake’s face. Just because she had to double-check if Blake was joking somehow. Answer: she wasn’t.
“B-but, my… my category is inherently dangerous, and I am an exception to it. Faunus aren’t. And I never should have insinuated otherwise.”
“Penny… No…” Blake shifted closer. “I know this is currently just a sample size of one, but… synthetic people aren’t inherently dangerous even if non-sentient robots can be used for tremendous evil. They can be used for incredible good, too! And you know what else has the capacity for tremendous evil and tremendous good? Humans. What I’m trying to say is. Human, Faunus, synthetic—we all have the capacity for good acts and evil acts. We just have a choice about it. Things without sentience don’t get choice, and there are just some things that won’t be capable of it. But also, being deprived of choice when you should have choice is a tragedy, and that was what you were thinking about. You shouldn’t feel bad for reacting to the movie the way you did.”
“But what Professor Carmel said about… when she said my argument was like I was trying to befriend bombs…”
“That’s not what you were doing, though. You saw the robots and thought they should have a choice. You’re not trying to make friends with bombs. You care about making sure everything that deserves a choice receives a choice.”
“I couldn’t have said it better myself, Miss Belladonna.”
Everyone in the closet jumped at the sudden intrusion of Professor Carmel’s voice through the door, including Penny. She had been disregarding her radar until now.
“Don’t worry, I just got here. All I heard was what Miss Belladonna just said. May I come in?”
Blake and Yang both looked at Penny questioningly, and after a moment, Penny made her decision and said, “Yes.”
The door opened once again, and Carmel slid in, followed by Weiss, who barely had space to close the door behind her in what was now a very crowded closet. Eventually, Carmel seated herself on top of an overturned bucket, while Weiss leaned awkwardly against a stack of crates.
“Miss Pallas, I owe you an apology,” Carmel said before Penny could get her own apology out. This close, able to study the wrinkles in Carmel’s aged face, she appeared much older and much more tired than she ever did in the classroom. “I let this get too personal for myself.”
“I understand,” Penny said, and now that she’d had time to process it, she really did understand. “You were born during the Great War. I assume you have at least some painful memories of it, and many more of its aftermath.”
Carmel nodded and propped up her chin on one veiny hand, a sad expression settling over her. “I committed the worst sin of being a professor,” she said. “I refused to consider a student’s opinion solely because it was different from mine. It never occurred to me to look at Silent Spring the way you did.”
“For understandable reasons,” Penny said.
“Well, that’s a generation gap right there.” Carmel let out a quiet chuckle. “I looked at the robots and saw a metaphor for the terrible violence of ‘advanced’ warfare, like Old Mantle’s bombing campaigns against Vacuo in the Great War. You looked at the robots and saw a metaphor for the malicious alienation of ostracized peoples, like what humans have done to Faunus too many times to count.”
Once again, Carmel was brushing up against the truth, without realizing just how close yet far away she was. As Penny’s panic continued to drain out of her, a new thought began to circulate in her mind. What if… what if she told Professor Carmel?
In some ways, it was incredible that she was considering telling someone besides her own team. But also… the urge to share this was… very strong at this moment. Perhaps recklessly so. But she was surrounded by her team. They would defend her. She was safe. Professor Carmel was a member of the Beacon staff—there were rules about student confidentiality that she had to follow.
And if she was going to be talking to someone about things like this, Penny wanted to be known.
“Professor?” she said, taking a deep breath. “What if there was a… a robot that really was a person?”
She felt Blake and Yang stiffening on either side of her. Weiss, behind Carmel and out of her line of sight, stood up straighter, her eyes widening.
Carmel blinked. “Pardon?”
Over Carmel’s shoulder, Weiss sent a silent question to Penny with her eyes, and mouthed, are you sure about this?
Penny pressed on. The more she said, the more she felt like she had to know what Carmel’s answer would be. “What if there was a mechanical being, without any organic matter anywhere in their makeup, who had a real soul? A real Aura? A real Semblance? Who didn’t want to hurt anyone? Who wanted to help people?”
“Well.” Carmel tilted her head in contemplation. “That’s an interesting thought experiment…”
Two things happened in quick succession, and both of them were more reflexive actions than conscious ones. The first was that Penny deployed her wings. The second was that, as the ka-chunk resonated starkly through the closet, she spoke in a voice charged like a wave cresting: “I am not a thought experiment!”
Almost immediately, Penny wanted to clap a hand over her mouth and yank her words back from the air. Why had there been so much urgency in her words? Why had she deployed her wings? She had not meant for it to come out so strongly, so… harshly. She did not want Carmel to think she was angry. Because maybe an angry synthetic person could be interpreted as evil—
“Oh,” Carmel said faintly.
Penny turned and buried her face in Yang’s side as two sets of comforting arms closed around her again, followed moments later by Weiss navigating around the mess of cleaning supplies to make it three people hugging Penny. And on her close-range sonar mapping, Penny could sense the professor staring at her, adjusting the position of her glasses as if she wasn’t seeing Penny correctly.
Some part of her noted, thank goodness she’d worn one of her hoodies that had slits cut for the wings.
“...If I’d known I was going to be meeting an entirely new kind of person today, I think I would’ve ironed my jacket this morning.”
“You don’t require any proof?” Penny did not care that her voice was muffled by Yang’s clothing.
“Proof that you’re a robot?” Carmel said. “Well, if this is all somehow a prank, then you all are in the wrong line of work, because this would be the best acting I’ve ever seen. I’m thoroughly convinced.” She hummed in thought and then added, “And if you mean proof that you’re a person… Miss Pallas, what kind of person would I be if I still needed proof of your personhood after everything that’s happened today?”
It was so oddly, comfortingly similar to what Blake had said when Penny told her team the truth. You don’t need to prove anything about yourself to us. You’ve already done that. And now Penny was hearing it again, from someone who… she really didn’t know much about. Maybe it was a little bit of proof that the world really was a nice place that would accept her. “Thank you,” she said, even though she knew Blake would tell her later that thanking someone for recognizing her personhood was wholly unnecessary—it was just what she deserved.
“Well. I… I don’t want to be rude or too prying, or any number of things that would make you uncomfortable, Miss Pallas, but quite frankly you are changing the fabric of existence. That’s not an understatement. I feel honored that you’ve chosen to spend part of your time in my class, out of all the things you could be doing.”
“You are welcome?” Penny was unsure how to take that statement. It seemed like it could be a joke, but it also seemed like it could be serious. Maybe it was one of the horrendous types of phrases known as a half-joke, which Penny had decided long ago was objectively the most confusing thing in the universe.
Carmel, however, chuckled lightly and seemed satisfied at that answer. And then something tapped at Penny’s knee—Carmel’s pointer, which she must’ve taken with her. Penny lifted her head from Yang to see the professor gazing right into her, all seriousness. “Is there anything I can do to make you feel more welcome in my class?”
“Er, well…” Penny trailed off, realizing she had never considered this question. “Will there be any sources of uncontrolled electricity?”
“Right, I’ll remember not to bring in the lightning gun when we talk about To Catch A Huntress.” Carmel was most definitely being serious when she said that, Penny noted. “Oh, and don’t worry, there won’t be anything else with killer robots... Actually, now I think I owe it to you to add something to the curriculum that has good robots and has a happier ending.”
“Oh, it is not necessary—”
“No, it is!” Professor Carmel sprung up, waving her pointer and forcing everyone else to dodge it. Penny did not try to protest further, as she had learned from experience that it was very hard to stop Carmel from something once she’d made up her mind. “Consider it part of my apology! Let’s see…" She was silent for several seconds, and then she leaned her head against the handle of a pushbroom and let out a deep sigh. "Well, I think that might take some serious searching on my part, but I will find something for you, Miss Pallas. That’s a promise.”
She telescoped her pointer down to a size that fit inside her palm and dropped it into a pocket of her jacket, apparently on the verge of leaving, but suddenly she stopped and looked back at Penny with a thoughtful gaze.
“I stand corrected about something else. When you looked at the robots, you didn’t just see a metaphor. You also saw a very real, direct way that people might try to maliciously alienate you.”
Penny nodded. She had done a lot of nodding today. “Better to treat matter as soul…” she started to say quietly, more to herself than anyone else—only to be surprised by Carmel finishing the saying for her.
“...than to treat soul as matter.” The aged professor gave Penny a smile that seemed to take up most of her face. “The Tale of The Blacksmith and The Robot. A wonderful fairytale.”
“Oh!” Penny said, surprised. “I did not realize it was a line from a fairytale. I just… I do not know where I knew it from, actually.” The saying was just… something she knew, without any regard for the source. It was a phrase with no chronological data. Odd. “Thank you, Professor. And thank you for accepting me as I am.”
“Gladly! Thank you for rocking my world.” And with that, she was gone, shutting the closet door quietly behind her, her footsteps quickly receding into the distance.
Fourteen seconds of silence ensued before Penny decided to speak. “…I just… I just told her that I was a synthetic person.”
Yang patted her on the back. “You sure did.”
When comparing this occurrence to her revelations to BSYP and Ruby, something she’d once considered impossible was not only becoming possible, but actually happening. “Telling people is becoming easier,” she said, hardly able to believe the trend even with the ones and zeros of her memories right there to confirm it.
“That’s how it tends to go.” Blake rose to her feet, stretching out her limbs, and nodded. “It means you’re carving out a place in the world for yourself.”
“I don’t mean to interrupt the good feelings, but is there any chance we could depart this closet soon?” Weiss was speaking for the first time in a long while, her words punctuated by a faint wheeze. “The dust in here—the mundane kind—is wreaking havoc on my lungs.”
“Of course you want to come out of the closet,” Yang said.
Weiss blinked rapidly at her. “What's that supposed to mean?”
“Never mind.”
Penny found Ruby in the dining hall, poking at a plate of pasta with a noticeable lack of energy. However, she did perk up a little as Penny sat down next to her.
“Oh, hey, Penny!” she said, putting down her fork. “Are you, um, okay?”
“I think so.”
“Sorry I didn’t, um, try to help you or anything…” Ruby scratched the back of her neck, letting out a nervous laugh. “I kind of got lost in my own head back there, trying to think about the stuff Professor Carmel was saying…” She shoved some pasta into her mouth and then continued. “I watched Silent Spring a few years ago, but I never realized any of the stuff she said about it being a metaphor and everything. I just thought it was a cool scary movie…”
Entirely unsure how to reply, Penny folded her hands together and kept silent, which seemed like a safe choice.
“But is she right? Is the movie right? I’m pretty sure bigger and more powerful weapons can only ever be a good thing! Because they make us safer from the Grimm! A Megoliath stampede nearly wiped Vacuo off the map fifty years ago, but now that we’ve got Paladins, we can go toe-to-toe with those things, which means we’ll never have to worry about a Megoliath stampede ever again!”
A ping on Penny’s radar alerted her to the approach of her teammates, and moments later Blake was sitting down across from Ruby with a tray of sushi. “And what happens when there’s no Megoliaths to worry about?” she said, her Faunus ears flicking back and forth as she stared at Ruby. “I’m not even talking about a post-Grimm future—if there’s a lull in activity, do we want kingdoms looking for an excuse to use their arsenals of weapons deadly enough to make the Great War look like a playground scuffle?”
“Well…” Ruby chewed voraciously on another forkful of pasta before continuing. “That’s why we make sure the weapons only stay in the right hands!”
“And what exactly are the right hands? Wonderful job the Kingdom of Atlas is doing there so far, by the way. There’s only been one incident where a callous killer got his hands on a fully armed Paladin and went rampaging through a city with it.”
“I don’t know…” Ruby went quiet, staring down at her plate. Until she whipped her head back up, making her braid bounce chaotically. “That’s why you need a weapon with a soul! So it’ll always know to do the right thing! Like me!”
Blake sighed. Penny took note that her body temperature had increased 0.8 degrees over the course of this conversation. “So your solution to the dangers of increasingly powerful weaponry is… historically unprecedented violations of bodily autonomy and personal agency.”
“I don’t mind it!” Ruby said.
Blake gave Ruby a look that… Penny was having trouble classifying it. Fifty percent sad, ten percent frustrated, forty percent unidentified. She tapped her chopsticks against the table once, twice, three times. “Will you always like it?”
“Huh?”
“For the rest of your life, not having a choice? Do you really think that your wants and needs and desires will always and forever line up with what’s expected of you?”
Ruby chewed slowly on a mouthful of pasta, staring at Blake. “Uh. When you say it like that, probably not?” She shrugged. “But when it happens, I bet it won’t be a big deal…? It’ll probably be something small I can just ignore.”
“Mm.” Blake took a slow sip of her tea. “And what about when there is a weapon with a soul who doesn’t want to be a weapon? What happens when that soul just wants to be a soul? What about the fact that it’s already happened?”
Realization jolted through Penny as Ruby said, “Huh?”
“Ruby.” Penny was very careful as she spoke—she did not want to push Ruby too far again, like what had happened that night in the tower. “Blake is referring to me.”
She was quite sure Blake had just stated the exact motivation that had led to her bringing herself somewhere away from her father with no memories. It seemed the only motivation that would explain why the past version of herself had made the decision to bury her entire past while leaving, like a plant pulled out of the ground without any of its roots.
And of course, that triggered a new question deep in Penny’s processors: Was she from Atlas?
A kingdom that had constructed one girl—would it be too significant a leap of logic to wonder if it had actually constructed two girls? Ruby and Penny?
But as always, Penny still had to reconcile that with the mystery of Cinder which seemed to point towards the conclusion that she’d been built in Mistral. And currently, she could not see any way for both things to be true.
But Penny could not contemplate this mystery now. She returned her attention to the conversation just as Blake nodded in acknowledgement of what Penny had said.
Ruby spun to Penny, and through her red-tinted goggles, Penny could see her eyes going wide as she mouthed ‘doesn’t want to be a weapon’ over and over again.
“If Penny was being treated the way you’re being treated by Atlas, how would that feel?” Blake said, her gaze fixed firmly on Ruby. “If Atlas was keeping Penny all alone in an airship and not letting her talk to her friends and treating her like a thing instead of a person, how would that feel to you?”
“I…” Ruby’s voice was now very small and quiet. “Oh.” She shifted in her seat. “Um… I guess I never thought about it… I…”
She looked at Penny, and then at Blake, and then down at her hands, and then when she looked back to Penny, there was a tear slipping out from under her goggles
“No—I wouldn’t want that for you—I—”
“If you wouldn’t want it for Penny, then why’s it okay for you?” Blake cut in, never wavering.
Ruby chewed ferociously on her lip, a quiet whimpering sound rising up from somewhere in her throat. And then she spoke in a voice even smaller. “It’s—it is okay for me. Not someone else. But it’s okay for me. Just me. It just is!”
“Why?”
Ruby’s hand briefly went to her goggles, in a motion that made Penny wonder if she was about to take them off, but in the end, all Ruby did was adjust them. “I can do something nobody else in the world can do,” she said. “Penny’s—Penny’s strong and cool and unique and synthetic, yeah, but she’s not as powerful as me! No one is! I’m a special case.”
Blake shook her head slowly. “Even if you were to have a semblance that lets you vaporize Grimm in the blink of an eye, you still wouldn’t deserve to be treated like this.”
Ruby’s mouth flew open, only for her to abruptly close it again as her heart rate spiked. Penny winced internally, wondering if Blake realized just how closely she’d brushed up against the truth.
And then Ruby folded her hands on the table in front of her, her tone taking on a stiffness that was entirely new. “I disagree.”
A silence ensued, one which gained tension with every millisecond, until—
“But what if Penny was the more powerful one?” Blake said. “Would you be fine treating her like a tool then?”
Ruby flinched, and the sight made a servo somewhere in Penny’s midsection squeeze painfully. “Blake, maybe we should—” she started to say, only to be interrupted by Ruby.
“She’s not more powerful. So we don’t have to think about it. Doesn’t matter. Nope.”
“I’m asking you to think about what if she was, and I think you should consider it,” Blake said.
Ruby rocked back and forth on her seat for a few moments, and then suddenly she was scrambling upright, throwing down her fork with a sharp clatter. “Why would I think about something that’s not even real! That’s stupid! I—I—you’re wrong! You’re just trying to make me not be happy, that’s what you’re doing! I’m happy! Always been! And the only thing that’s making me not happy is you,” Ruby said, her voice dropping to a hiss as she narrowed her eyes at Blake. “I don’t like you.”
And then she was gone, scattering silver everywhere in her Semblance’s wake. Penny rose from her seat with a cry, but she was too late to do anything except watch the traces of silver fade away.
Blake stared in the direction Ruby had fled, her mug of tea frozen halfway to her mouth. She carefully placed the mug down, and not-so-carefully dropped her face into her hands.
“Fuck,” she said quietly, her voice muffled by her palms.
Penny was struck by the urge to bury her face in Yang’s mashed potatoes in the same way an ostrich would try to avoid its problems.
“Anything?” Yang said.
“No,” Penny said without looking up from her scroll. She hadn’t looked up since messaging Ruby five minutes ago.
Yang sighed and tried to focus on finishing her lunch. She hadn’t thought anything could be stranger than last night, but damn, today sure was giving it a run for its money. Finding out that Ruby was basically a lab experiment. Having Penny hang out in people’s heads. Getting away with not doing the homework for Professor Carmel’s class. And then Ruby having a breakdown, which… Yang wasn’t sure how to feel about it.
“I think you should not have done that.”
It took Yang a moment to realize it was Penny who had said that—she was clutching her scroll and staring at Blake like it was causing her physical pain to disagree with one of her teammates. And Blake was just as surprised as Yang.
“Ruby was scared,” Penny went on. “I think you could see she was scared, too. Why did you not stop questioning her?”
Blake let out a slow, deep sigh. “I know I went too far, but… how could I not, Penny?” She swept out her arms, making a peculiarly wide-eyed gesture, the meaning of which failed to fully reach Yang. “The way she’s been indoctrinated, manipulated, weaponized, objectified, used… She’s a tragedy. She needs help. So much help. And I so badly want to give her that help, it almost hurts.”
“But that was not helping,” Penny said. ““We are already helping her. We have helped her explore so many new things. You were scaring our friend into maybe no longer wanting to be our friend. ”
Yang felt like she needed to step in. “I get it, Blake,” she said carefully, leaning across the table to put a comforting hand on Blake’s elbow. “But no matter how worried we are about Ruby. There’s only so much scrutiny she can handle. Which, honestly, I understand. If everyone around me started treating me like I was a walking tragedy who was nothing more than a victim of my past… I’d feel really insulted, and ostracized, and just…”
Yang went to put a hand on her prosthetic arm, until she remembered that she didn’t have her prosthetic right now. She’d sent it away to Atlas for repairs. Which was maybe unnecessary, considering that she had possibly the most technologically literate person on the planet for a teammate and full access to her workshop… But sending her arm for repairs gave her an excuse to send a letter to her prosthetics doctor! She couldn’t pass up the opportunity to do that. He was maybe the sweetest man on Remnant. So she’d just have one arm for the time being.
“I speak from experience,” she said, finally choosing to simply gesture at her arm stump. “Lot of people treated me like that after I lost my arm.”
Blake nodded slowly, but then her gaze drifted down and away from Yang. “But this isn’t—how long will it be before she stops being tragic and starts being harmful?”
“I don’t understand,” Penny said.
“You know what I see when I look at Ruby? I see a girl being raised to be an enforcer. An enforcer of whatever Atlas wants, without question. She says she was created to fight Grimm, but she’s eager to fight whatever she’s told is the enemy—Grimm or person. If we’d met a few years from now, I think when she found out I used to be in the White Fang she would’ve just arrested me. No questions asked. No trying to understand. That’s how Atlas works. They flatten nuance, until you’re either with them or against them. That’s what they do to people.”
She’d had her notebook open next to her for most of the meal, and now she looked down at it, and it was then that Penny realized she’d been sketching something—the White Fang’s logo. “Considering how she mowed down a squad of White Fang veterans last month, I really don’t think I, or anyone else, can risk what she might become in a few years without intervention. What happens when the semester’s done, when the Vytal Tournament is over? Then she goes back to Atlas, back to whatever they’re doing to her there, and back to a place where there’s no one challenging her worldview and plenty of people encouraging it.”
“But she is not that person yet,” Penny said, and this was the most stressed Yang had ever heard her aside from her coming out to her team. “At this moment, she is discovering the rest of the world and she is our friend.”
Blake must’ve noticed the stress in Penny’s voice, too, because her expression softened, and she fell back in her seat a little. “I—”
And then she stopped dead, staring at something over Yang’s shoulder. “…That is quite literally the last person on the planet I want to see right now.”
Yang looked over her shoulder, and found none other than General Ironwood entering the dining hall, deep in conversation with Professor Goodwitch about something.
Shit. Had Ruby run back to him? Was Ironwood mad? Were they about to be expelled for trying to help Ruby? Were—
Penny stood up and waved madly at Goodwitch and Ironwood, apparently trying to make herself as visible as possible.
“What are you doing?” Weiss whisper-screamed across the table. “I think we should be avoiding him right now?!”
“Don’t worry! I have a plan!” Penny said to her, before turning back around and continuing at a tremendously louder volume. “Professor Goodwitch! It’s good to see you!” And then, before anyone could stop her, she took off across the dining hall, weaving between tables towards the two professors. All Yang could do was follow after her and try to ignore the immense sinking feeling in her stomach.
She caught up just as Penny finished greeting Goodwitch and Ironwood. Ironwood had a suspiciously strange expression—he looked like he’d swallowed a cannonball—as he looked at Penny, one that instantly had Yang on high alert. And Goodwitch wasn’t looking at Penny but at Ironwood, with a highly attentive look which only made Yang wonder even more. Penny, however, barreled on without notice.
“I was just talking with Ruby Karyatis, and we’re both so thrilled that her medical leave is finally over! You must be so excited to have her finally in the classroom!” she said to Ironwood. “After all, she’s been so disappointed about not being able to attend classes or be outside of quarantine until now!”
Ironwood said absolutely nothing, staring at Penny as if he hadn’t understood a single word. Goodwitch, however, had.
“Oh?” Goodwitch raised a very sharp eyebrow at Ironwood. “I wasn’t notified about the ending of any leaves of absence.”
Now, Yang understood what Penny’s plan was.
“That is odd! Because Ruby has a clean bill of health!” Penny said. “There should not be anything preventing her from attending classes and socializing like a normal student!”
There was a pause as Yang stared at Penny and Penny stared at Ironwood and Goodwitch stared at Ironwood and Ironwood stared at Penny, and it felt like something was about to explode.
Finally, Ironwood nodded with glacial slowness. “It must’ve been a clerical error, Glynda,” he said, rubbing the bridge of his nose. “Cadet Karyatis does indeed have a clean bill of health. Her leave of absence is over.”
“Very well.” Goodwitch nodded and took out her oversized scroll, entering something into it. “I look forward to seeing what she can contribute in the classroom.”
“I am so excited!” Penny said, sending a look of glee Yang’s way.
In a moment of dazed realization, it hit Yang that Penny had just gotten exactly what she wanted. By forcing James Fucking Ironwood to lie through his teeth to Professor Goodwitch. With a smile on her face. Good gods, her teammate could be cutthroat when she wanted to.
When Ruby dropped out of her semblance in the middle of a deserted hallway, she had no idea where she was or how long she’d been running, and she really didn’t care.
She wasn’t sure how or why, but once she stopped moving she ended up flattening herself against a wall like she was still trying to get away even though there was no one in sight. She couldn’t stop hyperventilating, and the only thing going faster than her heart was the flood of weird and confusing thoughts that wouldn’t stop thundering through her brain. Why was Blake trying to make her think all these things?! Why?!
An ugly, violent thought rose up in her—that it was because Blake was ex-Fang, because she didn’t like Atlas, because she just wanted to make any Atlesian she saw feel bad—but Ruby pushed those thoughts away. Blake was a good person. She’d fought the White Fang right alongside Ruby. She’d stood tall against a guy she had some history with. She’d fought until she was out of aura, both times. Blake was a good person. Ruby knew that. She believed it.
So then why was Blake talking to her like this?! She actually seemed to think everything would be better off if she wasn’t in this situation?! That was just wrong! There would be so much less people saved if Ruby wasn’t the way she was right now. She was born to save the world. How could anyone just think it was okay to give up all those lives in exchange for Ruby’s life being a little bit better?! That would just—just be selfish. Ruby wasn’t selfish. She hadn’t been born to be selfish.
Her breathing finally started to slow as she realized there was nothing actually wrong. Blake couldn’t make her leave the military. No one could. She was safe. The world was safe. She’d just been afraid that Blake might’ve somehow managed to convince her to leave if she kept talking or if Ruby kept listening. Which would be really bad. People would die if she was anything less than what she was right now.
She had to be a good soldier.
Good soldiers follow orders.
The familiar mantra soothed her, and she finally began to untense. It was okay. Blake didn’t understand. That was it. She just didn’t understand how good Ruby was. She didn’t understand what she could do. And she probably wouldn’t, until she saw Ruby in action.
Well, it was a good thing that Project Moonrise wouldn’t be a student for long. And then Blake would understand.
But even as one worry began to dissipate, another one rose up in its place.
Penny.
Ruby wouldn’t treat her like a thing. Not ever. Penny was the most alive person in the entire world, the coolest person ever, and she deserved to be treated as such! And besides, the thought of being mean to Penny made Ruby want to throw up. Blake was just wrong there again.
Which was why Ruby was so scared of the other thing about Penny that Blake had gotten her wondering about.
Who had built Penny?
Ruby knew Penny was quite confident she’d been built for combat—she’d told Ruby that. So… what if that meant Penny had been built to save the world? Penny wouldn’t run away from that… would she? But she was a Huntress! Huntresses definitely didn’t run from danger, and least of all Huntresses named Penny!
But… but if Penny had been built in Atlas, like Ruby thought… What if she hadn’t been built by some rogue scientist like Ruby was? What if Penny had been built by the Atlesian military?
Which would mean… which would mean Penny had run away from the military.
It would mean Penny was a deserter.
Ruby shook her head wildly like she could just knock the thought out of her head if she tried hard enough. No. No! Penny couldn’t be. Couldn’t be. Not possible. Not a deserter. Didn’t make any sense.
Deserters were the worst kind of cowards, they were barely any better than the enemy, they were dishonorable, they were stupid, they were sad and pathetic, and—and—Penny wasn’t ANY of those things! She was good and kind and wonderful and brave and fearless and strong, she was the exact opposite of a deserter!
And just remembering all that gave Ruby exactly what she needed. Penny couldn’t be a deserter because that just wasn’t who she was. So maybe Penny had been built to be a weapon, but it must’ve been bad people who built Penny. They must’ve wanted her to do bad things, and that was why she’d escaped and erased her memories! The opposite of being a deserter!
It made perfect sense, and now Ruby was dizzy with relief. She’d never considered that someone could make a sentient weapon for bad reasons. Thank goodness whoever had wanted a weapon had made Penny, then. Because she was so, so, so, so, so good.
She would never try to make Penny be something she didn’t want to be. She was promising herself that. And if Ruby was good enough, she’d be the only sentient weapon the world would ever need.
Footsteps sounded at the end of the hall, loud and authoritative, and Ruby knew who it was before she even saw him.
The General rounded the corner, and when his eyes fell on Ruby, he didn’t seem surprised in the slightest. Only tired. Surprisingly tired, actually. But his eyes remained fixed on her as he strode closer, his arms folded behind his back.
Ruby felt as if she was rooted to the spot, her eyes going inhumanly wide as she let out a quiet, “G-good afternoon, sir!”
She wasn’t afraid of the General. She was afraid of what was going to happen next. Good soldiers followed orders. She’d broken orders. Did that mean she wasn’t a good soldier anymore? Did that mean she’d failed?
“Good afternoon, Cadet.” The General stopped several feet away, and held out something to her.
Ruby blinked at it in confusion, and then she realized it looked a lot like the kind of cases she kept her colored contact lenses in.
“Lieutenant Schnee informed me that you lost these yesterday, so I thought it best to keep a replacement on hand if I ran into you.”
“Oh,” Ruby squeaked. She reached out to take them. “Um—”
“After all, you’ll most definitely need to keep your eyes concealed now that you’ll be attending classes now.”
“I’m sorry, sir! It won’t—wait, what?” Ruby nearly dropped the case as she ran through those last few words in her head and realized what Ironwood was saying. “Sir?”
“I’m sorry. It was wrong of me to keep you confined to quarters. I should’ve expected that something like this would happen.” He nodded to her. “I suppose I should be thankful that you didn’t do anything more drastic.”
Oh. Oh. Oh, yes. This was actually happening. It’d actually worked. The General had changed his mind! See, Blake was wrong! This wasn’t bad at all! And it never had been bad before, too! Ruby nodded and saluted frantically. “Thank you, sir! Thank you so much, I promise I’ll be an exemplary student, the best version of myself I can possibly be, I’ll—”
“At ease,” the General said, smiling. “Don’t worry, Ruby. I’ve never once stopped believing you’ll save the world.”
Notes:
The movie discussed in this chapter is meant to be a reference to two entirely separate things. The movie's title comes from "Silent Spring," a real-life environmental book published in the 1960s about how the overuse of pesticides could lead to the destruction of all life.
However, the actual plot of the movie as described in this chapter is not taken from the real-life Silent Spring, but intended as a reference to another work--my favorite video game of all time, Horizon: Zero Dawn. I thought these two things fit together quite well for creating a fake movie expressly designed to distress Penny while still being full of nuance.
Chapter 25: Unleash The Whirlwind
Notes:
Content warning for this chapter (click this text to reveal the warning):
Discussions of past abuse.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Blake was silent through the rest of their lunch, but afterward insisted on going early to their next class. And when they arrived, she led them up into a corner of the classroom where Penny couldn’t ever remember anyone choosing to sit. And then Blake spoke, and her actions made more sense.
“I think I’ve figured out how to help Ruby,” she said. “Without hurting her, and without pushing her away.”
That was good. Penny wanted to help Ruby, and she did not want to hurt Ruby. But even so…
“Should we be doing this?” she said. She agreed with the sentiment of what Blake was saying, but also, she did not like talking about Ruby like this. It felt… sneaky, deceptive. Mean, even. Especially considering they didn’t know where Ruby was, or what her emotional state was, or how she felt about the conversation at lunch, or… really, anything about Ruby’s current situation.
“Right.” Blake blew out a hard breath, puffing her cheeks. “I know I messed up, Penny, but… The idea I have, I really think it’ll work. I—”
The door to the classroom opened—a janitor, collecting trash—and Blake cut herself off, watching over her shoulder until they were alone again.
“Are you planning to kidnap her?” Weiss said as soon as the janitor was gone, her tone full of wariness.
“Weiss, don’t be ridiculous. We can’t kidnap her.”
“Thank you.”
“Her Semblance makes it effectively impossible to pull off.”
Weiss blinked. “Pardon?”
“I have some other ideas about as illegal as that, but they’re all last resorts,” Blake said without acknowledging Weiss’s reaction.
Weiss did not back down, either. “About as illegal?”
Blake stared at her for a moment, and then sighed. “Okay. Weiss. I know that you probably still have some issues with more radical actions, but this is a kid who talks about herself like an expendable resource. And is treated like one. She’s never had a choice in anything. Do you know what that is?”
“I—” Weiss faltered, and then she crossed her arms, her expression hardening. Penny identified that not as a sign of conflict but rather a sign of agreement and resolve. “Slavery.”
“Exactly.”
Penny had never felt so conflicted. If Ruby was some anonymous person being mistreated by the Atlesian military that Penny had never met, she would have no qualms about whatever Blake wanted to try. Objectively, someone in Ruby’s situation needed help! But… Ruby was her friend. And she was a friend who was like Penny. Penny did not want to lose a friend, especially not one who felt so special to her. And that created some very complicated feelings.
“What if Ruby doesn’t want to be friends with us anymore if we keep trying this?” she said, shifting in her seat. “We’re… we’re pushing her, and we’re scaring her, and we’re talking about her in secret, and we’re scheming, and we’re… we’re acting like she doesn’t have a say in the matter, and we’re hiding things from her, and I would not like it if other people were doing those things to me even if they were trying to help me. She believes she’s happy with her current situation. I think she would be very upset by people trying to disrupt and upend her life. Upset enough that she would never want to be our friend, ever again.” She gave Blake a pleading look. “How do we help someone who does not believe she needs help, and therefore does not want it?” The thought of not being friends with Ruby anymore was actually causing Penny severe emotional distress.
“It’s tough. It really is,” Blake said. “But I need you to consider this from my perspective, Penny. Just for a minute, please.”
“Okay.”
Blake took a deep breath, and then put a hand on Penny’s shoulder, looking right into her eyes. “I’m a Faunus. I grew up in the White Fang. When Atlas says it wants to create bigger and better weapons to fight the Grimm? I don’t trust it. I’ve seen weapons that were supposed to be for the Grimm used against me, and people like me. Atlas justifies it by saying, chaos brings Grimm, and whatever’s causing the chaos, is part of the Grimm problem. Atlas sees Ruby as a weapon, and if she keeps going like this, she will hurt so many people, and deepen so much suffering, all while feeling completely justified.”
Suddenly, Penny realized Blake’s heart rate was picking up. And coupled with the words coming out of her mouth all the more rapidly, with the gradual widening of her eyes, another realization arrived: Blake was scared.
“Unlike the rest of you, I can’t take the risk of the kind of person Ruby might become. Maybe I could be one of the people she decides is just Grimm-bringing chaos that needs to be neutralized! I have to do something!”
“You have a perspective we don’t,” Yang said suddenly. “You can see something we can’t even imagine.”
Some of the tension left Blake’s eyes, and she nodded, shooting Yang a grateful grin. “Exactly.”
Feelings swirled inside Penny, even more confusing than ever. “I understand that the possibility that she may harm people is more important than the possibility of losing a friend, but… those are all hypotheticals. You cannot judge Ruby on the basis of things she might do in the future.”
“You’re right. I can’t. Which is why I’ve got a different plan.” Blake’s voice was gentle now, and to Penny’s facial recognition she seemed mostly understanding. “Please, just hear this out?”
Blake wasn’t trying to be mean to Ruby, Penny reminded herself. Blake was just worried. And trying to help people. Just like how Ruby was trying to help people. And they were both trying! Surely a solution could be found!
Penny nodded, and waited for Blake to continue, still not quite able to calm her anxiety, but at least sitting more comfortably with it.
“I realized I’ve been looking at this the wrong way. I can’t tear down someone’s entire system of belief between now and the Vytal Tournament, no matter how wrong it seems.” She jerked her head towards the door. “Case in point, what happened less than an hour ago. So, what Ruby needs is more time away from Atlas—more time to learn and think for herself. And she can get that time! If we can convince her that Atlas isn’t where she would be happiest. And that is something I think we can actually do between now and the Vytal Tournament. Because Ruby feels like a certain type of person I’m quite familiar with from my White Fang days.”
Penny quickly checked Weiss’s reaction, seeing her twitch slightly but remaining calm as Blake continued.
“We saw a lot of Faunus in terrible situations who rejected all help from the Fang. Opposed us, even. Sometimes because they didn’t trust us, sometimes because they thought a better life was impossible, and sometimes… because they’d convinced themselves they were happy.” She stopped, giving the three of them a significant look. “Does that last one sound familiar?”
“Ruby,” Yang said quietly.
“The ones who’d convinced themselves they were happy were the trickiest kind to deal with. The Fang realized over time that the best way to change their minds was to make the reality of the situation unavoidable, and offer a real vision of how things could be better. Translating that to Ruby… I’m not going to stop being me around her. I’m not going to stop speaking my mind when I need to. But, I will also make a genuine, concerted effort to be her friend before anything else. Just like the rest of you are.” She paused there, studying the rest of her team as her Faunus ears flicked back and forth. “Penny? How are you feeling?”
Currently, Penny was confused. She was mostly sure she understood Blake’s plan thus far, but… “You want me to be friends with Ruby? That is the plan?”
“Yes.”
And that was the confusing thing. “But I am already friends with her?”
“Exactly. You don’t need to change anything about what you’re doing, Penny—it’s already perfect. Just keep being the great friend that you are.”
On one processing cycle, Penny was immensely proud to hear Blake describe her friendship-making abilities in that way. But on another processing cycle, she was even more confused. “Then why was this conversation necessary?” She did not need an ulterior motive to be Ruby’s friend!
“Because I wanted you to know what I’m thinking, Penny, and I don’t want to hide that from you. As Ruby’s friends, the four of us can help her realize that the way she was raised was wrong, by showing her what freedom can feel like, showing her what an unrestricted life can be like to live. And once she has a real, undeniable taste of that, I fully believe that she won’t want to go back to Atlas. And then she’ll have more time for realizing all the other things which take longer.”
Well, that made sense to Penny. “Then I will continue to be the best friend I can possibly be to Ruby, and I will thoroughly disregard any ulterior motives! They will not factor into my thoughts or actions or feelings towards Ruby!”
“I don’t think you had to worry about that, ever,” Yang said.
Blake smiled. “And, Penny, to be clear. I would want to be friends with Ruby regardless, I think. Her energy and her spirit, and her drive to help people… it’s misguided, to put it lightly, but it’s there, and I can see parts of her which do resonate deeply with me. And I’d be lying if I didn’t say that part of why I want to help Ruby so badly is because I’m already friends with her.”
“Good!” Penny said.
“That’s actually far less hazardous than I was expecting,” Weiss said.
“Believe it or not, Weiss, I would prefer not to become wanted by the Kingdom of Atlas any more than I already am. However… if we get to the Vytal Tournament and nothing’s changed, then it’s time for drastic measures. I’m sorry, but I cannot let that girl go back to Atlas.”
Weiss sighed loudly, but immediately after, she nodded. “May I at least inquire as to what exactly the drastic measures are?”
“I break Ruby’s secret wide open. The government of Vale is no paragon of trustworthiness, but they don’t trust Atlas, and they’d have a field day if they learned about Project Moonrise. And the chaos of that, I hope, would be enough to somehow shake Ruby loose of Atlas’s grip.”
“It’s unpredictable,” Weiss said.
“Hence, it’s a backup plan.”
“Fair. I know that’s not your only backup plan, either, so—”
The door to the classroom opened again. Penny recognized the radar signature instantly.
It was Ruby.
Ruby scanned the room as she entered, and stopped short as her eyes fell on Team BSYP. She didn’t flee, but she didn’t come any further into the room, instead remaining stock-still in the doorway and looking up at them like they might suddenly attack her. Penny and Blake both jumped up, but the first to speak was actually Ruby.
“I’m sorry for blowing up!”
“What?” Blake and Penny said at the same time, pulling back the apologies on their lips.
Ruby took a step into the room, staring down at the floor and clenching her fists. “I know you’re just trying to help me even though I don’t need help, so I can’t get mad at you! I’m sorry for getting mad!”
She burst into silver dust and reformed in the middle of the classroom, now with her arms crossed tightly. “Can we… can we still be friends? Even if you don’t like how I live and even if I’m not gonna change it?”
“Yes,” Penny said, and that answer would’ve been an emphatic affirmative no matter what kind of conversation she’d had a minute ago.
She turned expectantly to her teammates, and was delighted to see them nodding along with her.
“Thank you!” Ruby said, and all the tension left her body like a switch had been flipped. “I really wanted to still be friends, I’m so happy! I don’t understand you all sometimes, but I’m trying! So I hope you can—”
The door opened again, and this time it was Professor Goodwitch, leafing through a folder as she strode into the room. She nodded hello to Ruby, glanced up at Team BSYP, nodded hello to them, and went back to whatever she was doing with her folder. 2.2 seconds later, she looked back up.
“Team Battleship,” she said slowly, “What exactly are you all doing up there in the corner?”
“Nothing.” The reply came simultaneously from all four of them, at the same volume and with mostly the same tone, the exception being Weiss sounding rather more stressed.
This was a sign that they were developing true synchronicity! The thought of that was so exciting that Penny just had to do a happy little wiggle.
“Well, please come on down to some seats that haven’t been collecting dust ever since this classroom was built.”
Team BSYP obliged.
“For the record, I didn’t realize you’d be here,” Ruby said as they resituated themselves in the first row of seats. “This is just, like, on my schedule. Which I had to actually look at for the first time this semester. This school’s really hard to navigate, you know that? I got lost. Not much of a problem with my Semblance, though. I’m… really glad I found you, though, I didn’t want you thinking we couldn’t be friends anymore…”
Penny considered her options, before deciding that a hug was the best action. She leaned forward and wrapped her arms around Ruby, who reciprocated immediately, and they didn’t move from that position until other students started filtering in as the clock ticked closer to the class’s start time.
“Aren’t you going to sit with your team?” Blake asked as a gaggle of Atlesian students entered with Ruby’s teammates amongst them.
“Nope. I’d rather sit with you all!” Ruby waved to one of her teammates—the girl with the blue beret—who nodded back wordlessly. “They won’t mind.”
Penny noticed Blake opening her mouth as if she wanted to say something, only to immediately stop herself.
“Anyway!” Ruby kept twisting around in her seat, studying the rest of the class. “You think I’ll get to fight someone? I bet I can look cool doing it. Wonder the Beacon students are more of a challenge than Atlas. I want so many things! I should’ve just left the airship a lot sooner…” She leaned forward, her eyes darting around like she was about to impart a great secret, and lowered her voice to a whisper. “I never lose, Penny.”
“Not ever?”
“Yup! I’ve never lost a fight in my entire life.”
Penny could not help her eyes going very, very wide. “Never?” she whispered. She’d assumed Ruby was joking in one of those unidentifiable joking tones that was still beyond her understanding, but… she was actually serious?
“Yup,” Ruby said proudly, popping the P. “Not in training, not in the field, not against people, not against Grimm, not against anything.”
It seemed like every hour, Penny discovered something else fascinating (and slightly concerning) about Ruby. To have never lost a fight… how good was she? And how long had she been doing this?
Ruby twisted her braid around her fingers, her smile turning into something smaller and more mysterious. “How could I not be made to save the world? It’s like I was born lucky.”
Thirty minutes later
“The next fight will be Pyrrha Nikos and Penny Pallas,” Glynda said.
Oooh. Interesting. Penny honestly had no idea how she would do against Pyrrha! Her prediction algorithms seemed thoroughly confused by Pyrrha’s fighting style, and she had yet to pinpoint why that was.
The class was suddenly paying a great deal more attention, a noticeable murmur audible, which made sense. When Pyrrha had a sparring match, the question seemed not to be if her opponent would win, but if her opponent would present a challenge for her. And Penny was… quite potentially, able to present a challenge to Pyrrha. Because Penny had yet to lose a sparring match in her time at Beacon. And the other students had definitely taken notice of that—it was rare to have an undefeated record this far into the academic year. In fact, Penny and Pyrrha were the only two students in their year with such an honor at this point. The closest to either of them was Yang, who would have such a record if not for her sparring losses to both of them.
Penny rose to her feet and reached for Luminous Electra, which laid on the ground beside her—
Only for Weiss to grab her arm, squeezing it tightly.
“Penny, wait,” she whispered, her face tight with anxiety, her heart rate spiking so fast that it stopped Penny in her tracks. Weiss motioned frantically for her to lean down, and she did.
“Pyrrha’s Semblance allows her to manipulate metal!” she hissed into Penny’s ear.
All of Penny’s extraneous processes came to a halt as she temporarily diverted all spare processing power to analyzing what that information meant for her. The quick answer: bad things.
“As in magnetism?” she said, and it was only at the last moment before she spoke that she remembered to keep her voice quiet enough for only Weiss to hear. “Can she generate her own magnetic field?!”
If that was how her Semblance worked, things would decline from ‘bad’ to ‘would have to find a way to nicely ask Pyrrha to wear a faraday cage in my presence without telling her I’m made of metal.’
“I’m not sure! I only know what she told me, which is that it’s called Polarity and she can control metal with it.”
That was far too vague for her comfort, although no answer Weiss gave could’ve changed her mind about her next choice:
“I am terribly sorry, Pyrrha and Professor Goodwitch,” Penny said, straightening up. “But I am choosing to decline this match.” She considered adding ‘for reasons I cannot disclose at this time’ to the end of that statement, but decided against it almost immediately because that seemed like it would only attract more questions.
A surprised grumble spread through the classroom, along with some scattered calls of what? and why? which were all ignored by Penny as she kept her attention on Pyrrha.
“O-oh. Okay.” Pyrrha nodded slowly. Her expression was forty percent surprise and fifty percent confusion and ten percent unidentified, which was better than the one hundred percent disappointment Penny had been expecting.
“Are you sure, Miss Pallas? That will go on your record as a forfeit, and therefore a loss,” Glynda said, frowning slightly, which made Penny’s internals squeeze painfully, like a bit of tubing was cinched. She did not have a great deal of emotional investment in her sparring record, but she did not like disappointing her professors—especially not Goodwitch.
“I am sure,” she said with a stiff nod.
“At the very least, please nominate someone else to take your place.” Glynda said.
Penny perked up a bit. Because she did have someone else she would want to nominate!
“Ruby!” she said brightly, turning to her friend. “Would you like to spar against Pyrrha?”
“Oh, yeah!” was Ruby’s response before she showered half the classroom in silver dust as she semblanced down to the sparring floor. Weiss, for some reason, buried her face in her hands.
Pyrrha was confused. An entire gamut of emotion had happened in front of her, in the span of several seconds, and she didn’t understand any of it. She’d seen Penny jump eagerly out of her seat. She’d seen Weiss stop Penny and whisper something into her ear. She’d seen all the excitement vanish from Penny’s face in the blink of an eye. She’d seen the fear that flashed through Penny’s eyes for just a moment. Something was wrong.
“This should be interesting! I’ve always wanted to fight The Invincible Girl!”
She would have to wonder later. For now, she had a new opponent. It took Pyrrha a moment, but she remembered the girl bouncing from foot to foot—it was Ruby, the girl that she’d played a board game with before the semester, and also the girl that Team BSYP had been searching for earlier that week. Pyrrha still wasn’t entirely clear on what had happened, but there was no doubting that Ruby was in class for the first time.
Pyrrha glanced up at Team BSYP, trying to gauge the course the fight might take from their expressions, but what she saw only made her more curious. Penny, naturally, was excited, bouncing up and down in her seat a little. Weiss looked as if she expected someone to die. Blake—Well, there had been a sad, distant look in Blake’s eyes for the entire class, and it was still there. But she did seem much more focused on the class than a minute ago. Yang was leaning forward, her eyebrows very elevated.
This all felt rather ominous.
Pyrrha turned to Ruby, sizing her up as she adjusted Akoúo̱’s position on her arm. She was small, but the easy, guarded opening stance she’d settled into spoke volumes about her fighting ability. All of her excited movement from a few moments ago had ceased completely.
“Students, are you both ready?”
Pyrrha and Ruby both nodded to Professor Goodwitch, and the countdown began.
“Three.”
Goodwitch’s intonations echoed through the classroom, as everyone and Pyrrha Nikos wondered if this would be the day someone would finally beat her.
“Two.”
Ruby twirled her staff and then split it in two, the war scythe turning into two smaller handheld weapons with the same slightly curved blade at the end of both. One, she held in a reverse grip, the other in a normal grip.
“One.”
Pyrrha narrowed her focus to Ruby and nothing else. Ruby gave her a smile that felt more like a threat, especially with the red-tinted goggles which hid her eyes and ever so slightly gave off the impression of a distant Grimm in the night.
“Begin.”
Ruby burst into a cloud of silver dust, and on instinct Pyrrha whirled around, knowing that if she couldn’t see Ruby anywhere, she would be behind her—just in time to catch a two-bladed strike with Miló as Ruby appeared in midair, forming from that same silver dust like a ghost materializing. And then she was gone again, and there were three brief, indistinct flashes of Ruby’s Semblance before she appeared beside her and caught her leg with a low, sweeping slash.
Pyrrha pitched forward, tucking and rolling rather than trying to fight the sudden loss of balance, and when she came up on her feet again, she realized what those three flashes had been: Ruby was, quite literally, running circles around her with her Semblance.
Ruby appeared beside her again, so close Pyrrha almost didn’t have room to block, and then she flashed to her other side, slipping a strike through her guard too fast for a proper reaction. Pyrrha leapt away, but giving ground to regroup didn’t help when Ruby could pursue more closely than anyone else she’d ever faced.
Actually, why wasn’t Ruby attacking in her Semblance? Yes, she was using it to move around with blinding speed, but every time she actually delivered a hit, she fell back to normal speed. As if—
As if she couldn’t actually hit Pyrrha while in her Semblance.
Pyrrha blocked, blocked again, tried to use her Semblance on Ruby before she could attack again, and… failed? Ruby flew out of the silver dust again without the slightest sign of being off-balance.
Several clashes of blades later, Pyrrha realized what was going on. She’d fought opponents with a speed-based Semblance before, and even at their top speed she could throw them off-balance with her Semblance. But Ruby’s Semblance was… different. Whenever she activated it, she was completely immune to Pyrrha’s Semblance—as if there was no metal anywhere in that cloud of silver for her to manipulate. Ruby may not have been able to touch Pyrrha in Semblance mode, but Pyrrha also couldn’t touch her.
Which left an extremely narrow window for her Semblance usage—the moments when Ruby dropped back into existence for a strike with two whirling blades to keep track of, when she was so close that there was only fractions of a second for Pyrrha to decide what to do. She needed a better sense of Ruby’s timing. Right now, she couldn’t keep up.
She had no choice but to abandon attempts at her Semblance for now and focus entirely on defense, retreating under the frenzied attack. Inevitably, some of Ruby’s attacks got through, slowly pushing her Aura lower, but right now Pyrrha was trading Aura for time. Time she needed to get a sense of Ruby’s fighting style and get a sense of which split-seconds to trigger Polarity.
It was a plan. But for now, Pyrrha was in unfamiliar territory: losing.
Ruby was wearing down her Aura slowly but surely, and Pyrrha had yet to get a single hit on her. There was a faint background murmur coming from somewhere. Probably the class, realizing that an unknown student was pushing Pyrrha Nikos onto the ropes. If Pyrrha was to win, it would need to be a comeback. Using her Semblance to throw Ruby off-balance in a way that opened up the opportunity for critical strikes that could hopefully make up the Aura difference.
Hopefully.
For the first time in years, Pyrrha Nikos was relying on hope to win a fight. Who was Ruby?
A girl with an SDC intelligence file. A girl who may have been held in house arrest on her own academy’s airship. A girl who was pushing Pyrrha to her limits in a way no one else ever had. Somehow, Penny’s unexpected avoidance of fighting Pyrrha was now the second-biggest mystery of this class.
Then, finally Pyrrha felt she had a good handle on Ruby’s timing, and the next time Ruby dropped out of her Semblance, she was ready. As the twin blades sliced towards her face and chest, Pyrrha twisted their path with her Semblance. More egregiously than she would’ve liked, but she was far enough in a hole that she couldn’t be picky.
Ruby’s swings flew wide, her eyes widening, and Pyrrha brought the sharpened side of Akoúo̱ through her defenses and into the side of her head with a shuddering impact. At the same moment, she drove Miló into Ruby’s midsection with every ounce of force in her body.
Ruby stumbled, then Semblanced away, and came to a stop at the edge of the arena, tilting her head in confusion. With the brief moment of reprieve, Pyrrha checked their Auras. Still a large gap to close, but smaller now. If she could keep up critically damaging hits like those—
Ruby reconnected her weapons with a click, turning them back into a double-bladed staff, and launched herself forward once more. Pyrrha was ready this time, timing her Semblance perfectly as Ruby reappeared, guiding her staff to one side and—
Only for Ruby to disappear into her Semblance so quickly that she must’ve been expecting something—
Ruby reappeared on the other side of the arena, smiled cheerfully at Pyrrha, and re-holstered her weapon.
To onlookers, it was a confusing move. But to Pyrrha, the message was clear. Ruby had figured out her Semblance. In two moves.
Ruby exploded into a cloud of silver dust again. Pyrrha braced, but this time she didn’t reappear. Instead, the dust swirled around her, faster and faster, whipping up the air around Pyrrha into a whirlwind which was moving so fast that it whipped her ponytail around, yanking it sideways.
Pyrrha leapt away, but the silvery tornado moved with her no matter where she moved or how quickly, never letting her loose from its center. She struck out with her spear, but trying to stab a cloud led to the expected result, not slowing down the storm in the slightest. It was only getting faster, the silver particles churning around her thicker and thicker to the point that she could barely see anything beyond the tornado, the rushing wind making her eyes water.
She pulled in her limbs as she realized that there was a genuine danger that this whirlwind could pull her off the ground if it kept accelerating—but she had a strategy for that.
She activated her Semblance, taking hold of her own armor, and pushed downward, anchoring herself to the ground—even as the wind grew ever-stronger—she could see nothing except silver shimmering everywhere—and then she had to squeeze her eyes shut because of the wind whipping against them ever-faster and sucking away all the moisture under her eyelids—all she could hear was a deafening roar—
And then, despite her Semblance holding her down, Pyrrha wobbled. She had just enough time to think, HOW fast is she going?! before the wind yanked her away.
For a moment, there was nothing except silver and weightlessness and a distant roar as she tumbled head over heels without the slightest idea which way was up, and then she was slammed into the ground with all the force of an angry god smiting its doomed creation.
Abruptly, the roar of the wind stopped, and before Pyrrha could move or even think, a foot was planted on her back and the point of a weapon landed between her shoulder blades.
The end-of-fight buzzer blared in Pyrrha’s ears, and for a moment a stunned silence reigned in the classroom.
It was broken only by Professor Goodwitch’s voice. “That… concludes the match,” she said faintly. “Ruby Karyatis is the victor.”
The weight disappeared from Pyrrha’s back. She turned her gaze to the Aura monitors, which confirmed the result—but surprisingly, closer in the end than she would’ve assumed. Ruby must’ve burned up a great deal of her Aura to push her Semblance to such dizzying levels. But the end result was the same—Ruby’s Aura wasn’t in the red, and Pyrrha’s was.
She’d lost. For the first time that she could remember. She wasn’t the Invincible Girl anymore.
Pyrrha rose to her feet, holstering Miló. The class was still silent, staring at Ruby. Not Pyrrha. For once, after a fight, all of the attention was on someone besides her. It felt… nice.
“Oh my gosh, that was the best fight I’ve had in a long time!”
Ruby appeared in front of her, looking every bit as joyful as she had before the fight. “Your Semblance is so cool! Now I know why you’re so good at fighting!”
“Thank you,” Pyrrha said, shaking Ruby’s hand while still trying to work her mind around the fact that she could never be called The Invincible Girl again.
Good riddance.
Team BSYP and Team JNPR were both waiting for Pyrrha and Ruby as they made their way off the sparring stage. Pyrrha thought it was a little strange that Ruby’s team wasn’t there to congratulate her, but perhaps they weren’t the expressive sort.
“Penny! Penny! Thanks for letting me fight in your place! That was awesome!” Ruby made a beeline for Penny and started talking animatedly to her while Penny nodded along excitedly.
Pyrrha couldn’t help but smile at the sight. Those two were adorable. They seemed to feed off of each other’s energy in a way that made both of them even more expressive, if such a thing was possible.
“Oh! Also! I understand—” Abruptly, Ruby clapped a hand over her mouth, looked around, and then leaned forward, whispering something into Penny’s ear. After a moment of listening, Penny nodded once, her expression inscrutable.
Before Pyrrha could wonder what that meant, she felt a hand on her shoulder. Jaune was looking at her, genuinely unsettled. “You good, Pyrrha?”
She gave him a wide, genuine smile. “Completely.”
It wasn’t a lie in the slightest. The more she thought about the fight, the more it felt like an enormous burden had been lifted off of her shoulders. At some point, her winning streak had become part of her identity… or at least, part of what she thought her identity was supposed to be.
She looked over to Weiss, who looked torn between embarrassment and disbelief, and her mind drifted back to that conversation with her in the CCT, about only ever knowing herself by what other people said about her. Well, now one of those things, maybe the most important thing, was broken. She wasn’t invincible.
She caught Weiss’s eye, and smiled, giving her a thumbs-up. And after a moment, Weiss smiled back.
Pyrrha couldn’t wait to see what else she could find out about herself.
Blake sat on the windowsill, her knees pulled up to her chest as she stared at the evening twilight outside, keeping herself perfectly still.
It wasn’t yet the time when any of them usually went to sleep, but the room was silent. Penny was sitting cross-legged on her bunk, hugging her Ursa plushie close to her chest and deep in thought about something. Weiss was on her bunk, with a textbook in one hand and her scroll in the other, and she seemed like she was having a difficult time deciding which she should pay attention to. And Yang was brushing her hair—a task which was taking longer to do, since she’d sent her prosthetic arm back to Atlas for repairs.
Repairs she needed because of the fight with Adam. Repairs that could’ve been avoided if Blake hadn’t frozen up like a newborn deer when she was faced with her past, could’ve been avoided if Blake hadn’t been so useless—
“Blake?”
Blake jerked upright, Penny’s concerned voice dissipating her spiraling thoughts like a javelin piercing a balloon.
“Your heart rate is spiking,” Penny said, looking carefully at her. “Are you in distress?”
Despite the guilt weighing her down, Blake couldn’t help but smile a bit. In a paradoxical sort of way, Penny’s directness made life better for Team BSYP. Not easier, because there was no avoiding difficult conversations around a girl who could quite literally sense emotional distress, but better, because without Penny these conversations might’ve never happened. And Blake couldn’t imagine what this team would look like without half the Penny-motivated conversations they’d had.
She swallowed down the guilt trying to claw out of her throat and slipped off the windowsill, landing on her feet and surveying the rest of the team.
“…I think I’m ready to tell you all about Adam.” She hated how shaky her voice was, how much she felt like she could burst into tears at any given moment. “If you’d want to know.”
It was getting late, and she would’ve understood completely if any of them didn’t want to hear this tonight, but at the same time, the immediacy with which her team gathered on the floor in a circle was incredibly comforting. No reluctance. She could see the honest care for her in their expressions, something that had disappeared from Adam in the—in the—
Don’t cry. Don’t cry. Don’t—
Her body didn’t listen to her, and Blake sat down—more of a collapse of her body than any kind of controlled movement—as she started to shake.
“I—I hate how weak he makes me feel,” she spat out as the comforting hands of Penny and Yang landed on each of her shoulders.
“Just—I’m supposed to be a Huntress. I’m supposed to be your leader. I’m supposed to be strong. But when I saw him last night, I didn’t feel any of those things! I just felt like a scared little girl who wanted to run away and hide.” She swiped at the tears sliding down her cheeks and let out a bitter laugh. “I guess that’s exactly what I am. I ran from the White Fang once, and then I ran from Adam again, so maybe he was right—”
“No,” all three of her teammates said in near-perfect unison. Blake didn’t know how they could possibly think otherwise, but they could talk about that later, because right now she was going to tell them about Adam and she wasn’t going to let that knowledge of him crush only her any longer and she was going to tell them about what’d happened between her and Adam and she was going to tell them how she’d been weak and how she’d been scared scared scared weak weak weak hands around her throat choking couldn’t breathe no no no—
“—ake? Blake?”
Yang’s voice pulled Blake back into herself, and only then did she realize she was cowering away from the team, as if trying to shield herself from a blow.
“You’re safe. We’re protecting you. No one’s going to hurt you.”
“But what if he hurts you—”
“He tried!” Penny said brightly. “And Yang broke his jaw!”
Penny’s words brought Blake no comfort. “He always comes back stronger.” She took a shaky breath which almost immediately turned into a sob. “I’m sorry. I—I didn’t think it would be this way.” She didn’t even know what she was apologizing for. Was she apologizing for Adam? Was she apologizing for putting a target on her team’s backs? Was she apologizing for being unable to tell them about her past in a calm and reasonable and normal way?
“I’m sorry,” she said again, and then words began to spill out of her. “I thought I loved him, and I thought he loved me. I don’t know. Maybe I did love him. Maybe he did love me. But by the end, it wasn’t love. For either of us. He wanted me to… He wanted me to be perfect for him, and I thought I could be perfect for him because he said I could be if I tried hard enough, and…” Her heart clenched painfully as she remembered moments, flashes, words— “But I could never try hard enough. I watched him twist the Fang into something worse than what I wanted. He didn’t treat violence as a means to an end. For him, violence was the end. He took pleasure in hurting people, and… I tried to change him, I tried to make him a better person, but I couldn’t, I failed—”
She stopped there to suck in a breath before she passed out, and risked a glance at her teammates to try and gauge their reactions. Yang had put down her hairbrush entirely and was watching her with the deepest, most soulful concern, her vibrant lilac eyes trained on her. It made Blake want to cry all over again. How did she deserve that concern when she’d—how did she deserve any of what Yang was—
She forced her gaze elsewhere before the thought of Yang dragged her down an entirely different mental path, and found Penny watching her with an understandable amount of uncertainty and confusion.
Penny wasn’t naive by any stretch of the imagination, and anyone who did think Penny was naive didn’t know her in the slightest. But there were certain things about the way Penny saw the world which were just… so different in comparison to the rest of the team. Not worse and not less intelligent. Just different. But quite different. Maybe the most significant difference being that Penny had a fierce belief in the fundamental goodness of all people. If Blake and Weiss and Yang had ever held such a belief, it was long since entirely shattered in each of them. To Blake, it made perfect sense that someone like Adam existed. In this world, it was inevitable that there would be people like him. People who only cared about themselves, or people who wanted to cause pain and suffering, or… people who just didn’t care. All too often, Blake felt as if those kinds of people outnumbered the good ones. How else could the state of the world make any sense at all?
But Penny didn’t think that way. Someone like Adam was clearly a shock to her. She tried to see the good in everyone, or at least the potential for good. If there was any potential for good in Adam, Blake hadn’t seen it in a very long time.
It wasn’t bad for Penny to think that way, either. It just caught Blake off-guard sometimes, when Penny treated the world as a place that held an infinite number of happy endings. She hoped Penny could keep that mindset. She wanted to help her keep it.
…This was the most orderly series of thoughts she’d had all day. And her heart no longer felt like it was about to jump out of her ribcage. The power of Penny: she was very good at pulling away despair and anxiety from situations. Sometimes quite unintentionally.
Blake shifted her attention to her final teammate. Weiss was watching Blake with… Okay, if that was pity, Blake was going to need to suppress the urge to jump across the room and strangle her because the last thing she needed right now was pity from a gods-damned Atlesian—
“Yes, I know, so sad and pathetic, isn’t it?” she growled at Weiss, trying to hold back a fresh wave of tears. “One of the public faces of the White Fang abused his girlfriend. Are you going to use that as proof that everyone who’s ever been in the Fang is actually an uncontrollable wild animal and that the movement is evil incarnate and completely irredeemable?”
“No!” The sudden horror in Weiss’s voice caught Blake thoroughly off-guard. “Blake, it’s—it’s—it sounds familiar.”
Abruptly, Weiss’s own words at the docks came rushing back to Blake, particularly the ones about her father. “Oh.”
Weiss had her hands balled into fists as she looked somewhere between Blake and an immeasurably distant thing. “My father has always demanded that I be perfect, and no matter how much I try, it’s somehow never been enough for him.” Then her eyes darted sideways. “Penny, you told me once you don’t think it’s possible to be perfect, and… I didn’t believe you. But now, from Pyrrha and from Blake… I think I’m starting to understand why trying to be perfect hurts so much.”
She leaned forward, holding her hands out to Blake, her face full of what Blake was now belatedly realizing was empathy. “You were never going to be enough for him. Just like I’ll probably never be enough for my father.”
Blake froze up for a moment, conflicting emotions warring in her, and then, before she could think better of it, she shadow-cloned forward and hugged Weiss.
“Oh! I. Um. Thank you?” Weiss said, returning the hug stiffly. “Are you alright, Blake?”
“I will be,” Blake mumbled into Weiss’s shoulder. “Just… I’ve never told anyone about Adam before.”
She felt Weiss nod once against her.
“Do you want this to be a one-on-one hug, or would you like it to become a group hug? Because, well, if you want a group hug, I think Yang and Penny would be very happy to join—”
Blake nodded frantically, words failing her at the moment. Moments later, she felt the unmistakable warmth of Yang and Penny enveloping her, Yang’s soft and lustrous curls falling against her as she leaned her head against Blake’s head—did Yang know how that contact made Blake’s heart skip a beat—
She could investigate how she felt about Yang some other time, when she felt safer and when her thoughts weren’t dominated by Adam. For now… she was going to let herself just enjoy a Team BSYP group hug.
“Are we the best team in the academy at giving hugs? It feels like it.”
“We’ve gotta be,” Yang said. “Especially Penny! I don’t know what your secret is, but I swear your hugs are like therapy.”
“Over the last several months, I have painstakingly crafted entire algorithms devoted to calculating the optimal hug parameters for each and every scenario in which I might hug someone!” Penny pulled back from the hug a little, cocking her head. “Nora did say I am a hug machine extraordinaire, and although she may not have known the exact truth of those words, I am proud of how accurate a description it is!”
“Speaking of which, Penny…” The mention of Nora brought back something else that’d been on Blake’s mind, and she settled back into a sitting position to give Penny a careful look. “I know this might be a difficult thing to think about, but… half of Team JNPR has a Semblance that could be really dangerous to you, and that feels like something we can’t leave alone.”
Penny sat back down as well, picking up her stuffed Ursa and resting her chin on its crocheted head. “…You are right,” she said finally. Her usual cheer was rapidly fading away. “The best course of action would be to tell them the truth about myself. I know I said that it was getting easier after I told Professor Carmel, but… it feels harder again. I am suddenly feeling a great deal of fear.” She pulled in her limbs a little tighter and shivered slightly, like a cornered animal cowering away from a threat. “What if they don’t want to be my friend anymore?”
A hundred different ways to reply to that ran through Blake’s mind, but to her surprise, it was Weiss who responded first.
“It’s Team JNPR!” Weiss said. “How could they ever reject you? Nora and Jaune are going to love you even more, and Ren is one of the most unflappable people I’ve ever met, and Pyrrha is an angel—of course they’ll accept you!”
However, Penny didn’t look any closer to being comforted.
And then Yang spoke. “You know, there might be a way to tell Pyrrha and Nora to be careful with their Semblances which doesn’t involve telling them everything?” She’d gone back to brushing her hair, pulling her thick-toothed brush through her locks with slow, steady movements as she spoke. “It wouldn’t be lying to just say you’ve got metal in your body. And there’s a lot of ways for someone to have metal in their body. Pacemakers, bone screws, body plates, hip replacements, prosthetics—” She paused her brushing to wave her arm stump. “Honestly, now that I know Pyrrha’s Semblance, I’m going to be more careful around her.” She cast a sideways glance at Weiss. “How long have you been sitting on that information, anyway?”
A deep blush spread across Weiss’s cheeks. “Only a couple of days! I figured it out during an informal sparring match. She asked me to keep it secret on account of it being such an important part of her strategy, and I didn’t see any harm in keeping that secret—at least, until she was going to spar with Penny!”
Well, that was fair. Blake certainly wasn’t going to hold anything against Weiss for making an effort to keep someone else’s secret. “You could definitely just tell them there’s something which makes you particularly vulnerable to their Semblances,” she said. “I’m sure they wouldn’t question it.”
“Yes, but…” Penny trailed off, squeezing her Ursa plushie so tightly Blake wondered if it might burst. “I… I want to tell them. And… I also don’t want to tell them. That is what I feel, but it doesn’t make any sense. I do not understand it.”
Blake’s heart lurched a little bit, if for no other reason than how painfully relatable Penny’s dilemma was. She’d spent most of the semester wanting and not wanting others to know she was a Faunus, wanting others to know the real her, not wanting others to judge her based off what they saw at a glance—
Wait.
Blake’s hand shot up, going to her second set of ears, and when her fingers brushed against soft fur, it confirmed her memories of the night before.
“My ears!” she gasped, sitting bolt upright. “They’re—I went the entire day not wearing my bow!”
Her teammates cast concerned looks at her.
“Do you remember last night?” Yang said slowly. “You threw away your bow.”
“Yes, I remember that—” Blake had to feel at her ears again because her brain was still refusing to believe what had happened today. “—But no one noticed?! All day? In every class?”
“Apparently not,” Weiss said, a look of dawning comprehension crossing her face. “I didn’t even see anyone looking at you differently.”
“Penny, let that be a lesson in how much can stay the same when you reveal something new about yourself.” Yang nodded at Penny, and then stopped brushing to tease out a knot in her hair. “Blake’s still the Blake we know and love, after all. And you’ll still be the Penny that JNPR knows and loves. Just like when you told us!”
Blake lowered her hands and decided that the world no longer made any sense at all.
“I see.” Penny’s voice was full of uncertainty. “You have made extremely good points. I will contemplate how, and when, and where, I want to tell them.”
“There’s no rush.”
“But there is,” Penny said. “What if we face each other in the Vytal Tournament? If I don’t tell Pyrrha before then, I could be seriously injured in a fight against her!”
A silence fell on Team BSYP as they considered all the horrifying implications of that scenario. Finally, Penny nodded stiffly.
“I will figure out the particulars,” she said, before burying her face in her plushie.
Blake, Yang, and Weiss exchanged a silent conversation of looks and gestures as they tried to figure out how to help Penny, who clearly still needed reassurance, but was also even more clearly overwhelmed by the topic.
When they’d sorted themselves out, Blake and Weiss were in the hallway, leaving Yang alone with Penny. It was the best decision—out of the three of them, Yang was the closest with Penny, and less people in the room would hopefully let Penny decompress a little bit. However, it had the side effect of leaving Blake alone with Weiss.
There wasn’t any antagonism between them! It was just that, well, after their… exchange of words… at the docks, they were both still getting fully used to each other again. Even if the outcome had been beyond Blake’s wildest expectations, it was the sort of thing that made being alone around each other a tiny bit awkward. It wasn’t affecting their team functionality, but being alone with each other like this didn’t happen very often.
Weiss seemed equally aware of the situation’s awkwardness. She looked from side to side, as if looking for something that would distract them, before sighing quietly and turning to look at Blake. Blake considered excusing herself to the library, but considering how late it was, she might fall asleep in a book.
“So…” Weiss said.
“So…” Blake said.
“What you said about the White Fang earlier, in class… That’s… that’s really how you radicalized people?”
Ah, so it was going to be this kind of conversation. Still, it was going to be much easier than it would’ve been a couple months ago. In reply, Blake shrugged. “Sometimes it didn’t work, sometimes it did.”
“It sounds so… so much less involved than what I was expecting.”
“Weiss, we didn’t tie everyone to chairs and brainwash them with subliminal images like Atlas would have you think.”
“Well—that wasn’t what I was trying to insinuate—”
“We only did that to the Faunus who were being really difficult.”
“You’re joking,” Weiss said immediately. “I refuse to interpret that as anything but a joke.”
“You’re right, it was a joke,” Blake said, letting a smile play over her face. “And I’m proud of you for not even considering something as ridiculous as that. You’ve come a long way from when we first met.”
“Well—I—” Blake did not miss the faint blush which briefly spread across Weiss’s features, and she also did not miss the way in which her posture relaxed as she continued. “…I am glad to hear that, Blake.”
Gods, if someone had told Blake before her first day at Beacon that she’d end up being friends with Weiss Schnee, well… her instinctive reaction would’ve been to think she’d abandoned all of her principles. But no, in reality, there was something about Weiss that had helped Blake stick to what she believed even more resolutely.
Ozpin had been right on that first day of classes. Weiss’s drive to improve herself and be a better person was not only genuine; it was admirable. And it seemed to bleed over to the rest of her team, Blake included.
Funnily enough, Blake could see this version of Weiss being a team leader—the Weiss Schnee who not only strove to be the best version of herself, but also (successfully) encouraged others with equal energy to be the best versions of themselves. Still, Blake wouldn’t be saying that aloud to Weiss until the next academic year.
“Really, the state of affairs in the world does most of the radicalization for us,” Blake said. “No matter what someone might think of the White Fang before, the SDC can only press its boot so far into someone’s windpipe before that person decides enough is enough.”
Weiss grimaced, but Blake was quite sure it was a sympathetic grimace. “I can’t wait to dismantle all that when I inherit the company.”
“Careful where you say that,” Blake said, half-joking. “The largest corporation in the world has eyes and ears everywhere, and you never know what might get back to your ghoul of a father.”
“I know. I know. Do you know how hard it was to hold my tongue around him sometimes?” Weiss shuddered violently. “Because I knew the smallest mistake could mean the end of my inheritance. Even now, at Beacon, I have to be careful what I say, what I do, because I know he’s watching like a hawk. He was against just the idea of me becoming a Huntress. Oh, dear gods. He’s going to be furious that you’re my team leader.”
“And is that all worth it?” Blake said.
Weiss’s eyes went very, very wide. “Blake…?”
“For however long you’ll need to keep compromising on your morals more and more as he endlessly demands you stay in line under threat of taking away your inheritance?” She gave Weiss a sad look, because she was once again remembering how much she’d tried to fix Adam, believing that if she just tried enough, she could stop what he was doing from the inside… and how it had never worked, only resulted in her making more and more unbearable choices. “What if you just decided to do good now, without any care for what Jacques Schnee thinks, instead of waiting however long it’s going to take?”
Weiss crossed her arms and chewed on her lip for a moment, looking down and to the left of Blake. “I… I get that. I really do. But I can’t lose the company. It’s a chance to do so much good without spilling a single drop of blood. I could completely destroy everything harmful about the system without any violence.” She let out a short laugh. “If I wanted to, I could just… entirely shut down the SDC. And no one would be able to do anything about it because I’d be in sole ownership of the company.”
“Hm,” was all Blake said in reply.
“It’s… Yes, it feels bad to know I could be doing more, but I see it as trading a little bit of good now for an immense amount of good later. I can’t let the company pass into the hands of my little brother. He’s just a miniature version of my father with no independence and no sense of morality and he only cares about pleasing him.”
Ah, there was part of Weiss’s anxiety. To know that her father did have a choice in who the company went to. “It sounds like he’s almost holding you hostage.”
“Maybe!” Suddenly, Weiss’s voice had a rapidly growing tinge of panic. “But I owe it to my grandfather! To raise his family name out of the absolute muck that my father has thrown it into! And I—I need to—live up to the name—need to—” She gasped violently, her mouth moving but no words coming out.
“Weiss? Weiss? Breathe. Breathe for me, please?” Blake jumped forward, putting a hand on each of Weiss’s shoulders and looking into her eyes. She would recognize the signs of a flashback anywhere. “You’re okay. You’re safe. He can’t control you.”
Weiss stared right back at Blake, thoroughly uncomprehending for a moment as she twitched violently, and then finally she took a deep, heaving breath and relaxed so suddenly Blake thought she might collapse.
“Right. I… I’m sorry, Blake. I—”
“No, it’s fine. Do you want to talk about something else?”
Weiss seized on the opportunity like a drowning woman sighting land. “Do you really think your plan will work for Ruby?”
“I hope.” Blake let go of Weiss as her breathing returned to something calmer, and turned her thoughts to the girl with a hero complex so big it was crushing her. “You know… in a weird sort of way, I keep wondering if the way Ruby is now… is the way Penny would’ve turned out, if she was forced to stay with whoever was trying to use her and never had a chance to escape.”
Weiss briefly looked taken aback, but after a moment, she nodded. “Dear gods, I can see it. Do you think—”
The sound of a door opening interrupted her, and they turned to see Yang exiting their room. She nodded to them as she quietly closed the door behind her. “All set.”
“Penny’s doing better?” Blake said.
“Much. We talked about it, talked about a few other things…” Yang reached down and adjusted her sleeve around her stump. “I asked her about her mystery friend.”
Blake’s eyebrows shot up, while Weiss blinked owlishly. “Her what?”
“Oh, right, you weren’t there when we talked about it before. Okay, Weiss, you’ve heard Penny mention how I was the second friend she made, right?”
“I recall her saying that several times, yes.”
“So, on our way to Junior’s bar, Penny told me and Blake that her first friend—who she met at Beacon before she was a student, who she doesn’t want to say anything about—has been missing since before the start of the semester.”
“Oh.” Weiss fell silent. “If she was living at Beacon before this… it had to be someone at Beacon, didn’t it?”
“That’s what I thought, maybe a higher-year student staying at the school over the break, but… You’d think news of a missing student would spread pretty damn quick. And we haven’t heard anything like that.”
“Did Penny say anything else?” Blake asked.
Yang gave her a helpless shrug. “Not really. She says the mystery friend had secrets of her own, and Penny would tear off one of her own limbs before she’d give up someone else’s secret, so…”
Before Blake could offer any thoughts of her own, the door opened again and Penny stuck her head out, giving the three of them a curious look.
“Er, I just wanted to inform you all that I do not need any more solitude tonight.”
“Oh, thanks.” Yang pulled her hairbrush out of her pocket and resumed brushing as she re-entered their dorm, Blake and Weiss following after. “It’s a lot harder to brush all this without a mirror.”
Penny was giving Yang a contemplative look, and a moment later she seemed to reach some sort of internal decision.
“Yang, after thinking about it more deeply, there was something I liked about temporarily inhabiting your body.”
“Oh?”
“The experience of having long hair.” Penny twirled a strand of her own hair between her fingers, and sent a longing look at Yang as she kept working the brush through her hair. “It seemed very nice. I think I would like to try having it sometime.”
“Yo, Cinder.”
Mercury poked his head through the door to Team Crimson’s dorm room, making sure that the only occupants of the room were members of his team, before stepping in and throwing the door shut behind him. The abrupt slam of the door made Emerald jump, but Cinder didn’t even look up from her scroll.
“What is it?” she said.
“Somebody beat Nikos in a fight.”
That got Cinder’s full attention. She put her scroll down and stared at Mercury, her gaze piercing enough to make any normal student shrink away just from its sheer intensity. “Who?”
Mercury shrugged. “Some Atlas chick I never heard of. Ruby, uh… what was her last name? Carcass?” He looked over to Emerald. “Help me out here, it was that short kid we caught in the middle of a makeout session in a closet the day we got here—”
“Karyatis,” Emerald said, while also looking personally affronted that he couldn’t be bothered to remember it himself.
Mercury snapped his fingers and flopped down on his bed. “That’s her. Apparently she had a speed Semblance, and Nikos just couldn’t keep up. Which is weird, because she’s beaten people with a speed Semblance before.”
Cinder was silent, tapping at her scroll as she navigated through the footage from combat classes, looking for the fateful fight. How convenient of Beacon Academy, to make all its sparring footage available to any student in the school.
“Does this change anything?” A hint of worry crept into Emerald’s tone. “Can we still make an example out of Nikos if she’s not the Invincible Girl anymore?”
Cinder didn’t reply. Her eyes were trained on her scroll, watching the fight unfold in an explosion of silver dust and blindingly quick movements.
“Cinder?”
Cinder snapped her scroll shut, sent a sharp but wordless glare to Emerald which immediately cowed her, and rose to her feet.
“Nikos is still our target,” she said, before crossing the room to look out the window. She placed her palms flat against the sill and stared out at the Atlesian airships moored on the grounds. “But I think Ruby Karyatis will make a most interesting opponent in the first round of the Vytal tournament.” Cinder would be very curious to find out if this girl’s victory was just luck, or something more. The way she had won was… interesting. Pushing her Semblance to limits no other Huntress would push them, nearly draining her own Aura just to drain Nikos’s faster. It spoke to a certain ruthlessness that no one else in this spineless school had.
“Cool.” Mercury was already on his scroll, rapidly losing interest in the conversation due to there being much more interesting things to pay attention to. Such as online gambling with other people’s credit cards. At least, until something else occurred to him.
“Hey, what about the other girl we saw Carcass with? The one with the bright fucking orange hair and the stupid bow. Are you ever going to tell us why you freaked out when you saw her—Penguin or whatever her name was?”
In the silence that followed, there was no way that Mercury and Emerald could miss the way Cinder’s hands tightened on the windowsill, or how her Semblance unconsciously activated, drawing the faintest wisps of smoke out from where her suddenly-superheated hands made contact with the wood.
But, as happened every time Mercury asked about this, Cinder said nothing.
Notes:
I had this chapter entirely written when Nightshade posted his own Penny vs. Pyrrha sparring match chapter, accidentally making their almost-spar in this chapter even MORE of a bait-and-switch. The funny coincidences between our stories continue.
Chapter 26: Shades Of Ruby
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
Several days later
Nora really didn’t know what to expect when Team BSYP asked for a few minutes to talk about something. Well, more than just a few minutes, because it had been Penny asking for ‘thirty to sixty minutes of free time for discussion,’ because to Penny, a few minutes really did mean exactly three minutes. Nora knew this from experience. But anyways! Discussion. Penny had not elaborated at all about what that discussion would be, so Nora was here in the common lounge that their dorms shared, (she had to get there early to claim the comfiest seat available: the beanbag chair she’d found in a thrift shop for twelve lien) as the two teams gathered.
Blake, Weiss, Yang, and Penny—and Ruby, who kind of seemed like a fifth member of their team at this point—seemed to be in a casual enough mood, but Blake was really hard to read and Weiss was really hard to read and Penny was really good at hiding emotions and Yang was really good at hiding emotions, so… Nora was really relying on Ruby being a good emotional barometer of the situation. And Ruby looked very… nervous? Excited? Anticipatory? Whatever it was, she kept looking at Penny. Although, she did that a lot normally. So that might not mean anything.
“So!” Jaune said, folding his hands behind his head and giving Team BSYP (and Ruby) a quizzical look. “What’s up?”
A flurry of looks between the five girls followed—well, four of them, because Penny was practically staring a hole into a point on the wall somewhere between Jaune and Nora. And then, weirdly enough, it was her who spoke.
“Unless I have made a horrendous error in my behavioral analysis, the four of you are my friends,” she said slowly.
Well, that was a silly thing to say, of course they were friends! Nora almost blurted out something like, do you even need to ask?! but caught herself when she noticed something in Penny’s face. She didn’t really seem like she was in a joking mood right now.
“I trust you all very much,” Penny continued, absently fiddling with the hem of her skirt.
And then Nora noticed something else. The way Team BSYP and Ruby had arranged themselves, with Penny in the center and the girls in a semicircle around her, and Yang leaning ever so slightly forward over her… they were protecting Penny.
This kind of felt like a coming-out, but… for what? Sometimes Nora could forget things, but there was no way in the world she’d ever forget Penny was trans! She’d just seen her at the queer club yesterday, for crying out loud. So… was she coming out with something else? Maybe her sexuality? But why was she doing it here, and not with the queer club? Maybe it was a trust thing? Maybe it wasn’t a coming out. But damn, it really did feel like one. Especially with how nervous Penny looked. Maybe it was just another really big secret.
Nora tried to think of other big secrets that could be this significant. Had Penny faked her transcripts to get into Beacon like Jaune did? Was Penny living a secret double life of crime?! Did Penny have dissociative identity disorder? Was Penny pregnant???
Right, whatever Penny was nervous about, it was time for something Nora was really good at: UNCONDITIONAL SUPPORT!
“We trust you, too!” she said, leaning forward and putting her hand on her leg to stop it from bouncing. “I’d trust you with my life, Penny, and I’m not kidding.”
For some reason, something about that made Penny go very still, and she looked away, suddenly not meeting anyone’s gaze. “That is a very similar topic to what I wanted to talk to you about, actually.”
Okay, now Nora was worried. Was Penny sick? Was she about to die? Had Team JNPR hurt her somehow—
Wait.
Suddenly, she was remembering a piece of information that felt very important right now. “Does this have anything to do with how you’re afraid of my Semblance?” she said out loud.
Penny stiffened and nodded once.
Huh. Well, that answered one question and created a whole bunch of other ones.
Then Penny turned to Pyrrha. “Your Semblance also poses a unique danger to me.”
Wait, so Penny was vulnerable to electricity and polarity? Nearly everyone was vulnerable to electricity, that was no big deal, but how was polarity a problem for Penny? Did she have a secret prosthetic or something?
“Weiss informed me about what you can do just before I would have sparred with you. And I assure you, she only did that because she felt it was a matter of potentially serious injury if I went ahead—”
“I’m deeply sorry,” Weiss broke in, giving Pyrrha a desperately apologetic look. “I would have kept that knowledge private—I know I promised— but my partner’s safety was at stake.”
Oh, Weiss. She would figure out her gay feelings for Pyrrha one day, but until then, Nora would just have to deal with Weiss talking like the world’s most dramatically noble knight in shining armor every time she interacted with Pyrrha.
Pyrrha, for her part, seemed mostly surprised but not upset. Her Semblance was a secret, yeah, but it wasn’t a secret secret, so there probably wouldn’t be any hard feelings there, thankfully. And Penny’s safety was very important, anyways.
Nora looked back to Penny, who had fallen silent, her eyes darting between each member of Team JNPR.
Okay, so if Penny’s big secret was that she had a secret prosthetic, that was cool! That would make two people on Team Battleship with a prosthetic, and when you threw in Weiss’s face scar… they were basically the Cool Battle Scars team. Nora wasn’t jealous or anything. Okay, maybe a little jealous. She wanted a cool battle scar. Considering she was a former orphaned street urchin who had to fend for herself for most of her life, she felt like she really should have one of those by now!
Oh, well, her career as a Huntress was only getting started. Anyways. More importantly right now, Penny! She needed reassurance about her secret prosthetic! Reassurance that Nora was more than ready to provide!
“No worries, we’ll be careful, all of us!” She nodded decisively. What Penny probably needed right now was a little joke, to show that everything was okay—she definitely liked knowing that.
So, with a little laugh, Nora added, “Y’know, with the electricity and the polarity being dangerous for you, it sounds kind of like you’re a robot or something!”
But as soon as the word robot was out of Nora’s mouth, Blake, Weiss, Yang, and Ruby all froze like they’d just stepped on a landmine. Now the four of them were all looking uneasily at each other while Penny blinked rapidly.
“Nora,” Ren whispered, elbowing her. “This probably isn’t the time for… jokes…?” He trailed off, apparently also noticing team BSYP’s reaction.
Meanwhile, Nora had just enough time to think, WAIT— before Penny met Nora’s eyes again, smiled, and said, “The term I use is synthetic person, but… yes!”
Silence.
Nora’s brain crashed and restarted several times in rapid succession. Synthetic person. Synthetic person. As in, not just prosthetics. Everything.
Pyrrha’s mouth had fallen open, her eyes going very wide, maybe with a little bit of worry? Jaune just looked really, really stunned. Ren was probably taking it the best out of any of them, but he was always the best at taking big news well. As for Nora, her brain had finally caught up again.
She couldn’t help the excited gasp that slipped out of her mouth. “Oh my gods,” she whisper-screamed, bringing her hands to her mouth as she stared at Penny, Penny the synthetic girl sitting right there in front of her oh my gods oh my gods this is the coolest thing someone’s ever told me—
“So when you said you were a girl that was made, not born…?” she said, feeling like she was going to explode from joy.
Penny nodded, and all her energy seemed to be coming back to her, probably because Nora was making absolutely zero effort to hide just how excited she was right now. “I meant it in the most literal sense!”
At that moment, Nora made a decision. She was indoors. She was supposed to be using an indoor voice. But indoor voice be damned, this was too exciting for that. So she squealed. Loudly. Loudly enough that she hit that specific squealing volume she reserved for the most special of occasions, like this! It was fine, everyone here had Aura!
“AAAAAAA! PENNY! THAT’S THE COOLEST THING EVER! I’M SO PROUD OF YOU AND YOU’RE SO COOL! CAN I HUG YOU?”
Penny, thoroughly unaffected by Nora’s outburst which had everyone else (except Ruby, weirdly enough) scrambling to cover their ears, nodded. “Yes? As long as there is no danger of electrocution—”
Nora had never yanked out her portable battery and discharged herself into it so fast in her life. Then she bolted across the room and hugged Penny, squeezing the life out of her. She was hugging her metal friend! Her friend made out of metal!
“You do not mind that I am not really transgender? You don’t mind that I was… using your identity, as a way to conceal my truth?”
Nora made an incorrect buzzer sound with her throat. “What are you talking about? You are trans! You’re the ultimate trans girl! Built from the ground up!” she cheered, pressing her cheek against the side of Penny’s head. “I’m actually jealous!”
“W-what do you mean?” Despite the waver in her question, Penny was smiling now! Good! Nora didn’t want Penny to ever think that anyone on Team JNPR would ever dislike her because she was a synthetic girl!
“You actually get to build yourself! To look exactly how you want to look! You built your gender! That’s the most trans thing ever, choosing what you look like and what you are! Could you swap out different parts of yourself if you wanted to? Just for fun?”
“Well…” Penny trailed off. “Theoretically, yes, many parts of my body could potentially be made modular, but I think some questions would be raised if I was suddenly walking around with new limbs.”
“Well, you can do it when you’re just around us!” Nora pulled back from the hug and gave Penny a longing gaze. “I’m kinda jealous, honestly.”
Penny squeaked (adorably). “Jealous? You are jealous of me?”
“You kidding?” Nora gave her a friendly poke in the shoulder. “I want a body with swappable parts. It would’ve made transitioning faster. And easier. And more fun. I could change my boob size whenever I want!”
Penny’s eyes went very wide, and she made a very loud whirring noise—Nora was going to have to ask how she did that—and stammered out something that sounded like a question.
Nora took a stab in the dark at what the question actually was. “See, mine are great, love ‘em the way they are right now, but when I’m in a fight? Ehhh.” She shrugged, poking at her own chest. “They get a little more difficult because, y’know, big. Sometimes a girl gets tired of wearing mostly sports bras!” Hot girl problems, really.
“Oh my god, same,” Yang said. She held up her hand for a commiseration fistbump, which Nora was more than happy to oblige. “She’s right, Penny, a lot of people, very cis people included, would kill for that kind of interchangeability.”
“Such as me!” Jaune had joined the group in the center of the room, scratching at his neck. “For like the exact opposite reasons from Nora, though. The hormones did a pretty good job of rebuilding me into how I want to look, but if I could actually rebuild myself… No way I’d choose to be this short, I’d add an extra five inches to my height. So yeah, I think it’s pretty cool that you’re the way you are, Penny!”
“Oh.” Penny looked as if she was having a hard time believing what she was being told, and Nora’s ‘protect this delicate flower’ sensor was going off again.
“You’re cool!” she said. “You’re cool for who you are, just like how humans are cool for being humans and Faunus are cool for being Faunus, and that’s the truth!”
Penny squeaked again and pulled Nora into another hug, one which she was more than happy to return! Hug machine, for real!
“Nora, I think this would be a good time to tell you one other thing about myself.”
“Oh?” Nora said, wondering if the day’s wonders would ever cease. Now was Penny going to announce she was pregnant? With a cute little robo-baby?
But instead of replying, Penny raised a hand, and suddenly a slow beeping sound was emitting from her mouth. She was beeping. BEEPING. Nora would’ve pulled out another maximum-volume squeal, if not for her curiosity at what Penny was doing.
She brought her hand near Yang’s head, and the beeping noise sped up. Then she pulled her hand away, and the beeping noise slowed down. Then she brought her hand near Blake’s head—beeping sped up. Pulled her hand away from Blake—beeping slowed down.
Nora was starting to get a little fucking inkling about what was going on here. And that inkling exploded into a full-on realization a few moments later when Penny turned her hand towards Nora, smiling widely, and began to beep faster as the hand neared Nora’s head.
“GAYDAR!!!!!” Nora shrieked at the top of her lungs, completely disregarding the eardrums of everyone again. “You have GAYDAR! Actual gaydar?! Is this real life?”
“Well… in all honesty, it is just radar! I do not have any actually reliable ways to distinguish between queer and not-queer subjects on the radar. Yet.”
“I love you so much I’m making you my sister for life,” Nora whispered. And then, abruptly, she remembered there was another mystery girl in the room who seemed to have a lot of secrets to keep. “Hey!” she said, wheeling to point at Ruby. “So, are you a robot too?”
“I wish,” Ruby said as about four different people in the room made choked noises, while Penny just broke into a fit of giggles.
“Okay!” Question answered, and with no further questions, Nora went back to hugging Penny.
Blake let out a small laugh, surveying each member of Team JNPR. “I can’t believe you all found out Penny’s a synthetic person before you noticed that I’m a Faunus.”
Nora blinked, pulled back from the hug again, and stared at Blake. And then realized that the bow on top of her head had stopped being a bow at some point. And was now a pair of cat ears.
“HUH?!”
Several days later
“I think you two will love this place.”
Yang’s hair bounced behind her as she led Penny and Ruby down a street towards… Somewhere. Blake and Weiss were absent from this outing, the former due to a Team Leader-only seminar of some sort, the latter due to having a phone call with her father.
“You say that, but you have not actually told us where we are going.” Penny had been trying to guess their destination based on her internal positioning system and the map of Vale saved to her memory.
“All part of the surprise!”
Given that Yang had said ‘almost there’ three minutes ago, Penny was guessing that they were either being taken to a bank, a laundromat, a video arcade, or a boutique Dust retailer. Some of those possibilities seemed likelier than others.
She kept returning her attention to Yang’s hair. The last several days had solidified in her mind that she wanted to try the experience of having long hair at some point. But there was still the problem of actually procuring the materials necessary—
A nudge at her side pulled her attention to Ruby.
“Whatcha thinking about?” she said. “You looked deep in thought.”
Penny understood the meaning of ‘deep in thought’ perfectly well, but privately, she really wanted to know what it would look like for someone to be shallow in thought. She considered it one of the most pressing unsolved problems of language, placed in the same internal category as ‘why is a driveway something you park on while a parkway is something you drive on?’ and ‘why do slim chance and fat chance mean the same thing?’ Sometimes she really did wonder how authors could navigate the vagaries of language for a living without exhausting themselves.
But anyways! Ruby was expecting an answer.
“Hair,” she said, and then immediately realized that was not an adequate answer. “Having long hair, that is! I think it would be quite nice.”
“Oooo.” Ruby tugged at her braid. “Can confirm, it’s great!” Then she blinked three times in rapid succession. “Wait, how does hair work for you?”
“It’s quite simple!” Penny caught several strands between her fingers, showing them to Ruby. “My strands of hair are made of carbon-polymer nanofibers with a double-helix structure, which allows them to withstand tensile and shear forces far beyond what organic hair is capable of!”
“Whoa.” Ruby reached out, brushing two fingers across the strands Penny was holding out for inspection. “That’s why it’s so smooth, too?”
“Indeed!”
“So how does growing it work? Does this stuff grow on its own?”
“No, the process is a little more involved. I’d need to synthesize a quantity of the polymer, and then superheat both the new polymer and my hair using a metal coil. At a high enough temperature, the polymer will bond to my hair, and then to give it its shape I’ll need to spend the next several hours slowly lengthening it with that superheated metal coil.” She paused, and then added for clarity’s sake, “Think of it as the world’s most intense hairbrushing session.”
“And I’m so jealous,” Yang shot over her shoulder with a teasing smile. “I had to grow my hair the old-fashioned way, with time and careful attention, and several boatloads of haircare products.”
“How do you just keep getting cooler and cooler?” Ruby said. “I mean, at this point, is there anything about you that isn’t the coolest thing ever?”
Penny thought about it for a moment. “I don’t have cool sunglasses like Yang’s.”
“Hey! No stealing my style! You can take my money, you can take my arm, but I’ll never let go of my pizzazz.” She whirled around and made finger guns at Penny and Ruby for unknown reasons, before adding, “But I do want to steal your haircare routine, Rhubarb. Seriously, how do you do it? You keep it in a braid all the time, but it’s so lustrous.”
Ruby shrugged. “I don’t know?”
“If you don’t want to tell me, that’s fine.”
“No, I mean, I don’t know!” Ruby shrugged again, harder. “It’s just always been like this!”
“What?” Yang came to a halt and stared at her. “You don’t do anything? And no breakage? No split ends? No brittleness?”
“I don’t know what those things are.”
Penny was still trying to puzzle out why Yang had referred to Ruby as ‘Rhubarb,’ so it took her a moment to catch up on the conversation.
“That is surprising,” she said. “In hair as long as yours, at least some maintenance is needed to maintain the strength of the strands.”
Ruby picked up her braid, twisting it between her fingers and staring at the black-and-red hair. “Maybe it has something to do with the experiments that scientist did on me? All I know is it always looks the best after I’ve been in a fight.”
“Weird. So you two are just partners in having unfairly good hair. Anyways, we’re here!” Yang swept her arm out grandly in front of her. “Welcome to the Electric Sheep Video Arcade!”
“Oh!” Penny let herself do one delighted hop. “I’ve always wanted to go to a place like this!”
“I don’t know what this is, but it sure does look cool,” Ruby said.
“Okay, I’m going to ignore the alarming implications of what Ruby just said for now, and—” Yang dug around in her pocket for a moment, pulled out a fifty-lien note, and dropped it into Penny’s hands. “Alright, you two have fun!”
“You aren’t coming in with us?” Penny said.
“Nope!” Yang jerked a thumb over her shoulder, indicating the boutique Dust shop across the street. “I’ve been here plenty of times in my life. I’m placing a special order for a new kind of Dust round custom-made for Ember Celica, so I’m going to be a few hours—and no, Ruby, I am not allowing you to come in with me no matter how much you like weapons. You are going to do a normal teenage girl activity with Penny, and you’ll like it. Toodles.”
Yang departed with a jaunty wave, leaving the two of them outside the arcade together, and Penny had the most inexplicable feeling somewhere in her processors of being tricked, even if she could not actually identify how.
Still though, as tricks went, this was quite an agreeable one, she decided as she strolled inside with Ruby.
“Oh, wow,” Ruby said in a quiet, breathy tone, turning in a slow circle and taking in the flashing lights and pulsing screens with wide eyes. “This is… it’s so colorful.”
Penny fed the fifty-lien note into an exchange machine, and was rewarded with a bounty of arcade tokens clattering out. “Exactly why I’ve always wanted to come here!” she said, holding out a handful of the tokens to Ruby.
“And so bright…” Ruby’s gaze roved in every direction, before coming back to Penny as she took the tokens. “You’re still the brightest thing in here, though!”
All of Penny’s processors surged abruptly, leaving her temporarily at a loss for words due to literally not having the resources for her language unit. “I am—I do not think my luminosity is that extreme,” she managed to say, finally. And then she wondered if perhaps she should have waited a bit longer until she could say something that made more sense.
But that made Ruby giggle, so actually Penny decided it was the perfect thing to say. There was something very nice about Ruby’s laugh. Something that made her want to hear it more.
As she turned and began scanning the arcade, looking for a game that caught her interest, Ruby spoke again.
“So! What do we actually… do here?”
“We play games!”
Ruby seemed to be looking for something now, as she kept turning in a slow circle, now seeming less amazed (twenty percent) and more confused (eighty percent). “…For what?”
Penny blinked. “For fun, I believe.”
“Huh.” Ruby tilted her head, and then poked at a nearby joystick. “This isn’t like, going to train our reflexes or quicken our reaction speed or teach us situational awareness?”
“Possibly? Some games might, but it is not a stated goal of this establishment.”
“So we’re just doing this? For no real reason except we can? Wild.” Ruby looked around once more, and then lit up. “Oooo! There’s a thing over there that lets us test our strength!”
The thing appeared to be some sort of large metal unit with a punching bag built into it, designed to register how hard someone could hit it. It also had a sign that read, “NO AURA. NO SEMBLANCES. THE MACHINE HAS A DETECTOR.”
“Aw,” Ruby said a moment later, taking notice of the sign. “I thought I could cheat the thing—oh, wait.” She turned to Penny, waggling her eyebrows. “It says no Aura and no Semblances, but it doesn’t say no robots.”
“Would that be fair…?” Penny said. This machine was most definitely calibrated for organic persons and not people with a metal chassis.
“Totally!” Ruby said. “It’s the arcade’s fault for not knowing you exist!”
“…When would they have had the opportunity to know?”
“Good point.” Ruby dropped a token into the machine, wound up, and threw a leaping punch at the bag. “Then it’s the world’s fault for not being a nice enough place for you to publicly be yourself!” she declared as the machine blinked and beeped for a few moments before spitting out a score. “Huh. Not bad.” Then she fixed an acutely pleading look on Penny. “Come on, Pennyyyy, I really wanna see how high you can score.”
Well, now Penny felt compelled to do it. Maybe it would make Ruby giggle again! “You have successfully convinced me!”
“Yes!” Ruby pumped her fist as Penny stepped forward and began analyzing the mechanics of the punch machine. She did not want to break it, after all, which she was very much capable of doing. This, combined with taking readings from Ruby’s attempt, gave Penny a clear idea of exactly how much force she could apply. She dropped a token into the machine, calculated her vectors, wound up, and—
WHAM.
For a moment, Penny was worried that the blaring alarm and flashing lights meant that she’d overdone it—
“High score!” Ruby squealed, jumping up and down while holding Penny by the shoulder. “Holy gods, Penny, you’re strong!”
Penny beamed. “The limiting factor was not actually the structural maximums of the mechanism, but the maximum displayable number on the segmented display!”
The segmented display could only display numbers as large as three digits, meaning the maximum score she could’ve attained was 999, but to throw off suspicion of cheating she had chosen a score of 997.
“No one’s ever beating that,” Ruby said as a shell-shocked attendant came over to investigate. “No one except you! See, you’re already leaving your mark on history—wait, there’s prizes?”
Ruby’s abrupt change of subject mid-sentence was because the attendant, having verified the score, was now handing Penny a shark plushie half as tall as her.
“Yup,” the clerk said. “Anyone who gets a high score on one of our machines gets a prize. Congratulations!”
Penny took the plushie—it was so soft!— and then noticed Ruby was staring at it longingly. It took her 0.002 seconds to decide what to do next.
“For you!” she said, holding out the plushie to Ruby.
Ruby’s eyes bugged out, and she took the shark with extreme slowness. “Y—you’re serious?”
“Ab-so-lute-ly! It was your idea for me to try this, after all.”
Ruby let out a quiet squeal, and then hugged the plushie so tight Penny worried it might burst. “I’ll treasure this forever, I promise!”
The attendant, who had turned around to rearrange something on the prize shelf, paused and muttered under her breath “oh my gods,” so quietly that Penny was quite sure she wasn’t meant to hear that. She didn’t know why the attendant was saying that in the same sort of tone Weiss might use when seeing a dog, but she wasn’t going to look for an answer because she wasn’t supposed to be eavesdropping.
“Okay, now I need to win something for you!” Ruby looked around jerkily for a few moments, and then clapped her hands together. “Oh, perfect, there’s a shooting game! Here, hold my shark.”
She disappeared into her Semblance and reappeared next to the game, shedding silver dust, while Penny had to take the conventional route and walk over.
“All right, let’s see what this baby can do…” Ruby dropped a token into the slot and picked up the gun tethered to the machine, turning it over in her hands. “Aw, it’s not an actual gun, it just shoots infrared lasers. I can work with this, though!”
Penny looked over at the electronic scoreboard, and noted that the highest score belonged to someone named ‘QROW69420,’ while the second highest score belonged to ‘SUMMERAVEN4EVA,’ both of which were significantly higher than the third-place score, ‘TAIYANG.’
She made a mental note to ask Yang if that was the same Taiyang as her father.
A rapid pinging signaled the start of Ruby’s game, and Penny watched, rapt, as she began mowing down legions of cartoonishly rendered Grimm on the screen in front of her.
“The real thing’s easier than this!” Ruby said, an enormous grin spreading across her face as she whipped the toy rifle around with pinpoint accuracy—was it usual for someone to have a perfect score this far into the game?
Penny had finally figured out the right word to describe the smile Ruby got on her face during battle—the same smile from the docks, and from when she’d fought Pyrrha, and now making an appearance during this game. That word: carnivorous.
She liked finding new words to describe Ruby with. There was just something about her which produced bountiful metadata in her memories.
Ruby narrowed her eyes in concentration, her tongue sticking out ever so slightly as she fired faster and faster. Finally, the timer (the game had a time limit) blared, and Ruby spun around with a flourish, posing dramatically with the rifle. “Yeah! Did you see that? I was all like bang bang bang POW bang BAM kaboom!”
Penny applauded. “Sensational job!”
“High score. Perfect score. First try.” Ruby spun the rifle on a finger three times before putting it down, like protagonists often did in the Vacuo-style movies that Nora loved. “Wouldn’t expect anything less, of course. I was made to save the world, made to never lose, made to—” She fell silent as the attendant handed over her spoils of victory—a plushie of a frog just as big as Ruby’s shark, and then she turned and held it out to Penny, her smile back to maximum size again.
“Well, maybe I was made to win prizes for you. I’d be happy with that, too!”
“Oh gods above and below, how does this taste so good?!”
Weiss punctuated her question with a drawn-out moaning noise as she bit into the burger, fresh off the stove of Five Gals Burgers And Fries, or as Yang liked to call it, ‘a place that figured out how to bottle up happiness and use it as seasoning on burgers.’
“First time having a Five Gals burger, huh?” she said. “It’s an experience no one forgets.”
Weiss nodded frantically in reply without stopping her chewing. She didn’t seem the least bit embarrassed by the sounds she was making or how she looked while eating, which really gave Yang a very clear idea of how terribly Weiss’s phone call with her dad must’ve gone.
“I consider this an act of active rebellion,” Weiss said finally, pausing momentarily in her attack on her burger.
“If mmm fmmsgt tmmmnghmr hmmm r!” Ruby said.
Also at the picnic table: Ruby and Penny. Yang had bought a burger for Ruby, and then she’d remembered, to her immense embarrassment, that Ruby couldn’t taste things. Ruby had accepted the burger anyways, probably to spare Yang’s feelings, and had proceeded to disassemble it into all its constituent parts. Which she was scarfing down one-by-one now. It was making Yang die inside a little to see someone eating a Five Gals burger that way, but she could consider this her punishment for forgetting Ruby’s nonfunctional tastebuds.
Yang chuckled. “Hey, slow down a little bit. Even if you can’t taste it, you’re gonna choke if you keep sucking it down like a vacuum cleaner.”
She leaned back in her seat, watching Ruby finish a gargantuan bite while Penny continued to steal her fries (could it really be called stealing if Ruby was letting Penny take them?). It was a shame there wasn’t a Five Gals close to Beacon—Yang had to make an outing out of it if she wanted to get one.
Ruby, finally having swallowed her food, spoke in intelligible words again. “This is my first time ever having a burger! I mean. Not that it matters. At least it looks good?”
There were two giant questions that ran through Yang’s mind whenever she thought about Ruby. The first question was, who does she remind me of? And the second question was, what the fuck? At this particular moment, the second question was taking up a lot more mental real estate.
Yeah, sure, there wasn’t really any incentive for Ruby to try new foods because of her sensory thing (or rather absence of sensory things), but also, what the fuck?
But Yang didn’t want to make Ruby feel bad. Ruby’s past isn’t as important as the person she is right now, she reminded herself about. That sentiment had echoed between her and Blake and Weiss, while Penny didn’t even need to be reminded of it because she was proof of it to herself.
So with that in mind, she bit back a declaration of intent to choke out whoever in Atlas had kept this girl from ever having a burger, taste buds be damned, and just said, “Well, there’s a first time for everything!”
Ruby nodded and started in on the top half of her bun.
“Blake has arrived,” Penny said suddenly.
Yang blinked, looking around, and saw a notable lack of Belladonnas in the area. “Huh?”
“She will arrive in three-point-six seconds.”
After what Yang assumed was three-point-six seconds, Blake appeared around a nearby corner. And Yang really shouldn’t have been surprised by this, because she knew Penny had a whole bunch of instruments and sensors humans didn’t have, but even so.
“How’d you know?” she said as she waved to her partner.
“I recognized the unique tempo of Blake’s footsteps, and I used the change in volume level over time to calculate her time of arrival!” Penny said brightly, while looking extremely pleased with herself. Then she took another one of Ruby’s fries.
“How was the team leader thing?” Yang said to Blake.
“Nothing too interesting.” Blake sat down at the table next to Yang, their legs briefly bumping against one other. Which made Yang’s heart skip a beat. “It was mostly just making sure the team leaders weren’t running their teams into the ground or letting someone else be the leader. Things like that.”
Yang’s first instinct was to make a joke, something along the lines of well, what’s the verdict? Are you running us into the ground? But after a moment’s thought, she decided Blake wouldn’t really like it. With everything that’d happened between her and Weiss not exactly ancient history yet, it felt best to steer clear of jokes about her qualification to be leader, no matter how lighthearted.
Her backup plan was to ask if Blake wanted to get something to eat, but before she could do that, she glanced at Ruby and noticed something… off.
Ruby had stopped eating, and her usual enthusiasm had faded from her face, replaced by something blanker. She wasn’t looking at anything in particular, just staring into space, and…
Penny, literally much more attuned to the status of people around her, turned and put a gentle hand on Ruby’s elbow. “Ruby? Are you alright?”
“Mmm.” Ruby nodded slowly in a way that didn’t reassure Yang.
“Are you sure? Because my vital sensors are telling me otherwise.”
“Uh-huh. ‘m fine,” Ruby mumbled, even as her head sank down towards the table.
“Ruby?” Now Penny was inspecting her closely, tilting her head in a way Yang had learned to recognize as Penny activating secondary sensors for more detailed information.
“Just a headache. Get them… sometimes. Don’t know why.” Ruby’s head lolled worryingly in her arms now, her eyelids fluttering. “Need sleep…”
“Sleep?” Penny frowned, exchanging concerned looks with the rest of her team. “Ruby, your body temperature is rising. I think this requires medical attention.”
“No!” Suddenly, Ruby’s voice came out as a yelp, and she shied away from Penny’s touch, shaking her head like a dog trying to dry itself off. “No! Need to stay secret…”
Yang’s heart broke for Ruby all over again. “Kid,” she said carefully. “You can’t just… We’ve got to do something.”
“Sleep,” Ruby muttered decisively. “Gonna be fine, promise. ‘ll go to the ‘ship if it’s really bad. Used to it.”
“Well… we’re taking you back to our dorm, then,” Blake said, her voice paradoxically decisive and helpless at the same time. “Weiss, could you call a taxi?”
Weiss pulled out her scroll. “On it.”
All Yang could do was move to Ruby’s side and put a comforting hand on her shoulder, an action which felt thoroughly useless. Wasn’t Ruby supposed to have some sort of thing that prevented her from feeling pain? So either the mystery headaches got around that somehow, or… they were so painful that anyone besides Ruby would’ve been in a coma right now. She wasn’t sure which option was more unnerving.
Weiss closed her scroll. “The taxi should be here in a minute.”
“Can you move, Ruby?” When Ruby nodded, Penny put a hand on her other shoulder, and slowly Ruby rose to her feet, assisted by Penny and Yang. She let out a faint whine as they began navigating towards the street corner, but otherwise stayed quiet, her eyes closed.
Used to it, Ruby had said.
Yang felt so thoroughly powerless that it hurt. The list of things that Ruby was used to seemed to be endless at this point.
After arriving back at the dorm, Ruby collapsed onto the nearest bunk—which was Penny’s. Penny was not sure what to do after that (neither was the rest of her team), but then she realized she was still carrying the two giant plushies from the arcade (along with a bag of other, smaller prizes), and she knew that plushies were wonderful for increasing comfort, so…
She held them both out to Ruby. “I don’t think these will improve your physical state, but I do believe they could improve your emotional state.”
Ruby raised her head slowly, registered the plushies, and then made little grabbing motions with her hands. But when Penny went to place them on the bed, Ruby latched onto Penny’s elbow.
“Sit with me?” she murmured. “You’re good emotions too…”
Penny didn’t know why that question sent her body into enhanced alertness mode, but it did, and she made the decision immediately, sitting down slowly on her mattress, doing her best not to disturb Ruby while she kept registering an incredibly unnecessary amount of detail about the environment and about Ruby’s position next to her. It somehow felt extremely necessary to remember. Her consciousness worked in strange ways within her body sometimes.
Ruby made a little whining noise and curled herself around the plushies before pressing her head into Penny’s side. She didn’t move from that position, her eyes closing again. It seemed that Penny would be here for the time being, and she was more than fine with that. But as for her teammates…
She looked up at Yang and Blake and Weiss. They were on the other side of the room, alternating between concerned looks aimed at Ruby, incomprehensible looks aimed at Penny, and somehow even more incomprehensible looks aimed at each other. She wasn’t sure how that was a mathematical possibility, but she had discovered that some things really were more incomprehensible than some other things. Anyways. Her teammates.
Her scroll vibrated—a text from Blake.
It seems like it might be best for us to leave you two alone?
Penny thought about it for a moment, and then nodded. Too many people seemed like the sort of thing that would make a headache worse.
Her teammates departed silently, and the room was quiet—one girl trying to be quiet, and one girl not really capable of noise at the moment. Penny sat with her hands folded in her lap, monitoring Ruby’s vitals and thinking about how soft Ruby’s cheek felt pressed up against her. And how warm she was. And how her braid was sprawled across her lap like a big soft snake—wait, was that a good analogy? Now that she thought about it, maybe Ruby wouldn’t appreciate her hair being compared to a snake. But what else was long and colorful and pretty and bendy?
She had learned a great deal about the vagaries of language over the last two semesters, but some things were still hard.
What was not hard, however, was thinking about Ruby. So Penny continued to do that, following the rhythm of her slowly deepening breaths, listening as she whimpered in her sleep, wishing there was more she could do.
One hour, thirty-five minutes, and fifty-five seconds later, Ruby opened her eyes again.
“Ugh.” She yawned slowly, so wide Penny briefly worried she’d hurt her jaw, and then pulled herself into an upright position.
“Are you feeling better?” Penny said, noting with relief that Ruby’s body temperature was trending back toward normal.
“Yeah. Still a little achy, but I’ll be fine.” She looked around, blinking, and then her gaze settled on Penny. “Penny, have you been sitting with me the whole time?”
Penny nodded, the suddenly nervous edge to Ruby’s voice making her nervous in turn. Had she overstepped a boundary? “Was that alright?”
“Oh! Yeah! Totally! I just… Sorry. I didn’t mean to make you do it, I hope you’re not annoyed…”
“I am not annoyed in the slightest!” Penny said. “On the contrary, I greatly enjoyed the closeness!” She leaned closer, putting a hand on Ruby’s shoulder. “And I would gladly do it again, if you so desire.”
“O-okay,” Ruby said, staring down at Penny’s hand as if she couldn’t believe it was there. “Sorry… I ruined a really nice day with my stupid… stuff.”
“Don’t worry. There will be more nice days in the future!”
Ruby let out a small laugh. “I’d like that. Today was really good. Really, really, really, really good. The arcade…” Some of her old energy came into her voice as she turned to face Penny more fully, her eyes widening with familiar excitement. “It was so colorful, Penny! I, I don’t even know why I’m so excited about colors, but, colors! Lots of them! Like a painting, but all over everything!” Abruptly she pulled back in on herself a little bit, fidgeting with her hands. “And now I want more color in my life, but there really isn’t room anywhere in my life for that. It’s… it’s making me feel that dilemma again. The one where I have things I need to do and things I want to do, but I don’t know if I can do both things at once and I know I should be doing what I need to do but I really want to do what I want to do and it’s really tempting and I…” She slumped down, letting out a long, drawn-out sigh. “Yeah.”
“Hm.” Penny tapped her chin, and then an idea struck her (metaphorically). “Ruby, if there is no room for color in your life, then why don’t you make some room?”
Several days later
Blake wasn’t usually one to visit the machine shop by herself, but Gambol Shroud needed sharpening, and Yang was in the library, Weiss was in the fitness center, and Penny was… Actually, Blake didn’t know where Penny was. Although she could at least make an educated guess about who was with Penny.
So Blake tapped in the passcode for the machine shop and pushed open the doors, entering alone with nothing for companionship except her ever-faithful weapon holstered on her back. Only to be greeted with the sound of a familiar giggle from inside.
Penny was in the corner of the shop with Ruby, both of them bent over a worktable, their attention on something out of Blake’s line of sight. She could hear the hiss of an airbrush, but that was all. A few moments later, the sound of the airbrush stopped, and the two girls looked up.
“Hello, Blake!” Penny said cheerily. “Don’t worry, you’re not interrupting anything!”
Ruby seemed… a little less enthusiastic than Penny to see Blake, which was understandable. But she gave a small wave and a smile nonetheless. Blake waved to them both, and made her way to a different area of the workshop where the honing stations were located. Whatever Penny and Ruby had been doing before she came in, they went back to it immediately, chattering away with one another.
Sharpening was a simple job, and she was content to lose herself in the repetitive motion of passing her katana over the honing surface again and again, stopping only to test the blade against a block of scrap wood.
“Are you afraid of me?”
Blake, in all honesty, was a little embarrassed by how caught off-guard she was by Ruby’s sudden appearance beside her. Her Faunus hearing should’ve allowed her to avoid being taken by surprise in situations exactly like this, but no, because good gods, Ruby was inexplicably stealthy.
She jumped, just barely managed to stop herself from flinging her katana through the wall, and spun towards Ruby, trying not to hyperventilate. Some part of her brain noted that Penny had left at some point in the last few minutes, leaving Blake and Ruby alone in the machine shop. This was fine.
“What?” she said.
“Penny just went to get some color samples,” Ruby said. “She’ll be back soon! I promise she’s not trying to make us interact or anything, she actually has to get them to show me, and I just thought I’d ask, because, you know, I wanna be your friend and I guess friends have to ask these things to make sure we don’t accidentally become enemies or something?”
Blake blinked rapidly, still trying to catch up with Ruby’s rapid-fire… everything. “No, I mean, what was the question?”
“Oh.” Ruby scuffed at the ground with her foot for a few seconds. “Are you afraid of me? I don’t want people to be afraid of me. I’m supposed to save the world. I’m supposed to help people. I… I guess I want people to feel safe around me. Like I’ll protect them. And I’m pretty sure you don’t, because you’re trying to change me even though I don’t need to be changed.”
Blake stared, entirely unable to think of where she could steer this conversation. How was she supposed to reply when the honest answer to Ruby’s question felt so dangerous?
“You want to help people, and I want to help people, and if we both want it, what’s scary?” Ruby said.
Gods. To hear Ruby say I want to help people, it made Blake’s heart break a little. Not because she thought Ruby was lying, but because she knew Ruby believed what she was saying with her entire heart and soul. She probably wanted to make a difference as much as Blake did. Just… it was what kind of difference it might be, which scared Blake.
It would be so much easier to answer Ruby if Blake could just genuinely, honestly believe in her ability to become a better person. But… after Adam, how could she have any faith in that for anyone?
Ruby was still waiting for an answer.
Maybe she could just… try to think like Penny, just this once, and be optimistic. Right. She could do this. This was fine. Optimism. That was a thing her mind could conjure, right? What would Penny do in this situation?
She’d answer honestly.
Damn it.
Blake took a deep breath, hoping she wasn’t about to break the promise she’d just made to Penny several days ago. “How do you want to help people?”
Now it was Ruby’s turn to blink in confusion. “I… isn’t it, like, really obvious?!”
“Pretend it isn’t.”
“…Okay. Wipe out the Grimm.”
“Mhm.” Blake pushed aside the thought that this was an incredibly heavy burden to put on one person no matter how superpowered she was. And then she very deliberately pushed aside a thought coming from some unknown corner of her mind which whispered that she also had a tendency to put too much on her shoulders. “I want to help the people who most need the help. The disadvantaged, the subjugated, the oppressed. Sometimes that’ll mean fighting Grimm, but more often it’ll mean fighting for those people. Fighting against other people who are keeping them down, wronging them.”
Ruby nodded. “I get that! Totally cool of you.”
But did she? “We have different ways of wanting to help people. And… I’m worried our ways will come into conflict.”
Ruby was silent, and that worried Blake. The forgotten sharpening wheel spun behind them with a dull, monotonous whir.
“How?” she said. And that was all she said, one question that sounded entirely genuine in its unsureness.
Blake reminded herself that she had to be careful. She’d already pushed Ruby too far twice. But this time, Ruby was the one asking questions. She wasn’t being forced into anything.
“Conflict brings Grimm,” Blake said, feeling out each word as it left her mouth. Ruby gave a nod in answer. “Especially when it’s an emotionally charged fight, when things like Faunus rights and freedoms are involved.” Another nod from Ruby. “So, for someone whose sole purpose in life is to deal with the Grimm…” She gestured at nothing. “Will it matter to you what a conflict is actually about, or will you prioritize stopping the fight at any cost?”
“Huh.” Ruby hopped up onto a footstool behind her and cocked her head, muttering to herself. “I guess… Well, huh, that kind of is Atlas’s whole doctrine, order must be preserved… that’s how we’ve gotten so good at keeping the Grimm away, but… Huh.”
The thoughtful tone in her voice was entirely new. Blake almost didn’t dare to take a breath.
Suddenly, Ruby straightened. “I’m powerful enough that too many Grimm’s never gonna be a problem for me! So whatever conflict you involve yourself in, Blake, don’t worry about me getting in your way! Because I’ll be off dealing with the Grimm directly. People conflict isn’t my job.”
Well… it wasn’t the most reassuring answer, but Blake hadn’t expected any massive shifts in perspective from this conversation. Honestly, it was a real relief just to hear Ruby willing to consider hypotheticals at all after everything else. So she’d take—
“But if I did get caught in a conflict with you somehow? I know you’d be on the right side, Blake.”
Blake’s train of thought screeched to a full halt.
“You want to help people,” Ruby said. “I want to help people. Sure, maybe we’re different about it, but at the bottom of it all that’s what we want. I know you care about it just like me. I can hear it in your voice. That means we’re always gonna be on the same side. So, if I see you fighting anyone, Blake? I’m with you, no questions asked.”
A door swung open on the other side of the room—Penny, re-entering with an armful of brightly colored items. Ruby seemed to know it was Penny entering without even turning around, and slid off the stool.
“That’s a promise,” she said, giving Blake a salute that was far more solemn than all the other times she’d saluted. And then she jetted away to Penny in a burst of silver.
Blake stared after Ruby, too stunned to summon any sort of reply. She believed what Ruby had said.
Suddenly, all the anxieties she had about Ruby didn’t feel quite as overwhelming as they had before, and the present image of her rose just a little sharper in her mind—Ruby, the girl who just wanted to help people. More than anything. Still just a kid. Still figuring herself out. But trying. And, gods, the way she tried felt so familiar to Blake—for once, a good kind of familiarity.
She watched Ruby and Penny rifle through an entire rainbow of colors, trading opinions about shades and tints and hues and temperatures, and then turned back to her katana. Her work there was still unfinished.
It was strange, to think that emulating Penny’s viewpoint had turned out so well.
…Maybe Blake should try to take Penny’s view of things more often.
Actually, not should. Maybe she could try.
The next night
Ruby couldn’t conceal her enormous grin as she skipped through the halls of Beacon Academy towards her team’s room. Penny, the complete and utter genius that she was, had come up with a perfect idea. More color in Ruby’s life? There was one very easy, and very cool way to do it. One way that they’d already done together. And now Ruby was putting that skill to good use.
“Ah, Ruby, I was just about to—”
At the familiar voice behind her, Ruby snapped to attention and spun around, saluting. “Good evening, General!”
“At ease, Ruby—er—” The General suddenly seemed uncharacteristically distracted; his eyes kept flicking to something over Ruby’s shoulder. “Ruby, what in the gods’ name has happened to your weapon?”
“Oh!” Ruby sent him a huge grin, pulled Lunar Enforcer off back, twirled it around a few times, and sank its blade into the floor. “I painted her!”
Courtesy of several painstaking and exciting and giggly hours in the machine shop with Penny, Lunar Enforcer had a new color scheme. Almost the entire weapon—everything between the blades and the grips—had been painted blood red.
Red like the blood of her enemies when she cut them to shreds. Red like the eyes of the Grimm she hunted. But most of all, red like Ruby. It felt good.
“May I ask why?” Ironwood said, sounding thoroughly mystified.
Ruby shrugged. “I wanted more color in my life. This seemed like a good place to start!”
Ironwood continued to stare for a moment, and then he smiled and gave a single nod. “Very well. Just one thing, Ruby—”
“Yes?” She straightened up into her parade pose immediately at the prospect of an order.
“—Please don’t drive your blade into the floor like that again. The repairs for that come out of my pocket.”
“Will do, sir!”
“Dismissed. It’s getting late; you really should get some sleep.”
“Yes, sir!”
Ruby holstered Lunar Enforcer, saluted Ironwood, and then turned and skipped down the hall, unaware of Ironwood’s eyes following her with trepidation until she’d disappeared from view.
Notes:
I just want to note that the headaches are a Watts-caused thing, not an Ironwood-caused thing
Chapter 27: The Paintbrush Is Mightier Than The Sword
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
Several days later
Ruby felt like she was on top of the world. What better way to announce herself to this generation of Huntresses than by defeating The Invincible Girl in her first-ever public sparring match? Since Pyrrha had been more than happy to give up that title (she’d literally called several of her sponsors afterward to inform them that the title was no longer accurate), Ruby was intent on claiming it for herself. And she sure was doing it.
The Invincible Moonrise. She liked the sound of it.
Her legend had started with that fight, and she’d only grown it from there. She’d convinced Professor Goodwitch to start giving her extra sparring opportunities in class—partly because she had been absent from class for so long and needed to ‘catch up,’ and partly because Ruby so rarely took hits to her Aura that she could stretch it out over multiple fights without breaking a sweat. It helped that she was a genuinely new look for each of the students she fought, which usually didn’t happen this late into a semester. So there was an actual logistical reason to prioritize her matchups.
And she did not disappoint once in any of her matchups.
Pyrrha Nikos, by Aura depletion. 1-0.
Violetta Graves, by arena knockout. 2-0.
Brie Westmoreland, by Aura depletion. 3-0.
Jaune Arc by arena knockout, and then Jaune Arc by knockout immediately again because she felt bad about how fast she’d tossed him out, and then Jaune Arc by knockout again immediately afterward because she’d done it just as fast the second time and she wanted to give him a chance, and then finally she’d taken pity on him and held back a little bit in their fourth matchup in five minutes so he could actually try to learn something from fighting her, which was the entire point of a sparring match. She still won by Aura depletion, naturally. 4-0, 5-0, 6-0, 7-0.
Dante Foxglove, by Aura depletion, and that was when she started having multiple fights in a class with different opponents, with two victories against Persimmon Vanderbilt (arena knockout, arena knockout) next, followed by Yolanda Berry (Aura depletion). 8-0, 9-0, 10-0, 11-0.
Nora Valkyrie, by Aura depletion. She had a little bit of a nasty surprise in that one, though, when she discovered that Nora’s Semblance allowed her to soak up the immense amounts of static electricity Ruby generated when she used her Semblance to create a tornado, which had forced her to actually get creative and stop using her Semblance after Nora hit her harder than even Pyrrha had. A victory, but a hard-fought one. 12-0.
And that was where she stood today, having beat Nora a half-hour ago and just waiting for her name to be called again for her thirteenth match and her thirteenth win. In the meantime, she was more than happy to sit next to Penny and talk about fighting and also make little jokes that made Penny giggle and hearing Penny giggle made Ruby’s heart go pitter-patter, and Weiss would roll her eyes and mutter under her breath about paying attention, and sometimes Yang would laugh quietly at the jokes too, and Blake was probably the most focused out of any of them on what was going on in class but that was okay because it was her job! They were all just… hanging out. Doing ordinary and extraordinary teenage girl things at the same time.
This was maybe the happiest Ruby had ever been.
She’d figured out at some point that this was probably what being on a team was supposed to feel like. Just… good friends that would also fight to the last breath together with you. Ruby didn’t think that anyone in Team RSST qualified as that. Really, they’d been selected as her teammates based on their ability to be discreet and not ask questions. Which, again, she didn’t have a problem with! She was Moonrise, the most powerful girl in Atlas and maybe the world, and she was a secret that needed to be kept until she was ready. That was the priority.
But… sometimes Ruby found herself wondering. Couldn’t she be on a team that was good at keeping secrets and also good at being friends? That would be so much nicer. Team Battleship, for example! They were all really good at keeping secrets, and they were also all friends! Ruby was always excited to see them, and it was much easier to imagine her fighting side-by-side in battle with them.
Of course, an actual battlefield rapport with her team wasn’t really important, since Ruby’s whole thing was that she would be operating solo in battlefields too risky for most Huntresses, but… Ruby liked having a rapport with Team Battleship.
Every once in a while, Ruby would remember that eventually the semester would be over and she would be going back to Atlas. Away from Team BSYP and Team JNPR, back to just a team that wasn’t really a team, and people she didn’t really know. Back to her future as Moonrise. Away from Penny.
Honestly, she wasn’t even sure how much longer she would be a student. All of this was kind of a formality. Ruby was getting revealed to the world as Project Moonrise no matter what she did in the academy, and she was getting that Huntress’s license no matter what. She’d already learned everything they were learning in classes—except for things like what they were learning in Professor Carmel’s class. That was interesting and new and making Ruby think about things in ways she didn’t even know was possible to think. She wished it was possible to keep learning that stuff even when she became a full-time Huntress.
…Well, what if Ruby just stayed at Beacon, kept being friends with Team Battleship, kept learning cool things she didn’t know, and graduated in a few years as a normal Huntress?
…The General would most certainly never allow that.
Good soldiers follow orders.
And it would be selfish of her to do that, anyways—the whole point of training her so early, doing everything for her early, was that she could be unleashed on the world sooner, save more lives sooner. It would be really selfish of her to prioritize some friends and some classes when she could be saving lives. How could she live with herself when people died who didn’t have to die because she’d decided to have a little fun and delay being a hero?
Ruby tightened her grip on Lunar Enforcer. Maybe she could have fun once the world was saved.
Never mind all those gloomy thoughts, though, the next match was being decided!
Glynda looked up from the randomizer on her scroll, her eyes not landing on anyone in particular, and intoned, “The next match is Penny Pallas and Ruby Karyatis.”
Oooh. Oooooooooh. Penny jumped out of her seat immediately. This promised to be even more interesting than her match against Pyrrha! (Well, the concept of a match against Pyrrha, since she’d never actually had the chance to fight her) With one hand, she picked up Luminous Electra, and with the other hand, she reached for her fake jetpack.
“You’re going to use your wings?” Blake said.
Penny nodded as she pulled on the straps for the pack and tightened them. “I have calculated that the downside of having more surface area vulnerable to hits is worth the tactical opportunities that my flight will give me in this fight.”
Blake nodded. “Good luck.”
“You’ll need it,” Weiss said.
“Show her who’s the strongest of Team Biceps!” Yang said, flashing a thumbs-up.
Weiss hit Yang over the head with her notebook.
With that, Penny and Ruby descended to the sparring floor together, giving each other excited grins. Ruby kept twirling Lunar Enforcer in one hand, sizing up Penny. Her signature feral-about-to-kill-you fighting smile was entirely replaced by her usual enthusiastic-hanging-out-with-Penny smile.
Penny’s prediction algorithms spun up with speed that was impressive even in the context of her capabilities, and she scrolled through the myriad options which flashed through her consciousness. Ruby’s Semblance was the key factor, and why Penny was choosing to use her wings. She was not sure if she would be able to use her wings to evade the tornadoes generated by Ruby’s Semblance, but she was excited to find out!
The class, meanwhile, was paying a great deal of attention. A little harmless eavesdropping told Penny that bets with actual lien were being placed on the fight right now. Penny’s sole loss remained her forfeit to Pyrrha. She still did not care as much about her sparring record as she did about learning the intricacies of combat—Professor Goodwitch had repeatedly praised that attitude—and she felt she was about to learn a great deal.
“Hi, Penny!” Ruby said, waving to her from the opposite side of the sparring floor.
Even though they had been sitting next to each other and talking for most of the class before this, Penny waved back. “Salutations, Ruby!” She had forgotten to re-tune the range of her audio sensors, so she picked up one student in the class letting out a quiet awwwww.
“Students, are you ready?” Professor Goodwitch said, raising the shields around the battleground with a tap of her scroll.
“Sure am!” Ruby said.
“Affirmative!” Penny said.
“Three,” Goodwitch said, glancing from Ruby to Penny.
Penny had noticed a strange habit involving Ruby that Professor Goodwitch had. Every so often, she would look at Ruby—whether to ask her a question, or to respond to something she’d said, or just as a passing glance—and her heart rate would briefly spike. And sometimes, alongside that, a minor—likely imperceptible to anyone besides Penny—tensioning of muscles throughout her entire body would occur. It was mystifying.
“Two.”
Penny chose to keep Luminous Electra in its shorter form—range factor was irrelevant when Ruby had a Semblance that let her get as close as she wanted without being harmed.
“One.”
Ruby split Lunar Enforcer in two, lowered her goggles, and dropped into that familiar double reverse-grip stance. Now her feral battle smile was making an appearance.
“Begin.”
Ruby exploded into a cloud of silver dust, and Penny activated her flight mode. Before Ruby could charge her, she was off, rocketing through the air at full power. Ruby’s Semblance form was undetectable by her radar and most other sensors, so Penny was mostly relying on photovisual input to keep track of the silver cloud. Which meant committing a great deal of processing resources to her high-speed vision, limiting her prediction algorithms’ adaptability. She would have to hope her plan worked.
Even at full thrust to her rockets, the jet of silver pulled level with Penny in a few moments. But as soon as Ruby tried to spin up into a tornado, she fell behind, and Penny flew safely out of range as Ruby dropped out of her Semblance, blinking at Penny. However, a moment later, she was gone, and once again Penny was surrounded by the silver dust which flashed and glimmered like the shattered remnants of the moon in the night sky (When had Penny become better at metaphors and similes? It was hard to say), and Penny accelerated once again.
What followed was a game of keep-away that must’ve looked absurd to onlookers, as Ruby constantly chased down Penny, only for Penny to fly free of the choking grip of her Semblance-generated storms every single time. It was a race at both girls’ limits, silver and green chasing each other around the sparring stage—Ruby could easily outpace Penny in a flat race, but spinning up a storm slowed her down enough that Penny could outrun the storms at full thrust to her rockets.
There was one very important detail in all this: Ruby was slowly but surely draining her Aura through constant Semblance use, and Penny was not.
However, a few moments later, Ruby clearly realized that, because she dropped out of her Semblance and did not re-enter it. There was a distinct murmur in the classroom now. No one had ever held a lead over Ruby this far into a match.
Penny stayed in the air. She had the aerial advantage now, and she intended to rain down destruction on Ruby from above with Luminous Electra’s dual Dust-firing chambers! Ruby, for her part, was also accepting that this was a long-range duel for the time being, reconnecting the ends of Lunar Enforcer and transforming it back into sniper mode—
And then Ruby was barraging Penny with extremely accurate fire, taking full advantage of the extra surface area provided by her wings, shots exploding off the metal and erupting in bursts of fire which were rapidly cutting into her Aura levels. Penny took evasive action, firing back with a double-barrelled Fire Dust volley, but she couldn’t keep up with the rate of fire from Ruby, and she also could not evade Ruby’s shots with any real effectiveness. Ruby was just too accurate, tracking her path perfectly. And there was only so much Penny could do to turn in midair. Nimbleness was not one of the prominent properties of her wings.
Ranged combat was a no, then. And Penny had still not found a way to use her Semblance in the small time windows that a fight allowed.
Penny flew directly towards Ruby, blocking shots with the flat of Luminous’s blade, landed several meters away, and managed to get in a hit on Ruby by transforming Luminous into zweihander form mid-swing, causing Ruby to misjudge the distance needed to dodge.
Penny made a judgment call and pulled away processing resources from her high-speed tracking to redirect to her prediction algorithms—she needed a new plan.
Ruby semblanced away, and Penny, unable to track the path of silver dust as effectively without high-speed tracking, could not catch up in time as Ruby fired off a volley from one side, landing shots on her extremities where Penny could not block as effectively. She snuck a glance at their Aura meters—Ruby was pulling ahead now.
Her prediction algorithms pinged, and a new round of possibilities scrolled through Penny’s mind. Immediately, she returned the processing power to her high-speed tracking and went on the offensive, firing her thrusters and flying towards Ruby—she had just enough cycles to determine where Ruby’s trail of silver led, fly in that direction, adjust her course accordingly as the silver slowed (this entire exchange was taking place entirely within fractions of a second), and she swung Luminous Electra into Ruby’s stomach just as she emerged from her Semblance. That hit, and the follow-up to a reeling Ruby before she could semblance away, was enough to draw them even again.
This fight was fast becoming an incredibly strenuous exercise in allocating processing power—Penny was draining battery faster than she ever had in her life, and she found herself thankful that she’d charged the night before.
Ruby paused at the opposite boundary, breathing heavily, and her goggles met Penny’s eyes for a moment. She sent Penny a fun grin, nodded once, transformed Lunar Enforcer into single-staff mode, and burst into motion again.
The noise from the rest of the class had grown significantly louder at the moment that Penny pulled even on Aura with Ruby, and now that volume was sustaining itself as Ruby and Penny closed to melee.
And here the fight entered its most concerted phase—Ruby, entirely defining the tempo of the fight by endlessly jumping in and out of her Semblance around Penny, and yet Penny’s concerted pursuit of Ruby’s position never giving her a moment’s reprieve. Their blades clashed over and over again, metal meeting metal far more than it met Aura. There wasn’t a moment when either of them wasn’t in motion, and yet, neither of them strayed more than a meter or two away from the other, both of them sensing that a retreat would give the other an opening which could be the difference in the match.
It was almost a dance, the way they moved around one another, and it was almost musical, the way that the swish and shwm of Ruby’s Semblance mixed with the whistle and whir of Luminous Electra as it sped through the air, constantly transforming.
Whether due to reduced chronometer resources or something that came from the poetic part of her consciousness, Penny had the strangest sensation of feeling as if this duel could go on forever, the two of them moving in concert until the sun went supernova and the world stopped spinning.
Fighting was exciting, yes, but Penny felt like an entirely new emotion above and beyond thrilling was being invented at this moment between the numerous glimpses they caught of each other’s faces between their crossed blades. The radiant silver glimmer given off by the dust from Ruby’s Semblance was never brighter than when it was contrasted against the freshly-painted red coat on Lunar Enforcer. And in turn, Penny turned up the luminosity of her eyes to match—just a few lumens, not enough for any observers to notice, but hopefully enough for Ruby to notice. In this fight, they were both shining, literally and figuratively!
But Penny could not be lost in the aesthetic splendor of this moment for much longer. She had a strength advantage, but Ruby was leveraging her hits better, pushing Penny into more off-balance positions—positions which took longer to recover from because processing power that would’ve gone to balance calculations was instead devoted to high-speed tracking. And that was giving Ruby openings, openings she was taking advantage of with swipes and stabs that kept on lowering Penny’s Aura. Still, Penny wasn’t far behind, close enough that one good hit could put their Auras dead level again.
Either way, both of them were approaching the Aura danger zone, and Penny decided it was time to try leveraging her strength.
If she tried to physically grab Ruby, she would semblance away immediately. But if Penny grabbed her weapon…
On the next exchange, she did exactly that. One hand shot out, right into Ruby’s guard, and closed around the middle of Lunar Enforcer, holding it at maximum grip strength. Ruby’s eyes went very wide, and she wasn’t semblancing away, and then Penny was lunging forward and slamming her backwards into the floor, making Ruby’s Aura flash wildly, and Ruby still wasn’t semblancing away, staring up at Penny as she scrabbled at her weapon, and then Penny was bringing Luminous Electra up for the match-ending strike, and then Ruby disappeared in a burst of silver, leaving her weapon behind in Penny’s hands.
And Penny had overcommitted to holding Ruby down, because now with Ruby gone, she was toppling toward the floor, too far forward already to attempt a recovery—
And that was when Penny noticed Ruby had left behind something else besides her weapon. Something that Penny was falling directly onto. One of Ruby’s ammunition bandoliers.
Before she hit the ground, Penny had just enough time to visually confirm that at least two of the rounds in the bandolier had been broken open, meaning Penny was about to land facefirst in a pile of leaking, volatile Dust.
Drat.
BOOM.
The ending buzzer blared as Penny flew head-over-heels, wing-over-sword through the air. Her sensors, thrown into complete disarray by the explosion, currently could not determine so much as which continent she was on. She resigned herself to having a hard landing somewhere in the classroom.
So she was quite surprised when she found herself landing in someone’s arms with a lurch. After a few more moments, she had enough photoreceptors in order to realize the person who’d caught her was Ruby.
“Hi!” Ruby said. Her face was close to Penny’s.
“Cumulonimbus,” Penny said.
“What?” Ruby said.
Penny rebooted her language processors, and this time, the word coming out of her mouth was logical. “Salutations!”
With most of her sensors back online, Penny noticed three things. One, the class was cheering for them. Very loudly. Two, Goodwitch was staring at the two of them and not even trying to hide her astonishment. A rare occurrence for the professor. Three, one student in the back row was urging them at moderate volume to kiss.
Well, Penny was glad that Ruby could not hear that, because it would have been truly embarrassing if Ruby knew what was causing the sudden temperature spike in her body. She was most definitely aware of the popular joke that sparring matches were a metaphor for… romantic or sexual tension… but she absolutely did not believe or endorse that viewpoint! She did not even endorse it as a joke! She did not want to make Ruby—or anyone she fought—uncomfortable!
Thankfully, Goodwitch quieted the audience at that moment by stepping forward.
“The match is over,” she intoned. “Ruby Karyatis is the victor. And I must congratulate you two on that fight—I think I would need to go back more than twenty years to name a better match that I’ve witnessed.”
“Did you hear that?” Ruby squealed as she set Penny upright. “We’re historic! That was the best fight I’ve ever had in my life! Dear gods, Penny, no one’s ever kept up with me like you did! Not even Harriet!”
Penny giggled as she brushed ash and silver dust off herself, swept up by Ruby’s enthusiasm as easily as her opponents were swept up by her Semblance storms.
“Thank you!” she said. “I think that is the most fun I’ve ever had in any kind of battle, too!”
“Good!” Ruby said as Penny handed Lunar Enforcer back to her. “I want a rematch so bad now. I think you could actually beat me someday.”
They were making their way back up to their seats now. Penny beamed at Ruby as they passed between the awed stares of their classmates. “I eagerly await it.”
The next day
Alone in his office, sitting in his chair, Ozpin allowed himself to fully ponder a question that had not left his mind in weeks.
Who would be the next Fall Maiden?
The power which sat beneath his school weighed on him like nothing else. He knew that the power could disappear from his control at any moment, knew that the only thing keeping it from her hands was an unconscious shell of a body that could not live forever. But, however precarious the situation, he could not rush the decision. No matter how much he wanted to.
Ozpin turned his head idly, more out of a desire to look at something else besides the surface of his desk, and saw something entirely unexpected.
It took him a moment to comprehend what he was seeing through the window, but when he did, he rose to his feet and approached the wall, straining his eyes to get a closer look.
In the rooftop garden that he hadn’t entered in years, the one that he could hardly even bear to look at anymore, the one which was visible only from the tallest towers of the academy, were two figures, standing amongst the overgrown flora and talking. Even from this distance, he could instantly recognize the flaming orange hair of one figure. And the other… Given the Atlesian cadet uniform, he could make an educated guess about who Penny was with.
“Her Semblance manifests silver dust whenever she uses it,” Glynda had said.
The two girls, talking animatedly and setting up something that he couldn’t quite make out from this distance, didn’t seem as if they would be leaving the garden anytime sooner, either. Ozpin turned, retrieved Long Memory and his mug from his desk, and stepped into the elevator. Now seemed like as good a time as any to meet the enigma that was Ruby Karyatis.
When Ozpin emerged into the garden, blinking away the sudden morning sunlight which shone almost directly into his eyes, a rush of sorrow hit him. He’d intended for this garden to be a memorial when it was built, but almost immediately he’d regretted it. But perhaps what he’d regretted even more was neglecting this place, leaving it to deteriorate instead of erasing it completely. At the same time, though, he knew he couldn’t have brought himself to tear it down. He still couldn’t.
“Good morning, Headmaster!” Penny’s voice brought him back to the present moment as she waved to him. “I was wondering if you ever visited this place!”
Now Ozpin could see what the girls had been setting up: two easels, one for each girl, and an assortment of paints and paintbrushes.
Ozpin gave her a warm smile and sat down on a moss-coated bench opposite the two girls. “I didn’t think anyone else in the school knew about this garden.”
Penny nodded as she carefully balanced a tray of paint jars on her lap. “This is a lovely place! I don’t understand how it could ever be forgotten.”
Penny couldn’t possibly have known that statement would send a pang of acute sadness through Ozpin’s chest. He turned his gaze to the ground directly underfoot, and scraped at the moss there with the point of Long Memory until a small patch of bare stone had been exposed. Engraved in the stone, appearing exactly as he remembered it from the day he’d laid the stone here during the academy’s construction, was an ornate cursive letter S.
Ozpin had once built this garden for the memory of Salem, of his love. But then he had resolved to leave this place behind, rather than wallow in past misery—and now he wanted nothing more than for this place to become something happier, a peaceful shrine to someone else’s living relationship, rather than a crumbling memorial for something long gone. Perhaps that would soothe some of the eternal ache.
But for now, perseverating would only intensify the sorrow, and so he forced it down and moved his mind toward pondering the questions that surrounded Ruby and Penny. Two souls that were perhaps far more alike than either of them realized.
He spoke again. “Making a foray into artistic pursuits, I see?”
“Yes!” Penny straightened her easel, and then tilted her head, staring at it. “It is my first attempt at painting in my life!”
At that moment, the garden’s other occupant chimed in. “And I haven’t done painting in like, five years, so it’s basically my first time too!” Somehow, she already had a splotch of green paint on her chin despite there not being any paint on her canvas.
Ozpin took great care not to let any extra emotion into his voice as he turned his full attention to Ruby. “And you would be one of the visiting Atlesian students?”
Ruby nodded energetically, and saluted. “Ruby Karyatis, first-year cadet of the Atlas Military Academy at your service!”
It was only through millennia of learned self-control that Ozpin could avoid staring, because this girl truly did look like Summer Rose. The resemblance had been apparent even when looking at the blurry profile picture in the student database, but now, sitting across from Ruby and seeing her face in person for the first time… it was disquieting.
“Pleasure to meet you, Miss Karyatis,” he said, nodding in greeting. It was as if he’d been thrust back in time several decades, to the day when he’d stood on the stage in the auditorium and anointed Summer as the leader of Team STRQ. “Has Beacon been to your liking?” The lightness of his tone was entirely at odds with his internal turmoil.
“Definitely!” Ruby lit up, and immediately launched into an exhaustive list of all the things she’d done recently, most of which seemed to involve Penny in some way.
Even from this distance, Ozpin could tell her eyes were brown. That, of course, meant nothing when colored contact lenses were a thing which existed—and a thing which he had tried to get Summer to wear on numerous occasions, if only to make it less obvious at first glance that she was a silver-eyed warrior. She had always refused, saying that they never felt right when she tried them on.
What was almost as arresting as the resemblance to Summer was the protective goggles perched on Ruby’s head. The presence of those made the conclusion almost inescapable. According to Glynda, she took them everywhere with her, and he could think of one very good reason why someone would do that.
But even if Ruby’s eyes were silver under a false brown, that didn’t answer the question of how. Where had this girl come from? What was her connection to Summer? Who had taught her that her eyes needed to be protected? What did James know about this girl?
The child that Summer and Taiyang had lost more than a decade ago weighed heavily on his mind, but—it couldn’t be. It simply could not be. She hated the silver-eyed warriors more than anything else in existence, save only Ozpin himself. And Ozpin was very much unkillable, whereas the silver-eyed warriors were not. None survived her wrath.
It was why Ozpin had stopped having children. As long as she walked the planet, his silver-eyed descendants would never know peace. He was the cause of enough suffering in this world as things stood.
This wasn’t Summer’s lost child. There could be no doubt about that. But where did Ruby Karyatis come from, then?
Ruby and Penny burst into simultaneous laughter, and Ozpin realized he’d missed part of a conversation. He straightened, trying to put together some understanding of what they were laughing at, but drew a complete blank.
“Pardon my ignorance,” he said finally. “But I seem to have lost track of what was being said.”
Ruby took a few moments to catch her breath, and then said, “I was just saying, I could probably do as good of a job with my eyes closed!”
“And I was saying that some artists actually do that,” Penny added. “So it would be quite artistically legitimate if Ruby wanted to do it!” And then her voice became quieter, more contemplative as she held out her hand to catch a leaf floating down from above. “Of course, the question of what might be considered artistically legitimate is a fascinating one that has inspired a great deal of scholarship. The answer seems to be… if you want it to be art, it can be called art. Not everyone may agree with it, but it is an inherent property of art to mean different things to different people.”
Ozpin let a small smile slip across his face. “You yourself sound like an art scholar, Penny.”
“I spent several hours on the CCTnet yesterday reading scholarly essays on art! After all, I want to be prepared for what promises to be a unique interaction between the spontaneity of art and the logic of my processors!”
“Er—” Ozpin indicated Ruby with a subtle tilt of his head, trying to wordlessly ask Penny if this was something she should be saying—
It was then that he noticed Ruby looking at him with equal trepidation and saying, “Um, Penny—”
“It’s fine, Ruby; the Headmaster knows! He was the one who gave me the room in the tower to use as my personal workshop, after all.”
“Oh,” Ruby said, blinking.
Ozpin was equally surprised. Well, that was an interesting turn of events.
The girls seemed content to immerse themselves in painting without further conversation, which gave him an opportunity to sink back into his musings.
Another possibility about Ruby was occurring to him, something that felt far more disturbing than anything else he’d considered thus far. Disturbing because in addition to who and how, it necessitated questions of when, and where, and perhaps more pressingly of all, why.
Was Ruby a clone of Summer Rose?
It was almost comically farfetched, and yet, it made more sense than anything else he’d considered. There was, after all, a kingdom thoroughly capable of pushing the frontiers of science far beyond what he’d ever thought might be possible. A kingdom that had already shown a propensity for making experiments out of souls. A kingdom that had already weaponized one girl’s soul in the interests of war. A kingdom which Ruby hailed from.
What did James know about her, exactly?
Too many troubling questions. Not enough avenues for answers at the moment.
Ozpin rose to his feet and nodded to the girls. “I should return to my duties. I wish you two luck with the painting.”
Penny waved goodbye, while Ruby gave another salute. “It was nice to meet you, Headmaster!”
Ozpin descended the steps back into his academy without another word, feeling the weight of a trillion duties pressing down on him. He could only gather information for so long. Sooner or later, Qrow and Taiyang would have to at least be notified that there was a student on campus with a startling resemblance to their deceased teammate. He was not looking forward to that day, for their sake and for Ruby’s.
“I don’t understand art.”
Penny glanced over to Ruby, who was staring at her canvas and pouting.
“It’s feeling stupid again.” She poked limply at her easel, leaving a red smear in the middle of a jumble of green and gray and blue. “I get what you said about appreciating beauty and everything, but how do I appreciate something when I can’t make my painting look like it? Fria always made it look so easy…”
Penny looked at her own in-progress artwork. “I think I have the inverse problem.”
“Huh?”
“Depending on the size of the memory file, I can reconstruct an image in my head with high-definition quality akin to an incredibly advanced camera. If I wanted to, I could use that memory along with precise color-matching and coordinated brush strokes to create a photorealistic reproduction of whatever I’m painting. What would be the point of that, then?”
Ruby nodded animatedly. “I wish I could do that! Then I could just look at the picture in my head and not bother with this.”
“But art is almost always intended as an act of expression.”
“Oh, right.” Ruby’s posture sagged a little bit. “I guess I’m not expressing anything if I’m just staring at a picture in my head.”
“While researching art last night, I found an idea that seems very helpful to what we are both struggling with right now.” Penny reached into her memory, retrieved the right file, and repeated the sentiment. “Many works of art aren’t about capturing what you see. They’re about capturing what you feel.”
“What you feel…” Ruby mouthed the words to herself, and then leaned forward, almost upsetting her tray of paint. “Wait! We don’t know what emotions look like!”
“Exactly!” Penny said. “So there is no objective way to represent emotions visually! Which means you can do whatever you want, and that’s art!”
“Wait.” Ruby pointed a paintbrush at her easel as if she was leveling a sword at it. “You’re saying that if I decide a bunch of splotches is how anger feels like, I can paint a bunch of splotches, and that’s art?!”
“Some people would even argue that the splotches do not need to represent anything, but yes!”
“Oh my gods.” An expression of pure glee crept over Ruby’s face. “This changes everything!” She raised her brush like she was about to stab the canvas, and then paused. “Um. I still don’t know what to paint.”
Penny giggled, and hoped that Ruby did not think the noise was unkind. The fresh smile that broke over Ruby’s face reassured her. “What is something that makes you feel a lot of something? It doesn’t even have to be something here!”
“Hmmm.” Ruby scrunched up her face in that adorable way she did when she was thinking hard about something. She rotated her head around several times before her gaze settled on Penny again. “Okay, I think I’ve figured it out.”
“Sensational!”
Ruby swapped out her canvas for a fresh one from their shared pile of art supplies, and Penny was about to turn back to her canvas when Ruby said, “And what are you painting?”
For some reason, Penny suddenly felt reluctant to tell Ruby, but she pressed on anyway. “I wanted to do something which made use of my capability for accuracy and detail which is unparalleled among humans. And also something which made use of my capability for imagination, which is unparalleled among computers. I intend for the result to be a piece of art made by the computer and the consciousness working together in harmony. A… celebration of my unique nature, in a way.” Even though art could be anything, she hoped that did not sound too strange or self-aggrandizing.
Several seconds passed. Penny wondered if Ruby realized that her mouth was hanging open.
Finally, she seemed to realize, and closed it with a snap.
“You keep saying things that are like, the coolest things anyone’s ever said in the history of the universe. I wish I could be more like you…” Her gaze, while still aimed at Penny, became noticeably faraway. After a few seconds, though, she shook herself out of it. “So what are you painting?”
“Would you be disappointed if I said I wanted it to be a surprise?”
“Nope! Mine’s a surprise, too!”
There was no need for any more discussion after that as Penny and Ruby focused on their respective paintings, the garden mostly silent aside from the rustle of the branches in the breeze and the soft notes of Ruby humming to herself.
Painting was a truly fascinating endeavor. There was such a thrill to watching an image take shape from the movements of her hands and the intentions running through her mind. And there were so many ways that something could be represented! And the pure subjectivity of it made Penny’s processors spin and turn in a delightful way, where any choice she made might be a good one. One person’s ‘good’ art might be another person’s ‘bad’ art, and neither would be right. Her logic core couldn’t do much with that, but she wasn’t trying to make it do much right now. In art, there was less need for logic. Just the wonderful randomness of consciousness.
Time passed. Penny did not try to sneak a glance at Ruby’s work, but she did notice that Ruby’s brushstrokes were quite energetic, and she barely ever slowed in her work. Her eyes were narrowed in focus, and her tongue was poking slightly out of her mouth. Which… which…
Why did that make Penny want to squeeze Ruby? How much could a human be safely squeezed? Did humans like being squeezed? Was it like hugging? Would Ruby like being squeezed? Why was Penny wondering all of these things?
“Finished!” Ruby announced, dropping her paintbrush with a flourish and sitting back. “Show me yours first?” she added with a pleading look.
Very glad for something to pull her away from that string of thought, Penny turned her easel towards Ruby.
“Whoa…” Ruby’s eyes went very wide.
Penny tried to parse the emotions in that look. Would this artwork inspire the same feelings in Ruby that she was trying to express?
Her artwork was a study of the moss growing underfoot, utilizing her magnified vision. Except, this was not moss at its normal size. She had drawn it much bigger, towering over the viewer’s perspective as if it were trees in a forest.
“I wanted to convey the idea that fascination and wonder can be found in even the smallest and most unassuming things!”
“I see it! It’s so cool, you put so much detail into something I’ve never thought about much—” Suddenly, Ruby leaned closer. “—Wait, is that us?”
Penny nodded happily. “I needed something for scale, of course! If we weren’t there, it would just look like a very close-up painting of some normal moss.” She had painted the two of them standing at the base of one of the giant mosses, side-by-side and gazing up at the towering plants. It felt like a scene from a storybook.
And only then did it occur to Penny that Ruby might not like being painted. “Is that alright?” she said, nervousness creeping into her.
“Oh my gosh, totally! Heh, it makes me feel better about what I painted.” With that, Ruby turned her easel towards Penny.
It was an explosion of orange in almost innumerable shades, like a star going supernova, streaks of color radiating in every direction. Analyzing the feelings it sparked, Penny felt words like passion and energy and brilliance, and maybe… joy.
“It is sensational!” she said to Ruby. “It looks like how sunlight on my face feels.”
“Oh, that’s good! Because…” Ruby’s voice was full of pride and something else thick and deep and quiet that Penny couldn’t quite identify. “…I painted how you feel.”
“Ruby…” Penny’s cores jolted so powerfully that for a moment, she genuinely feared she might short-circuit.
“At least, how you feel to me.”
Penny decided the best way to reply was by activating maximum hugs mode, because a hug felt like far and away the best way to sufficiently convey how Ruby’s painting made her feel.
Notes:
AI art on Earth: a dystopian late-stage capitalist techbro nightmare
AI art on Remnant: Penny with an easel and a paintbrush having a fun afternoon :)
If only AI art could be as cool and ethical and robotgirl-oriented here as it is on Remnant!
Chapter 28: Old Connections Made New
Notes:
After the previous chapter, in which Ozpin considered the possibility of Ruby being a clone, I have to recommend one of my favorite Nuts and Dolts fics ever: 'Miracles Of Modern Engineering' by thesecretsix. It hasn't been updated in nearly eight years, but what there is of it, I absolutely adore. You'll notice some thematic similarities between the two stories, and there's a reason for that. I genuinely consider Miracles Of Modern Engineering to be one of the inspirations which got me thinking about War Machines all the way back in 2017! Hope you enjoy that, and hope you enjoy this chapter!
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
“Good news, girls!”
Yang swung open the door, announcing herself with that sudden and dramatic declaration, and stepped into their room.
At the abrupt entrance, Blake jumped so high that she nearly fell off of her bunk, while Weiss reflexively snapped the pencil she’d been writing with. Penny and Ruby did not so much as blink—because at the moment, neither of them could afford to blink.
“Guess what just came in the mail! Straight from—” Yang broke off. “What are you two doing?”
Penny assumed that Yang had noticed her and Ruby, but she could not look back to answer because she was currently occupied with staring into Ruby’s eyes.
“They’re having a staring contest,” Weiss said. “Just ignore them.”
“No, no, this sounds interesting.” Yang edged closer, coming into Penny’s field of vision. She had a package under one arm. “Ruby, I don’t want to be rude or anything, but… you’re in a staring contest with a girl who doesn’t need to blink.”
“And yet, they’ve been doing this for fifteen minutes,” Weiss muttered.
“Sixteen minutes and thirty-six seconds, to be precise!” Penny spoke without moving the upper half of her face. “I actually do need to blink, Yang—well, sort of. I have an automatic routine that governs my blinking, in order to ensure I fit in with organic beings without wasting conscious processing power on a repetitive task. And if I choose to delay this routine, that takes conscious power, and the more I delay it, the greater load on my processors. I’ve been trying to calculate the theoretical limit before I would have to blink or else enter my sleep state, but it is hard to determine.” She paused, and then added, “I could just disable the routine entirely, instead of delaying it, but that would not be a very fun staring contest.”
Yang laughed—a very kind sound, Penny thought—and patted her on the shoulder. “Only you, Penny. Only you.”
On the words alone, Penny wasn’t sure what Yang meant, but she said it with such pride that it had to be something nice.
“And I think I can beat Penny because I don’t feel pain, so no matter how much my eyes might want to blink, it just doesn’t bother me!” Ruby said. “I have no limits!”
“So… this could go on for a while?”
Weiss sighed deeply. “Most assuredly.”
“Aw… Any chance I could get you two to call a timeout?” Yang said hopefully.
“No,” Penny and Ruby said at the same time.
“But I’ve got something exciting to show you!”
“No.”
Yang was silent for a few moments, and in that pause Penny wondered if she was planning something. As it turned out, indeed she was.
“Blake, you know what the best way to end a staring contest is?”
“What?”
“Kiss your opponent.”
Penny had never had an internal reaction quite like this one, where her cooling fans kicked into gear so suddenly and powerfully that her diagnostic system threw a warning about damage to the blades from the sudden torque.
“What?!” she squeaked, turning to look at Yang because she had to know if Yang was serious and there was nothing at all in her voice which indicated any sort of joking manner—
And only as she saw Yang’s face and registered that she was grinning enormously did Penny realize her mistake. She’d broken the staring contest. Fortunately for her, at the same exact time, Ruby had yelped, “What?!” and also turned to look at Yang with equal speed.
If possible, Yang’s smile grew wider. “Knew that would work.”
Ruby spluttered, while Penny had to take several seconds to get her language modules in order again. “It seems this is a draw, then,” she said, turning back to Ruby.
“Guess so.” Almost immediately, Ruby perked up. “Rematch?”
“…I would like to, but we should probably see what Yang has to show us first.”
“Thank you.” Yang placed her package onto her bed, pulled out a pocketknife, and cut it open. After rooting around in packaging materials for a moment, she let out a triumphant noise. “Shiny and new again from Atlas! Ta-da!” With that, she whirled around, holding out her repaired and refurbished prosthetic arm.
Penny and Ruby broke into applause, making all the right appreciative noises as Yang held it in the air like an explorer discovering a precious lost treasure.
“That was fast,” Blake said with a raised eyebrow.
“I know, right? My arm guy is the best.” Yang untied her sleeve and slid the prosthetic on, the mechanisms locking into place with an audible click. She twisted it back and forth, wiggling the fingers, and then sighed happily. “Smooth as butter, like nothing ever happened. Thank you, Doctor Polendina!”
Weiss blinked. “Polendina? I’ve heard that name.”
“Oh, you probably have.” Yang racked the arm’s firing mechanism, and nodded in satisfaction. “He’s probably the smartest guy in Atlas. Was behind a whole bunch of technological advancements and weapons development for the military. He retired from all that a couple years ago, though—now he only runs a clinic in Mantle. Sweetest guy I’ve ever met.” She shook her head. “Honestly, I’m still not sure how I got to be one of his patients, since he mostly works with people in-kingdom, but I’m not complaining! His work is stupendous.”
“Oh!” Ruby snapped her fingers. “I’ve met him!”
Yang turned to stare at Ruby, about twenty percent of the enthusiasm disappearing from her face. “…He’s not one of the scientists who experimented on you, is he?”
Ruby shook her head. “Nope! Only met him a couple times. Only before he retired. Pretty distant. Nice enough, but I don’t know? He always seemed a little distracted?”
“Huh. Well, I’m glad the sweet old man I’ve known for a decade wasn’t weaponizing people on the side. Because if he was, I’d need to have a talk with him.” Yang turned back to the box the prosthetic had come in, and rooted around, pulling out several tools and cleaning supplies, and finally a folded-up piece of paper. “And, as always, a letter from him!”
“Seems like he knows you pretty well,” Blake said, looking over the box’s contents.
“Definitely. He was the one who made my original prosthetic and all the updates since then! And he was very patient with seven-year-old me even though I was so mean to him. Which was mostly because I wanted my moms and my sibling back, and he understood that more than I did. Also, I was really scared of having a metal arm, for some reason.” She cast a sideways look at Penny. “I wish kid me could’ve had you around, Penny. You would’ve shown me how awesome it is to have metal parts.”
“That would have been very nice!” The thought of a younger Yang and a younger Penny playing together made Penny smile.
“Yeah! So I made friends with him eventually. Once I stopped trying to bite him.” Yang flipped open the letter and scanned it, humming to herself.
“He wishes me luck in the Vytal Tournament, and he says he’ll be sure to watch my fights to make sure his handiwork is functioning as expected!” she said, folding it back up.
“The tournament.” Blake gave a short laugh. “With everything that’s happened this semester, I completely forgot about it.”
“Well, we shouldn’t have any issues competing in it now that I’m at full power again!” Yang said.
“How… how am I even supposed to think about competing now?” Suddenly Blake sat up, dropping her book and swinging her legs over the side of the bunk, fixing an intense stare on her team. “With Adam and Ilia in Vale, we know the White Fang is planning something big, but we have no idea what. We can’t just let it happen! We have to do something! We have to keep looking for answers, we have to keep looking for a way to stop it, we have to—”
At that moment, Blake’s book, which she’d dropped on the edge of her mattress, slid off and landed on the floor with a THUD, making Blake jump again, even higher than when Yang had entered. She stared at the book, her Faunus ears going flat against her head. “…It’s going to be my fault if something happens.”
Penny thought back to a pattern she’d noticed over the previous several days. “Is this why you have been staying up late the past several nights?”
Blake whipped around, her eyes widening. “I thought you all were asleep—”
“I was,” Penny said solemnly. “But I have a passive monitoring system that informs me of movements around me during my sleep states.”
“Oh.” Blake shrank in on herself, and mumbled something that just seemed to be more a self-flagellating noise rather than any intelligible words.
Weiss pushed back her chair, a full participant in the conversation for the first time. “I mean no offense when I say this, Blake, but that would explain why you’ve looked frankly terrible the last several days.”
Indeed, there were some concerning changes in Blake’s appearance which Penny had registered. Abnormally pale skin, dark circles around sunken eyes, increased irritation… she would’ve suggested a vitamin deficiency, if she hadn’t known about Blake’s recent sleeping habits.
“Blake…” Yang hopped up onto her bunk, seating herself next to her. “You can’t just run yourself into the ground because you think you’re the only one who deserves to be burdened with this problem.”
“I—” Blake looked away from everyone. “I wouldn’t want to make it your problem just because you’re my team…”
“That is exactly what we want!” Penny leaned forward, pulling up her file on the Beacon student handbook. “Chapter two, section one, paragraph two of the student handbook clearly states that one of Beacon’s goals is the fostering of group-based problem-solving! And what better way for us to fulfill our duty as students and teammates by helping you solve a problem?” She paused, thinking over what she’d just said, and then added a more personal touch. “Besides, we want to help you because you’re our friend,” she finished softly.
Blake froze at those words, but Yang laid a hand on her shoulder, and seemingly on reflex she leaned into the touch.
“I suppose you’re right,” she said finally, a small smile playing across her lips. “To bring back a rather worn-out metaphor… It makes sense that Team Battleship shouldn’t just float together and sink together, but this ship also has to fight its battles together.”
“There’s the Blake we know and love!” Yang crowed, hopping off the bed. “Okay, any ideas on what we should do first?”
“I have one.”
Several nights later
Crouched on the edge of Beacon’s roof, gazing out at the distant lights of Vale which spread all the way to the horizon, Blake tried to calm her racing mind. It was a task that felt a little less insurmountable now, knowing that her teammates (and Ruby) had promised to follow her into whatever laid ahead.
A low, thick cloud cover had hidden away the moon, rendering the night dark and foreboding except for where the beams of light from the academy’s windows fell. A slight chill cut through the air—the first hints of fall, promising a thousand changes and transformations.
Soft footsteps sounded on the roof behind her, approaching slowly. Blake didn’t turn—her visitor was someone who was quite capable of moving soundlessly, and the fact that she could hear footsteps at all was a greeting in itself.
Ilia Amitola came to a stop next to Blake, her hands jammed in her pockets and her eyes glued to the horizon.
“You didn’t bring Gambol Shroud,” she said.
Blake glanced at Ilia’s holster, and saw that Lightning Lash was absent from its usual position. “You sound surprised.”
“Wasn’t expecting a promise from you to still be worth anything.”
The words made Blake wince, but she couldn’t refute them. How could she, when it felt like Ilia had every right to think this way?
“I’m sorry,” she said.
Ilia didn’t reply—instead, she turned in a slow circle, scanning the area in silence. Blake took the opportunity to study her. The outfit she’d always worn in Menagerie was gone, swapped out for long sleeves probably more suited to Vale’s wetter, cooler climate. But there was one thing about Ilia’s current appearance which held her attention above all else: Ilia’s mask was gone.
It made sense, given that they were having a covert meeting on the grounds of a Huntress academy. It would be suicidally foolish for Ilia to announce herself as White Fang on a campus crawling not only with students from four academies but also military personnel. And with no mask, Blake could see her face fully for the first time in… more than half a year.
She seemed wearier, her posture a little stiffer than before. Her gaze shifted from side to side, never quite resting, in a way that Blake was intimately familiar with.
“No backup, either,” Ilia said, returning her attention to Blake after what felt like an eternity.
Well, Blake did have backup, but by her own choice none of it was close by, so what she was about to tell Ilia was the honest truth: “I still trust you.”
“Then why couldn’t you tell me you were leaving?”
Suddenly, Ilia’s words were full of venom, and Blake didn’t know how to reply, how to apologize—how could she apologize to her oldest friend who she’d left behind without a word? All she could do was shrug helplessly, and say, “I—I was scared, Ilia, I… I… We were going too far, we were crossing lines I told myself I’d never cross—I just couldn’t stay.” She stared down at the ground several stories below, unable to meet Ilia’s gaze.
“Oh, I understand that, Blake. Whether I like it or not, there’s plenty of Faunus who think the best way to get respect is pacifism. Nonviolence. Taking the high road.” Ilia spat out each of those things like they were dirty words. “And I think it’s a stupid choice. Suffering nobly isn’t going to win you anything from your oppressors. But no matter what I think of it, there’s Faunus out there who believe in it with their whole hearts, and I can’t change that, so I’ve got to accept it.”
Blake stayed silent, wondering if it was best to stay silent and let Ilia believe that this was why she’d left, even though it wasn’t. Even though she still very much believed in the things that’d kept her in the Fang long after her parents left. But Ilia’s next words annihilated any hope of maintaining that illusion.
“I think I could’ve understood if that was why you left the Fang! If you just wanted to keep your head down, live your own life free of concern, trying to shield yourself from the worst the world had to offer instead of facing it head-on like the Blake Belladonna I used to know.”
Ilia’s voice cracked in a way that sounded suspiciously like an angry sob, but Blake didn’t dare look up to confirm whether or not she was crying, because she was terrified that the slightest wrong move would shatter this conversation, if it wasn’t already ruined.
“It would’ve broken my heart, but I could’ve lived with it!” And now Ilia’s voice rose to a near-shout, all stealth apparently forgotten. “But this, Blake! This path you’ve chosen for yourself! You’re still the same person who believes in the same things you always have, but now you’re fighting for the things we spent our entire lives fighting against! I know you still believe in direct action, because I saw you and your allies guarding Schnee Dust Company property with your weapons! I know you still believe in your own strength, because I can see you training under the colors of the Huntress system! I know you still believe in the transformative power of a well-placed fist, because you and your partner broke Adam’s face! I know you still believe in subterfuge, in underhanded tactics, in not taking the high road, because you infiltrated one of our rallies!”
Ilia stopped, gasping for breath, and Blake could feel the accusing eyes on her. She wondered how long Ilia had been holding this in. She wondered how much of it was despicably accurate. She wondered if Ilia hated Blake as much as Blake hated herself.
She waited for more, but it didn’t come. Ilia was still standing over her, fists clenched, but she seemed to be waiting for something. What—oh.
Given the gift of a chance to reply, Blake spoke slowly. “I’m not becoming a Huntress to uphold the authority of everything wrong with the world. I’m becoming a Huntress because I thought, maybe with a little legal authority, I could change more than I ever did in the White Fang. A Huntress’s license would give me the power to help so many people without the SDC ever being able to do a damn thing about it. Even they know it would be a terrible idea to get on the wrong side of the Huntress system.” And finally she turned to look at Ilia, taking in her freckles, her ever-so-faint chameleon markings which only revealed themselves when she changed color, the eyes which were full of suspicion and sadness and longing. “I only went to the docks to prove that it wasn’t the White Fang behind the thefts.”
Ilia held Blake’s gaze until that last sentence, when suddenly she looked away, and Blake could hear her grinding her teeth.
“I understand stealing Dust,” Blake said. “But I don’t understand stealing that much Dust, so quickly. And I especially don’t understand why you were allied with Torchwick. I thought it was a basic principle of the White Fang to only work with people who actually believed in our cause, to avoid being used for someone else’s means?”
The wind picked up around them, sending brush and debris skittering across the roof and over their feet before tumbling over the edge, falling to somewhere far away.
“It’s more than just Torchwick,” Ilia said quietly.
Despite her Faunus hearing, Blake had to wonder if she was hearing Ilia right. “What?” Was that why the Dust thefts hadn’t slowed since Torchwick was jailed? She’d thought it was because he was still handing down orders from prison, but if—
“Torchwick was following orders as much as we are.”
“But then…” Blake’s head spun, ramifications spilling through her mind almost too fast for her to process. “What’s all that Dust for? Who is it for? And what’s the Fang getting out of this?!”
And that last question was maybe the question she most cared about. In some ways, she still cared about the White Fang, still wanted to closely guard the things they'd fought for and the victories they'd won. And so, she wanted to know what the Fang was getting out of this.
There was a clear hesitation in Ilia’s reply, a reaching for words that weren’t coming easily, the first sign in that conversation that she was on the defensive.
“We’re being promised more.”
“More what?”
The answer Ilia gave sent a chill down Blake’s spine far beyond what the night breeze could cause.
“Everything.”
“Ilia…” She didn’t like the sound of everything. It sounded like a false promise.
Ilia took a shockingly ragged breath before continuing. “All I know is that something happened at one of our camps, something where Adam and Verdant were the only survivors, and ever since then Adam’s had a deal in place with someone who’s been giving him orders. No one knows who, but it was someone who had the power to wipe out an entire camp of White Fang. Someone who has the power to keep Torchwick in line.”
“So it’s coercion.”
“Maybe. Maybe it’s also recognizing that things are about to change, that something’s going to shake up Remnant. And we’ve got a chance to be in a favored position when the wind shifts. How could we not take that opportunity?”
At last, Blake felt she could rise to her feet and meet Ilia at eye-level—not out of aggression, but out of an understanding that Ilia was finally unsure about something. And Blake wanted to prod that uncertainty, see where it led.
“It sounds like you’re being used,” she said, flat and honest and unflinching. “You don’t know what the shakeup is. You don’t know if things will get better or worse for us. You don’t know if you’re going to be the ones taking the fall.”
Ilia reached into her pocket, and for a half-second Blake tensed, but she only withdrew her scroll, glancing at the time before putting it back. “When you’ve been kept down for so long, any kind of revolution starts appealing to you, no matter how violent or destructive or risky it might be,” she said finally.
Blake didn’t know what to say in response to that. So she sat back down, crossing her legs and looking out over campus once more. And then, a few moments later, Ilia sat down next to her.
“You know, it wasn’t really anything White Fang-related which brought me here to Vale.” Her voice was softer now, still with that acidic edge, but not quite as combative as before. “It was when I heard you were leading a Huntress team, Blake. Not even a subordinate, leading our enemy. I needed to come out here, to see if your betrayal was really as complete as Adam made it sound.”
At the mention of the name which haunted her, Blake couldn’t suppress a shudder which wracked her body and forced her to grab onto her thighs with a death grip, for fear of her body falling apart into nothingness.
“You said you were scared.” Ilia paused. “It wasn’t just the Fang you were scared of, was it?”
Blake wanted to answer, but suddenly her tongue felt like it was glued to the roof of her mouth.
“Adam’s been different, ever since you left. When he unleashed his Semblance on you at the rally… there were people caught in the crossfire. People with no Aura.”
Blake closed her eyes. She didn’t remember much of her escape from the rally because she’d been drowning in panic, with Yang being her only connection to the world, but… she remembered the red.
“We played it off as a tragic consequence of trying to deal with infiltrators, but… he killed our own people, Blake. To try and get at you. And then he tried to chase you down with no backup, got one of our prize pieces of weaponry destroyed, and all he had to show for it was a jaw turned into pulp.”
And a lost sword, Blake added silently. She wondered if Adam had told the others about being down one-half of his weaponry. And he would never get the original back—she’d melted his sword down in the Beacon armory’s blast furnace.
“There was a reason why I didn’t tell anyone I was leaving,” she said.
Ilia was silent for a while before replying, and when she did, she rose to her feet. “I guess we’re both trying to find new solutions to an old problem.” A hint of color flashed at the margins of her face, as if her body was thinking about changing color, but nothing more happened. “I hope one of us succeeds. But I don’t think it’s going to be you, unless you actually start doing something.”
And with that, she was gone, leaping over the side of the roof and shimmying down a drainpipe with speed that not even Blake could manage. Within moments, she was all alone on the roof again, watching a shape vanish into the darkness.
When Blake was sure she wouldn’t be heard, she spoke again.
“Okay, Penny, you can come down now.”
She turned around just in time to see a light flash at one of the farther-away towers of Beacon—Penny’s tower, in fact. A few moments later, the light resolved itself into the green glow of Penny’s wings as she flew towards Blake. Seconds after that, Penny touched down in the spot where Ilia had been standing, with Weiss in one arm and Yang in the other arm, which was a fairly ludicrous sight.
“Could you hear everything okay?” Blake said.
“Crystalline! It was an excellent demonstration of the long-range capabilities of my audioreceptors—I was able to relay the conversation to Yang and Weiss as if they were standing next to you!”
“That’s good.” Blake nodded to her team as Yang handed Gambol Shroud back to her. “Let’s go. We need to go tell Professor Ozpin there’s probably a conspiracy happening in Vale.”
She turned to leave, but a few moments later, she sensed something off, and looked back at her team. “Everything alright?”
“With us? Yeah.” Yang’s eyes bored into her. “But we’re not as sure about you.”
“I’ll be fine. I—”
“Blake,” Penny said, and there was a quiet concern in her voice that immediately made Blake listen, because Penny did not interrupt lightly.
“I know that biological signs of dishonesty are thoroughly inconclusive and unreliable and unable to be used as factual evidence of any kind, but… I sensed your heart rate rising abnormally at the exact moment that you said you would be fine.”
On the one hand, Penny was right about biological tells for lying being complete bullshit, but on the other hand… She was right about Blake not telling the truth right now. Blake wasn’t alright, and she wouldn’t be until this conspiracy was dismantled.
“What are you going to do after we tell Ozpin?” Weiss said.
Ilia’s words echoed in her mind. Start doing something. Start doing something.
Blake wished she’d screamed one last question at Ilia: But WHAT?
“Keep looking. Keep trying to stop this. What else would I do?” She didn’t know.
Unfortunately, from the way her teammates’ concern visibly increased, Blake knew that wasn’t an answer they would accept. They knew she didn’t know.
“…You’re starting to sound a little bit like Ruby,” Yang said, and Weiss nodded rapidly in agreement.
It was those words which made Blake stop for the first time in days. Fuck. Yang was right. She could almost hear those words coming out of Ruby’s mouth in that heartbreakingly-innocent-yet-experienced tone of hers.
Some of the tension slipped out of her body without her intending it, and Yang must’ve noticed. She put a hand on her hip as she glanced over to Weiss and Penny. “Do you two mind if I talk to Blake? Alone? Partner-to-partner?”
Penny nodded and deployed her wings again. “Would you like a ride down to the ground, Weiss?”
“I can get down with my glyphs just fine, thank you.”
A few moments later, Blake and Yang were alone on the roof. Suddenly, she found it hard to meet Yang’s eyes—she wasn’t sure if it was because of how easily she could get lost in them, or because of how difficult she knew this conversation would be.
“Do you remember how my arm ended up like this?” Yang said, lifting her prosthetic arm and twisting her hand back and forth.
Blake nodded. “It’s not exactly the sort of thing I’d forget.”
“Heh.” Yang lowered her arm, and then her tone was all seriousness again. “But do you know why it happened?”
Blake could see where this was going. “Yang…”
“With my dad doing his best imitation of a vegetable and my uncle trying to find the bottom of every bottle of alcohol on Patch, I thought I was the only one strong enough to find my baby sibling in the woods. I thought I was the only one smart enough to find where my deadbeat-but-not-dead biological mom had run off to. I wasn’t going to stop until I found all of them, and that nearly killed me.” She paused, her hair fluttering in the wind and wrapping around her face, golden like the rays of the midday sun filtering through a grove of trees, even at night. “And it feels a lot like what you’re doing to yourself right now, Blake.”
Blake swallowed and tried to think of how to say this without demeaning Yang’s trauma. “I… I don’t want to minimize what happened to you, but—this isn’t some impossible quest where I’m too young to realize it’s impossible.”
“But unlike Kid Me, you’re not alone.” Yang reached out and put a hand on Blake’s shoulder, gazing into her eyes. “We’re students. We haven’t even finished our first year. Maybe we should leave this to the adults, who have a much better idea of what they’re doing?”
“I can’t.” Ilia’s words hissed in her mind again, taunting. Cop, cop, cop. “Being able to leave things alone is a privilege. One that I don’t deserve.”
Yang pulled back and pursed her lips, looking carefully at Blake. “What would you do? If we let you keep going like this?” she said finally.
“I’d…” Blake trailed off abruptly as she realized, to her immense frustration, that she had no idea what should be done next. Going back to a White Fang rally wasn’t an option, now that they’d be on the lookout for them. Ilia had said all she would say. Junior definitely wouldn’t be as helpful if they went to him again. Staking out potential sites of Dust thefts only worked when there was an obvious target, as there had been at the docks that weekend—now, if they tried that tactic again, they could stake out a hundred different locations and not have any success. And then, Ruby… well, Ruby didn’t know much more than they did.
“I don’t know yet,” she said finally, refusing to let any defeat leak into her voice. “But I’d figure something out. I just need to think about it—”
“And run yourself into the ground some more?” Suddenly, Yang’s eyes were red. “We can see what you’re doing to yourself. Your whole team can, and it’s breaking our hearts. I can’t just stand by and let people I care deeply about hurt themselves like this! You know as much about what’s going on in Vale as I knew about where my biological mom was!”
It was those words which pierced through whatever shell of denial Blake was trying to build up, and she turned away from Yang, closing her eyes.
“So… what am I supposed to do, then?” she said, hating how small her voice sounded.
“Three things,” Yang said immediately. She sounded like she’d rehearsed this part. “We let the people in charge, who know what they’re doing, handle things. We keep training to be Huntresses so that when we do need to be the ones handling things, we’ll be ready. And—as Ruby would put it—we do ordinary teenage girl things.” Yang nudged her. “Y’know, while we still have the chance.”
There was something comforting to Blake about just how confident Yang sounded. A little more of the tension drained out of her, and she turned back to Yang. She couldn’t keep a small smile off her face as she considered those words. “And what do you define as ordinary teenage girl things, Yang Xiao Long?”
For some reason, Yang blushed wildly, her eyes returning to deep lilac. “Well, uh, stuff we’ve been doing already, fun stuff? And, well, just speaking about things up ahead, Weiss and Penny and I were thinking at some point we’d go dress shopping for the dance.”
The dance. Another thing that Blake had forgotten about entirely. “That sounds… nice,” she said. “I would need a dress if I were to go to the dance.”
Yang broke into a wide smile. “That’s the spirit! And, also. Uh. Well. One other thing.”
Blake’s ears perked up as Yang took an extremely sudden turn into bashfulness.
“Another thing teenage girls do. Not all of them! But some of them. Uh. Yeah. Some of them go to dances together? If they’d like to?”
It took several moments for Blake to work through the meaning of those words.
“Yang,” she said slowly. “Are you… asking me to the dance?”
Yang blushed almost as deeply as the color of her eyes in Semblance mode, and nodded. “That went a lot smoother in my head…”
Blake rolled her eyes fondly and patted her on the back. “Goof.” And then she realized, Yang probably wanted an answer.
“I…” she began carefully, thinking through the words of her answer. “I don’t know if I’m in the right mindset to answer that right now. I’m sorry. It’s just… I’ve got a lot on my mind right now. Not just with everything going on in Vale, but… things about myself.” Things such as Adam, the White Fang, Ilia, Adam…
“Oh. That’s fine!” Yang nodded. “Totally fine, no pressure to answer!”
“Oh, I will. I just need a few days to… clear my head.” Honestly, maybe taking it easy for a while was the best thing. If she didn’t have the presence of mind to answer a question like that, how could she possibly try to unravel a nefarious conspiracy?
…Gods help her, she really was starting to sound like Ruby.
On a Sunday morning when Team BSYP had already finished all their classwork for the weekend and there was nothing near enough in the schedule to necessitate planning ahead (even by Weiss’s standards), they decided to make a team breakfast together.
Weiss had managed to procure a waffle iron at nine in the morning through reasons completely unknown to the rest of the team. There were communal baking staples and supplies in the kitchen they shared with Team JNPR, and they raided the dining hall for fruit and various other things to put in their waffles. And so the ingredients for a delicious breakfast of waffles were assembled!
Well, presumably delicious, in Penny’s case, since she couldn’t taste them. But it was a pleasure to observe the light golden brown color of the waffles fresh out of the iron, the small wisps of steam rising off them, the loud bright red bits of strawberries and raspberries embedded within. It was a visual feast—a phrase Penny had learned from studying art.
Yang was commandeering the waffle iron and refusing to let anyone else near it, and attempts to ascertain why Yang was guarding the waffle iron were met with a response of, “Weiss, you’re a recovering rich girl who could probably set a bowl of gazpacho on fire. Blake, your style of cooking is to burn it until it’s sanitary, which is fine for a revolutionary living in the woods, but too gritty for us. Penny, because you are the sweetest girl on Remnant, I am contractually obligated to cook for you even if you’re not actually going to eat any of it.”
Penny was quite sure no contract was involved here, but Yang had a determined look in her eyes and was pouring the batter with the same concentration she applied to crafting custom ammunition. And so she was happy to watch Yang having fun.
Penny nibbled on a waffle, of course, but it confirmed what she already suspected from the dining hall. Waffles were too fluffy for her liking, and it did not feel as satisfying to bite into. She liked touching fluffy things, but she did not like having fluffy things in her mouth. She was considering asking Yang to deliberately burn a waffle for some added crunch when there was a knock at the door.
As everyone turned to look, Penny was the one to answer, opening it with an expectation of who it was because she’d detected and recognized the footsteps of the person approaching. And also, there was really only one person at Beacon who was likely to knock on their door at 9:30 in the morning.
“Hi!” Ruby said, unfazed by how there had been 0.3 seconds between her knocking and the door opening. “Penny! Exactly the girl I was looking for!” She held out a scroll to her. “I have Roman Torchwick’s scroll, and I just realized you could probably use your Semblance to unlock it!”
“Hang on, what?” Blake rose rapidly from the floor where they’d been eating, almost kicking over her plate of waffles. “His scroll? How?”
“Oh, I requisitioned it from him at the docks. But I was never able to crack the encryption—I tried getting the password out of him directly, but he wouldn’t crack—”
“When did you interrogate him?!”
“Couple weeks ago, most recently?”
“Most recently—”
“I can do it anytime, we’re keeping him on the General’s flagship, so—”
“Hang on, wait, why?” It seemed that Blake was growing more distressed with each word coming out of Ruby’s mouth, and now if Penny’s facial analysis was right, distress had abruptly become suspicion. “I’m sorry, but why is a criminal arrested in Vale and wanted entirely for crimes in Vale being held in custody on an Atlesian military ship?!”
“Would you trust the Vale PD to guard so much as a bag of chips?”
“Well—” Blake hesitated, what looked like a ‘no’ to Penny forming on her lips, before she caught herself and shook her head. “Not relevant; how did he end up there?”
Ruby shrugged. “Dunno. General’s decision?”
“That’s not how it works. That’s—that’s violating international treaties. That’s…” Blake trailed off, heaving an enormous sigh. “And there’s nothing I can do about it.”
“Would you, um, like to come in?” Yang said, turning around and holding out a freshly-baked waffle speared on the end of a prong. She was wearing an apron that said ‘BE A PARENTAL FIGURE TO THE COOK.’ (Yang had previously explained to Penny that it was meant to be ironic.)
Blake did not return to her seat as Ruby shuffled in, closing the door behind her and fidgeting with the scroll in her hands. “Is it really that bad…?” she said finally to Blake.
Blake crossed her arms. “Yes. Because you can’t just have a kingdom throwing anybody it wants in jail. Did Torchwick receive a trial? How long is he being held?”
“Um.”
“If Atlas starts throwing people they think are bad in jail without paying attention to things like the law, it could happen to anyone!”
“Was one nice, peaceful morning too much to ask for?” Weiss mumbled, before shoving a forkful of waffle into her mouth and suddenly looking like she wanted more than anything to go back to sleep.
“It wouldn’t, because it would only… happen to bad guys?” Ruby said in reply to Blake.
“Bad guys.” Blake’s voice had an edge to it that Penny had learned to characterize as dangerous. “Who’s to say they wouldn’t jail someone like me, theoretically an armed and capable ex-White Fang?!”
And something about that seemed to strike Ruby in a very armor-piercing way, because if her consciousness ran on computers, Penny would’ve thought that Ruby was rebooting right now. Or at the very least, struggling with CPU resource allocation.
“That would be real bad,” Ruby said with an air of immense dread.
“And now that I’ve done enough you reconsider your worldview for the morning, can we look at Torchwick’s scroll?” Blake said, holding out a hand.
Ruby handed it over, still doing a good impression of a beached fish, and Blake immediately gave it to Penny. “Want to try your Semblance?”
“I will certainly try, but I have never attempted entering a locked item—although, it would be a good way to test the question of whether or not inanimate objects can offer variable resistance to my Semblance in the way that sentient beings can!” And then Penny activated her Semblance, focusing on the scroll in her hands.
INPUT DETECTED: SCROLL
“I am in,” she said, before remembering that she was speaking into a featureless void.
Except, a few moments later, she heard the replies of her teammates, both through the audioreceptors of her body, and also as sound which was extremely tinny and compressed in comparison, as if it was coming through a low-quality microphone—exactly like what might be found in a scroll.
“You can hear me?” she said.
“Your voice is coming through the scroll’s speaker!”
Oh, fascinating. It seemed that with practice, her Semblance could unconsciously work to match outputs with her inputs, which, depending on the limitations, could significantly expedite the usage of her Semblance!
Now, theoretically, if she just sent an unlock command the same way that she might send a command to any of her tertiary systems…
Something pushed back. The encryption, insisting, locked, locked, locked—
Penny pushed back harder, and a little bit of Aura flared around her.
For a few moments, there was nothing, and then she had the sensation of shoving a very heavy object out of the way.
Triumphant yells (somewhat distorted—how did organics ever use these devices regularly?) came through the speaker.
“We’re in! You’re a genius, Penny!”
Even with the poor audio quality, that was undoubtedly Ruby’s voice, Penny thought as she returned to her own body.
“So how’d you do it?” Ruby said, who turned out to be standing right next to Penny, leaning on her shoulder. “Learn anything new about your Semblance?”
Penny checked her scroll, confirming what she thought—a greater-than-expected drop in Aura for semblancing into an inanimate object. “I did!” She filed the information away in her memory, sending adjustments to her prediction algorithms. “Inanimate objects can also offer variable resistances to my Semblance which tax my Aura more! The scroll was supposed to only be unlocked with a passcode, so I was going against its intended function by opening it without a passcode. But since it is an inanimate object and I am not attempting to override an actual sentient being’s will, I can force an action against its intended function without exhausting my Semblance!”
“Cooooooool,” Ruby murmured, still leaning her chin on Penny’s shoulder.
Penny made an adjustment to her internal understanding of her Semblance. Before, she had thought of the mechanics of such things as resistance to her Semblance. Now, though, she was thinking of it as opposition. The more opposition that an object or a person had to what she was doing with her Semblance, the more they could resist.
“So…” Ruby said. “What if you try using your Semblance to make someone do something which they only mildly don’t want to do? Could you make that person do that thing they only dislike a little, just with a lot of extra effort and Aura burned up?”
Penny thought about it for a moment, and then realized there was a key point Ruby was overlooking with this question. “I think the most efficient way to push someone from mildly not wanting to do something, all the way into violently and emphatically not wanting to do that thing… would be to force my way into their head in an attempt to physically make them do it. At which point, I would be booted out, and lose all my Aura.”
“Oh.” Ruby nodded slowly. “I guess having an uninvited guest in your head makes that person pretty likely to really not want whatever you want… even if it’s something they would’ve wanted before?”
Penny nodded. “Exactly.” She intended on keeping that promise of never semblancing into anyone without their explicit consent beforehand, but she was comforted by the knowledge that even if she decided to break that promise in the future for some incomprehensible reason, any unannounced foray into someone else’s head would be very short regardless.
Meanwhile, Blake was clicking through Torchwick’s scroll.
“Damn it, he’s good at opsec,” she muttered. “He’s got a thing on his scroll which auto-deletes everything after a few weeks.”
“Really?” Weiss craned her neck to see over Blake’s shoulder. “That doesn’t seem like something he’d be smart enough to do.”
“Ilia probably made him do it.” Blake kept poking through, until suddenly her eyebrows shot up. “Wait. He didn’t delete his photos.”
“Really?!” Now Penny and Ruby were also peering over Blake’s shoulders at the scroll, to see…
Many, many selfies of Roman Torchwick making ridiculous faces, many of which included Umbrella Girl, apparently his companion, also making ridiculous faces.
Blake sighed. “Figures. We’re not—”
“Wait!” Penny stopped Blake’s hand before she could scroll past a particular picture. “Can you zoom in on the upper right corner?” She had spotted something in the sidewalk over Torchwick’s shoulder. Something that could be very helpful.
“What are we looking at?” Blake said. “A drain cover?”
“Yes! Every drain cover in the city of Vale has a unique code engraved in it for expediting maintenance management! If I can parse the code on this one, I can tell you exactly where this picture was taken—” At this depth of magnification, the picture was rather blurry, but Penny worked it out nonetheless by counting individual pixels.
“Hm,” she said, dialing up her CCTnet connection and cross-checking the number against the online Vale municipal database. “That is odd.”
“What’s odd?”
“This drain should not exist. Every code should start with A, B, C, or D, but this drain’s designation is MG-11. I cannot think of anywhere in Vale that would fit this.”
“MG…?” Yang repeated, lifting her head. And then suddenly she spun around, coming dangerously close to upending the waffle iron. “Oh, shit. That’s Mountain Glenn!”
“Mountain Glenn?” Blake said in the tone people usually had when they had absolutely no idea what someone was talking about.
“Here, let me show you—” Yang pulled her scroll out of her apron pocket and motioned Blake over, momentarily putting a pause on the conversation. Penny was already familiar with Mountain Glenn since she had spent large amounts of time reading about the history of the world, so she stayed next to Ruby.
“Waffles, huh?” Ruby said, looking over the arrangement of plates on the floor. “Interesting.”
“They are very fluffy,” Penny said, not adding that she didn’t like fluffy foods, because she did not want to speak poorly of Yang’s cooking even as a matter of personal preference.
“Want to know how they taste?” Ruby said.
Penny blinked. “Well, to do that, I would need—” In the middle of that sentence, she recognized retroactively that there had been an undeniable tinge of excitement in Ruby’s tone. “—I would need the right technology…” She hardly dared to hope as she searched for any sign of mischief or deception in Ruby’s face, but…
“Exactly.” Ruby was bouncing on her toes now, smiling wider and wider. “I think I figured out how to build taste and smell sensors for you, Penny!”
Notes:
I cannot overstate how excited I am for the next chapter. It's one of my favorites, and it's actually the longest one out of the 48 chapters I've written to this point!
See you all in a week for Chapter 29: The Tale Of The Blacksmith And The Robot.
Chapter 29: The Tale Of The Blacksmith And The Robot
Notes:
I experimented with a third-person-omniscient viewpoint in parts of this chapter! I'm very satisfied with how it came out, but I'm just giving fair warning about it so that it's not a shock when a scene dives into both Ruby and Penny's thoughts.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
“Friends!” Ruby declared, standing proudly at attention in front of a whiteboard. Team BSYP, crammed together onto the one couch in Penny’s workshop, was her audience.
“I have gathered you here today for the execution of Operation GORGEOUS!” With a flourish, she pulled away the sheet she’d draped over the whiteboard, revealing the abbreviation that she had spent twenty minutes figuring out. “Gustatory-Olfactory Recognition-Generating Electrical Operative User System!”
Penny gasped and clapped appreciatively, Blake and Yang nodded, and Weiss said, “Why is it named that?”
Ruby didn’t really have an answer for that. But that was okay, because the only reaction which mattered was Penny’s reaction, and she was definitely excited! So Ruby pushed on, pulling a marker from her supply belt, and began scribbling diagrams and charts all over the whiteboard as she rattled off a compressed explanation of her weeks of research and development.
“So the first question was, how do taste and smell work normally? And the answer is, it’s really complicated! But at its core, it’s about tiny sensors on your tongue and in your nose detecting certain chemical compounds and sending a unique signal to the brain to tell you you’re tasting or smelling a thing! And now, you may be thinking, hang on a minute, couldn’t we make that work in an inorganic medium? After all, there are chemical detectors designed to do exactly the same thing—detect and distinguish between numerous kinds of chemical compounds, so who’s to say we couldn’t just rig one of those up in Penny’s mouth and hook it up to her processors?” She stopped just long enough to take a breath, and then kept talking as she reached behind the whiteboard and pulled out the night’s first piece of hardware. “But there’s two big problems, one of which I can demonstrate perfectly with this Dust-detecting unit I borrowed from the General’s flagship.”
“Hang on, does ‘borrowed’ mean—” Yang started to say, but Ruby cut her off by throwing the rig at her.
“Hold your questions until the end, please!” she shouted as Yang barely managed to catch the Dust-sniffing rig on reflex.
Ruby was trying to follow Winter’s principles for delivering a briefing, and sure, maybe she was a little more energetic than Winter, but she liked to think she was doing a good job following Winter’s example of keeping the audience quiet until she was done talking! She liked it when Winter said she’d done a good job. Winter was great at making her feel like a good soldier. Sure, she knew that already, but getting Winter’s approval, a little nod after a successful mission, was such a cool feeling. Winter would definitely make a good general.
“Now you’re up close and personal with the first big problem!” she said to Yang, who was struggling to extricate her head from the tangle of hoses and wires that’d landed on her. “Chemical compound detectors are big! If we tried to apply this tech to Penny, she’d have to wear a sensory backpack anytime she wanted to taste or smell anything.” She shrugged. “Which, you know, better than nothing, you could still have a great time with that, but in Atlas, we strive for perfection!”
With that, she swung back to the whiteboard and rapidly drew some chemical compounds, with smiley and frowny faces added. “Which brings me to problem two! How would Penny know how to interpret the signals a chemical detector is sending her? Different devices send entirely different types of signals—it’s kind of like how different things will taste different to different people! I think.” Now she added a bunch of arrows going in different directions, to emphasize the unpredictability. It was also possible that she was just having entirely too much fun drawing on the whiteboard. “Point being—” She pointed at Penny. “—how can you actually figure out what tastes and smells you like and don’t like?”
Penny propped up her chin on her hand, thinking, and then stuck out her tongue, crossing her eyes to look at it. Which was adorable. “I think I would need some sort of constant for a frame of reference.”
“Yes!” Penny was so smart. “And I’ve found the constant, which just so happens to be something you have in abundance!” She scribbled out a lightning bolt. “Electricity! Every chemical compound has a very slightly different conductivity, which means the way an electrical current will move across any given substance will be unique to that substance, which means that with instruments sensitive enough, you can measure and identify minute changes in current traveling through your mouth or the air, which would allow you to distinguish and sense almost anything!”
“And I have sensitive instruments!” Penny said, jumping to her feet. “And the necessary processing power!”
“Yes!” Ruby cheered, jumping forward so that she and Penny were right in front of one another. “And you wouldn’t just be getting a readout, you’d be able to interpret the electrical impulses exactly the way you want! Maybe you decide you don’t like the sine wave generated by certain kinds of bread! Maybe you decide that the current generated by chocolate is delightfully uneven!” To punctuate her excitement, she grabbed Penny’s hands.
“And I would also be able to detect quantity, so it would be possible for me to taste whether there’s too much or too little of something in a food!” Penny said, leaning right into her hands. They were basically spinning each other around now, talking faster and faster and louder and louder and it was making Ruby so ridiculously happy because Penny could keep up with her in a way that no one else could—
“And it would definitely be small enough to be integrated into your body!”
Penny nodded frantically. “I am going to taste things!”
“You’re going to taste things!”
“I am going to smell things!”
“You’re going to smell things!”
“All thanks to you!”
“All thanks to us!” Ruby preened at the praise all the same, but Penny was the one who would be doing all the real work here, putting it into practice and testing it—all Ruby had done was have a good idea.
The two of them finally stopped spinning and turned back to look at the rest of Penny’s team. They’d spun their way across the entire workshop and kind of left the other girls behind a little bit.
“Um, did you get all that?” Ruby said to them.
“You lost me right around chocolate, but I’m a believer!” Yang said.
“Good enough.” Ruby let go of Penny (reluctantly) and semblanced her way back to the whiteboard. “Okay, so the actual customization and installation, I think, should be pretty simple. And mostly a job for Penny. So I have another very important task for you three. One only you know how to do.”
“Oh?” Weiss raised an eyebrow.
Ruby threw an empty canvas tote at her. “You’re going to go buy some snacks!”
The only noise in the tower was the scratch-scratch of Penny’s pencil as she sketched a layout diagram for her new circuitry, and the awed sounds coming from Ruby as she examined other circuit diagrams for Penny’s body.
Penny knew that Blake and Yang and Weiss would probably be giving her an odd look if they knew she was showing these diagrams to Ruby, but she trusted Ruby with this knowledge! Besides, to hear Ruby so excited and appreciative, and to know it was because of things about Penny… it made Penny happy. Really happy. And it wasn’t as if Ruby saw Penny as an interesting not-sentient piece of technology to study and nothing more; she was Penny’s friend and she was admiring every part of Penny. Even the parts that did not look even slightly close to a humanoid of any kind, because most circuit diagrams were a maze of lines and symbols and to an untrained observer, would’ve been akin to ancient hieroglyphs. But Ruby understood what she was looking at, and unless there was some enormous failure in Penny’s emotional recognition systems, Ruby liked it. She liked it in a certain kind of way that Penny had difficulty envisioning Blake and Yang and especially Weiss emulating. Not because of any biases or malicious intentions on their part, but simply because Ruby possessed an insight that none of Penny’s teammates had. A breathtakingly rare commonality. A unique connection. Ruby was the first of her kind just as much as Penny was. A synthetic-mechanical girl and a synthetic-organic girl, sitting together and helping each other feel less lonely. It made Penny happy in a unique way.
She made one final pencil stroke, and then turned to Ruby. “I have finished the planning phase!”
“Wooo!” Ruby pumped her fist, and then held it out to Penny with raised eyebrows.
Penny was more than happy to oblige the fistbump—ever since she’d introduced it to Ruby, Ruby had delighted in using it as many times as possible. Penny had voiced a worry at one point that fistbumping so often would dilute the coolness of it, but Ruby had replied by saying that fistbumps just made everything cooler. And that was an argument that Penny found quite compelling.
So, they fistbumped, standing up from the table, and Penny affixed her diagram to the now-extremely cluttered whiteboard alongside the other schematics she’d drawn up. She took care not to cover up Ruby’s drawing of an amino acid wielding a sword and fighting an axe-wielding tastebud.
“I think I am ready to move to the next step!” she said, turning to one of her workbenches.
“Oooh!” Ruby bounced alongside her. “What’s next?”
“Well,” Penny said, tapping in a code to unlock a safe built into the workbench and then withdrawing the scroll kept inside, “Building the necessary parts should be fairly simple—the tricky part is actually installing it!” She returned to the circular table at the center of the room and plugged the scroll into a port on one side. After a few moments, the holographic projector in the table’s center flickered to life, projecting—
“Oh my gods,” Ruby whispered. “That’s you!”
“Indeed it is!” Now floating in the air in front of Penny and Ruby was a monochromatic recreation of Penny herself. “Do you remember last month when you asked if you could see my blueprints?”
Ruby looked thoughtful for a moment, which was understandable—most people could not recall the exact transcript of a conversation from over four weeks ago. And then her eyes widened. “Is THIS your blueprints?”
“Yep!” Penny said, popping the ‘P’ sound with a quick movement of her lips. She’d learned that from Yang, and immediately added it as a habit. It felt delightfully bubbly. “My blueprints are not two-dimensional. They are an incredibly complex, multilayered interactive 3-D model which can be split into different components for simultaneous viewing, along with a completely indexed search system!” This blueprint had actually already existed in Penny’s memory when she woke up at Beacon, but it was quite helpful to have a visual representation outside of herself to look at.
“Whoa…” Ruby moved closer, her eyes roving all over the hologram without pause. “I wish I could just look at a blueprint of myself. Instead, I have to get MRIs. Which is really annoying and boring, because I’m stuck in a big metal tube and I can’t do anything. Blueprints would be so much easier.”
It took Penny a moment to realize Ruby was talking about Magnetic Resonance Imaging, which… “I think an MRI machine may actually be the most efficient way of killing me,” she said.
Ruby nodded, all seriousness. “Oooh. Okay. Good to know. I won’t bring you to a hospital or something if you get hurt.”
“I believe attending doctors would notice something different about me before getting to the point of internal imaging,” Penny said. She was trying to work on more subtle forms of humor, the kind of humor that Blake liked to deploy. It was quite a challenge, since she barely understood that genre as it was, but the challenge was precisely why she was doing it! Fortunately, this joke was functional, because Ruby snorted. Loudly.
“They shouldn’t bother, all your internal images are right here!” she said, gesturing to the blueprint.
Penny did not quite have the structures in her body needed to produce a snort, so she settled for her usual laugh.
It was incredible. If she were to somehow travel back in time to the beginning of her academic year and tell her younger self that she would be showing her blueprints to another student, her younger self’s reaction would be… Well, her younger self would be excited because she would immediately recognize that she’d become close enough friends with someone to show them that. But also, her younger self would be extremely shocked. The logical and the emotional, almost always producing vastly different reactions within Penny.
It all added up to this moment feeling just as magical as when Penny had first told her team the truth about herself. And she’d chosen to do this thing tonight so casually.
“So!” she said, bringing her processing focus back to the evening’s objective. “Once we have assembled the electrical current generating-receiving array, it should be a fairly simple task to install it in my mouth and nose. I believe I should have the necessary space in there if I reduce the thickness of the plate used for the roof of my mouth. However, the next step is considerably more involved. Not dangerous!” she added hastily at the end, seeing Ruby’s worried look. She tapped at the table’s controls, layers of her body peeling away like pages of a notebook fluttering away in the wind until they were looking at bare mechanics, the shape of a humanoid body almost completely lost. “You are likely not aware of this, but most of my processing power is actually located in my upper torso area, positioned behind and underneath my Aura generator—”
“Wait. Hang on.” Ruby’s gaze whipped back and forth between Penny and the blueprint of Penny. “Does that mean you do your thinking there, and not in your head?”
Penny ran a quick calculation. “Semantically… Yes?”
“Huh. Well, it’s a good thing you’re not an Atlesian cadet!” Ruby said. “The General’s always telling us, think with your head, not with your heart.”
“Is General Ironwood aware that the vast majority of organic emotions originate from the brain? Which is in the head. Or is he simply ignoring that in favor of dispensing poetically worded advice?”
Ruby shrugged, and Penny decided to continue with upgrading rather than pursue that thought. “Because of the location of my processing power, I will need to connect the new sensors to the nearest available input node. Which is here.” She rotated the hologram with a twist of the table’s controls, and zoomed in on a particular region, now blinking green. “I should be able to make use of channels in already existing architecture for most of the way! However, there is a small gap—about 50 millimeters wide—between the preexisting circuitry and the chosen input node. A new circuit board needs to be inserted there. And to install it…” It took Penny a moment to choose words which would not sound so violent. “...A number of things will have to be removed.”
“How many things?” Ruby said, sounding a little nervous for the first time that day.
In reply, Penny flipped through the controls, set a custom parameter, and the hologram shifted—now layers upon layers of material floated on top of one another above the blinking green target area—layers of her body displayed like layers of clouds in the sky.
“A square of my cosmetic skin layer, the entire apparatus for my flight mode, armor panels SD-7 through SD-9, armor panels GP-7 through GP-9, hinge joints GEU25B and GP38, all F-region servos up to servo F40PH, wiring terminal DDA40X—” She broke off, realizing that this might be a bit much, even for Ruby. “I am sorry, you don’t need to—”
“No, no, it’s totally okay!” Ruby said, waving it off. “I just might, um, need to write that all down…”
Penny blinked, and then realized the assumption Ruby was making. “To be clear, none of this will need to be removed by you!” she added quickly. “I have done similar procedures on myself many times!” She gestured to the workstation where she kept the articulating robotic arms. “I would not ask you to do any work on me! That would be far too much of an imposition.”
“Oh,” Ruby said. “Is there some other way I can be useful, then?”
“Yes!” Penny plucked a list she’d written earlier off the whiteboard and held it out to Ruby. “I have all the necessary materials for the equipment; if you’d like to gather them from around the workshop and begin building the transmitter and receptor arrays?” She’d witnessed Ruby’s technological and mechanical skills more than enough times to trust her with building an actual part of herself.
“Yeah!” Ruby accepted the list, scanned it, and then whispered, “Oh, wow, your handwriting is kind of perfect… how do you make all of your letters the exact same size?!”
Penny was surprised that Ruby even had to ask that question—she would’ve assumed the answer was obvious. And then an idea floated out from somewhere in her code.
She put a hand on her hip in much the same way Yang would if given an opportunity to respond like this and gave Ruby a small smile, one corner of her mouth tilted up more than the other. Then, as the finishing touch on a carefully constructed facial expression and pose, she raised one eyebrow and asked, “What do you think the answer to that question is, Ruby Karyatis?”
Ruby stared at her for a moment, uncomprehending, and then she blinked and smacked her forehead. “Oh! Of course! Beep-boop stuff. Silly me.”
One of the many things that Penny liked about Ruby was how she referred to Penny’s synthetic-mechanical nature as beep boop stuff. It was cute, and although there was no feature of Penny that was actually intended to beep or boop, she was capable of making those noises with her vocal instruments—and she was considering doing them around Ruby because it would delight her.
Penny turned away as her small smile bloomed into something most likely to be classified as goofy. Which was an unusual facial expression for Penny Pallas to make. Why did being a little silly and fun with Ruby cause this reaction? She was silly and fun with many other people without similar reactions, after all.
…Well, it couldn’t be called unusual within the greater context of all the different ways Ruby produced unique reactions in Penny. Now that was a trend worth studying—but another day! When she was not literally in the middle of upgrading her body! She would not run these kinds of procedures with anything less than full processing power availability.
So Penny shunted that thread of thought to a much lower priority and turned her attention to setting up the robotic arms and preparing the workspace for the procedure, while Ruby began zipping around the workshop, gathering things.
(If Penny had stayed facing Ruby instead of turning away to conceal that goofy smile, she would’ve been granted the sight of Ruby also turning away to hide an equally goofy smile.)
Penny sat down, the two robotic arms behind her primed and ready (armed and ready, Yang might say), the lasers warmed up, hundreds of storage containers of all shapes and sizes nearby and ready to become a temporary receptacle for all the parts of Penny that were being removed. She looked around, ran through a checklist one more time, and started to pull off her hoodie.
And then Penny froze, realizing something very important: Every prior time she’d performed a repair with this much of her body involved, she had been alone. Which meant she’d never had to be concerned about covering up. Her repairs she’d done with Team BSYP present were just repairs on her limbs, where all she’d had to do was roll up a sleeve. But now this repair was happening, and Ruby was here, and Penny could not just… could not just be half-naked in front of her! But she needed to have her dress out of the way for the repair on her back, because this was a very nice dress, and if she couldn’t remove it, then she would have to cut through it, and then she would have a ruined dress! And Penny was not skilled at sewing!
She whirred frantically through her options. Ask Ruby to leave? No, too rude. Drape a bedsheet over herself and the robotic arms? No, could risk interfering with the procedure. Ask Ruby to avoid looking in her direction for the next several hours? No, too inconvenient. But she did not want to make this weird! And it wouldn’t be the good kind of weird, like what Yang and other people at the queer club proudly called themselves. It would be the bad kind of weird, the kind where people looked at Penny with silent discomfort and then moved slowly away from her as if she was about to explode, the kind of weird that made her want to hide for the rest of her life. She didn’t want that! If only there was something which could cover the front of her torso while leaving it open from the back, like—
Penny’s processors almost tripped over themselves as they hit upon a solution.
Currently, Ruby was kneeling down to get something out of a ground-level cabinet, her head buried all the way inside the compartment and facing directly away from Penny—exactly the opportunity she needed. She quickly finished pulling her hoodie off, shimmied her arms out of the sleeves of her dress, and then—
When Ruby turned around thirty seconds later, she was greeted with the sight of Penny sitting crosslegged and wearing her hoodie backwards. The zipper, now behind her, had been unzipped all the way, giving the robotic arms unfettered access to her back. Already, one of them was starting the first pass with the laser, etching a cut into her synthetic skin with the faintest of hisses.
Penny gave Ruby what she intended as a very normal and natural smile to hopefully convey that there was nothing unusual about this arrangement, finished adjusting her dress so that it was now bunched loosely around her waist, and tugged down the sleeves of her hoodie so that they almost covered her hands. “Are you finding everything you need?” she said, once she’d ensured she was covered.
“Absolutely!” Ruby dumped her stuff at the nearest workbench to Penny, plugged in a soldering iron, and started arranging all the tools into a neat grid around her and humming to herself as she did so. Then, abruptly, her humming stopped, and she cocked her head at Penny. “Wait.”
Penny winced. Was this the moment when Ruby would decide this was too weird-bad and leave? Was this—
“Should you start that now?” Ruby said, pointing to the arms, which had just finished cutting out the square of Penny’s synthetic skin and was starting to apply the adhesive solvent. “I’m not really sure yet how long this is going to take me.” And that was all she said.
“O-oh,” Penny said. “No, I should be fine. It is not the fastest of processes.”
“Okay, cool!” With that, Ruby turned back to her work, immediately resuming her humming and swinging her legs slowly beneath her as she reached for a canister of graphene resin and a diamond-tipped angle slicer.
Penny let out a very quiet sigh of relief. She already felt a bit silly for thinking that Ruby would be weirded out by this. She had a great capacity for just going with things, and it was on full display right now. Things which bothered nearly all other people, just did not bother her. Yet another similarity between the two of them!
As it turned out, both girls finished their side of the project faster than initially expected, but Ruby’s side of the project just had less to do, and so by the time the solder had cooled and all the tools were returned to storage and her workplace was entirely cleaned, she still had time to perch herself on the worktable in front of Penny and watch the incredibly unique process unfolding before her.
The robotic arms moved ceaselessly under Penny’s command, swapping out tools and depositing removed parts into various containers. After the first layer, Ruby had expected… maybe more sparks flying, more sounds of metal grinding, things like that, but actually—it really looked like a very orderly process which moved deeper and deeper. Which made sense. Probably wasn’t a good idea to design a robot girl that couldn’t be taken apart easily. Would be absolutely terrible for maintenance and repairs.
From this angle, Ruby couldn’t actually see Penny’s internals, and she was trying to work up the courage to ask. Just because—not because of anything weird or anything! Just because she was really curious about how things worked in there! What kind of specialty materials did she have? What kind of arrangements were there, for everything to fit together so seamlessly into one sleek and sophisticated and happy body? What kind of design philosophies did she follow? Was there even such a thing as a design philosophy for a girl who was entirely unique?
She snuck another glance at Penny. Who was passing the time by seeing how long she could balance a half-kilogram titanium sphere on the tip of each finger while subroutines in her cores handled the job of directing the repair.
Taking something apart is easy. Putting it back together is the hard part.
Given that far more processing capacity and also conscious observance was needed to put herself back together, Penny was inclined to agree with that aphorism. For now, still on the first leg, balancing this sphere was both preventing her from becoming bored and doubling as a useful way to verify her fine motor calibration. And she could see how much she was impressing Ruby, too. She wondered how much practice it would take for a human to replicate this.
Ruby was noticing a lot of things right now. She was noticing Penny balancing the sphere so effortlessly. She was noticing how the shiny, polished surface reflected Penny’s hair as an orange blob. She was noticing how the braid of cables connected to the back of Penny’s head reminded Ruby of her own hair braid.
Hm. That was giving her another idea for an art. What if Ruby drew herself, but with her long braid made of wires instead of being made of hair? Wait, why stop there? Why not draw her entire self as made of wires, and metal, and circuits? Lightbulbs for eyes, and treads for feet, and… why not draw herself as a robot? That would probably look so cool. The girl with silver eyes, with a body just as silver to match. Just like Penny. It would be so beautiful.
…Except Ruby couldn’t draw. Well, yeah, she could almost hear Penny and Fria saying that it didn’t matter what the drawing looked like, just how it felt, but she had no idea how to turn ‘me as a robot with a braid made of wires’ into a feeling! She wanted to like, actually have it be recognizable as herself to other people if she was going to draw it.
Maybe Penny would draw it for her? If she asked really nicely? If she paid her? How much did an artwork cost? According to the museums in Atlas, a whole lot. Which was fine. Ruby was like, a funded military project in herself, so she could probably get the money for it if she wanted to. Although… she might have trouble getting the General to approve that expense.
Maybe asking Penny nicely would work. She kind of really wanted to see that the more she thought about it.
“Finished!”
Penny’s voice drew Ruby out of her reverie, and she looked up to see Penny with her hands folded in her lap, smiling broadly at her as the arms lowered themselves to either side of her and halted.
“Well, finished with Part One, at least.” Penny added. “I am installation-ready!”
“Awesome!” Ruby sprang up and carefully picked up the clean rack holding the newly-built circuit board. “Okay, what now?”
“Just hold it—right there—and I will handle the rest!”
Ruby obliged. But then, as she watched the robotic arms curl around Penny to grab the board, she caught sight of a wisp of smoke coming from the elbow joint (Wrist joint? Second elbow joint? Shoulder joint? These arms had a lot of joints), and then in the space of a few seconds, the wisp turned into a full-on puff of smoke.
“Um, Penny?” she said, pointing. “Is that… supposed to happen?”
“What?” The arm yanked away just before it would’ve taken hold of the array, and then instead of turning to look at it, Penny raised the arm until the offending joint was directly in front of her face.
“Oh, no,” she whispered. Then she was raising the other arm, where she found the exact same thing.
“They’ve burned out their primary speed controllers,” she said, a tinge of clear anxiety coming into her voice as the number of steps ahead spiraled out into a drastically larger project. “Not only do the speed controllers need to be replaced, the entirety of the arms need to be taken apart to check for other damage.”
“What’s the big deal?” Ruby said, a little befuddled. “It’s a couple extra hours for the project, sure, but… I’m fine staying up? I’m sure your team won’t mind, too!”
“No.” Penny was suddenly hit by a wave of shame so painful it felt like her missing parts, instead of being meticulously removed, had been gouged out with a rusty shovel. “The process of repairing the arms will take at least three hours for disassembly, inspection, parts replacement, and reassembly. And then the actual installation of the circuit board and the reconstruction will have to proceed much more slowly, to make sure that I don’t overtax the arms, as I just did—which will add at least another three hours—”
She wanted to bury her face in her hands. But right now, she couldn’t.
Well, Ruby had to admit, that was a lot. She was prepared to make sacrifices for Penny, though! “But hey! If I work on one of the arms while you work on the other, that cuts off half the time!”
“Ruby.” Penny’s voice was so thick with misery it almost sounded like it was crackling with static. “Because of what was removed, I currently cannot move any part of my body above my hips. Aside from my face.”
And for that one small mercy, Penny was still thankful. If she had to have this extremely upsetting conversation with Ruby while wearing a blank, expressionless, unmoving face—She did not want to think about it.
Ruby stared. It took a second for the meaning of that to sink in, until she understood why Penny hadn’t moved her head to look at the smoke. “Oh.”
Penny wanted to look away from Ruby, but that would require turning her neck joint. Which was currently inoperative. So all she could do was shift her eyes as far to one side as they would go, and focus on a point so far in the distance that Ruby’s shape was reduced to a blurry blob of gray. She felt embarrassed, she felt useless, she felt like a—a—a pile of scrap, barely operative—
“Well, I’ll fix both arms myself, then!” Ruby said, putting her hands on her hips and making her best confident face. “Might take a little longer because I’ve never worked on these arms before—” Seriously, Ruby was starting to think Penny had custom-built them, because she’d never seen those anywhere, and she knew her heavy machinery, thank you very much. “—But I know machinery as much as I know my own hands!”
“Ruby, no—” A worried noise escaped from somewhere in Penny’s vocal encoder, and at the same moment she realized what she would have to do. As dangerous as it was. “You are organic. You need sleep. You will get none of that if you concern yourself with my… problems.” She would not be an inconvenience to Ruby. She would not be a hindrance because of a problem with herself that no one else had. “If I wait for the speed controllers to cool, the arms will still be somewhat functional, and you can sleep while I use them to reassemble myself to regular mobility and then—”
“No!” Ruby yelped, so fast she startled herself.
Penny’s eyes widened. She had never seen a look in Ruby’s face quite like this one—
Wait. No, she had seen that look. Once. At the docks. When Ruby had said, “I’m going to end this battle.”
Ruby stared at Penny, and this time Penny made herself meet that gaze which was intense and luminous even with her silver irises hidden away under her contacts.
“What if the arms malfunction while they’re working on you?” Ruby said. It was too easy to imagine a bigger fire, things melting, pieces being damaged, maybe a fatal short-circuit—she needed to stop thinking about ways Penny could be hurt before she had a panic attack.
Penny didn’t want to be an inconvenience. She didn’t want to be an inconvenience on account of her being different. She didn’t want to make Ruby worry about her. She didn’t want—
“I would not be harmed,” Penny lied.
Hic.
Penny could not currently clench her hands into fists, so she settled for squeezing her toes together so hard that her diagnostics registered a stressage warning. Oh, how she strongly disliked that untraceable hiccup reflex, the one that she had made multiple attempts to isolate and delete over the past several months, and each time, it would turn out sooner or later that she’d failed once again.
When she had first woken up at Beacon, she had hiccuped on every lie, including lies by omission and other people’s lies if Penny knew that person was lying. And she kept trying to delete the program, the code, the protocol, the whatever form the hiccup took, and overall, the incidence of the hiccuping had decreased over time, which most would take as a positive sign, a sign that Penny was going in the right direction. However, the more seemingly random it became, the more frustrating it became! There were plenty of times Penny had lied without a hiccup! At this point, it made no sense to hiccup so unpredictably! It couldn’t possibly be following any sort of code! What was the pattern?! What controlled this protocol, for it to be silent on some extremely blatant lies, and yet unavoidable on others?! What was wrong with her?
And Ruby was thinking that she’d heard Penny hiccup before. She usually thought it was kind of adorable, because there was no way robots needed to hiccup, right? So she had to be doing it just for fun! Which was such a Penny thing to do! But now… it was occurring to her that maybe the hiccups did have a function. A function which had something to do with how she was ninety-nine-point-nine-nine-nine-nine percent sure Penny had lied right before the hiccup.
“...Do you hiccup whenever you lie?” Ruby said.
A brief flash of panic hit Penny, just long enough for her to ignore the warnings of her logic core and say without any thought at all, “No.” A millisecond later, she realized what she’d said (lied) and braced herself for—
Nothing.
She didn’t hiccup.
Penny had no idea what was happening.
“Oh, okay,” Ruby said. “Sorry…” She wasn’t even sure why she was apologizing. She just felt bad about asking almost immediately. “Um. But. I know what an electronic speed controller is, and if there’s an ESC burned out, that’s bad.”
“The secondary ESCs are still online.”
“Secondary usually means ‘can’t do the job by itself,’ Penny.”
“If I proceed with caution, I will be fine.”
Hic.
Ruby and Penny both froze.
“If I proceed with caution, I have reason to believe I will be fine!” Penny said, her voice much shriller.
Hic.
“It would—it would be better than imposing on you!”
Hic.
Penny fell silent and squeezed her eyes shut, looking like she was on the verge of tears. And Ruby decided the hiccups still weren’t important even if Penny was still clearly lying. Maybe she hiccuped when she said something which made her nervous? Either way, Ruby was going to ignore the hiccups because that was less important than…
“Penny?” Ruby said softly. “I just thought of something faster.”
Penny opened her eyes. It took a moment of prediction algorithm application to realize, the only thing that could be faster—
“I… could install the circuit board in you myself?” Ruby said, holding up the board in question. “And I could put you back together just enough so you can move, and then you could do everything else yourself, safely?”
Almost immediately, Ruby wanted to yank back the question from the open air. Her heart thundered in her chest as Penny stared at her, wide-eyed. Oh gods, what was she thinking? Was Penny going to be mad at her for daring to suggest she could work on something as incredible and complex as her internals? Ruby probably didn’t even deserve to ask to do that, it was for Penny and Penny only—
Penny re-parsed and re-parsed and re-parsed what she’d just heard, and she still couldn’t bring herself to believe it was something Ruby would’ve suggested voluntarily. Penny must have coerced her somehow! She must’ve tricked Ruby into wanting to do this somehow, or—what was the peculiar verb Blake had introduced her to? Guilted, she must have somehow guilted Ruby into asking to help, she must have— “I do not want to make you uncomfortable—I would never ask you to do such a thing—”
“I want to do it!” Ruby burst out. And then she had to resist the overwhelming urge to clap a hand over her mouth. Oh gods, why did she keep saying things like this that would definitely probably make Penny not want to be friends anymore—but she wanted to help Penny! She did! So what if this help meant working on… working on her! She’d done a whole lot of unique things in her life. And, also, there was a tiny little corner of her mind suggesting it would be really cool. It was really hard not to listen to that tiny little corner right now. “I mean, because I want to help my friend! Who needs help! I don’t want you to get hurt! And I know I can help you, I’m one of the best repair technicians in Atlas! It’s one of my essential skills.”
Penny’s eyes darted around the workshop, but she did not know what she was looking for. If she could move her upper body right now, she would be pulling in on herself, trying to hide from the world. Maybe she was looking for something that would allow her to hide in plain sight. “I…”
Her logic core was turning out the same point over and over, reminding her that this was far and away the most reasonable choice. Ruby would still be able to get some sleep. This would be far safer than attempting reassembly with two damaged and possibly incendiary robotic arms.
“...You are absolutely sure you want to do this of your own free will?” she said, afraid to meet Ruby’s gaze.
Ruby let out a short bark of a laugh. “Penny, you’re kind of physically incapable of forcing me to do anything right now.” And then her voice turned quieter, more determined. “So, yeah. I know what I want. I want to help you.”
Penny was still having difficulty believing this was happening. Even if her sensors were all in agreement. But her logic core was insistent, and it was only getting later in the night.
“...I will accept your help, Ruby,” she said. And then she immediately added, “But you can decide to stop at any time! If you get tired, or if you are scared, or uncomfortable—”
“Noted! Pretty sure it’s not gonna happen though.” Ruby stood up, shifting her weight from one foot to the other, and then pulled off her cape, rolling it up and placing it on the table. Then she pinned up her braid so it curled up around her head—better to make sure nothing got in the way, or that nothing would get caught, right?
Meanwhile, Penny was slowly moving the robotic arms away, leaving a space for Ruby to slip in behind her. The arms were making dangerously torturous noises as they moved, something somewhere whining and screeching in a way that was entirely unprecedented. Her logic core kept transmitting bursts of data which pointed out this particular development, as if the core was saying, See? Told you so.
Penny never knew that something as rational as logic could be so incorrigible.
Ruby picked up a workstool. “Um. So. I’m ready? If you are?”
“Yes,” Penny said. And then if she could breathe right now, she would’ve held her breath as Ruby navigated behind her, set the stool down—she heard the deep breath Ruby took—and then turned to look at Penny again.
People always told Ruby it was rude to stare, but she was going to have to stare if she was going to do her job! And… there was so much. Wires and circuits and joints and servos and moving parts and things that glowed and lights and… It was like a little miniature world, all tucked away inside Penny somehow. It made Ruby think of a fairytale she’d read once, where a girl looked into an opening in a tree and found an entire world inside.
Honestly, Ruby had kind of known what to expect. She’d just seen Penny’s blueprints! This was really just the same thing, so it shouldn’t be a big deal. But girl oh girl, her heart and brain were acting like it was a big deal. To be fair to her heart and brain, after the monochromatic, semi-translucent blueprint, everything looked way different in person. Everything here was in full color, and here, Ruby instinctively knew that everything had a weight and a surface and an actual function, with electricity and Aura and life thrumming through it all. So much life.
With so many layers removed, layers which normally deadened sound and kept the ambient noise of Penny’s body to comfortably quiet levels, the whir of her processors and a hundred other mechanisms echoed rhythmically and deeply in Ruby’s ears, like the crashing of ocean waves against a rocky shore. Things glowed and pulsed, the spinning blurs of tiny fan blades peeked out from a few corners, and it was all so much.
In what was most certainly and definitely not an overreaction in any way, shape, or form, Penny was starting to think she might be about to spontaneously collapse into all of her constituent parts. Every second that Ruby didn’t say anything was another second where Penny wondered if something was going terribly wrong, either with herself or with their friendship. What was she thinking about? Was she about to change her mind and decide she wanted nothing to do with Penny ever again? Was she about to get mad at Penny and tell her this was a stupid idea and she should do her own repairs herself?
Penny felt so incredibly vulnerable right now, and strangely enough, the feeling didn’t have much to do with not being able to move half her body. This was more than she’d ever shown someone, even to her own teammates; she had literally opened herself up and entrusted Ruby with this sight and this task. What if it was too much?
Ruby finally managed to shake herself out of her reverie. Penny was probably nervous! And still thinking she was inconveniencing Ruby! Ruby had to let Penny know that everything was cool and fine and that she still wanted to do this! Maybe even wanted to do it more now that she was seeing all this.
She needed to say something. Something that would comfort Penny. Something that would make it clear everything was okay. Something, something, something…
“Wow!”
(If Weiss or Blake or Yang had been there at that moment to hear that, they probably would’ve simultaneously facepalmed.)
“Is that a good wow?” Penny said tentatively.
“Ab-so-lute-ly!”
Due to Ruby’s near-complete lack of touch and temperature sensation, she didn’t notice that she was blushing. And because Penny did not have a visual on Ruby right now, she didn’t notice Ruby was blushing, either. But Ruby was blushing, across her whole face. (And Penny hadn’t yet added in a blush mechanism, but if she had one, she would also be blushing right now.)
“I am glad to hear that,” Penny said. Warm happiness and relief spread through her at the same time as it hit her—Ruby really did want to help. And all this was just as cool to her as everything else about Penny. “Do you see where the circuit board is intended to go?” she asked eventually, because they did need to actually begin making progress at some point.
Ruby’s eyes went to the holographic blueprint which was still floating on the table at the center of the room, and then the corresponding part inside Penny. “Yep. It’s, uh, node H24-66, right?”
“Correct!”
“All right.” Ruby hefted her soldering iron, squinting at the gap. “I see what I gotta do. Do you want it hooked up to anything besides the input and the output?”
“No, thank you.”
They fell into a silence as Ruby moved the board into position, slotting it neatly into the node, almost like sliding extra RAM into an expansion slot. Then came the soldering, which she was as slow and careful with as possible, watching like a hawk as the metal shifted and solidified.
One of the robotic arms moved with another screechy, protesting whine, and for a moment, Ruby worried that Penny was trying again to do the job by herself, but then the arm simply jerked to a stop next to her and curled itself over her shoulder like an observer peering at her work.
“Camera built into that?” she said, stopping long enough to glimpse a small lens built into the arm just below the lowest joint. “Can you see everything okay?”
“Yes. You are not doing anything wrong; I just wanted to be able to offer a second angle.”
“Totally fine! I mean, I’m glad, but also, if I was doing something wrong, I’d want you to tell me.” And then, on a complete whim, Ruby reached out and patted the arm like Penny might. It felt a little silly, but also, it really looked like a curious little animal or something right now, the way it was situated and the way it was moving!
Until now, Ruby never really understood why Penny always took the time to be polite to computers and machines and things and especially when they weren’t working well. In Atlas, these things were just means to an end, and malfunctions were nothing more than impediments to success. But now she looked at this robotic arm and she could hear Penny saying, It is hurt, but it is trying its best! Which was something she’d said before about other machines. And Ruby was feeling it now. This brave contraption had literally burned itself out in service of giving Penny a cool upgrade. She respected that.
“Heh, I’m thinking more like you every week,” she said aloud as she finished the final bit of soldering. “And the circuit board is installed!”
“Oh!” Penny blinked, and then ran a diagnostic, which immediately found the new hardware connection and set about integrating it properly into her systems. The diagnostic and the camera could not detect any issues. “That was much faster than I expected.”
“Told you I’m good at this,” Ruby said proudly. She tilted the soldering iron upwards and mimicked blowing smoke off the tip, like an Old Vacuo gunslinger would do with the barrel of an actual gun. “I might need you to talk me through the reassembly, though,” she said, replacing the iron in her hands with an adjustable hex wrench and a screwdriver. Then she paused, noticing something in Penny’s internals that she hadn’t been expecting.
She looked over to the holographic blueprint, still floating above the projection table. Then she looked back to Penny. Then to the blueprint. Then back to Penny. She blinked several times to make sure she wasn’t seeing things.
“Penny? There’s something in here which shouldn’t be here.”
“What?” Penny said, a little bit of anxiety creeping into her voice.
“There’s a green box…” Ruby stared at it, trying to get some sense of its purpose. It was embedded into Penny’s lower back, only partially uncovered by what’d been removed, so she couldn’t see its full shape or size, but it was most definitely not supposed to be there. On Penny’s blueprint, this section appeared as nothing more than a non-removable structural section of Penny’s chassis. But to Ruby’s own eyes, this green box did not look structural. In fact, she could see points where it could be removed, and not just that—she could see mechashift components.
“It’s just below the lowest mounting points for your flight mode,” she said. “Do you have any idea what it is?”
Penny did not have any idea, but just as she was about to ask Ruby to investigate further, something somewhere in the recesses of her memory unlocked, and then for the second time in her known life, Penny was hearing the voice of her father.
“No, not yet, Penny. That is only for the gravest of emergencies.”
For a moment, all Penny could do was let shock consume her as she replayed the voice over and over again. Her father. Her father’s words. Her father had left this with her. It was from her father. Her father.
…The gravest of emergencies. What did that mean?
In some regards, Penny hoped she never had to find out, and in some regards, she hoped she would find out, because maybe this mysterious component was how she would see her father again. But she would follow his request for now.
“Penny?” Ruby said, yanking her out of her daze.
“It’s fine,” Penny said. “Do not worry about it, please.”
“You sure?”
“Completely!” Penny said, and for a moment she was worried she’d said it too sharply. But Ruby said, “Sure thing,” and then she was resuming the reassembly job without further questions.
Ruby wasn’t fully convinced that this was a nonissue, but… Penny was allowed to keep her secrets.
Several minutes passed in silence, until Penny broke it by saying something she felt was long overdue: “Thank you.”
“Hm?” Ruby looked up from a bit of rewiring.
“Thank you for doing this.” Penny wasn’t just thanking Ruby for volunteering her time and skill like this. She was also thanking Ruby for the entire idea of this project. It was brilliant.
“Huh?” Ruby blinked, and then nodded rapidly. “Of course, Penny! I’m so excited that I’m gonna help my awesome robot friend taste things!”
Penny shifted her gaze down, focusing on her dress where it bunched in her lap. “Synthetic person.”
“Hm?” Ruby blinked at the back of Penny’s head for a moment, and then understanding dawned on her. “Oh, right! Sorry! I’m gonna help my awesome synthetic person friend taste things!”
Ruby said it with just as much energy the second time around, but there was a question in her mind. And Penny knew there was a question in Ruby’s mind. She was waiting for it to land like a boulder thrown into a calm pond.
“Um, Penny…?”
Penny tried to take a deep, cooling breath, only to remember she couldn’t move those parts right now, and had to settle for closing her eyes and trying to emotionally brace herself for whatever might come next. “Yes?”
“Can I ask why you like being called a synthetic person more than a robot?”
It was… Ruby was pretty sure Penny referred to herself as a synthetic person every time she talked about herself, or nearly every time, and even when she didn’t use synthetic person she still never used the word robot. And she was so curious, because, well, Penny was a robot! Which was awesome! So why did she prefer not to call herself that?
Penny was silent through Ruby’s reinstallment of four more mechanical parts, and then she spoke. Choosing her words carefully.
“What do you think of when you hear the word robot?”
“You,” Ruby said, no hesitation or consideration, not even enough time for a heartbeat between Penny’s question and her answer.
And, despite the gravity of the situation, Penny could not help the smile which crossed her face, the jolt of happy energy which pulsed through every component of her body. Ruby…
“But before meeting me, what did you think of?” she said finally.
“Huh.” With a twist of the hex wrench, another servo was in place, and Ruby set about reconnecting the wiring. “Atlas bots, I guess. Knights, Paladins, pretty much everything we’ve ever put in the field.”
“Exactly. When people hear the word robot, they think of tools. Weapons. Objects. Things which are not people. Things which are physically incapable of disobeying an order. They think of movies like Silent Spring. Yes, I am a robot. But if I tell people that I am a robot they will not think of me. They will not think of a girl with orange hair and freckles who likes birds and insects and collecting interesting words. They will think of all the other things already deeply associated with robots. And it will be much harder to convince them I am a person.”
“Oh.”
Ruby was silent, but Penny registered several more connections in her internals coming back online—the repairs continuing.
“It makes sense,” Ruby said finally. “I guess it’s kinda true for me too, because if I tell people I was grown in a lab to laser-beam Grimm with my eyes, they’ll probably start seeing me as Frankenstein’s Monster or something else from a bad horror movie.”
Another circuit board clicked back into place, followed by its protective cover.
“The two of us could make the worst horror movie ever, actually! You see crowds of people running away screaming in terror, and then the camera cuts to reveal it’s just us two girls standing there and being cute.” Ruby shook her head. “People really do get scared of the most ridiculous stuff, huh?”
“Yes. But even if their fear is unjustified, it is still fear.” Penny felt a tightness in her chest that had nothing to do with the reassembly. “I do not want to be feared.”
Ruby reassembled several more servo connections without saying anything, and Penny had just enough time to realize, wait, Ruby hadn’t asked for any guidance yet—and then Ruby asked, “Penny, do you know where the word robot comes from?”
Penny searched her databases, and realized she did not know the word’s etymology. Which felt uncharacteristically uncurious of her. She could just look it up on the CCTnet right now, but it would be more fun to hear Ruby’s answer. “Surprisingly, I do not.”
“Oh, good, now I get to tell you! Ever heard of The Tale Of The Blacksmith And The Robot?”
“No…” Penny had meant to look it up after Professor Carmel had mentioned it to her, but she had not yet found the time to do so.
“They say it’s the oldest fairytale in existence. Even older than things like The Girl In The Tower, or the Shallow Sea, or… everything, really.” Ruby turned and looked at the robot arm’s camera so Penny could see how much she was smiling, before continuing with the reassembly. “And it’s my favorite fairytale!”
Long, long ago, perhaps longer than memory itself, there was a small village in the middle of a forest as wide and deep as any ocean. Innumerable creatures big and small roamed these woods, some more dangerous than others. To protect themselves from the worst of these creatures, the people of this village needed weapons. And to forge these weapons, they needed a blacksmith.
And to the immense fortune of this village, the blacksmith that made her home here was said to be the finest in the land. She was tall and strong and sturdy, and never asked for payment beyond what someone could afford. Visitors to the village told her she should bring her talents to the royal capital, that her skill was being wasted out here in such a secluded place. But the blacksmith was content where she was, to stay with her friends and where green trees stretched in every direction like a great leafy blanket draped over the land. The people of this place loved their blacksmith, even if from time to time they found her to be a little stranger than the rest of them.
This blacksmith talked to her creations as if they were people. She murmured hello to them when she first withdrew them from the forge, still glowing red-hot and not quite formed. She spoke casually and lightly to her creations as she hammered them into shape and tempered and engraved them, as if they were holding a conversation with her. She brushed her fingers lightly along the gleaming sides of her finished products, as if stroking a pet’s fur. She whispered goodbye to her creations when they left her workshop in the hands of a new owner.
And if anyone asked the blacksmith why she did this, why she spoke to things which never seemed to answer back, she would always reply with a gentle smile and the same words.
“Better to treat matter as soul, than to treat soul as matter.”
The townspeople didn’t fully understand what she meant, but in the end, they found it harmless. And besides, if that belief was what allowed the blacksmith to make such beautiful and durable weapons, they were more than happy to let her do that.
And if people noticed that the blacksmith’s weapons always flew a little truer, swung with a bit more strength, sat in the hands with the best balance, well… one could never say for sure whether it was because of her skill, or because she treated her creations in such a unique way.
However, there was one woman in the village who wholeheartedly believed in what the blacksmith said. Whether they were lovers, or friends, or something else, is an answer that has been lost to time, but they were undeniably the closest of companions. Where the blacksmith was a creator, not a fighter, her companion was the village’s bravest and hardiest warrior. She was the one who the village could always call on to fend off whatever deadly creatures or roaming bandits might threaten them. The blacksmith always crafted the finest, most beautiful weapons for her warrior companion, and the warrior always wielded them with the greatest pride.
But this is not the story of the blacksmith and the warrior. This is the story of what came after the day the warrior fell in battle, staggering back into the village with a thousand claw wounds and the slain carcass of the largest wolf anyone had ever seen, succumbing to her injuries before anyone found her.
The blacksmith was inconsolable, and spent days grieving alone in her home. Until one rainy morning, before anyone else in the village had risen, she left her bed, walked into her workshop, and began crafting a memorial.
Out of huge chunks of raw metals, she shaped and forged and shaped again and reshaped, the bending and twisting of metal as natural to her as the bending of a rope. She worked on little food and less sleep, and the people of the village worried deeply for her.
And then, one evening at dusk, with the fading light faintly reflecting off the blacksmith’s gleaming pauldron, she unveiled her work in the center of the village.
A statue of the warrior, made with every kind of metal in the blacksmith’s workshop. The warrior’s likeness was captured mid-pose, charging into battle, and the blackshield had placed the warrior’s actual sword and shield in the hands of the statue. Everything about the warrior had been rendered with the greatest of care, a tremendous achievement of metalwork.
For the next several weeks, the statue watched over the village, and each night the blacksmith would sit beside it and talk to it. No one was sure if she was talking to one of her creations as she always did, or if she was talking to the warrior that she grieved for. Perhaps it was both.
The warrior’s name had been a name that would, much later, take on another meaning. But for now, it was still just a name. And that warrior’s name was Robot.
It was almost a month later, when the town awoke to find that the statue of Robot was gone.
Everyone was upset, and none more so than the blacksmith. However, she was also confused. She knew how heavy the statue was. She had barely been able to move it to the center of the village herself. How could someone have stolen it away in the night without waking anyone?
And then the blacksmith noticed the footprints in the dirt around the statue’s plinth. One set which led up to the plinth and back away—her own, from the evening before. And then one set of footprints, which only led away from the statue.
As if the statue had simply walked away.
Several days later, the village was attacked by a flock of enormous winged beasts, big enough to snatch up a person in their diamond-sharp talons. The blacksmith, who was more eager than anyone to step into the stead of the fallen warrior, was defending the village with two of her own weapons, slicing through wings and beaks with a pair of viciously sharp battle-axes—until, too late, she heard the rush of wings, behind her, and it would’ve been the end of her story, if not for the sound of talons clattering off a shield a moment later.
The blacksmith turned to see a very familiar shield being held aloft over her, one that had been forged by her hands and presented to the warrior. Buckled into the shield was a gleaming bronze arm, and the blacksmith followed the arm up to a body of more metal, and a very familiar face, one that she had shaped herself. The blacksmith recognized the sculpted hair, too. It had previously been a solid, unmoving chunk, but now it flexed slowly with the statue’s movements like a thin sheet of metal.
The statue of Robot stood over the blacksmith, protecting her from a fatal blow with one arm. And then, with the other arm which wielded Robot’s sword, it slashed through the beast’s head.
The rest of the beasts fled within minutes, driven off by the statue which could move and speak and wield a sword and shield just as powerfully as Robot.
The blacksmith did not know what to do, seeing the face of the dead warrior moving again in a form she had never seen before. But then she remembered her own words.
“Better to treat matter as soul, than to treat soul as matter.”
There was something before her which seemed very much like matter, and yet very much like soul, too. And if given a choice… the blacksmith knew what she would choose. She stepped forward, and extended a hand of friendship to the now-animated statue.
The people of the village were confused and afraid to see metal apparently brought to life and moving like a human, but they had also seen the statue defend them without hesitation, and when it became clear that the blacksmith was determined to befriend the statue, their suspicion fell away.
And so, the statue of Robot became a member of the village, its unflinching protector. But it was not Robot. It knew whose image it had been sculpted in. It remembered the blacksmith’s words of grief, all of them. It could wield Robot’s sword and shield just as easily as Robot herself had. But the statue was not Robot. It was someone else entirely, someone new.
And yet, the people of the village needed something to call her, and because they were looking into a metallic face which was so painfully familiar, they began to call her the robot. Something which felt right to call the face which lived with them again, while also reminding them that she was someone else entirely. The woman made of metal who defended their village was not Robot, but the robot.
The blacksmith could not help but be a little disappointed that this was not the Robot who she had grieved for, but whenever she began to feel the slightest creep of bitterness towards the robot for not being her fallen friend, she always whispered the words to herself.
“Better to treat matter as soul, than to treat soul as matter.”
Years passed, and the blacksmith and the robot became friends on their own terms. The robot could not speak, but it communicated with sign instead, and there were many nights where it stayed up with the blacksmith, conversing together about anything and everything in the world, and not parting until the early hours of the morning. The blacksmith forged entirely new weapons for the robot, weapons that it could call its own instead of the weapons of someone else. They grew as close as the blacksmith and the warrior had, and as the village grew and changed, the blacksmith and the robot seemed to be the two constants of it.
However, with every passing year, the robot became more and more aware that the blacksmith was aging and the robot was not. It was greatly distressed by this, but it also knew there was nothing it could do to stop the march of time.
By now, the robot’s prowess in combat was unmatched, and the village had not been threatened in decades. Beasts and bandits alike knew to give a wide berth to the village of the unstoppable robot. It shook off blows that no one else could, and where it did receive nicks, or scratches, or dents, the blacksmith was always there to repair it.
But then, one day, the village received word of a terrible army from an enemy kingdom approaching, wielding contraptions which chewed through the trees to make way for its massive body of soldiers and weapons, carving straight through the forest. They had weapons that could smash castle walls into smithereens or slice a person in half, and there were thousands of them.
As the villagers prepared to flee, the robot decided to stay and face the army. It would give the villagers—and the other villages farther away—more time to leave. And perhaps the robot could deal meaningful damage to the opposing army, and weaken it.
The robot also knew it would likely die. But it had made peace with this fact. It believed that was its purpose, to protect the village. That was what it had been made for, after all.
However, just as the villagers were leaving and the sound of war horns could be heard in the distance, the blacksmith put a hand on the robot’s shoulder, and told it to flee. The blacksmith would stay behind and fight the invading army.
The robot couldn’t believe what it was hearing. It looked at the blacksmith, older and grayer and more wrinkled and not as strong as she once was, and it asked why the blacksmith wanted it to leave when defending the village at any cost was the robot’s purpose.
The blacksmith gave it a sad smile, and said, “You may have had a purpose when I built you, when you were still just matter, but the moment there was a spark of life in you, the moment you became something else, your purpose was gone. A soul does not have an inbuilt purpose. It simply is.”
The robot was moved by this reply, but still it asked to stay with the blacksmith. It wanted to fight together with her against the invasion.
But the blacksmith replied, “I was the reason for your creation; it would be shameful if I were the reason for your destruction as well.”
Once again, the robot was struck powerfully by the blacksmith’s words, but once again, it hesitated. It wanted to know if the blacksmith, aging and no longer eager to fight, could possibly offer any resistance against this invading army.
And finally, the blacksmith said, “I am not a fighter. But I have made every weapon in this village sing, and now I will make them thirst for the blood of our enemies.”
This, the robot understood. And finally, it realized that no one’s fate was ever set in stone, not even the fate of someone who was made of stone.
The robot left. The blacksmith remained.
The villages farther away never saw the invasion. When scouting parties were sent out weeks later, they discovered that the invading army’s path of destruction ended directly at the blacksmith’s village, in a sea of bodies and blood and wreckage and ruins. There was no trace of the blacksmith.
But the robot lived on, and she chose to wander the planet, forever finding new journeys, new people, new things, for the rest of her days. In fact, some say she still wanders the planet. And she never forgot the blacksmith, nor did she ever forget the blacksmith’s words.
“Better to treat matter as soul, than to treat soul as matter.”
“And there it is,” Ruby said softly. She sat back, twirling the screwdriver in her hands and inspecting her handiwork. “The Tale of The Blacksmith and The Robot.”
Penny’s processors whirred as she processed the final parts of the story, a deep warmth filtering through her body. The story had left her with a kind of calmness that was exceptionally rare for her to feel—she had only previously felt it after the times she’d told people about being synthetic, and after she’d read her own favorite fairytale for the first time. And curiously—the good kind of curiously—there was a particular similarity between Penny’s favorite fairytale and Ruby’s favorite. Now that she’d noticed the similarity, Penny wanted to study it, and look for a connection between the two stories. But that could be done later. For now—the calmness. It was a blissful feeling, and she savored it for as long as her emotional processors would generate it. And when that feeling faded away, Penny twisted around to look at Ruby, her eyes wide.
“Ruby, that was a sensational story! Thank you for telling me!”
“Heh, glad you like it!” Ruby scratched the back of her neck as she added, “And, I promise I wasn’t trying to convince you to start calling yourself a robot or anything! I just wanted to show you a nice thing about the word robot! It comes from a fairytale about a woman made out of metal who came to life by accident and protected people and made friends and, and everything! So robots are named after someone who was a real person and was really nice! So, I guess if someone ever tries to be mean to you by calling you a robot in a mean way, you can remember the first robot, and maybe you can try to pretend that’s what they’re talking about instead?”
Penny’s entire body tensed up, but not from negative emotions. Rather, it was from the sheer validation of what Ruby was telling her and suggesting. It truly was comforting to know that the word robot could mean something as powerful as that. “I am filing that suggestion away in my memory with the highest of retrievability.”
And then Penny realized something else. She should not have been able to tense her entire body right now. And she most certainly should not have been able to twist around to look at Ruby—!
“I can move again!” she gasped, before rapidly moving everything else in her upper body. “I have full mobility—” Then she noticed that there were no removed parts of her anywhere to be seen in the workshop, not even her outer armor plates. “Ruby, did you finish?”
“Yeah! Everything except the skin.” Ruby tapped the handle of the screwdriver against Penny’s back. “I just got into a groove while telling you the story, and I didn’t want to stop, so I just kept going and going and it was really easy to see where everything went and how to reassemble it!” She shrugged. “I mean, repairs are the second easiest thing in the world after combat, so I’m not surprised.” And then she looked away, crossing her arms and wincing a little. “Is it okay that I did it so fast…?”
“Yes.” A quick diagnostic confirmed that everything inside her was exactly where it was supposed to be. “It’s perfect!”
Because she had the ability again, and because she wanted to, Penny jumped forward and hugged Ruby, remembering at the last moment to calculate the movement to not knock Ruby over. “Thank you!”
Ruby, grinning wildly, didn’t really have anything to say in response, so she just hugged Penny back as tightly as she could and tried to imagine what the hug felt like.
They stayed that way for several minutes as the stars in the night sky above and around them slowly moved past, the passage of time always present but momentarily forgotten.
Finally, Penny pulled back, her hands still resting on Ruby’s shoulders, and gave voice to something she’d never considered before tonight.
“Ruby, you may call me a robot. I am giving you permission! Because I know which robot you are thinking of when you say the word, and I know exactly how you intend it. And that word feels special when you use it, when you say it, in a way that it does not for anyone else.”
It was true. The way everyone else said robot was quick and careless like someone snapping their fingers, only carrying an intent of talking about a nonliving object. But when Ruby said robot, she said it the same way she said Penny’s name, with respect and unabashed joy, taking just a little bit longer than everyone else to say the word, as if she was savoring its sound and its feel and its meaning.
Ruby sucked in a surprised breath, but she could see how sure Penny was about this, so sure that Ruby didn’t even need to ask if she was sure. So instead, she said, “Thank you, Penny Pallas, my awesome and cool robot girl friend!”
For some reason, that sent them both into a fit of giggles.
Notes:
Writing a RWBY-style fairytale was fun! And this wasn't the only one I've written for this story!
Apologies for the delay in posting, I usually try to do it earlier in the day but I had technical difficulties.
Chapter 30: Sense-ational
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
Now able to move again, Penny was busying herself with repairing the robotic arms. At least, until she paused, registered the time, and frowned in confusion. “Shouldn’t my teammates be back by now?”
Ruby shrugged. “I guess they’re really making sure they pick the right snacks?”
Weiss, Blake, and Yang stood on the airship pad, watching helplessly as the last airship to Beacon until tomorrow morning rose into the air. It turned slowly to the east, dipping to one side as if taunting them for how close they’d come to catching it, and then roared away into the night.
“This was your idea to go into the city,” Weiss said, leveling a piercing glare at Yang.
Yang, lugging not just the bag Ruby had given them but four other bags filled with a sampling of every kind of shelf-stable snack food to be found in the city of Vale, shrugged. “It was for the best. The convenience store on campus is insultingly overpriced. Have you seen what they charge for ramen cups?”
“Yes, all of that money saved which will now be wasted in a different way because we have to pay for a hotel room!” Weiss snapped.
Yang appeared entirely unfazed as she lowered the bags to the ground and pulled out her scroll. “We’re fine, my dad will pay for it,” she said, dialing.
Weiss blinked, because even with the large household and the motorcycle for Yang, the Xiao Longs did not seem like a family that was… lavish.
“Didn’t you say he would only cover emergencies?” Blake said. “Which. This is not.”
“Probably. But I know my dad. He still feels guilty about how he basically left me to fend for myself for three months when I was seven. If I ask nicely enough, he’ll cave.”
Weiss and Blake stared at Yang as she raised the scroll to her ear, something like amazement and sadness and disbelief warring for control in both of them.
“It’s not a sore subject! Really!” Yang said. “He’s been an awesome dad for the last decade to make up for it. We’re the Xiao Longs. We’ve lost too much family to ever hold a grudge against each other for… Xiao Long.”
Despite the somber subject, Weiss could not hold back a groan. Yang winked at her, finished dialing, and went back to doing what any spunky, inventive teenage girl would do if given the opportunity.
“Hey, Dad? —Don’t worry, I’m fine, sorry for waking you up… So, I’m stuck in the city with my team, we need a room somewhere for three, with a minibar and a hot tub and—”
The next afternoon
“Well, aside from missing the airship, how was the snack-gathering excursion?” Penny said to Weiss, Blake, and Yang, Team BSYP together again in their dorm room. (With Ruby as well, who was sprawled out asleep on Penny’s bunk)
“Fun!” Yang said. “I actually found a place in the city that sells Miss Mary’s Mud Pies, which for some reason I only ever saw in Patch before—”
“Mud?” Penny said, extremely alarmed.
“…You know, I never thought about how weird it is that we call them mud pies, but don’t worry, they’re an actual food.” Yang dug around in one of the shopping bags before pulling out something wrapped in foil. “They’re like, a thick sandwich made of two chocolate cake circles with a layer of vanilla creme between. And they are the most delicious things in existence.”
Oh, so they were a dessert item! Penny was still flabbergasted (another word she liked, very exciting to say) by the naming choice, though.
“And they’re really only a thing in Patch, so you’re one lucky gal.”
“Yay!” Penny said. “If everyone else is prepared, I am tasting-ready!”
A table from the common space outside was quickly maneuvered into the room as a testing space for Penny, upon which Yang laid out an array of items.
“Someone wake up Ruby,” Yang said as Penny sat down. “I don’t think she wants to miss this.”
At the mention of her name, Ruby’s head shot up out of what Penny was quite sure had been a sound sleep. “Huh, whuh—” And then she disappeared into a cloud of silver, which shot up to Weiss’s bunk, where Ruby reformed, perched on the edge and blinking down at everyone. “Oh, false alarm.”
“Please get off my bed,” Weiss said in a tone which was only mildly strained—something that Penny was proud of her for, considering how territorial Weiss could be about her bunk.
“Sorry. Reflexes.” Ruby semblanced back to Penny’s bunk, and then noticed the setup. “Wait, are you trying the new sensors now?!”
“Indeed!” Penny said. “I was about to turn the taste sensors on—I thought it would be best to do one sense at a time, for a purer experience. I’ll try my smell sensors another day!”
“Oh, this should be good.” Ruby leaned forward, watching closely, as did Yang and Weiss; Blake was holding up her scroll and recording everything.
The installation of the actual sensor arrays in Penny’s mouth and nose had thankfully gone much smoother than the first part of the project, and Penny had also been able to do it herself. So now, the only thing left to do was run the command to bring the taste systems online, and…
Well, currently, Penny was tasting the air. Which tasted like… air. She had no frame of reference, which was to be expected. And considering how ubiquitous air was, it would be odd if it had a distinct taste.
“Everything is functioning normally so far,” she said, before reaching for a nearby item: a bar of chocolate. As much as she wanted to try the aforementioned mud pie first because of the name and Yang’s endorsement, it seemed sensible to start with something very simple. So, a bar of chocolate.
She took great care with unwrapping the bar, since her body’s standard operating temperature was above the melting point of chocolate.
She stared at the now-unwrapped chocolate for a moment. She’d never had much interest in chocolate before, since she didn’t find its texture to be especially exciting. But now, a whole new world was about to open up to her!
Right. She knew how to eat things; she’d done it plenty of times before. With her teammates and Ruby watching, she broke off a square of chocolate and placed it in her mouth, and—
Her language processors stopped entirely. Wait, no, they hadn’t stopped, they were suddenly demanding so much processing power that they were frozen up even with every spare cycle allocated to them. For a moment, all Penny could do was sit there with her mouth slightly open as the taste of chocolate melted into her mouth for the first time ever, and it felt as if it wasn’t just melting into her mouth, but into her entire chassis, into her consciousness, into her soul.
This wasn’t just a whole new world—it was a whole new universe. It defied comparison to anything in her existing memory banks, and Penny was realizing that her language processors would not be able to accurately capture the full experience anytime soon. How could they, when she was encountering an entirely new universe? A universe for which there was absolutely nothing in her code to anticipate—although, currently her consciousness matrix was frantically writing volumes of code based on this single taste of chocolate.
“I take it from the extremely loud whirring that you like it?” Yang said with a chuckle.
It was at this point that Penny noticed other things about her reaction—such as the whirring, or having been frozen still for the past thirty seconds, or the fact that she had unintentionally turned up the brightness of her eyes to a setting just below ‘flashlight.’
She pried processing resources away from her language processors, commanded them to mostly ignore taste for the time being, and rediscovered the ability to speak.
“My life has changed forever,” she said, which was not an accurate description of the chocolate itself, but was an accurate description of the emotional impact it was having on her.
“I think that’s about what we expected,” Weiss said with a smile.
Penny was about to break off another square of chocolate when she realized… Wait. Would more chocolate mean more taste?
And then Penny, in what was not the most logical of decisions, but what was most certainly an emotional decision, shoved half the bar in her mouth.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa!” Yang and Blake and Weiss all startled forward and then stopped, as if they’d briefly wanted to stop Penny. But Penny wouldn’t have let it happen even if they’d tried. She was a synthetic person with the grip strength of an Ursa, and she was not going to let anyone deter her from her experiments in discovering all of the intricacies of the flavor of chocolate!
“Oh my gods, Penny,” Yang said, laughing a little bit. “Pace yourself, girl, we’ve got a whole table to get through here.”
Right. Penny slowed her chewing as logic and the limitations of her body caught up with her thoughts. Pacing herself really was important, with so many things to try. If she was not careful she could overload her incinerator, which had a tragically finite capacity.
In regards to the theory of ‘more chocolate equals more taste,’ early results suggested that Penny had hit upon diminishing returns. Perhaps more chocolate than her first bite, but less chocolate than her second bite, would result in more taste. Further experimentation was certainly required!
She finished her second-ever bite of chocolate, and finally found a word to describe this. “That was sensational!”
Yang spoke up.“So, that was dark chocolate—”
“Which is the superior kind of chocolate,” Weiss interjected.
“No, it isn’t,” Yang and Blake replied at the same time.
“I partake in chocolate the way it was intended to be enjoyed,” Weiss said with a sniff. “Not that watered-down rubbish that you two dare to call chocolate.”
“Actually, I get why you like dark chocolate. Because it’s just as bitter as your cold, dead heart—”
Before her teammates could come to blows, Penny had to clarify one very important thing from that exchange. “There are other kinds of chocolate?!” she asked. She’d never paid much attention to classifications of foods she didn’t enjoy, so this was a new discovery!
“Yes! And—” Yang slid another bar of chocolate towards her. “—It’s called milk chocolate, and it is objectively the best kind.”
“It’s better than dark chocolate, at least,” Blake said.
“It’s sacrilegious,” Weiss said.
Penny unwrapped the new bar, and immediately noticed this variety had a lighter shade. Well, that must explain why dark chocolate was called that.
Weiss and Yang were watching her archly as she broke off another square, and—
Oh. Oh.
Now that this was the second thing Penny had tasted, she suddenly had a frame of reference, and if possible, the first chocolate she’d tasted suddenly became even more sensational.
The first chocolate was deeper and richer and sharper, and this was sweeter and lighter and—oh, her language processors were finally suggesting words! Still, she hoped to find so many more! Maybe she should make some paintings expressing how this made her feel!
She let the chocolate sit, melting it rapidly on her tongue, and her wonderment grew ever-greater. Chocolate. Its electrical current was creating waves in her consciousness which resonated through her code like great digital waves. She had never felt her code, the very fabric of her body itself, responding in this way. She practically vibrated.
“So!” Yang said, waggling her eyebrows. “Which one do you like better?”
Penny blinked at her. She was supposed to choose? How could she do that?
“I like them both!” she said brightly.
Weiss and Yang turned to glare at each other, and then both sighed.
“I suppose I should have expected that from you, Penny.” And then Weiss narrowed her eyes. “—But if you pick white chocolate as your favorite, then I am disowning you as my partner.”
Penny had reason to believe this was sarcasm, but even so, she decided to affix onto her face the most dismayed expression she could construct.
“She’s joking!” Yang said quickly. “Do you see what your obsession with dark chocolate has done to our wonderful teammate, Weiss?”
Weiss scoffed. Blake pushed another chocolate bar towards Penny. “This one is white chocolate, and it’s my favorite.”
“And out of the many, many millions of things about you, Blake Belladonna, that is the one and only thing which I do not like,” Yang said.
“Likewise for you and your milk chocolate,” Blake shot back.
“Unlike milk chocolate, which at least has a discernible amount of cacao, that slop is not even chocolate!” Weiss said. “It’s just… chewable sugar!”
Penny was now extremely curious about white chocolate, and she wasted no time opening the wrapper—well. That certainly was chocolate which was white.
Penny bit into it, and once again it was like a supernova blooming across her consciousness. Was this just because it was her first time, or did all things which tasted good taste this good?!
Ruby was the greatest person in the world, Penny decided. It was not even a little bit of an exaggeration. The taste sensors were her favorite addition to her body since she’d discovered the existence of temporary tattoos.
“It sounds like it’s good,” Blake said. And that was when Penny realized she was whirring again. She didn’t really mind, though. “Is it your favorite?”
Penny looked at each of her teammates, all of whom were watching her expectantly, all clearly hoping she would pick their favorite chocolate.
After a moment’s thought, she decided—it would only be fair for the balance of the team if she liked all three equally.
Ruby was feeling weird feelings.
For pretty much the first however many years of her life she’d been alive (hard to say on account of being grown in a lab, she just said she was seventeen because that was the age to be a first-year student), she hadn’t had many weird feelings. But ever since coming to Beacon, she’d been getting more and more weird feelings.
The reason they were weird was because she didn’t know how they made her feel. Which was maybe an insane thing to say about a feeling, since the whole point of a feeling was that it made her feel something, but… but with these weird feelings, Ruby knew she was feeling something! She just didn’t know what that something was because she’d never felt it before!
A lot of things caused the weird feelings, too. They could happen when she was with Penny, or with Team BSYP, or in class, or anywhere around Beacon at all, or… anything.
The current cause of Ruby’s weird feelings: Watching Penny discover the sensations of taste for the first time.
She was definitely happy Penny could have this experience! No doubt about that! And she was proud that she’d been the one to think of the concept and that it was a little bit of her work in the incredible machine which was Penny’s body. And seeing Penny so happy and excited and smiling endlessly was the kind of thing Ruby would never get tired of looking at! But also…
Ruby kept thinking about how she would never be able to taste or smell things. Because she couldn’t just design a sensory array to build into herself. There was nothing she could plug herself into to run a diagnostic. Whatever that dead scientist had done to her when he created her, it was permanent. She was stuck like this with broken senses forever, unlike Penny.
That was the price she had to pay for being extra good in battle, she knew. It made her better at saving the world!
But.
Ruby didn’t want to say she was jealous. She didn’t want to sound ungrateful. She didn’t want to sound like she was jealous of Penny. That would be mean to Penny. But. She kind of maybe potentially theoretically was possibly somewhat a little bit jealous?
And that was what made this feeling weird, because the good part and the bad part basically canceled each other out, leaving Ruby with the definite feeling of having a feeling, with no idea what the feeling was.
Ugh. She didn’t want to think about this. So she was going to concentrate on the much more fun thing right now! Which was: watching Penny be happy!
And, oh girl, Penny sure was happy right now as she discovered her first-ever bowl of fruit salad. She had to be careful with it, because of the high water content of the chunks of fruit, but seeing the expressions on Penny’s face was kinda like magic.
“Penny?” she said, as Penny finished navigating the flavor profile of a raspberry.
Penny wiped away a little trace of red juice from the corner of her mouth and gave Ruby a questioning look. “What is up?”
“Would it, um, would you mind, if it was…” Ruby was really quickly losing her nerve—she didn’t want to make Penny annoyed, but also… “Could you tell me what it’s like to taste things? Because you remember what it’s like to not taste things, and I feel like maybe you’d have a better idea of how to help me understand what taste is like, since I won’t ever be able to taste things, and I’m really curious…” She looked away in a random direction, afraid to see Penny’s reaction to that, and when there was nothing but a few seconds of silence, she took it as confirmation of her worst fears. “Sorry, never mind, it was a stupid idea,” she mumbled.
“I can absolutely tell you what it is like!”
Ruby turned back to Penny, blinking. “Wait, really?”
“Of course!” Penny was, if anything, apologetic, not judgmental. “I’m sorry, Ruby. It did not occur to me that it might be difficult for you to watch this.”
“No, it’s fine! It’s fine! I’m really happy for you! I’m really proud too, that it’s working! I’m just curious, that’s all.”
“Okay!” Penny leaned forwards, and after a moment’s contemplation, chose a strawberry from the bowl. Immediately upon placing it in her mouth, she gasped.
“What’s it like? What’s it like?” Ruby said immediately, feeling a little bit ridiculous about how eager she was to know the answer. She was Project Moonrise, for crying out loud—she shouldn’t be getting this worked up over a strawberry of all things. They had a stupid name, anyways—they were very clearly not made of straw! But still, here she was, on the edge of the seat and hanging on Penny’s every word.
Maybe she could just let herself enjoy this, and forget about how Project Moonrise was supposed to think for a few seconds.
Penny chewed slowly for several seconds, making all sorts of fascinating expressions, and then spoke. “It tastes… like how the color red feels.”
Ruby’s first instinct was to say, well duh, of course, they’re colored red! But she knew Penny meant it differently. “Is this like, an art thing?”
“Sort of.” There was more decisiveness in Penny’s words now. “I have eaten other red foods, but if I were to somehow procure a cube of nothing but the color red as an abstract concept, and eat that cube, I am quite positive it would taste like a strawberry.”
“O-oh,” Ruby said, nodding and trying to imagine that feeling actually happening in her own brain.
“It is… bright, and I also think it tastes like your weapon when it is spinning through the air in a near-indistinguishable blur.”
On the one hand, the thought of Penny taking an actual bite out of Lunar Enforcer was really funny. On the other hand, Ruby… kind of got what she meant? Like, ever since she’d painted Lunar Enforcer red, there was something about it when it twirled around her which was so delicious to her eyes.
Ruby reached over, took a strawberry from Penny’s bowl, and popped it into her mouth. She tasted nothing, of course, but as she chewed she closed her eyes and thought of Lunar Enforcer flashing through the space around her with its brand-new gleaming red paint job. She thought of the blood-red color dancing in her hands on the sparring floor as she mowed down her opponents. She thought of red like Ruby, red like the heart, red like how Penny made Ruby feel.
If this was what strawberries tasted like, Ruby loved strawberries.
“Thank you,” she said quietly.
“Thank you,” Penny said, and then without another word, she was hugging Ruby.
“Oh! What’s this for? I mean, not that I’m complaining! I love your hugs! But any reason for this one right now specifically?” Ruby said, and she only remembered to hug Penny back after she’d said all that.
“You quite literally changed my life, Ruby,” Penny said, continuing to hug her and also resting her chin on Ruby’s shoulder. “You have added more wonder to my life on top of what I already saw as an exceedingly wonderful amount. But now—the world is magical, and I am so glad we are both here to experience it together!”
And then she squeezed Ruby even tighter.
“I’m glad, Penny… You’ve changed my life, too. It’s harder for me to explain, but I know you have.” Words failed Ruby after that, because how could she explain to Penny all these new things like weird feelings and colorful things and appreciating beautiful things and having friends and getting to hang out with an actual team? It was just… her life was changing. And it kept on changing. And… maybe she didn’t mind some change, actually. It wasn’t like everything was getting worse.
However, Penny must’ve understood perfectly, because she nodded, and then she started stroking Ruby’s braid as the hug went on, and Ruby just kept on clinging to her, even more tightly.
Penny and Ruby were changing each other’s lives in incredible ways, and yet neither of them had any idea just how much more change there was still to come in the future.
Later
Ruby didn’t really get the whole fuss with dances. Sure, she knew what they were—there was a lot of them in Atlas, apparently—but what was the point of them? If she wanted to have fun while moving, there was fighting! Which was definitely better in every way compared to dancing. Getting in sync with Lunar Enforcer until it twirled around her as easily as another limb, whirling and slashing through foes, never staying in one place for more than a moment… When she got into that perfect rhythm, she almost felt like she was flying. Example: Her sparring match with Penny! Now that was otherworldly. How could clomping around in a noisy room full of people ever compare?
…But Team Battleship was really excited about the upcoming Beacon dance, and that excitement made Ruby curious. She wanted to know why, and maybe she wanted to feel that excitement too. So here she was, tagging along with Blake, Weiss, Yang, and Penny as they went dress shopping at a variety of thrift stores around Vale, wondering if she would catch their excitement.
Dresses. Another thing Ruby didn’t get. Why give up so much mobility? While also making it much easier to trip and fall? And that wasn’t even getting her started on the absolute travesty that was high heels, how in the name of all the gods did Weiss fight in those—
“Ooo, these are cute!”
At the sound of Penny’s voice, absolutely filled with delight, Ruby immediately pulled herself out of her musings and looked up to see Penny showing off a pair of light-green heels to her team. She turned without ever showing a sign of wobbling on them, her balance looking as perfect as it would’ve been on flat shoes. And, okay, the light green really did look quite nice on Penny, and they had a cute little pink bow on the tips—
Okay. Ruby was conceding that maybe there was an argument to be made for heels after all.
“Penny? Is that the first time you’ve ever worn heels?” Weiss said.
“Yes, it is. At least, in my memory. I cannot speak for the time before I arrived at Beacon.”
“But then… how are you not falling over?”
Penny shrugged. “The center of gravity is different, yes, but it’s a simple matter of recalibrating my internal gyrometer, which only takes a few seconds.”
Weiss made a slightly strangled noise. “I’m thoroughly envious of you right now.”
“I tried wearing heels a few times and decided they were just completely incompatible with my way of existing,” Yang said. “So… You’ve got a superpower, Pens.”
Penny gawked at Yang with a face full of disbelief and confusion. “Yang, with all the things that I am capable of, this is what you label as a superpower?”
That made Yang burst out laughing, and then Blake looked up from the pile of outfits she was flipping through. “Clearly, the real superpower Penny has is her hugging ability.”
Penny nodded in satisfaction. “Much more accurate!”
And then Yang was looking at Ruby, tilting her head. Why was Yang—
“Hey, Ruby. You ever worn heels before?”
Ruby snorted. “I wouldn’t wear those stupid lady stilts if you paid me to.”
“Yeah, fair, but have you ever tried to look pretty before? Just a nice fancy outfit?”
“Pretty and fancy don’t give you an advantage in fighting.” Ruby made no effort to hide the derision in her voice.
“First of all, don’t say that to Coco. Second of all, we’re getting you an outfit for the dance, I’ve just decided.”
“What?” Ruby blinked as Yang stood up and approached her, sizing her up in a way that didn’t bode well. “Wait, hold on—”
“Come on, Weiss, Blake—I need y’all’s fashion advice.” And now three members of Team Battleship were focusing on Ruby.
“Once we get her out of all those grays, I think it’ll be quite obvious what colors suit her well,” Weiss said, crossing her arms and studying Ruby.
“Because of her hair, right?” Yang said. “We’re looking for something red and black.”
Blake tapped her chin thoughtfully. “Do you think we could find something with a gradient to match her hair?”
All Ruby could do was watch, bewildered, as an outfit was planned for her. If Blake and her team were so concerned about choice or a lack thereof in Ruby’s life, then why weren’t they giving her a choice in her outfit? They were being hypocritical!
“So I guess you’re making me wear something you pick, whether I like it or not?” she muttered at one point.
“Because your idea of ‘fun,’ as far as I can tell, is literal actual special-ops missions, and that’s not healthy or well-adjusted,” Yang said immediately. “So we’re taking you out of your comfort zone to help you expand your horizons.”
Penny stuck her head out from a nearby rack of clothing she was browsing. “Additionally, I believe trying on clothes counts as Ordinary Teenage Girl Things, which you have expressed a desire to experience!”
Well… Penny did have a really good point. And also, Penny was so excited about this, so how bad could it really be? Even if nothing about the dance was fun, Ruby could extract fun from anything just from Penny being there.
“Okay, you all win!” she said, holding up her hands. “I’ll let you pick me a dress, but I want a say in what I’m wearing.” She had to wear something that, at the very least, could be pulled off easily in the event of a fight breaking out. “Deal?”
“Deal!” Yang said immediately. Weiss looked far more reluctant.
But before any progress could be made, Penny squealed excitedly and jumped out of the aisle, and then immediately ducked back in before any of her teammates could look in her direction.
“I found a very cute dress!” Penny said. “However, I want to put it on before I show it to any of you!” Then, hurriedly shoving a pile of random clothing items into her arms to conceal whatever she’d found, she darted sideways into one of the dressing rooms.
And after what seemed like not long enough of a period of time for someone to change their entire outfit, Penny emerged from the dressing room. “Ta-da!”
Ruby’s brain went blank for a moment.
Penny was still wearing a dress, but this one was frillier, and poofier, and lacier, and shimmeryer, and normally Ruby would have noted that this dress was not at all fit for combat, but right now she was too occupied with… Well, she wasn’t sure what to call it, but Penny was taking up all of her attention right now!
There was just something about the way the dress sat on her that made Ruby want to… keep looking. Penny had removed her hoodie, and the dress was strapless, so the full galaxy of freckles across Penny’s shoulders and neck was revealed. And the dress was made of two different shades of green, one laid atop the other, and they matched the color of Penny’s eyes so well. And there were these little loops of fabric that hung off the side, which Penny had put her arms through, and that was definitely not functional in any way, shape, or form, but Ruby couldn’t be bothered by that because it looked… Cute? Was that the right word? Was cute a word she could use to describe Penny? Did she have the right to judge whether or not someone was cute? Ruby hadn’t really ever thought about this sort of thing before in her life. How much art did she have to make before she could judge cuteness?
Right. She needed to say something. Penny was definitely expecting a reaction of some sort to presenting this dress. Had the others reacted? How much time had passed? Why was Ruby’s brain suddenly acting like a malfunctioning turret?
“Wow!” she said loudly, and immediately wished she could think of more words than just that.
But then Penny beamed at Ruby and twirled three times, making her dress flutter around her, and Ruby decided maybe it was all she needed to say after all.
There was something about the way Ruby had breathlessly said “Wow!” which kept that word circulating in Penny’s short-term memory far longer than most spoken words did.
And Penny was just as excited about this dress as Ruby was. It was so light and fluffy and sparkly, and she couldn’t wait to wear it at the dance! And she was looking forward to dancing in it—twirling with a dress on was spectacularly fun. She’d already spent several hours reviewing instructional videos on forms of dance from every culture on Remnant, and calculated which type of dance style would feature maximum twirling.
She was still wearing the dress, and she would have to take it back off at some point to purchase it, but Penny wasn’t prepared to do that just yet. For now, she was content to sit and watch Ruby try on dresses with the help of Yang and Blake. As for Weiss, after some frank exchanges of opinion with Ruby about fashion, she had entirely given up and was sitting next to Penny with her arms crossed.
“Who evaluates formal wear by its tactical value?!” she groused.
Ruby must’ve heard that, because she stuck her tongue out at Weiss. “It’s not my fault that a terrorist attack is just as likely to happen at a fancy party as at any other kind of large gathering! I’m just being responsible!”
Weiss only grumbled and shook her head.
“Okay, I think I’ve found a good one!” Yang reappeared from an aisle with something in her arms; Penny only saw a flash of red fabric before Yang spun around, putting herself between Penny’s line of sight and whatever she was showing to Ruby.
“Huh. It’s got potential,” Ruby said thoughtfully. “Okay, I’ll try it on.” And then she grabbed the dress and vanished in a cloud of silver dust which trailed off towards the dressing rooms.
Yang, for some reason, gave Penny a suspiciously large smile as they waited. And Penny was not the kind of person who let things like that stay unsaid, so she asked.
“What is it?”
“Nothing,” Yang said.
Penny very much doubted that. “It seems like something.”
“Alright, fine, you got me.” Yang shook her head as if she had put up a great deal more resistance to answering than what she’d actually put up. “I was just thinking, your dress and Ruby’s dress are going to match really well.”
“Oh.” Well, red and green did complement each other well, but Penny still wasn’t sure why Yang would be so enthused about that. “Are you insinuating that Ruby and I should go to the dance together?”
Yang blinked. “Uh.”
“That certainly sounds like a fun idea!” Penny said, when it became clear Yang wouldn’t actually be answering that question. “I have not given much thought to the idea of going to the dance with someone. That activity usually has romantic connotations, correct?”
Yang and Weiss’s facial expressions were only getting stranger and stranger.
“Although, there are plenty of students who are going to the dance with someone as just friends. So it doesn’t have to be romantic. But how would I want to go to the dance with Ruby, if I were to ask her? Romantically, or platonically?”
This felt like an extremely important question for Penny to answer, actually. She shifted all processing power towards the subject, and considered—Hm. Well, in order to determine how she’d want to attend the dance with Ruby—if Ruby even wanted to attend with her—that necessitated starting with a much larger question: What was romance to Penny?
She knew of romance in the abstract, yes, but was it something she even wanted? Was it something she would enjoy? Was she capable of having romantic attraction? There were many, many kinds of emotions and urges which had no basis anywhere in her code, belonging instead to the ever-shifting domain of her consciousness array and her soul, and it seemed perfectly plausible that romantic feelings could be in there somewhere. And if Penny couldn’t have romantic feelings? Well, the queer club had taught her that there were other people in the world who did not feel romantic attraction, and they were no less a person because of it! And no less happier because of it! So that would not be a cause for worry.
But that knowledge, while comforting, didn’t actually help answer the question: How was Penny supposed to determine if her feelings were romantic or not? This was extremely important! It would be impolite and un-friend-like to ask Ruby to the dance with the wrong kind of feeling, wouldn’t it?!
At that moment, Ruby’s voice floated out of the dressing room.
“Okay, with a few modifications, I can make this work!”
She reappeared in another burst of silver, and gone was her academy uniform, replaced by…
In some ways, Ruby’s dress was the opposite of Penny’s. It had no frilly or poofy parts, instead laying mostly flat against her in a manner akin to certain types of robes, and it covered much more of her legs than Penny’s dress did. Instead of solid colors, it had a red-black gradient which indeed matched her hair perfectly.
Ruby turned in a slow circle, looking down at herself, uncertainty coursing through her face. “I mean. It fits. But I can’t say much else about it… It’s simple. I like simple.” She looked up at the others, clearly still uncertain.
Words leapt into Penny’s mouth from somewhere deep in her processors. “It looks absolutely lovely,” she said, and she meant those words with every joule of energy in her body.
Yang broke into a coughing fit at that moment, which she stifled by plunging her face into a pile of discarded dresses.
“O-oh, really?” A blush rapidly spread across Ruby’s cheeks. “You’re sure?”
“Completely!”
“Thank you…”
Hm. Penny rewound her internal thoughtstream, reviewing the contemplations of the past few moments. Then she stood up, twirling around in her dress once again and taking full notice of how Ruby’s eyes roved over her as she did that. Their dresses did indeed match very well, and she felt… proud of that.
She looked at Ruby, and closely studied the feelings that coursed through herself at the sight of Ruby’s face, at the thought of her presence. Romance was said to be different from other kinds of feelings, different from how people felt about their friends. That was an incredibly roundabout classification for her poor processors, but Penny was now picking up on one very important detail.
How she felt about Ruby was different from how she felt about all her other friends. Noticeably different. The Ruby-related feelings sat in their own special memory partition, which was currently unlabeled.
That could mean something… or it could not mean something.
So was that romance she felt? Or was it just a super-duper-special friend feeling that she’d unlocked? Would it be better to ask Ruby to the dance romantically, or as super-duper-special friends?
Actually, there was another question Penny needed to be asking herself, on top of everything else. So if, possibly, hypothetically, theoretically, supposedly, she felt romantic feelings, then what exactly did that mean? What was romance, for Penny Pallas, the synthetic girl? What would she want?
She had seen romance mean different things to different people. So even if Penny did feel romance (which she had yet to establish), could romance work very differently for her, since there were so many other things which worked very differently for her? If she were to want things, what would she want which would be different from other wants and maybe or maybe not other other wants, but not other other wants wants and then if wanting was—
Penny blinked, realizing she’d started to do the logic equivalent of spinning endlessly in a circle. She did not have answers to any of these things. Maybe these were not things she could find answers to by standing still and thinking hard. But then how—
An idea occurred to Penny. An idea that very well might help her find answers to these questions. An idea that made a great deal of sense. An idea which, maybe most importantly, could also be fun.
“Yang?” she said. “Do two people have to explicitly declare what kind of feelings they are going to a dance with? Or can they just… Go together?”
“Wha?” Yang gave her a look of pure confusion, and then it hit her what Penny was asking. “OH. No—yeah—no—I mean, yes, you can just go! You can just go to a dance with someone, and ride the wave of a good time without putting labels on it. For sure.”
Excitement filled Penny. It was official! This plan could be put into action! She could ask Ruby to the dance without specifying platonic or romantic feelings, which was the perfect solution to not being sure what those feelings were right now, and then in the unique environment of the dance she could probe the depths of her feelings for Ruby and figure out exactly what they were and what that could mean and what she might want and—
Of course, this was all contingent on Ruby saying yes. So what was she waiting for?
“Ruby!” Penny said, hardly able to contain the sudden deluge of emotions within her. “Would you like to go to the dance together?”
Penny very much hoped her feelings for Ruby would prove to be romantic. The thought of that possibility sent a thrill vibrating through every servo in her body. And if her feelings were romantic, then that opened up fantastic and dizzying possibilities! Yes, she would do her absolute best, and devote all of her processing power to discovering the exact nature of these feelings, and she would hope for one particular outcome of her deductions.
But also, this was all still contingent on Ruby saying yes. And—
Ruby’s eyes went very, very wide, and her entire body went very stiff, and then her reply was so loud it might’ve shattered glass if there was any nearby.
“YEAH!!!”
Notes:
[anakin skywalker in revenge of the sith voice] this is where the fun begins
For real though, I put a lot of thought into this, and came to the conclusion that Penny's thinking style only allows a certain threshold of obliviousness (unlike Ruby, who could get run over by a truck carrying all her feelings and still not have a clue), and right about now is when she starts bumping up against that limit. Beyond it? She's going to start putting pieces together. Problem is... Penny's thinking style also means that she has to go through ten thousand layers of painstaking logic and reasoning and deduction and rules-lawyering of her feelings, before she can actually DO anything about those feelings. And trying to apply logic to something as illogical and nebulous as romantic feelings... it's like trying to staple water to a tree. So, wish Penny luck, because she's going to need it!
See you all next time for Chapter 31: Personal Feelings!
Chapter 31: Personal Feelings
Notes:
I don't think anyone is taking medical advice from this story, but just in case you are: Warning! Incorrect medical information in this chapter! Concussion recovery does not work this way in real life, since we do not have Aura to speed up recovery times.
And now, SURPRISE FANART!
I didn't commission this! I knew nothing of it until last night when my good friend Desib717 messaged me and said, "I've been working on something you may be interested in" and then sent me THIS:
A beautiful rendering of the intimate and emotional repairs scene between Penny and Ruby in Chapter 29! I love it so much. And if you want to reblog the post on Tumblr, here's a link to it!
Chapter Text
“You were trying to make that happen, weren’t you.”
Yang made no effort to hide the smile on her face as she glanced at Blake, who really didn’t seem that bothered about Yang’s machinations. “Look, in my defense, I didn’t think she’d actually ask Ruby right then and there!”
Blake shook her head, but a smile flitted across her face.
“I mean. I was thinking those two would be the last people to figure out that they might be crushing on each other,” Yang said, looking ahead to where Penny was talking Ruby’s ear off about the dance as the two walked side-by-side. Penny was carrying both her shopping bag and Ruby’s. How chivalrous of her.
“Hm.” Blake studied the girls. “A few weeks ago, I wouldn’t have been so sure about any feelings between them just because it was still so new, but… now, I think I see what you mean.”
Yang was walking alongside Weiss and Blake, further back from the pair ahead—but not because they were trying to give those two alone time, but just because Ruby and Penny really did walk way faster than most people on Remnant.
“The girl who acts like she runs on jet fuel, and the girl who actually runs on jet fuel,” Weiss said. “May the gods help us.”
The conversation ahead must’ve changed course, because currently Ruby was flapping her arms in some sort of imitation of… something, gods knew what, and was making Penny convulse with giggles.
“She was calling the dance stupid. Until Penny asked her to go, and now she’s as excited as I’ve ever seen her…” Yang trailed off as something else occurred to her. “Wait, does the dance count as a date for them, then?”
“Well, I can’t speak for Penny and Ruby, but…” Blake met Yang’s gaze without breaking her stride. “If you want to make the dance a date for us, Yang, I wouldn’t mind.”
Yang’s brain crashed.
“Wha—buh—uh—REALLY?” she spluttered out, staring back at Blake and completely forgetting to watch where she was going. Which turned out to be a catastrophic mistake when, half a second later, she crashed into a lamppost.
Once the world had stopped spinning just enough for her to figure out which way was up, she asked, “Does—does that mean you decided to go with me?” and hoped that she was talking to Blake and not the lamppost, because her vision was still blurry enough to make that mistake.
“Yang! Are you okay?” The alarmed voice of Penny reached her ears instead of a reply from Blake, and she turned her head (bad idea, it made her head go very spinny) to see a blurry orange-and-green blob staring at her.
“Peachy!” Yang said, breaking into a loopy grin.
“I do not understand what fruits have to do with it?”
Before Yang could attempt a reply, Penny turned elsewhere. “Blake, I must ask if you are okay as well—your heart rate just spiked more violently than it ever has in the entire time I’ve known you!”
“I’m fine, don’t worry, but Yang—” And then Blake was leaning down, her face coming close enough for Yang to see it clearly even as her vision continued to swim. “Yang, I’m actually worried about you. You hit that lamppost with your Aura down, and that was more than enough force for a concussion.”
“I’ll be fine,” Yang said, despite maybe not really feeling that way—the spinning, throbbing feeling in her head wasn’t getting any better, and the relationship between her brain and her mouth right now felt like more of a suggestion than a direct connection. Which was probably why the next sentence slipped out. “I’ll be fine as long as I’m looking at you.”
A bright red blush spread across Blake’s face, and she brushed a strand of hair away from Yang’s eyes. “Yang, you’re slurring your words. I’m making an executive decision, we’re going to an emergency room to get you checked out.”
“Can we stop at the police station first, though?”
“What? Why?”
“Because… you stole my heart.”
“Yang.” And now there was an arm being thrown under Yang’s shoulder, supporting her. “Penny, Ruby, can I get a hand?”
That was a perfect opportunity for Yang to take off her prosthetic hand and give it to Blake, but for some reason, her limbs were having trouble cooperating now. She turned her head towards Ruby to ask for help taking her prosthetic off, and found herself looking into a face—a face—a face—
An incomprehensible sadness rose up in her, and she collapsed into a mess of loud, heaving sobs. She didn’t even know why she was crying. It was complete instinct. It just—something hurt deep inside of her.
That was all she thought before she passed out.
“She will be okay?” Penny asked.
Blake quietly closed the door to the hospital room behind her, and nodded. “The doctor said it’s a textbook concussion, and her Aura is already healing everything. She’s just sleeping right now.”
“Oh, good.” A sense of relief surged through Penny. It had been truly scary to see Yang burst into tears and pass out. “Is she going to stay here overnight for observation?”
“She shouldn’t have to. They said that whenever she wakes up, she’ll be good to go back to Beacon, and then she should take a day to rest and recover and make sure her Aura heals everything unhindered. She’ll miss a couple classes, but it’s fine—everything is just review for our exams.”
“Okay.” Penny nodded once, and settled deeper into her chair. Weiss did not move from her chair, either.
Blake stared at them, shifting on her feet for a few moments. “It’s fine if you want to go back to the school, by the way. I don’t mind staying here alone.”
“Nope!” Penny said immediately. “Our team member is injured; we’re staying with her!”
“Somehow, this isn’t what I imagined would send a member of our team to the hospital for the first time, but I will be remaining here as well,” Weiss said dryly, crossing her arms.
Blake sighed and nodded, but Penny saw the smile that crossed her face. “What about you, Ruby? No pressure to stay—as much as you feel like an honorary team member at this point, you still have your own team to worry about.”
“Yeah…” Ruby scratched the back of her neck. “I should probably get back to the school, sorry… the General already sent a car for me, it should be here in a couple minutes.”
Penny stood up. “I’ll walk you outside!”
“I hope Yang feels better,” Ruby tossed over her shoulder as the set of double doors closed behind her, leaving the two of them to descend the hospital stairwell in silence.
“Um, Penny, I have a question,” Ruby said eighteen steps later.
Penny looked over—Ruby sounded quite nervous suddenly, and appeared even more so. “Ask away.”
“So, I was looking up types of dances on my scroll, and apparently… there’s a kind of dance called The Robot?” She was poking her fingers together now, a gesture that Penny simultaneously found adorable and also confusing because she had no idea what it signified. “Is that a dance you’d want to do together? At the dance? Where we’ll be dancing? Or would that be rude? To you? Because. You know. You.”
Her rambling trailed off into increasingly nervous and incomprehensible sounds, before she finally stopped herself with a shrug. “Um. Sorry if that was a stupid question. I was just trying to figure out what kind of dances we could do. At the dance.”
Penny finally allowed herself to giggle, hoping that Ruby did not feel bad about the question. “That sounds lovely! I think it would be quite fun! Don’t worry, I am not offended by the question. It could be delightfully ironic.”
“Heh. Yeah. Ironic… Because you’ve got iron in you?” Ruby said, gently knocking the side of Penny’s head. “Get it? Get it?”
“That is technically true, but did you know that iron is actually relatively uncommon in my body? The majority of my chassis is made of a chromium-cobalt-nickel alloy, and iron is only used in smaller quantities as part of a steel alloy in certain parts where strength is not important.” Penny took a moment to look up something, and then added, “And the human body contains anywhere from two to four grams of iron, so you are ironic too, Ruby!”
“Okay, I’d like to be more ironic, please,” Ruby said as they exited the hospital. “Oh, there’s my ride! Bye, Penny! See you later!” And with that, she scooped up her newly purchased dress and vanished in a cloud of silver, reappearing next to the car and waving to Penny before opening the door and hopping into the backseat.
Penny waved back and watched the car pull away.
Ruby most definitely inspired a particular feeling in Penny that she was having difficulty ascribing words to. The closest verbal approximation she had at the moment was that it was like a surge of electricity throughout her entire body, occasionally leaving her with the most strangely pleasant feeling of disorientation that mystified her sensors. It was a feeling that no one else inspired in her. Was that what romantic feelings felt like?
If it was, that would explain why romance was so revered amongst the general population. The feeling… it was exciting. Penny wanted to feel more of it, wanted to know just how deep it could go, wanted to map it out and log it into her memory with all of the care she might take in remembering her own face.
If that was romance, romance was sensational.
Penny could try just searching the CCTnet for an answer to this question, but that felt… unsatisfying. Besides, there were plenty of lies and rude people on the CCTnet. This was the sort of thing she wanted to figure out herself. Or with the help of friends—Yang might be able to help. She would try asking Yang about this, once Yang was fully recovered.
Her logic core pointed out one very important component in all of this—the reciprocal nature of romance. If this was romantic, was it possible that Ruby was feeling these same feelings as Penny?
If Ruby was not feeling the same way, did Penny’s feelings mean anything? Were they meaningless if she was alone in this?
No. They couldn’t be meaningless, even if she was alone in it. Because she was feeling them, that made them significant. At least to her.
But what would she do if it was just her?
Her logic core suggested another, much less stressful question: what would Penny do if Ruby did have similar feelings in return?
Well, that thought was…
For reasons Penny couldn’t even begin to understand, a mild shiver passed through all her major servos. But not a scared shiver. An excited shiver? Was that possible?
If they both had romantic feelings, and they were both interested in acting on them, then logically what would follow was… romantic actions.
That was even more of an undefined territory for Penny. Just like with romantic feelings, she had no idea if romantic actions would apply to her in the same way that they did for everyone else on Remnant.
It was at this point that a distant ship’s horn startled Penny out of her reverie, and she realized that she was getting far too far ahead of herself. It wouldn’t be helpful to contemplate any of this until after she’d asked someone she trusted for insight. She hoped Yang could help.
Drat. Even after so much time existing, feelings were still difficult sometimes. Was it like this for organics, too? How did they handle all these confusing feelings without the help of a detailed internal indexed catalog and classification system? It was hard enough for Penny with those abilities readily available!
Well, there was nothing she could do at the moment, unless she wanted to continue ruminating fruitlessly.
Penny relegated this chain of thought to a much lower processing priority and turned, intending to go back inside—but at that moment she noticed something interesting in her surroundings: There was a pet store across the street from this hospital.
The thought of seeing many cute little animals(!) sent all of Penny’s thoughts veering away from romance. Surely a small detour before she went back to her team would be perfectly reasonable…
This was perhaps more than what could be called a ‘small detour,’ but Penny was entranced. Betta fish were so interesting and varied! This would be a fun place to take Ruby; since she enjoyed colorful things she would certainly enjoy this. They came in bright neon colors—green bettas the same color as the green in her emblem, silver ones the color of Luminous Electra’s blade or perhaps Ruby’s eyes, red ones the color of a ripened apple, orange ones startlingly close to the color of Penny’s hair. It was fun watching their movements and trying to anticipate where they would go next. Penny wondered if it was possible to create an algorithm that predicted the movements of fish.
She wondered if it would be possible to keep fish in their dorm. Their room was somewhat cramped for space already, but… fish! How could anyone say no to fish?
The betta fish seemed to be taking notice of her, too. Some of them were moving slowly along the side of their tanks, staring directly at her while making little gaping motions with their mouths. Perhaps they were surprised by the fact that a synthetic girl was looking at them. Or perhaps they just wanted her to give them food.
Suddenly, Penny’s proximity sensors went off, alerting her to a potential problem nearby. When she (reluctantly) looked away from the fish, she did indeed find something troubling. Her secondary sensors hadn’t been able to exactly ascertain who had just entered the store, but the match was close enough to ping her, and now her full suite of visual sensors was registering a short girl with pink-and-brown hair and an umbrella—
The one and the same umbrella girl as the one from that fight in the city several weeks ago.
Penny immediately shifted into a ready position, although truth be told, she was not sure what she should or could do. She didn’t have Luminous Electra on her, and even if she did, she was surrounded by fish tanks! One swing of her sword even in its smaller form, or even just her fists, would have disastrous consequences for the bettas.
But, speaking of harming animals, was that what Umbrella Girl was here to do? Since she was a known lawbreaker, perhaps she was here to hurt some poor innocent animals for no other reason than some sadistic pleasure? Penny would have to defend these creatures if that was the case!
She studied Umbrella Girl, watching her movements, and… well, Umbrella Girl did not seem intent on harming the animals, unless they could be harmed by being looked at too much. Umbrella Girl was peering into the mice enclosures and watching the mice inside with a little smile, as enraptured as Penny imagined herself to be when watching the betta fish.
After eighty-one seconds of watching Umbrella Girl watch the mice, Penny was starting to think that she really should do something. There was a criminal in front of her! The problem was that she had no idea what to do.
Perhaps… she could simply gain a better understanding of a foe. After all, the job of a Huntress was not always to vanquish evil—sometimes the job was to convince evil to stop being evil! Or at least, be less evil. And sometimes someone doing bad things just needed the right reason to start doing good things.
With that in mind, she walked around the row of fish tanks, approaching Umbrella Girl from behind, and tapped her on the shoulder.
“Salutations! Why are you a criminal?”
Umbrella Girl spun around with shocking speed, drawing her umbrella before she’d even finished turning around, and a second later, Penny found herself with the umbrella’s very pointy tip aimed directly between her eyes, just barely touching her skin.
“I do not want a fight!” she added hastily, putting up her hands in a show of goodwill. “I don’t even have my weapon with me! Please consider this encounter to be under a flag of truce—and also consider the innocent animals around us who would be caught in the crossfire of a fight. And the police attention which would be drawn to such a fight.”
Umbrella Girl’s eyes flicked around the store before coming to rest on Penny again, narrowed in what was definitely suspicion. Finally, she lowered her umbrella, and gave Penny a look clearly meant to convey a question along the lines of what the fuck do you want?
“I was curious why you have chosen to be a criminal? And I have the opportunity to ask, so why not ask?”
Umbrella Girl stared at Penny for a long time, making a facial expression that was entirely new and novel in Penny’s databases. Finally, she made a gesture which wasn’t sign language, but just a universal hand signal for you’re weird.
“And proud of it!” Penny said brightly, echoing Yang’s sentiment.
The girl hooked her umbrella to her belt, gave Penny one more strange look, and then began signing with both hands. Okay. Forget why I’m a criminal, why are you a cop?
Penny blinked at Umbrella Girl. “But I am a Huntress, not a member of localized civilian law enforcement. There is a significant difference between those things.”
Umbrella Girl rolled her eyes and made a motion with one arm which could either be interpreted as an extremely inappropriate sexual gesture, or a crude imitation of a gun being cocked. She was going to ignore the explicit meaning and choose to believe that this girl was pointing out that like cops, Huntresses carried weapons. Which was an incredibly reductive comparison which missed so many other things! Well, Huntresses and cops were probably all the same to a criminal, since both categories of people would all be opposed to a criminal, so no point in arguing that any further.
Instead, Penny said, “You have not answered my question.”
Umbrella Girl shook her head and jabbed a finger at Penny, frowning.
Did she want… All right, then. Even though Penny had asked first, she decided to concede and answer the other girl’s question, since otherwise this could take quite a while. “I am a Huntress because I want to help people.”
Umbrella Girl yawned, long and blatantly. Penny had never seen anyone use a yawn as a communication of rudeness, but Umbrella Girl was doing it. And then she signed, I’m a criminal because it’s fun.
Penny stared. Out of all the possible answers she had anticipated, that was not one of them. “Fun?”
Umbrella Girl nodded, smirking. She reached into her pockets—making Penny instinctively tense, but what she withdrew couldn’t really be called a threat of any kind. First it was a wad of cash, tied up in a rubber band and undoubtedly acquired through illegal means. Then it was a lighter, which she briefly flicked on and off. Arson? Probably. Maybe the flame symbolized her being a free spirit. Then she tapped her umbrella, which Penny knew doubled as her weapon, and mimed a stabbing motion. Then she stuck her tongue out. Penny wasn’t sure if that was one of the reasons, or if she was just being rude.
Either way, that was a lot of things which Penny could not say she especially wanted. “Oh. I see,” she said, even though she did not actually understand any better.
Their relative positions in the conversation had essentially been reversed, because now Umbrella Girl looked much more at ease as she tilted her head, studying Penny. After a moment, she turned and picked something off a rack of pet toys next to them—a little stuffed chew toy in the shape of a carrot. Which she pointed at, before pointing at Penny—oh. She was calling Penny a carrot. Because of her hair color.
But then she dropped the chew toy (Littering! Penny chided silently) and pulled out the wad of cash again, before making a beckoning gesture at Penny and arching an eyebrow.
Was… was she inviting Penny to take on a life of crime?! Or was she just—actually, never mind, whatever the question was, Penny’s answer was clear.
“I do not want to be a criminal!” She paused, and then after a moment, added, “And my name is Penny. Not Carrot Girl.”
Umbrella Girl smirked, and from somewhere that not even Penny could see, produced a penny—the coin—which she flipped once before it disappeared again. She raised an eyebrow at Penny.
“Yes, it is also very accurate to my hair color! Although I do not know if that was the exact reason I was named…” She did have a fair amount of copper in her body, but that wasn’t something she could offer as an explanation. “I should not just refer to you as Umbrella Girl, for that matter. Do you have a name?”
Umbrella Girl reached into a pocket, instinctively making Penny tense again, but all she withdrew was… a business card? She flicked it towards Penny, who caught it instinctively. It didn’t seem to be a disguised bomb of any kind, which was good.
NAME: Neo.
OCCUPATION: Crime.
PHONE: If I want to talk again, I’ll call you.
ADDRESS: Wouldn’t you like to know.
Penny looked up from the business card. “Thank you? I mean, thank you, Neo?”
You can be a criminal who still helps people, you know, Neo signed. Not my style, but I’ve met people who do it.
“I do not think there is anything wrong with being a vigilante, but I personally would prefer to operate in a legal manner.” What Penny did not add to that was that she was afraid the extra scrutiny placed on vigilantes would result in her identity as a synthetic person being revealed against her will. “It is nice, being part of a team instead of operating alone as non-licensed individuals usually do.”
Neo gave an incredibly unenthusiastic thumbs-up.
Penny was starting to regret initiating this conversation. “You are trying to influence me.”
Neo gave Penny a disbelieving look, and indicated herself with both hands.
Well, that was a logically sound rebuttal. Penny had entered this conversation with the intention of possibly finding a way to help Neo not be a criminal, and that certainly was an attempt at influence as well.
She gave Neo another analyzing look, and then decided it was time to rejoin her teammates. “I should go! It was interesting to talk to you!” she said, and started to turn away—only to catch her foot on a cable running across the floor. She managed to stop herself from yanking it too hard, thankfully avoiding an accidental destruction of one of the aquariums. However, the cable must’ve been old or frayed, because when her foot caught it, it was pulled away from the connected aquarium in a shower of sparks.
Penny’s instinctual reaction, which she could not sufficiently suppress, was to jump away in fright and attempt to shield herself from the sudden electrical hazard—only to realize a moment later that this common electrical source posed absolutely no danger to her and couldn’t have so much as blown a single capacitor in her body.
She lowered her hands, suddenly feeling very self-conscious. Neo was watching her with a thoroughly amused smile. After a moment, she flicked another business card towards Penny. This one read:
TIRED OF A LIFE ON THE STRAIGHT AND NARROW? NEOPOLITAN AND TORCHWICK CAN HELP YOU OUT! CONTRIBUTE TO OUR GROWING CRIMINAL EMPIRE!
Penny nodded, more out of politeness than any actual desire to become a criminal. “Er, and if you ever get tired of the… the crime, I would be happy to help you not be a criminal!”
And with that, the two girls parted, Penny quite unsure if she had learned anything from this encounter. And not a single fish was harmed.
“Come on, is all this really necessary?” Yang said.
Penny, Blake, and Weiss stood arrayed in their dorm room, watching Yang with care as she sat in her bunk and slurped her way through a bowl of chicken noodle soup. Penny was monitoring every one of Yang’s vitals, ready to spring into action at the slightest sign of her condition deteriorating.
“Even if your Aura is fully healing you without outside help, we aren’t leaving you alone in your recovery from a traumatic brain injury,” Blake said. “It’s like you said once—I’ve got your back, and that’s a promise.”
“…Good point,” Yang said, pausing to go at her soup again. “But I know how to take care of myself.”
And when Yang said that, Penny knew it was time to step in with what Blake would refer to as an ‘armor-piercing’ statement, despite the lack of actual physical encroachment in her words. Yang had a great deal of… emotional tolerance, to put it lightly.
“Additionally, Yang, what you have told us of your childhood suggests that you have been forced to care for yourself from far too young of an age! So I believe it is only fair that you receive at least some of the external care that you’re due.”
Yang blinked rapidly for a few moments before staring down into her soup, a strange tension passing through her body.
“I guess I can let myself be spoiled for just one night,” she muttered, before resuming her soup consumption.
Penny smiled. Armor: Pierced. It was amazing how much could be done by simply saying things that no one else wanted to say.
Blake sat down on the foot of Yang’s bunk, eyeing her. “I’m surprised you’re being so calm after that.”
Yang looked up, one noodle caught halfway out of her mouth. “Why wouldn’t I? I mean, it must’ve been scary, but we know there’s nothing to worry about now.”
Blake stared at her. “Yang, do you remember why you walked into a lamppost?”
“Honestly, no? The last thing I remember was walking down the street with y’all, and then it’s nothing but a blank until I woke up in the emergency room.”
“Ah.” A small smile played over Blake’s lips, and she leaned closer to Yang. “Put down your soup for a second. And put your Aura up.”
“Um, sure?” Yang obliged.
“If you still want to go to the dance together, as a date, I think that would be wonderful.”
“Really?” Yang sat up so fast that her head bounced off the bunk above her—harmlessly this time thanks to her Aura being up to shield her from the impact.
“I’m guessing that’s how I got the concussion?” she said, looking upward and rubbing the top of her head.
“Yup.” Blake’s smile was one of the widest Penny had ever seen on her team leader.
Neo didn’t understand that Penny girl. Thankfully, she didn’t have to.
The door to Team CMSN’s room opened, and Cinder walked in. Mercury didn’t look up from his comic book, while Emerald snapped to attention, and Neo simply swung her legs off the side of her bunk, watching Cinder as she crossed the room and sat down on her own bunk, tapping at her scroll.
At least Neo had gotten one useful thing out of that conversation. She sent a text to Cinder’s scroll, and a moment after the ding from across the room, Cinder looked up.
“What is it?”
Neo sent another text. You know the orange-haired girl on Team Battleship?
Cinder stared at Neo, her face flattening into something perfectly blank. “Yes.”
One more text. I found out yesterday that she’s terrified of electricity. To punctuate her point, she used her Semblance to craft a brief reconstruction of the scene she’d witnessed—Pallas jumping away from a sparking wire, utterly terrified by a bit of electricity that probably couldn’t have even made a single hair stand on end.
What happened next, Neo couldn’t possibly have anticipated.
Cinder’s eyes widened, and in a seemingly unconscious motion, one of her hands squeezed into a claw, rising to her throat in a jerky motion as if she was grabbing at something there. And then in the next second, the emotion was gone, tamed into a slight frown that was more contemplative than anything else.
“Interesting,” Cinder said after a moment’s thought. Was it Neo’s imagination, or was there a hint of strain in it?
“I think that quite nicely clarifies the question of who to put Team JNPR up against in the first round,” she added after a moment’s silence. “Pallas is their best fighter, and if she’s afraid of electricity, Valkyrie’s Semblance neutralizes her. And that prosthetic on Xiao Long makes her especially vulnerable to Nikos’s Semblance. BSYP won’t stand a chance.”
The dance was tomorrow. The dance was tomorrow. The dance was tomorrow! And Ruby was going with Penny! She didn’t know why she was so excited about that. Dances had seemed boring, right up until when she’d realized she could go with Penny. And then it became so much more exciting! Really, anything could be exciting as long as she was doing it with Penny. Even wearing a stupid un-tactical outfit.
“You wanted to see me, sir?” she said, opening the door to the General’s office aboard his flagship. She knew it was considered polite to knock, but Ruby didn’t like to knock unless a door was locked. Because if someone’s door was unlocked and they were expecting you, why waste the time? Anyways, important conversation time.
“Ah, Ruby,” the General said, looking up from his paperwork and nodding. He was used to her entrances. “Please, take a seat.”
Ruby obliged, crossing and uncrossing her legs repeatedly as she waited for him to say something.
When the General did, it was with a deep sigh, sitting back in his chair and rubbing his forehead.
“…Ruby, I’m worried about you,” he said.
A queasy feeling started to gather in the pit of Ruby’s stomach. “Sir?”
“The repeated unaccompanied excursions you’ve been making into Vale. The incident at the docks, and then the fight with the stolen Paladin. It’s… too much, too soon for you.”
The only thing Ruby could think to say was, “It’s not unaccompanied, I’m always with Penny and the rest of her team…”
He tapped his index fingers together deliberately. “Well, that’s hardly sufficient accompaniment for someone as valuable as you.”
“But it is!” Ruby nearly kept going to explain just how good Penny was at protecting people, but at the last moment she bit down on her words. Oh, she wished so much that she could tell the General about Penny. If he knew what she was capable of, then he wouldn’t ever worry about Ruby’s protection when Penny was around! But Penny being a robot was a secret, just like Ruby's eyes were a secret, and Ruby had promised to keep it. She tried to keep her promises. She really did.
So she said nothing about how strong Penny was, and instead folded her hands in her lap and said, “Am I to be put under a protection detail again, sir?”
A protection detail was military-speak for what Ruby had been doing for the several weeks where she wasn’t allowed to attend classes.
“Oh, not at all. I’d like to think I’ve learned my lesson when it comes to trying to corral you that much.” The General punctuated his words with a small chuckle.
“Lieutenant Schnee knows I’m sorry, right?” She really hadn’t meant to cause her that much stress… And she also hadn’t meant to interrupt the General’s presentation like that… And she also hadn’t meant to run out of the cafe without paying her bill…
Yeah. Not her best day. Panic sure could make her do some weird things.
“Certainly.”
“Oh, good.” Ruby relaxed in her seat, and then gave the General a curious look. “So, what do you want me to do, sir?”
“Well, it’s hard to articulate, but…” He turned and looked out the window at the cloudless blue skies outside, the airship far enough in the air that the view stretched to the horizon. “To put it simply, I want you to be more careful. I want you to think about where you’re going. What kind of situations you’re putting yourself in. The enemy activity in Vale has only increased with time.”
“They’re getting stronger?” Ruby said, frowning. How could that be possible?
“Or bolder. Regardless… There are situations that we cannot afford to put you in, for risk of what might happen. Your prowess won’t go unnoticed forever, Ruby. And when you do come to the attention of those who wish the world harm… You will be the most hunted person in existence.”
Ruby shifted slightly in her seat, pulling her braid into her hands and beginning to twist it back and forth as she liked to do whenever she was trying to figure out something really tough. “Who exactly wishes the world harm, sir?”
The General stared at her for a long time with an unreadable expression, folding his hands together. Finally, he seemed to reach some sort of internal decision, and nodded. “After the Vytal Festival. That’s when you’ll be read into the true state of affairs. And when you will finally be unleashed in full. It will be the end of your training, and the beginning of your career.”
Excitement arced up and down Ruby’s spine like a bolt of pure electricity, and she couldn’t hold down the resulting shiver of elation. A Huntress, full-stop. Finally. Finally. She’d been waiting for this her entire life! All she had to do was get through this semester, win the Vytal Tournament, and then… at long last, the time of Moonrise.
The world would be so saved.
“But until then,” the General continued, his deep tone dissipating her thoughts. “I need you to stay especially low, stay especially safe. And that behavior needs to start now. Specifically, with tomorrow’s dance, which I understand you wish to attend.”
Suddenly, Ruby felt like her stomach was dropping all the way out of her body and down to the center of the planet. “Sir?”
“I am truly sorry, but you cannot attend that dance. It’s a massive security risk, both for the students and for the school, and I’m already beyond concerned about what’s going to happen that night. The security measures that Headmaster Ozpin has acquiesced to aren’t going to be enough. I am convinced that the dance will be the perfect cover for a covert strike of some sort. Or perhaps, a brazen act of terrorism. I may not be able to stop such an event from occurring, but I can prevent Atlas’s greatest asset from making herself vulnerable in the midst of it.”
With each word that the General spoke, Ruby felt like her body was getting heavier and heavier, more and more weights being clamped around her ankles and shackling her to the ground, to the airship. Her focus faded away from the General, suddenly fixating on seemingly random details around the room. The dark patterned wood grain of his desk. The bit of carpet beneath her feet which was especially scuffed from so many people walking over it. The angular shape of Due Process hanging on the wall from bright brass hooks, directly behind the General.
“You will remain on the airship from now until twelve hundred hours the morning after the dance.” He gave her an apologetic look. “And that, I’m sorry to say, is an order.”
Ruby didn’t know how to react. She’d never had an order that made her feel like this, not even when she’d been given that order to stay in the airship and cease outside contact. That order felt like the easiest thing in the world now, now that she was facing this. It made her want to scream. It made her want to cry. It made her want to do extremely un-soldierly things. It made her want to kick things and hit them and stomp her feet really hard and, and, and… she wasn’t supposed to have violent thoughts about her commanding officer, but she was having a lot of violent thoughts about her commanding officer right now! Why did this hurt so much!! It was just a stupid order! It was for something that didn’t even really matter, it wasn’t like she wouldn’t be allowed to see Penny ever again, it was just for one night, it was—it should be easy! Why did it feel like the worst thing that’d ever happened to her?!
And it was a stupid dance! Why was she so upset about missing a stupid dance which she didn’t even really care about!
Ruby didn’t know how to react, and so she defaulted to what was expected of her.
Good soldiers follow orders.
“Understood, sir,” she said, rising slowly to her feet and saluting. “May I be dismissed?”
“Of course.”
Ruby barely made it out of the General’s office before the ugly feeling boiling and writhing and twisting inside of her finally broke containment, bursting out of her in the form of thick, angry tears which streamed down her face almost faster than she could wipe them away.
Why was this bothering her so much?! She was Moonrise, she was supposed to be the best soldier in the world, the best soldiers in the world didn’t throw fits over little things like this—
Good soldiers follow orders.
She heard footsteps from around the corner—probably soldiers patrolling the halls—and she couldn’t bear the thought of anyone seeing her right now, so she activated Silver Storm and semblanced down the hall, ending up in front of her onboard quarters. She barely managed to get the door open and stumble inside, slamming it shut behind her, before her tears morphed into loud, violent sobs. She yanked Lunar Enforcer off her back and flung it into a corner and then flung herself onto her bunk, feeling like she was going to somehow explode and dissolve at the same time.
Ruby knew why she was upset, actually. She knew why she wanted to go to the dance so badly.
Penny.
She wanted to go to the dance with Penny. It felt like a really really special friend thing, and it wasn’t going to be boring at all because nothing with Penny was ever boring, and maybe they would do some cool things together, ordinary teenage girl things, and maybe some extraordinary teenage girl things too—
And now Ruby wasn’t going to do any of them.
Would Penny hate her for this? Would Penny not want to be her friend anymore? Would Penny think she was lying? Would Penny decide that it wasn’t worth it to be friends with a supersoldier whose life was really complicated? Would… would…
Good soldiers follow orders.
But good friends don’t desert the people they’re supposed to be friends with.
Ruby was tired of thinking. She wanted to be nothing more than a simple Grimm-killing machine controlled by someone else that didn’t need to care about anything besides its job. She wanted to turn off her feelings like a light switch being flipped.
As she curled up into a ball and tried to do something about the storm of emotions chewing up her insides, she registered something different. Something dangling in front of her eyes when it shouldn’t have. Her hair. Loose strands of her hair. That should’ve been tied up in her braid. Her braid…
Ruby raised one hand just enough to confirm that her hair was sprawling itself over her unrestrained, the braid completely gone. That wasn’t possible—her braid had been fine just a minute ago—wait. Had her Semblance untied her braid somehow? If she dissolved into a cloud of particles… what was to say she would be able to put them back together in the right order?
Great. Just great. She was losing control of her Semblance. Of herself. Because there wasn’t enough going wrong in her life already. But she couldn’t just undo the angry feelings, she didn’t know how to get back control of her Semblance when she’d never known it to act any other way!
Ruby just wanted to… She wanted to go to the dance with Penny. She wanted to be a good soldier. She wanted to go to the dance with Penny. She wanted to be a good soldier. She wanted to go to the dance with Penny. She wanted to be a good soldier. She… she… Why was this so hard?! Why did this feel like the most difficult thing that’d ever happened in her whole entire life?!
For the first time in her life, she wished she was just a normal girl with normal eyes.
Ruby shoved her face into her pillow and screamed.
Chapter 32: Love Is In The Air, And So Is Penny
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
Ruby fell asleep at some point. When she woke up, she had no idea what time it was or even a general sense of how long it’d been, since the windows were dimmed to blackout mode and she couldn’t summon the energy to roll over and look at her alarm clock. She laid there in bed, staring up at the ceiling. Old but familiar thoughts began to circle in her head like a dark cloud of dust stirred up by a vicious tornado.
Maybe she really was supposed to be like the moon. Hidden half the time, just a shining light in the darkness that would forever be far away from everyone.
And this was what she received for trying to fly closer to the planet: shattering, just like the moon, until she couldn’t even keep herself together in her Semblance right.
Then a wild thought pulsed in Ruby’s head, as improbable as a thing to think as she’d ever thought—
What if she disobeyed this order? What if she went to the dance anyway?
As soon as the thought had crossed her mind, she was already instinctively shooting it down—she couldn’t, she’d already broken too many orders this semester and she needed to be a good soldier if she was going to save the world and good soldiers followed orders—
But. But. Ruby wouldn’t be any worse at saving the world if she went to the dance. Even if there was an attack, she could still protect herself! She was Moonrise, for crying out loud! If anyone attacked the dance, they would be expecting students, not the girl who had spent her entire life being sharpened into the deadliest of weapons.
So the General’s order was a stupid order. And she could disobey stupid orders with no problem as long as she didn’t disobey the real orders. And she was still obeying all the real orders, so she was fine! She was still being a good soldier! She was still going to save the world!
…But how was she going to leave the airship?
On the one hand, Ruby was perfectly aware that no one could actually physically prevent her from leaving if push came to shove; she could just blow right by the guards or knock them out to stop them from raising the alarm. But also, Ruby didn’t want to do that. That felt like going too far. That felt like going outside the bounds of the kind of disobedience that could be forgiven. Also, better to be noticed after she was done disobeying the order, rather than during or before.
So, sneaking out it was. At least if she managed to get to the dance, she wouldn’t have to worry about the General spotting her there—he’d told her he would be staying in the airship, managing security for the event from above. But how to sneak out—
Penny.
New purpose seized Ruby, and she scrambled around for her scroll so fast that she nearly fell out of the bed.
As she turned on her scroll and dialed Penny, her heart dropped momentarily as she saw the time. It was next morning already. The dance was tonight!
But she forced down the panic with determination. There would be a way. There had to be a way.
Yang was in the middle of washing her face when she heard someone’s scroll ring. Specifically, Penny’s scroll—her very-recognizable ringtone was a recording of birdsong. A few moments later, her voice filtered through the bathroom door.
“Good morning, Ruby! How are you?”
What followed was… Well, Yang couldn’t hear what was happening on the other end of a scroll call, but she could really only think of one person who would be calling Penny at this hour. But she did hear Penny’s reply.
“What?!” Penny said once Ruby was done, her voice suddenly bursting with shock.
Yang put down her washcloth, turned off the faucet, and stepped outside. Whatever was going on, it didn’t sound good. Blake and Weiss were listening now, too.
“Oh, dear…” Penny continued, looking around the room, before suddenly her eyes lit up. “Do not fear, Ruby! I have a plan!”
Yang could not stop her eyebrows from shooting up. She didn’t even know what the problem was, but a Penny plan meant the solution would be interesting, to say the least.
That night
Penny felt very fortunate for the fact that her choice of an open-backed dress for the dance allowed her to deploy her wings without tearing anything. Being careful so as not to scorch the delicate fabrics with her wings’ rockets, she took off from the grounds of Beacon, rising into the night sky. On the other side of campus, the bustle of students and faculty approaching the ballroom was at full strength. No one was present on this part of campus to notice the breakout that was happening at this moment.
Well, perhaps calling this operation a breakout was a little strong—she was confident neither her nor Ruby would face any disciplinary action for this. However, a far more important consideration: calling it a breakout made it so much more exciting!
And Penny did feel oddly giddy as she ascended towards the airship where Ruby resided, because quite a few rules were about to be broken in the name of something joyful. Starting… now.
Penny activated Ghost, focusing on the airship which was looming closer and closer, and the familiar tug-pull of her Semblance sent her into a new space.
INPUT DETECTED: ATLESIAN DELIVERANCE-CLASS AIRSHIP, DESIGNATION AKN PANDORA.
Even though Penny had learned so much about her Semblance, there were still so many more questions, several of which were about to be answered.
She had previously wondered, how would Ghost handle inhabiting something which her body’s processors would struggle to manage? Something with thousands more sensations and instruments and functions than even her own body? Something like, say, an Atlesian cruiser?
Penny found an answer now as thousands of new sensations filled her consciousness slowly, like an enormous gate being wheeled open before her. This was a ‘body’ completely unlike her humanoid-shaped one, and far more complex, but Ghost eased it all somehow, making her feel as if this was a body she could fit in. And now, with vision inputs located, Penny could see through a hundred different ‘eyes’: the cameras and trackers and sensors which were arrayed around the airship.
So this is how it feels to see like a bug, she thought as she took in the view.
Wait. What was stopping her from seeing through the eyes of an actual bug? She could semblance into a bug, couldn’t she? Or any animal, for that matter? Would it be mean to animals to do that? Some animals were sentient, some more than others, but they did not have sapience. But even so… it was still their body, and she would be intruding. Maybe if she only jumped into an animal’s body and made no attempt to control them? She didn’t want to control animals! She was just quite curious what it would be like to see the world through their eyes.
—Never mind that for now. She needed to move quickly, before someone noticed the landing lights of the Pandora had turned bright green. Penny mentally shook off that sequence of thoughts (taking care not to do any physical shaking, since that genuinely might send the airship careening into the ground) by relegating it to a lower CPU priority, and focused on the most important task: shutting down the ship’s radar systems.
But how, exactly? Ghost created a temporary file system in her memory for whatever she was possessing, along with a command shell, but… the command shell wasn’t very helpful when she didn’t know what command she was executing. In theory, turning off the radar system should be as simple as moving one of her fingers—except, this metaphor was complicated by the fact that the airship was giving her tens of thousands of new fingers that she’d never moved before, with no way to be sure she was moving the right one. And every finger was guarded by a layer of encryption and programming which would impede Ghost and waste time. And also, moving the wrong finger could be very dangerous. The safest course of action would be to catalog every single ‘finger’ by going through the Ghost-generated file system to identify everything in there, but… too long.
Penny needed something faster, something visual. Something less convoluted to search through. She needed it for Ruby. Every moment that she didn’t have this taken care of was a moment risking discovery by the personnel on board the airship, and a moment that Ruby wouldn’t be able to spend at the dance.
Could she change the interface of Ghost to something more convenient? If it was capable of taking the form of a command line and a file system inside her consciousness, then could she just give it something like a graphical user interface? In theory, it would be as simple as… just…
The world shifted and blurred around Penny, the cameras of the Pandora melting away like a chalkboard being wiped blank, and suddenly Penny found herself in—
Oh. Oh, yes. This was exactly what she needed! Now she was floating inside a three-dimensional reproduction of the Pandora, and that reproduction was floating inside a black void which was featureless except for occasional pulses of green light. When Penny tried to look down at herself, she found herself represented as a faintly glowing ball of energy. She didn’t bother trying to deduce how she was seeing right now—Semblances often defied explanation, and this was clearly some sort of Aura-powered Semblance landscape. But the important thing was that Penny could see where everything in the ship, which—
She shot through the wires and cables like a dolphin cutting through the water, not feeling restricted in the slightest, and moments later she’d followed the correct wiring bundle to the airship’s radar instrumentation. And here, all she needed to do was run the command, and—
The ship balked as she tried to deactivate the radar array. That wasn’t supposed to happen. It had to be on at all times. It was not allowed. It should not be turned off. It was a security risk.
Penny urged Ghost on, pushing back against the programming. Her Aura flared, and she wondered if that would be noticeable to anyone who could see the ship’s landing lights. She needed to hurry—
The internal model of the ship flashed, and a status update blipped through Penny’s thoughtstream. Radar array deactivated.
Penny smiled, and pulled herself back to her own body. Her Semblance was sensational.
She took 0.7 seconds to reconfigure her consciousness to the sensation of her own body—it was momentarily disorienting, to go from the massive airship to her comparatively small chassis, like she’d suddenly been folded back up into something else—and then resumed her ascent at a much faster pace without fear of detection, rocketing up to the window of Ruby’s room.
The window glass was opaque, intended for one-way viewing, and Penny triple-checked the ship’s blueprint just to confirm she wasn’t about to wake up some poor unsuspecting soldier. Then she reached out and rapped her knuckles against the glass three times: the agreed-upon signal.
0.9 seconds after the third knock, the window slid open, and the beaming, effusive visage of Ruby greeted Penny.
Immediately, Penny noticed one clear difference in Ruby’s appearance: She had taken her hair out of its braid, and now it tumbled down around her shoulders and back and brushed against her waist like a big fluffy cloud. Even though clouds were not black and red. But Penny was still going with that metaphor, because clouds were pretty and Ruby’s hair was pretty! Very pretty.
“Salutations!” Penny said, waving.
“Holy gods, you actually did it!” Ruby’s voice came out in a quiet squeal, and she wasted no time in starting to climb out the window. “No alarms! You hacked the Pandora! No one in the world can do that! Except you!”
A surge of warm pride filled Penny at those words, the feeling welling up in her chest like a pleasurable power surge. “I will use this power wisely,” she said, even though it was quite debatable whether or not this was a wise usage. Actually, no, she was amending that thought. There was no question about it, helping Ruby was most definitely an extremely wise usage.
Ruby extended a hand, and Penny took it, maintaining Ruby’s balance as she pulled up her other leg so that she was perched entirely on the windowsill. There, she paused for a moment, still grinning at Penny.
“I can’t believe we’re actually doing this!” she gushed. “It… it’s wrong, it goes against everything I’ve ever been taught, but it’s so, so, so exciting at the same time! How’s that possible?”
“I think it is the conflict between what you need to do and what you want to do,” Penny said. “Right now, you are prioritizing what you want to do, which is okay even though it is unprecedented for you. In fact, I would say that its lack of precedence makes it more okay!”
“Yeah… Yeah…” Ruby’s voice fell to a near-whisper as she nodded slowly. “Just gotta keep reminding myself it’s okay.”
Penny checked her chronometer, and arched an eyebrow, signaling that they should hurry. The airship’s radar could be reactivated at any moment. “I think it would be best to discuss feelings once we are safely out of the short-range radar umbrella of the ship.”
“Oops. Yeah.” Ruby leaned forward a little, glancing down at the cobblestone far below, and then met Penny’s eyes. “You’ll catch me, right?”
Penny nodded, priming her joints to anticipate a sudden impact. “I won’t let you fall, Ruby, and that is a promise.”
“Okay.” Ruby took a deep breath, rocked forward, and hopped into empty air.
Of course, there was never any doubt that Penny would catch her. But somehow, despite knowing exactly what would happen, Penny felt a surge of surprise when Ruby landed in her arms. She could consider that feeling later, though! First things first, a hasty exit.
She fired her wing rockets, sending them flying out of range of the ship’s radar and making both her and Ruby’s dresses flutter. No alarms blared behind them; no signs that Ruby’s departure had been noticed or that anything had gone awry.
“Mission accomplished!” Penny chirped, slowing to a hover in midair above the spires of Beacon.
And now, without the need to devote so much of her processing ability to monitoring the airship, Penny was able to focus on Ruby. Which meant consciously noticing more things about Ruby. And consciously noticing Ruby’s position in her arms.
With one of Penny’s arms hooked under the bend of Ruby’s knees and the other arm wrapped around her back, she was holding Ruby in what would be referred to as a hero carry in their search-and-rescue class. Penny had done the carry multiple times with her teammates, and yet holding Ruby in the same position was making Penny… happy. Really, really, really, really happy.
Not only had Ruby let down her hair, but she had also changed into her dress, and added a pair of long elbow-length gloves with a matching color gradient. Penny spent several moments cataloging this moment as a highest-value memory, until Ruby spoke.
“We did it,” she breathed, clutching Penny’s shoulders with what seemed like an extraneous amount of strength, her unbound hair fluttering wildly in the wind. “I’m sneaking out! With the help of my super-duper best friend with awesome wings who’s kind of breaking me out!”
“So it is not just me who finds it exciting to refer to this as a breakout, then!” Penny said.
Ruby nodded rapidly, and then leaned closer. Penny didn’t even need her heart rate sensors right now—she could ascertain Ruby’s heart rate just from the thumping in her torso which was pressed against Penny’s skin. “It’s just like The Girl In The Tower…” she said, her voice quieter.
“You truly think so?” Penny was quite familiar with that fairytale. And she was very aware at this particular moment that the story ended with the girl and her rescuer falling in love.
“Yeah!” Ruby said, likely oblivious to the stir of emotions within Penny. “When I was a kid, I imagined myself in that story… But I always saw myself as the one doing the rescuing. I never thought in a billion years I’d end up being the one who needed a rescue!”
And then Ruby leaned her head all the way forward until she couldn’t be any closer, resting it against the crook of Penny’s neck where it met her collarbone, strands of her hair splayed across Penny’s skin in a way that made her tingle. At the same time, Ruby pulled her arms in more tightly, so that they encircled Penny’s neck more than her shoulders.
“My hero!” she said with a giggle.
Penny’s processors jumped. In fact, every bit of computing or machinery in her body, without warning, sped up like she was in the middle of solving the most complex mathematical equation in existence. It was—what Ruby was saying, and what she was doing—it was making Penny feel things, things that were new even compared to all the things that Ruby already made her feel. She felt like she was going to overheat.
“All your computer noises just got way louder,” Ruby said, and although Penny couldn’t quite see Ruby’s face from this angle, she could feel the muscles of Ruby’s face pulling into a wide grin. “That’s a good thing, right? You like being called a hero?”
Penny’s diagnostic system warned her of another sudden increase in operating temperatures. She dismissed the alert immediately. “…Yes?” she said, her processors completely failing to supply useful words for speaking. “Thank you. I like it very much. And I… I especially like being your hero.”
Ruby lifted her head so she could look into Penny’s eyes, their faces suddenly just inches apart. Penny’s photoreceptors nearly overloaded themselves trying to track all of the ways Ruby’s hair fluttered, backlit by the lights of Vale in the distance. “Then I’ll call you a hero more. Because you are.”
Amongst the myriad emotions surging through Penny’s chassis like lightning in a thundercloud, yet another one was making itself known: Pride. Holding Ruby in her arms, helping her find a measure of freedom with things that only Penny could do… It made Penny feel proud. So incredibly, immensely proud. She wanted to keep being Ruby’s hero with such a peculiarly aching desire that she had to wonder if this was another kind of romantic feeling. How else would it make sense? How else would any feelings Ruby was causing make sense?
Penny wondered if perhaps she should just tell Ruby about these feelings she was having. What if she did it right now? What possible downside was there?
…After a few seconds of contemplation, Penny’s prediction algorithms informed her that there were a great many possible negative outcomes. Most of which revolved around Ruby having a negative reaction. And if Ruby had a negative reaction, that would almost certainly spoil her experience of tonight.
For Ruby’s sake, Penny would not take that risk. And so she gently pushed down all of these thoughts to a lower processing priority, and asked, “General Ironwood is still on the airship, correct?”
Ruby nodded. “He’s managing security of the event from up here. Eyes in the sky, y’know. I’m… pretty sure he won’t make an appearance at the dance! So I think I can do this without him ever knowing I’ve been gone!”
Penny nodded. Even if the General did appear, she had an idea for how to deal with that situation.
“Shall we proceed to the dance now?” she asked.
Ruby’s heart rate jumped. “Yes.”
Penny turned toward the other side of campus, throttling up her rockets. Her original plan had been to land elsewhere and walk to the ballroom with Ruby, but 1.3 seconds ago, she had decided that she was going to fly Ruby directly to the entrance. Because that made her feel proud, and warm, and… good.
One of the many advantages of being a mechanical girl with built-in wings: at any time, in any place, she could make a striking entrance.
“Uh, Blake, Weiss, just checking, you know that the dance is inside, right?”
Blake turned at the sound of Coco’s voice, and nodded in reply to the sunglasses-clad girl standing at the podium set by the ballroom’s entrance. “Don’t worry, we’re going in soon. We’re just waiting for the other half of our team.” And Ruby. Hopefully.
“Well, I hope they get here soon,” Coco said with a slight shake of her head. “Because I am going to be so disappointed if you two miss out on the exquisite experience my team and I created in this ballroom. And after our mission almost made us miss the whole damn thing, I refuse to let anyone miss this.”
Blake gave Coco a curious look. “That’s right—your mission, I seem to remember you were asking other teams at Beacon to take over the dance planning? Because it seemed like your mission was going to be much harder than originally anticipated? What changed?”
Coco shrugged. “Honestly? No clue. One day, we were drowning in Grimm, and then the next day, they were just… gone.”
“Gone?” Weiss repeated dubiously.
“Not a single Grimm left near the settlement we were defending.” Coco leaned forward, resting her elbows on the podium as she lowered her sunglasses just enough to peer over the brim and stare into Blake and Weiss’s eyes. “And those woods were so thick with Grimm that you couldn’t cut down a tree without the trunk landing on something trying to kill you.”
As Blake and Weiss processed that, Coco’s words hung in the air, and any chance that she might’ve been joking was nullified by the utterly serious expression tinged with just a hint of wonder. And then she straightened up, her eyes landing on something behind Blake. “Oh, look, one of your wayward team members.”
Blake turned around, and momentarily forgot how to breathe.
“Hellooooooo!” Yang said, flashing a trillion-watt smile as she strolled up to the group, her high ponytail—her ponytail!— bouncing regally and her dress shimmering in the lights from the ballroom like sunlight on the surface of a calm lake.
Blake stared. She felt mildly like she was going to explode.
“Honestly, Blake,” Weiss huffed. “At least hold a funeral for your sense of restraint.”
Yang came to stand next to Blake, casually throwing an arm over her shoulder in a way that raised goosebumps on every inch of Blake’s skin. “We’re Team Battleship, Weiss. Our restraint died the day we were named.”
“We formed a team by fighting a sentient gunship, we arrested Roman Torchwick, and we fought a giant mecha in the heart of downtown Vale,” Blake added with a smile. “It isn’t ever coming back, either.”
Weiss rolled her eyes, but if she was going to say anything, it was cut off by Coco interjecting with, “Hang on, you were the ones who nabbed Torchwick?! I was wondering who did that, the news was so bizarrely hush-hush about how the arrest went down that we figured something had to be fishy, but…” She shook her head. “I guess if we wanted some real action, we should’ve stayed here.”
“You don’t have any idea what eradicated the Grimm on your mission?” Weiss said.
Another shrug from Coco. “All we knew was, the night they disappeared, there were lights flashing in the woods, like lightning on the ground, but there was no sound. And we sure as fuck weren’t investigating at night, because the only safe place once the sun went down was inside the walls of the settlement. But by dawn, there was nothing left to investigate. We still don’t know what thing could’ve possibly done that.”
How odd. But truth be told, Blake was having a difficult time devoting much thought to it, because all of her focus was being taken up by Yang’s warm, chiseled arm around her shoulder.
“Strange,” she managed to say, while leaning into Yang’s touch just a little bit. This was a good spot. She could stay here for a very long time.
“Oh, hey, there’s Team JNPR,” Coco said, looking to the right. The present members of Team BSYP followed her gaze, although it was impossible to miss how Weiss’s head snapped around much faster than everyone else’s.
Indeed it was Team JNPR, the four of them chattering with one another as they approached the ballroom. Blake wondered how Weiss was handling the sight of Pyrrha in a sleek, slitted red dress which was tailored to accentuate her powerful build with great (but not as great as Yang’s dress) care.
Blake got her answer when she glanced over in time to catch Coco reaching out and closing Weiss’s open mouth with a finger. It took Weiss a moment to register the gesture, but when she did, a flaming blush filled her entire face.
“Weiss, what was that you were saying about shame?” Yang’s voice was full of mirth.
At that moment, Pyrrha waved to Weiss with a small smile. She didn’t seem quite as animated as the other members of her team—there was something about her entire posture that seemed tense and not at ease. Blake remembered what Pyrrha had said earlier in the semester, about not liking parties, and felt a pang of sympathy.
Weiss waved back with a smile that was uncharacteristically ecstatic, and then wiped all emotion off her face in an instant as she returned her attention to Yang. “The only shameful thing occurring right now is your harassment of me.”
Yang snorted, and was clearly about to continue prodding Weiss when she abruptly cut herself off, cocking her head. “Wait. I hear rockets.”
Blake heard them, too—and would’ve heard them sooner, if she wasn’t so… distracted. But there was no mistaking the sound of Penny’s rockets coming from somewhere above.
The assembled students turned their eyes skyward to see Penny descending from the sky with Ruby in her arms, the two of them backlit almost perfectly by the moon in an ethereal silhouette which made them appear as if they were glowing. Penny’s wings were spread, the rockets warbling as they throttled down, blazing green flames stark against the night sky. As she touched down, the wind generated by the thrusters buffeted her hair and Ruby’s, and her dress might’ve been sent fluttering embarrassingly as well, if not for the weight of Ruby pressed against her keeping it secured.
Ruby clung to Penny even after they’d landed, just long enough for Blake to start wondering, and then she hopped out of Penny’s arms with a little laugh and a twirl.
“Sal-u-tations, friends!” Penny said, smoothing down her dress and retracting her wings with a ka-chunk as Ruby shook out her hair. A corner of Blake’s mind noted that this was the first time she’d ever seen Ruby with her hair down.
“Okay,” Coco said slowly. “I think those two have won the award for Best Style.”
“No disagreement from me,” Yang muttered, before raising her voice to greet Penny and Ruby as they joined them. “Hey, girls! Looks like the breakout was successful?”
“Completely!” Penny said. “No one noticed the escape!”
“Escape?” Jaune repeated loudly, looking more than a little alarmed.
“Long story! Not important!” Ruby clapped her hands together. “I’m here, everything’s fine! Let’s—”
“Wait.” Coco interrupted Ruby, coming out from behind her podium to stare at Penny. “Pallas, where in the gods’ name did your wings go?”
Penny and Ruby both froze, and that was when Blake realized a very important detail: Penny was not wearing her fake jetpack. In other words, she’d just landed in front of everyone with her wings out. And then made them disappear in a way that would be completely inexplicable to everyone who didn’t know the truth about Penny.
Her first thought was, how does someone with actual computer memory forget something like that?
Her second thought was, oh my gods, I think Penny got so caught up in making a dramatic and maybe romantic entrance with Ruby that she completely forgot about the thing she was supposed to be hiding. That’s adorable.
And then Blake had to actually consider damage control. But just as she was starting to rapidly assess how trustworthy Coco was and how good she might be at keeping a secret, Nora chose that moment to remind her that there were much less complicated, if far more chaotic, ways to handle a situation like this.
“Coco!” Nora hissed in a not-subtle-at-all tone. “You can’t just ask a girl where her wings went! That’s private!”
Coco turned to stare at Nora. “Are you implying she shoved the wings up her—”
“PRIVATE!” Nora bellowed, slapping her hand down on the podium, her voice so loud Blake swore she heard a crack of thunder in the distance.
“…Right,” Coco said, setting her knocked-askew sunglasses straight on her nose again. “Point taken.”
Penny’s confidence had taken a visible dive in the last minute, and Blake considered whether or not some comfort would be helpful right now, but Ruby was already by Penny’s side and having the same idea, because a moment later she put a hand on Penny’s shoulder and said, almost as loud as Nora, “It’s dance time!”
And then she paused, her eyes widening, and looked at Penny. “Um. Now what?”
A genuine smile was back on Penny’s face in a matter of moments as she turned back to Ruby. “Well, for starters, we should probably go inside. And then I believe it is customary to mingle for some time before attempting an actual dance.”
“Okay!” Ruby nodded slowly. “This makes no sense! But I’m excited! Which also makes no sense! Let’s go! What’s mingling?” With that, she reached out, taking Penny’s hand.
They looked at each other, and then started forwards together. Penny gave a happy smile over her shoulder to the rest of Team BSYP, all of her previous joy back in full force. She and Ruby strolled into the ballroom side-by-side, not just holding hands, but their fingers interlaced tightly.
Blake, Yang, Weiss, Coco, and Team JNPR watched them disappear into the crowd, and then, naturally, it was Nora who broke the silence.
“So, uh… Penny and Ruby, are they here together, or are they here together together?”
“Damned if I know,” Yang said, while Blake shrugged, and Weiss just shook her head.
Coco lowered her sunglasses again, still looking in the direction Penny and Ruby had gone. “Well.”
“We should probably go in, too,” Blake said, nudging Yang a little. “No sense standing out in the dark anymore.” After a moment’s thought, she held out her elbow for Yang to take.
Yang hooked her own elbow around Blake’s with a speed that was frankly flattering. “So much for going in as a team, huh?”
Blake glanced to the spot in the crowd where she’d seen green and red vanish. “Whatever Penny and Ruby decide to do tonight, it’s what they deserve.”
“True.”
“Well, I suppose I’m coming in with you two,” Weiss said, standing stiffly off to one side.
“You sure you don’t want to go in with Pyrrha?” Yang said.
Weiss crossed her arms, giving Yang a thoroughly befuddled stare. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
Yang stared at her for a moment in what Blake was sure was disbelief, before shaking her head and clapping her free hand down on Weiss’s shoulder. “Never mind. Let’s go trip the light fantastic.”
As they entered, they caught another glimpse of Penny leading Ruby through the crowd.
“On a scale of one to ten, Weiss, how much were you worried that Ruby was going to wear her goggles?” Yang said.
“Ten,” Weiss said. “That’s the one girl in Atlas who would show up to a formal event looking like she was ready for a fight...” She trailed off, something occurring to her. “But where did she get those formal gloves? We didn’t get her those.”
“Penny did say that Ruby made a few last-minute changes to her outfit,” Blake offered.
Weiss shook her head as she sidestepped a blue-haired boy who was carrying four drinks in two hands and absolutely not looking where he was going. “Well, I’m just thanking every deity in existence that she didn’t ruin that dress in the name of tactical upgrades.”
As the three members of Team Battleship not raised to be living weapons made their way deeper into the ballroom, Coco watched them from her position at the entrance, something curious occurring to her.
“Huh,” she said, focusing on Yang in particular. She hadn’t thought anything of it until after seeing Ruby and Yang walk in.
Ren must’ve heard the acutely contemplative edge to her tone, because he leaned closer to her and whispered, “Is something wrong?”
“Oh, not at all, just…” Coco pursed her lips, turning it over in her mind, and then shrugged. “If you ignore the color, doesn’t it look like Yang and that Ruby girl have really similar hair?”
Notes:
Note: Weiss, Blake, and Yang's dance outfits are not their canon outfits; they're the designs which were shown in Volume 2 concept art but were scrapped because of animation limitations! You can see what they look like in this tumblr post which shows the V2 concept art!
I fully believe that while Ruby didn’t get the Xiao Long hair color gene, she did get the Xiao Long hair floofiness gene. And the only reason why we’ve never noticed is because she’s never grown out her hair enough for the similarity to be noticeable.
And now, the most important thing: Penny and Ruby outfit sketch courtesy of DesiB717! :D Ruby's hair should be let down instead of in her braid, but that's totally okay, she didn't know that when she did the sketch, and I wasn't going to ask for a correction because she did it unasked for!
And here's a link to the tumblr post if you want to reblog it!
Chapter 33: Sparks
Notes:
EDIT NOTE: AO3 is logging people out randomly, y’all. If you’ve typed out a comment, please save it somewhere else besides AO3 before hitting send on the comment, because there is a really good chance that AO3 will log you out and erase your entire comment!! It’s already happened once.
It was only after posting last Friday's chapter that I learned that Team CFVY's V2 mission appears in the After The Fall book, which I haven't read. I think it still works with this story, but some quick editing had to be done on this chapter to make the new information fit!
Now, for the far more important note: The truly lovely artwork which appears in this chapter was commissioned from One Crusty Batch of Nature on Tumblr! I am so happy to share it with everyone!
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
A strange, heady excitement was filling Ruby, making her feel vaguely like she was about to start floating in the air. Neither her nor Penny could stop giggling as they navigated through the crowd, Penny leading Ruby by one hand. And Ruby was more than happy to let her.
The night was full of possibilities! Even if Ruby still wasn’t entirely sure what those possibilities were. But with Penny, Ruby felt like anything was possible. That was the important part!
Eventually, the pair found themselves standing near the DJ’s stage. Here, the music was at its loudest, the sound which pumped out of the speakers making everything around Ruby vibrate—not just the floor, but the air, and maybe even Ruby herself. Actually, scratch that maybe and make it a definitely, because Ruby’s eyeballs were vibrating inside her skull right now. Then she noticed Penny blinking rapidly.
“You okay?” she said.
Penny paused for one moment, staring off into space, and then turned to Ruby and nodded. “Perfectly. The vibration from the music was sending my most delicate sensors into a perpetual error mode, and recalibration is not solving the issue. So, I just shut them down! The odds I would need to use something such as my spectrometer tonight seem quite low.”
“Oh.” Ruby tried to think of any combat scenarios which would necessitate the use of a spectrometer, and then realized belatedly—“You have a spectrometer?!”
Penny nodded. “Yes! I should show it to you sometime! It’s quite an interesting piece of engineering, to make it all fit into my optical systems!”
Ruby’s awe for Penny only grew stronger and stronger every day.
It might’ve been surprising to some people that she wasn’t having any trouble hearing Penny even as they stood next to speakers taller than both of them, but Ruby had grown up on the battlefield and knew how to pick out every word spoken amidst explosions and gunfire and the roar of Grimm. For a moment, she wondered why Penny wasn’t surprised that Ruby could hear, but then she remembered that Penny was a super robogirl with audioreceptors that could detect someone by the sound of their footsteps. Hearing something over a loud background noise was probably nothing for her. Good thing she was hanging out with the only other girl in this ballroom who was good at that.
For a few minutes, they were silent, just standing next to each other, watching the crowd and each other and slowly getting acclimated to something neither of them had experienced before. And honestly? Ruby was okay with this, if the only thing they did all night was bask in each other’s presence amidst the noise and lights and people, and send each other occasional little smiles that made something in her chest do backflips.
There was so much in the ballroom to look at, but over and over again, Ruby found herself looking at Penny. She was beautiful.
Other people made a big deal out of calling someone beautiful, but really, for Ruby, she didn’t see all the fuss. Beautiful was just a fact about Penny. Before this semester, Ruby had never cared about who or what was beautiful, because that had absolutely nothing to do with saving the world, so what was the point? But then Penny had entered her life with the blazing passion and energy of a shooting star, as if one of the stars Ruby used to wish to every night had come to life and descended from the sky. And with Penny came beauty as something that mattered to Ruby for the first time ever. Because of how easily Penny observed and appreciated beauty in everything—and how happy it always made her, Ruby loved seeing Penny happy—Ruby had begun to notice beautiful things in the world too, more and more and more. An iridescent purple dragonfly landing on Ruby’s knee while she studied outside with Penny. The perfect little point made by a freshly sharpened pencil. The hemispherical droplets of condensation which beaded on the leading edges of Lunar Enforcer during early-morning outdoor lessons. And on, and on, and on, and on, and… and after all of that, how could she not notice Penny’s beauty?
Everything about her was beautiful. Her hair, which was such a bright shade of orange, was visible from far off, a beacon for everyone to see that Penny Pallas was approaching, just like how the lightening of the night sky preceded dawn breaking. Her smile, so wide and always so genuine. Her eyes—Ruby could get lost staring at those many-sided polygons she had for irises. They were so unique, like nothing else in the world! Everything about Penny was unique, one-of-one, unmatched in the world. Maybe that was part of why she was so beautiful.
And then there was her dress for tonight. Gods. The dress, while incredibly unfit for any kind of combat, shimmered like she’d caught the stars in her hands and dusted the folds of her dress with them. And the fabric loops which hung from her arms sort of like decorations were just so artful… The dress made Penny even prettier, somehow. Ruby was having trouble understanding why the clothing someone wore would make them even prettier. It was probably an art thing.
Her eyes wandered across Penny’s freckles, which were everywhere that her skin was visible, and she wondered if Penny had placed the freckles herself. Had she painstakingly decided on the placement of each and every freckle. Did every freckle have a story of its own? Did Penny know how good of a job she’d done with her freckles?
Actually, wait. Did Penny know she was beautiful? Had anyone ever told her? How could she not know—but then again, there were a lot of things lots of people didn’t know about themselves that they probably should. So—
“Hey, Penny?” Ruby said, thankful she didn’t have to raise her voice too much to be heard by Penny over the music.
Penny turned to her. “Yes?”
“You’re beautiful.”
There. Now Penny had been told she was beautiful at least once in her life!
Penny’s eyes went very wide, and she opened her mouth a little bit—Ruby was pretty sure if they were in a quiet room she’d be able to hear Penny whirring right now. Her reply was so quiet Ruby couldn’t hear it over the music, but she could see the movement of Penny’s lips forming the words thank you.
She was facing Ruby, but even so her eyes seemed to be everywhere except meeting Ruby’s own. “You are too, and I hope you know I am not saying that just to reciprocate your sentiment—I am saying it because it is quite true for you as well.”
“Thank you, too!” Ruby couldn’t tell if it was the beat of the music pounding in her chest, or her heartbeat thudding. Maybe they’d synced up. Also, as usual Ruby couldn’t feel her cheeks, but she was pretty sure she was blushing right now.
Penny had begun to fold and unfold her hands repeatedly, and that only increased in speed when she asked, “Ruby?”
“Yeah?”
Penny looked towards the center of the ballroom, and then to the other side, and then up at the balconies, and then back to Ruby. “Would you like to dance?”
Ruby’s already-hyperactive heart jumped again. On the one hand, yes! On the other hand… “Um, is it okay if I have no idea how?”
“Ab-so-lute-ly! Just follow my lead!” Penny held out a hand to Ruby, who accepted immediately, and then Ruby was being led out onto the dance floor proper.
“I was told that dancing is oddly similar to fighting,” Penny said as they came to a stop in the midst of a mass of moving people and thumping music. “So I believe you will pick up the basics much faster than most would!”
Ruby cast a skeptical glance around them. “And how is this like fighting, exactly?”
Penny stepped closer to Ruby, placing one hand on Ruby’s arm and the other on her back, and now she was looking right down into her eyes. Staring up into those deep and bright and mystical green photoreceptors with so little space between the two of them sent a strange little shudder up and down Ruby’s spine.
“Two individuals in close quarters moving in concert, both anticipating each other’s moves, both falling into a certain rhythm which is reliant on the other.” Penny began to move, guiding Ruby along with movements that were clearly practiced and gentle. “What discipline am I referring to?”
“…Huh.” She’d never thought of it that way, but as Penny took her through murmured steps and then did it again with more confidence and speed, she began to realize Penny was right. The way they moved around one another, the way that Penny would spin and then spin her… Ruby was reminded vividly of her classroom duel with Penny, except instead of Ruby being the one with the initiative, it was all Penny this time. And Penny was so good at it…
But unlike a fight, there were no weapons, no explosions, no gunfire. Just the two of them. And Ruby… liked it. This wasn’t a duel where the objective was to end it. This was… it felt like they were creating something together with their movements, something that could go on forever. It could last for hours, Ruby watching Penny’s hair bobbing around her head with every movement, their arms around one another, the music resonating through Ruby’s chest like a second heartbeat. They were each other’s center of gravity. Ruby couldn’t stop staring at Penny, and Penny seemed content to look right back at her as they moved, the world around them fading away in much the same way it had during their duel.
Penny was right. Dancing was like fighting, although… Ruby would fight with anyone, but she only wanted to dance with Penny. Dancing with anyone else still seemed unbearably boring, but dancing with Penny… she could do it forever.
There were so many things she wanted to do just with Penny. So many things that felt special just because she was doing them with Penny. So many things that felt… so many… so many feelings.
Penny made Ruby feel things that she didn’t feel with anyone else. Not with anyone in Atlas, and not with anyone else at Beacon. Not even her other friends, Yang and Blake and Weiss and Nora and Pyrrha and Ren and Jaune. It was only Penny who made Ruby feel so… everything.
Ruby felt as if she physically couldn’t look away from Penny right now. She’d almost lost track of what she was doing with her own body as they danced amidst a blur of noise and colors and people, entirely trusting Penny to lead. She felt… she felt…
What was this feeling?
The feeling built stronger and stronger inside her every time she looked at Penny. It made her want to explode into her Semblance and paint the entire planet in silver. It made her want to fly to the moon and back in a single breath like a comet in the night. It made her want to unleash her silver eyes in full force, screaming the brilliant light of victory into the darkness that plagued their existence. It made her want to burst.
Ruby didn’t understand what was happening. She didn’t know why Penny kept turning her entire body into a pressure cooker. Maybe she should’ve been scared by something so unprecedented, so unfamiliar. Maybe she should’ve been suspicious. Maybe she should’ve wondered if this was some sort of nefarious psychological warfare. All of her inbuilt soldierly instincts screamed at her to do exactly that, to run away and figure out how to make this feeling go away in case someone or something was trying to hurt her. If Ruby had encountered this feeling months ago, she might’ve done exactly that. If this was the Ruby from the start of the semester, she might’ve done whatever it took to make this feeling stop.
But this was the Ruby of right now, the Ruby who had snuck out of the airship, the Ruby who never wanted to look away from Penny, the Ruby who was discovering the color of the world, the Ruby who was learning to paint, and she didn’t want this feeling to stop. In the weirdest, strangest, most inexplicable way, the pressure building inside her felt incredible. Penny was the cause of it, and if Penny was the cause, then the feeling couldn’t possibly be something to fear.
“I still can’t tell if they’re just together or together together,” Nora lamented to Ren as she watched Ruby and Penny like a hawk from across the ballroom.
For the twenty-eighth time that night, Penny’s diagnostics warned her of a chassis overheating risk. And for the twenty-eighth time that night, Penny dismissed it without further action.
“I still can’t believe it,” Ruby said. “I’m disobeying orders. And it feels so good. How’s that possible?”
Penny ran through several potential replies before settling on one. “Because you are doing it for yourself!” Blake would approve of that statement.
“I guess.” Ruby was silent for a few moments, and then she looked up into Penny’s eyes. “And it’s also for you. I’d disobey any order for you.”
For the twenty-ninth time that night, Penny’s diagnostics warned her of a chassis overheating risk. And for the twenty-ninth time that night, Penny dismissed it without further action.
The overheating was being caused by a combination of heightened sensor awareness of Ruby’s presence, emotion processors running at full capacity, and all spare processing cycles being devoted to solving an extremely important question. They were all essential to Penny’s experience of tonight, and she absolutely would not turn off any of them regardless of what her diagnostic system said. Her body was more than capable of running at heightened temperatures for extended periods of time! It just was not recommended.
And what was the extremely important question which all spare processing cycles were being devoted to? Well…
Penny’s eyes briefly flicked to their surroundings. Statistically, some of the dancing couples around them had romantic intentions, and some of them had platonic intentions. Where did she fall in that? What did her feelings towards Ruby mean? She had to be absolutely certain of what they meant before she acted on them in any way. Otherwise, she might do the wrong thing! Or she might somehow hurt Ruby, which was the last thing she ever wanted to do! So, faced with an incredibly hard question with extremely consequential outcomes, she had decided to play to her own strengths, and throw raw computing power at the question. Current computational status: Still solving. She hoped to calculate an answer before the night was over.
Well, if she did have romantic feelings, was it fair to have romantic feelings towards Ruby without informing her of them first?
Honestly, how did organics ever deal with these kinds of questions? They probably had to agonize over it for much longer! That did not seem enjoyable. For now, Penny was going to let her processors do the work, and focus her consciousness on the joy of tonight. And the cuteness of Ruby.
In the pause between one song fading out and another one beginning, Ruby leaned in closer to ask, “Penny, didn’t you say you’ve never danced before?!”
“Correct!” Penny, in all honesty, could not have possibly anticipated things going this well. Even with her study and internal preparation, there should’ve been a learning curve for the actual act. But as soon as Penny had begun to move, everything else had come to her so easily, as if… as if she’d done this before. And if she dove deep into her code, she could find far more code related to the kind of motion she was doing right now than she should’ve been able to make in a single night.
Dancing is like fighting.
Right now, this was just a theory, but Penny had to wonder if she was uncovering vestiges of her old fighting style, the one from her life before Beacon. Her fighting style with Luminous Electra was very simple and direct and based on economy of movement, but that was because Luminous was a giant sword. What had her weapon been in her old life? Something which was more suited to a dancing-oriented fighting style? She was struggling to think of what weapon would fit that definition… maybe multiple weapons instead of just one?
However, before Penny could think further on it, her scroll vibrated in one of her dress’s pockets. Not wanting to stop dancing to read it, she connected to her scroll wirelessly and pulled the notification up internally. It was from Yang—
Ironwood just showed up.
Penny stopped dancing. “Oh, dear.”
“What’s wrong?”
Penny looked around, spotting Yang and Blake on one of the balconies overlooking the dance floor. They were both signaling frantically to her, and pointing toward the main entrance. Where the unmistakable looming form of General Ironwood had just entered, his hands folded behind his back as he surveyed the ballroom.
Ruby followed the path of Penny’s gaze to the entrance, and the sudden, forceful tightening of her grip on Penny’s arms indicated she’d spotted Ironwood as well.
“Oh, no,” she whispered, her heart rate climbing rapidly in Penny’s sensors. “Oh no oh no oh no oh no oh no—”
“I don’t think he knows you’re here…” It was likely true. Ironwood showed no urgency in his movements as he turned to converse with a nearby professor.
“No, no, no, I need to get out of here, need to hide, I can’t be caught, need to be a good soldier—” Ruby’s breaths were coming out in shorter and shorter gasps, and Penny dropped her visual on Ironwood to turn to Ruby. And realized her friend was in even more distress than what she’d thought—Ruby’s eyes were as wide as Penny had ever seen them, and she’d moved to be half-hidden behind Penny. She wasn’t even looking at Ironwood anymore—she was staring at a point somewhere in the distance as she clung to Penny’s arm with a never-slackening grip.
“I can’t fail…” she whispered.
“Ruby?” Penny placed one of her hands atop Ruby’s—not trying to lessen her grip on Penny’s arm, just trying to offer comfort. “You are going to be okay. I promise.”
Ruby took a massive gulp of air, and her eyes finally refocused on Penny. “You promise?” Her voice was perhaps the smallest Penny had ever heard it. And she was unconsciously activating her Semblance, rapidly shedding silver dust without going anywhere.
The growing cloud of silver around them worried Penny—it would be highly reflective and especially visible, exactly the sort of thing that might draw Ironwood’s eye—
That was when she turned to check on him again, and found him staring directly at the two of them with obvious surprise.
Penny did not even spend any time feeling dismayed or scared. Instead, she switched straight to a resolve that was as hardened as the metal which made up her chassis. It was time to enact her contingency plan.
“Ruby,” she said, her voice utterly calm. She would be calm, because it was exactly what Ruby needed right now. And in a strange way, Penny really was calm. Because she would be confronting this head-on, and one way or another, things would be resolved tonight with finality. “General Ironwood has noticed us.”
Ruby let out a whimper, but aside from that, her reaction was relatively understated. It seemed she’d accepted that they would be spotted from the moment she’d realized Ironwood was here.
“I guess I have to go turn myself in now…” she mumbled, pulling back a little bit and shaking her head. “I’m sorry, Penny, I was really hoping tonight wouldn’t end like this…”
“It won’t.”
Ruby blinked. “Wha?”
“General Ironwood does not have the right to make you leave this dance. You have done nothing wrong by being here. I would like to inform him of exactly that.”
“Penny…” Ruby looked up at her with eyes as wide and scared as the day when she’d told Penny about her secret powers. “What if he tries to… what if he gets you in trouble?”
Penny narrowed her eyes at the General. He was looking right at her, and when he saw her narrowed eyes, he blinked and took a step back, as if she had thoroughly startled him. “Given that he is the headmaster of an academy which I do not attend, and the general of a military which has no jurisdiction in this kingdom, I would like to see him try.”
Ruby, still half-behind Penny and looking lost, nodded shakily.
“Of course, if you are uncomfortable with me doing such a thing, I will refrain from it entirely,” Penny added in a quieter tone. “It is you who is at risk for punishment, not me. So I will respect your wishes.”
Ruby didn’t reply for a few long seconds, looking back and forth between Ironwood and Penny and chewing her lip so fiercely that Penny worried she might break the skin. Finally, she nodded with much more sureness, some of the usual energy coming back into her body as she met Penny’s eyes. “I’m in too deep already. Let’s do it.”
“Okay.” Penny gave Ruby the most confident smile she could assemble, and held out a hand. “Ruby, no matter what happens, I won’t stop trying to help you. That is a promise.”
Ruby took a deep, shuddering breath and grasped Penny’s hand tightly. She looked down at their intertwined hands, and then back up at Penny. She held that gaze for a long moment, her eyes starting to return to their normal brightness. “Thanks, Penny… I never thought I’d be doing something like this, but…” She leaned closer. “...My life’s been full of surprises ever since you came into it, so I guess I should stop being surprised by, um, how many surprises there are.”
Penny knew there was a paradox somewhere in what Ruby had just said, but this was not the time to investigate that, so she filed it away, gave Ruby one more encouraging smile, and began to walk across the ballroom towards Ironwood.
As she walked across the floor, she caught the gaze of Blake and Yang, who were watching her closely, and gave them a nod and a smile which she hoped would communicate I can handle this.
Blake gave an answering nod, but Penny could see from here that her entire body was tensed, and she was leaning over the railing as if she planned to leap over it at any moment. Yang, meanwhile, simply gave Penny a grim-faced thumbs-up.
And then they were almost there, and Penny refocused her attention on getting all her thoughts in order. Resources were pulled away from trying to compute the nature of her feelings for Ruby, and temporarily diverted to her language processors—she would need the best capacity for eloquence right now.
Prepared for a battle, but hoping that it would be peaceful, Penny and Ruby came to a stop in front of Ironwood, still holding hands.
“Good evening, General!” Penny said with all of her usual cheer.
Ironwood’s expression was indecipherable as he looked from Penny to Ruby and then back to Penny, and then at their linked hands. Finally, he spoke in a voice which was perhaps more composed than what Penny had been expecting.
“Good evening, er… Miss Pallas.” The name came out of his mouth slowly, as if he was unfamiliar with saying it. Which made sense, given that this was the first time Penny had talked to him. “And good evening, Cadet Karyatis.” Ironwood inclined his head at them both. “I must say, I wasn’t expecting to see you here.”
“Because you were attempting to imprison her aboard the airship for tonight?” Penny said immediately in the same cheerful tone.
Ironwood stared at her. Ruby made a choked noise, and suddenly she was holding onto Penny’s hand much more tightly. “It wasn’t that bad—” she started to say.
Penny glanced sideways at her. “What would have happened if you tried to leave for the dance without any sort of concealment?”
“Well, I wouldn’t have been allowed to leave…” Ruby trailed off, possibly realizing just how bad that sounded when said out loud.
“It is an unjust limitation of your movement, at the very least,” Penny said, and then she was looking back at Ironwood, her tone morphing to the seriousness she felt. “General, you do have the authority to restrict a student to their quarters as a punitive measure, but if this was a disciplinary action handed down in your capacity as Headmaster, then I would like to know what transgression Ruby committed to deserve this punishment.” Oh, Blake would be so proud of Penny when she told her about this conversation later.
Ironwood finally seemed to be gathering himself, recovering from the surprise of Penny’s all-out conversational blitz. “Miss Pallas, Cadet Karyatis is in a… thoroughly unique situation.”
“I’m more than capable of defending myself in any situation!” Ruby said, but there was the slightest of quavers in her voice.
Penny squeezed her hand again and decided to explode the conversation, which was something that she was quite good at. “By ‘unique situation,’ you mean how she is Project Moonrise?”
Of course, she took care to make sure no one around them was listening in before speaking. Thankfully, they were in a fairly quiet corner of the ballroom.
Ironwood’s eyes went comically wide. Ruby squeaked and clutched Penny’s hand even more tightly.
“Ruby should not get in any trouble for telling me about her secret,” Penny added quickly. “Because I told her about my secret. And it is just as significant as hers. She is my friend, and she trusts me with her secret, just as I trusted her with mine.” Maybe that was a daring thing to say to someone who knew nothing about Penny’s secret, but Penny was willing to take chances for Ruby.
She moved forward, positioning herself so that she was partly between Ironwood and Ruby, and stared directly into the center of Ironwood’s pupils, resolving not to look away until the situation was settled. “General Ironwood, Ruby is a person. No matter how valuable she is to the fight against the Grimm, no matter how many lives she could save, she is not an object that can be stored away whenever not in use! Ruby’s own life has worth, too! She deserves a life beyond just fighting and being used for other ends! She deserves to do things such as going to this dance!”
There she stopped, hoping this would be enough to convince the General.
Ironwood let out a deep sigh, his gaze intensifying. He looked from Ruby to Penny, and then back to Ruby. But before he could say anything, Ruby spoke up.
“Sir, if I can be deployed to somewhere like Lower Cairn, like I was for that one night a few weeks ago, then why can’t I be deployed here?” She glanced around at their surroundings. “This place is a lot safer than Lower Cairn, isn’t it?”
“In principle, yes. But in practice… Lower Cairn was not a target of anything. It was a small, isolated settlement with no strategic value. The only thing I knew you would find there was Grimm, and no other enemies. It was the perfect place to make sure your…” Ironwood’s eyes flicked to Penny. “…Abilities were still in top shape. But Beacon… Beacon is a target. One of the most prominent ones. Our…” Once again, his eyes went to Penny. “…Enemies want to see it fall. It is a symbol of justice, of strength, of everything great about our civilizations. Precisely what our enemies want to tear down. And this gathering is even more of a target. It’s a gathering of the best and brightest young souls in the world, our future first line of defense against the enemies of civilization. What better place and time to sow shock and fear and destruction than here, tonight?”
“Um…”
Who exactly are these enemies? Penny wondered.
“Does that help you understand why this night is more dangerous than your night at Lower Cairn?” Ironwood said.
Well, Penny’s logic core could at least see the logic in Ironwood’s decision now, but she still did not have nearly enough information to call that the right decision. Information that it didn’t seem she would find.
Ruby was silent for a few seconds, her fingers squeezing and unsqueezing around Penny’s hand. Then she took a deep breath, and spoke.
“Well, if I’m going to be the greatest soldier in the world, I should be able to defend myself from anything that could happen tonight, right?”
Penny wanted to let out the loudest cheer of her entire life. Ruby was standing up for herself! Instead of a cheer, she settled for spinning her internal fans very hard in a quieter type of celebration.
Ruby turned to look at Penny, her eyes full of questions. Penny constructed her best encouraging smile in response. Ruby smiled back, even if it was a very nervous smile. Then, to Ironwood:
“What if you trusted me to do my own thing more, sir? Please? You’ve trained me. All of Atlas has trained me. If I can’t protect myself, how can you trust me to protect the world?” She paused, and then she was looking down and scuffing her feet against the ground, adding one more thing in a much smaller, far more emotional tone. “…Sir, you do trust me, right?”
And, oh, that was maybe the smartest, most perceptive thing Ruby had ever said, because she could see the change that came over Ironwood, the blatant surprise and something else and then the rapid softening in his expression as he looked between Penny and Ruby, and finally… the slow, assenting nod.
“Understood, Ruby. I won’t interfere with your night again.”
Ruby squealed. Loudly. Loudly enough to make Ironwood wince as she abruptly jumped into Penny’s arms, the hug so unexpected that it almost knocked Penny over. But once she’d ensured she wouldn’t fall over, Penny was only too happy to hug her back with the highest degree of safe force!
“I did it!” Ruby squealed, before remembering that Ironwood was still there. She lifted her head, glancing back at him. “I mean. Um. Thank you, sir.”
And then, even Ironwood was smiling a little as he looked back and forth between Penny and Ruby. “Well, I wish a good evening to you and your, erm, friend.”
With that, he turned and strode away without a backward glance, and Penny and Ruby were left alone. With neither of them in trouble. With neither of them in trouble.
“We did it!” Ruby squealed again, before burying her face in Penny’s shoulder, the pounding of her heart in her chest crystalline-clear. Then she pulled back once again, her arms still encircling Penny, and she gave Penny a wildly ecstatic, reverential look. “Penny. Do that dance move again! The one I really liked. You know the one!”
Penny did know the one, because there was one particular dance move she’d tried which Ruby had adored exponentially more than everything else, and ‘everything else’ was already a rather high bar to clear.
“Okay!” she said, before carefully taking hold of Ruby’s midsection with both hands and lifting her about a foot off the ground. Then, in a movement that was already becoming familiar, she spun in a slow circle, twirling Ruby around her through the air. Ruby giggled and kicked her legs as they spun around, and when Penny set her back down, she jumped up and down and did a little spin of her own.
“Oh my gosh. I feel really happy and I also think I’m going to throw up and I want to run a mile and I also feel like I can’t breathe and that was the scariest thing I’ve ever done but now I’m so excited I don’t know what to do with myself!” Ruby came to a stop, took several deep breaths, and then sighed heavily. “I kind of need a few minutes before I can do any more dancing…”
“That is perfectly alright!” From what Penny understood of organic biology, that was what the average stressful situation felt like. “We could do one of the other activities available to us?”
Ruby looked around slowly. “Such as?”
“Well…” Penny really hadn’t put much thought into what other things there were to do at a dance besides, well, dancing. “We could go drink some punch?” she offered finally.
Ruby shrugged. “I mean. I won’t be able to taste the punch.”
“And I cannot ingest fluids,” Penny added.
“...Might as well do it, just for the style?”
Minutes earlier
Blake was white-knuckling the balcony railing as she watched Penny and Ruby approaching Ironwood. Penny had signaled that the situation was under control, but… this was General James Ironwood. The face of the kingdom that Blake had been diametrically opposed to for most of her childhood. And she fully expected that Ironwood would not easily give up any kind of power, just like so many other people in Atlas who held power.
“Yang,” she said, her voice low and urgent. “If things go south for those two—I need to know, will you have my back?”
Yang stared at her. “You implying that you’re going to go have an up-close-and-personal argument with Jimmy Tin Tits if he doesn’t budge?”
Blake was already calculating the best place to land her weapon locker. “One, that is the funniest way I’ve ever heard anyone refer to him, ever. Two, it might be more than just an argument.”
“Thanks. I picked it up from my uncle.” Yang paused to watch as contact was made between Penny and Ironwood, his body language signaling that Penny was going in for the kill immediately. “And yeah. Definitely, I’ll be right there with you.”
“Thanks.” Blake wasn’t even sure what she wanted to do. She just had the strangest feeling that this encounter was going to answer a whole lot of questions about what they’d have to do to earn Ruby’s freedom. And if this ended with Ironwood trying to frogmarch Ruby back to the airship… Well, General of the Fucking Atlesian Military or not, and Headmaster of Fucking Atlas Academy or not, Blake was going to do her sworn duty as a Huntress and she was going to go down there and stop that man from controlling Ruby by whatever godsdamned means necessary.
Just like my White Fang days, she thought with a rueful smile as she tried to decipher the exchange that Penny and Ruby and Ironwood were having. Fifteen-year-old me would’ve wanted to punch Ironwood in the face just as much as I do right now, and the only difference is that now I’m close enough to him to actually do it.
It was really comforting to know Yang had her back. She was right beside Blake at the railing now, watching Penny and Ruby and slowly flexing and unflexing the fingers of her prosthetic hand. “So, should I get Weiss and Team JNPR, too—” she started to say. Only to fall silent as Ironwood turned and walked away from them. “Wait.”
Blake stared. What did that mean? What did walking away mean? She was too far away to make out his face or hear anything—
But she could very clearly see Penny picking Ruby up and twirling her around in the air, and there was no way to interpret that as anything but a celebration.
“They did it!” Yang said.
“They did it!” Blake said.
They turned and high-fived each other, as the momentous and ever-present pressure on Blake’s shoulders eased just a little bit. She genuinely felt like they’d just turned an immense corner. Ruby was standing up for her independence. And she was getting at least some measure of it.
“Well, that’s a relief,” Yang said, her entire body relaxing as she turned to look at Blake again. “Shall we leave those two lovebirds to do their own thing? And resume our own, um…” She trailed off, belatedly realizing the implications of where that sentence was headed. A brilliant red blush spread over her face with stunning speed. “Not that I’m implying we’re lovebirds or anything! That’s only if you want it to be that way! I was just talking about Penny and Ruby, and then, my sentence structure just went there—oh gods—”
“Yang.” Blake couldn’t hold back a little laugh as she reached out, brushing back a strand of Yang’s hair which had fallen in front of her face. “You’re into me. That’s okay.”
Although it was an open secret at this point, there was still something exhilarating and terrifying and liberating about saying it out loud.
Yang’s eyes followed Blake’s hand all the way from the start to the finish of the movement. “I—really?” she said, and Blake’s heart went ba-dum at how unabashedly hopeful her partner’s (no, not that kind of partner yet) expression was. With Yang, emotional secrets were vanishingly rare. And Blake adored that. It was a relief to be around someone who was always upfront with her real emotions.
“And… I’m pretty sure the feeling is mutual, Yang.” Understatement of the century, Belladonna. You’ve got it just as bad for her as she does for you. You’re just better at concealing it.
Blake told her inner voice to hush.
Yang’s deep lavender eyes were very wide, and she was watching Blake without saying anything. Her ponytail swayed slightly behind her, hypnotically.
“But I’m still…” Blake struggled for the right word to describe the immense changes to her life and mental state in the past few months. “…Still figuring myself out. And, as much as a part of me is telling me to see how deep these feelings go… there’s still a much larger part of me that’s just not ready.”
Yang nodded slowly. “I totally understand. If you want me to back off, or to stop having these kinds of feelings, just say the word and I’ll—”
“I don’t,” Blake said. Her voice made Yang pause, blinking. “I don’t want you to stop having them,” she added hastily, realizing how that could sound with no context. “I… I just want you to know that it might take some time, before I’m comfortable reciprocating, before I’m comfortable calling us anything besides friends and team partners. But I want to work towards that. Which means, Yang Xiao Long…” She firmly told her instincts she would not be going in for an impulsive kiss, and then she leaned forwards for the sole purpose of laying a hand on Yang’s prosthetic hand, slowly rubbing her thumb over the smooth, painted metal. “…Please keep being into me until then. It makes my heart sing, and it makes me look forward even more to the day that I’ll be comfortable enough with making you feel the same way.” She paused, and then added in a much quieter voice, “If that’s a day you’ll wait for.”
Yang swallowed heavily, and then nodded. “I’ll wait as long as you want, Blake Belladonna.”
Blake’s chest pulsed with the deepest of aches. Yang…
And then Yang held out her arms for what was undoubtedly a platonic hug, and after a moment’s hesitation borne mostly from old reflexes, Blake leaned all the way forward into those powerful, chiseled arms.
Normally, Yang’s hugs stayed around the shoulders, but this time… one of her hands went up to cradle the back of Blake’s head. It was a gesture saturated with tenderness and care, and right now, everything about Blake’s surroundings felt safe. Her partner, her team, her classmates, the school, all of it.
Blake wouldn’t call it inner peace. Nothing would count as inner peace until the world was a better place for Faunus. But this was a moment of comfort that she hadn’t felt in a very long time.
Eventually, though, they pulled away and looked at one another, Yang grinning widely and without concealment as she turned back to the ballroom. “How do you think the rest of our team is doing?”
Blake surveyed the ballroom again, and considered herself quite lucky for having two teammates with such incredibly distinct hair. Weiss, however, was nowhere to be seen. She found Penny after a few moments of searching, though, and naturally she was with Ruby. They were by the refreshments table, and—
Blake furrowed her brow. “Actually, what are those two doing?”
“Hm?” Yang craned her neck and caught sight of the two of them in the crowd. “Oh, there they… are…” She trailed off, and then muttered, “Oh my gods.”
“What is it?”
Yang sounded like she didn’t know whether to laugh, or facepalm, or coo. “…I think they’re playing I Spy.”
“I spy with my electronic eye, something with an atom of gold.”
“Hey, no fair!” Ruby poked Penny in the shoulder with a laugh. “I can’t see things on the atomic level!”
“Don’t worry, it was sort of a trick question, anyways!” Penny said. “There is at least one atom of gold in every single person in this room.” And some people, such as Penny, had many more gold atoms than the average person.
Ruby blinked. “Huh. I guess you’re right.” She looked around the room, and then said, “I spy with my silver eye, something fluffy.”
“You?” Penny said immediately, reaching out and flicking a tuft of Ruby’s hair.
Ruby snorted into her punch and shook her head. “Try again, I’m not going to pick myself.”
“Well, I think it was the best option,” Penny said resolutely.
“You sure about that?” Ruby nodded to the balcony where Blake and Yang were still standing. “I think our teammate has me beat for fluffiness.”
Penny started to analyze the fluffiness of Yang’s hair versus Ruby’s hair, and then stopped as something occurred to her. “Our teammate?”
“Oh. Oops. Sorry. Mistake.” Ruby flushed bright red, and took an enormous gulp of her punch.
“Do you want to be on our team, Ruby?” Penny had absolutely no idea if something like a fifth team member, or switching teams, was even allowed, but… just the thought of it was making her ecstatic.
“Mmmmmaybe?” Ruby said. “But it’s against the rules in ten different ways. So just forget I said anything.”
“Okay.” Internally, Penny decided to circle back to that idea later. Perhaps Ozpin would make an allowance for extraordinary circumstances.
“Well, hello to you two—are we all enjoying the night?”
“Professor Carmel!” Penny said, turning at the sound of her professor’s voice and finding her standing at their side in an impeccably tailored suitjacket. “Good evening! I was not expecting to see you here tonight.”
“Because I’m too old?” Carmel said, giving her a wry smile.
“Oh—not at all—I—I just assumed that this kind of event would not interest you—”
“Well, you’re right about that. I’d much rather have a night in with a nice cup of tea and a stack of books I want to read before I die.”
Penny did not do a very good job of keeping her face composed in response to that, and Carmel noticed. “Ah, no need to dance around it with me,” she said, waving it off as if death was a troublesome insect buzzing around her head. “I’ve lived nine decades, Miss Pallas, and in a Huntress’s line of work, that’s a miracle in itself. The end will come for me at some point, and that’s just biology.” She paused, and then gave Penny a scrutinizing look. “...Although, I must admit I’d be fascinated to hear your views on death, seeing as how you have, er…”
“Beep-boop stuff,” Ruby supplied in a tone of great helpfulness.
“Well, that’s not exactly how I would’ve put it, but it works,” Carmel said. “Miss Pallas, would it be overly rude of me to ask how your lifespan is measured?”
Penny had to think about it. And think about it some more. And—well, this was a question that could take up all of her processing resources. She could most definitely die in any number of ways—running out of power, being ripped to pieces, being stabbed through her Aura generator—but as for a natural way to die, insofar as organic beings died of ‘natural’ causes…
“...I don’t know,” she said finally. She could replace parts as they wore out, and even her Aura generator could theoretically be repaired, although it would be an extremely tricky undertaking.
“That’s always the most fun answer, isn’t it?” Carmel said. She turned to the refreshments table behind them and picked up a cup of punch. “Would you two like to know what my Semblance is?”
Penny and Ruby both nodded immediately.
Carmel opened her mouth to answer, but before she could say a word, someone brushed past her, and the collision spilled some of Carmel’s punch onto her sleeve.
“Tarnations. Well, here’s a perfect demonstration of it right now,” she said, before reaching into the pocket of her suit and pulling out a neatly folded handkerchief. “I was wondering what I’d need this for.”
Penny tilted her head in confusion. Was Professor Carmel implying that…
“My Semblance is an extremely limited kind of precognition,” she said, dabbing at her sleeve. “I call it Cupboard, and it tells me exactly how much of any given object I’ll need over the next twenty-four hours. For example…” She indicated the handkerchief. “This morning, my Semblance informed me that I’d need one handkerchief for the next twenty-four hours. I thought it was telling me I’d end up at the dance tonight—which I wasn’t planning on attending originally, an old friend of mine asked me to show up—but rather, it seems Cupboard was telling me to plan for a spill.”
“Fascinating!” Penny said.
Then Carmel’s face became somber, and she leaned towards Penny, suddenly much quieter. “And theoretically, my Semblance means I could see my death coming,” Carmel said. “If I were to have a habit I did every day, with a certain object, if my Semblance were to tell me I wouldn’t need that object tomorrow, well…”
“But maybe you just forgot to do it!” Ruby said.
“Exactly!” Carmel gave her an appreciative nod. “You’re thinking about it the right way, and I’d give you extra credit for that if you were actually enrolled in my class and not just a strange girl who shows up to my lectures randomly.”
Ruby let out a nervous laugh. “Um. Sorry?”
Carmel’s reply was a loud cackle. “Don’t worry about it. Anyways, you’ve just illustrated exactly why I have to be careful with my Semblance. It could lock me into a certain way of thinking, which could turn out to be completely wrong. When I was far younger, I had a terrible habit of getting too focused on one version of the future which I was absolutely positive would have to come to pass. And I was wrong. Many, many, times.” She pointed to Penny, and then Ruby. “Take that wisdom to heart, girls. Don’t ever think for a moment that the future is unchangeable. Destiny is a terrible thing to believe in.”
And with that, she drained her cup of punch, tossed it over her shoulder into a nearby trash bin without looking, and nodded to them both. “Well, now that I’ve dampened the mood enough, I must go find my esteemed colleague who somehow convinced me to come here tonight. Ta-ta!”
She started off into the crowd, only for Ruby to call out.
“Wait! Professor?”
Carmel swung around, raising a questioning eyebrow at Ruby.
“Do you think you’ll finish your reading list before you die?” Ruby said.
“Nope!” Carmel said, before giving them a toothy grin. “And that’s the beauty of it. Now, I’ve bothered you two enough. Enjoy your date!”
And then she was gone before Penny could correct her about this not being a date; all she could do was dismiss another overheating alarm, and then look at everything in her vicinity except for Ruby.
But thankfully, Ruby seemed more preoccupied with Carmel’s answer to her question—or she hadn’t even noticed what they’d been referred to as.
“Can we go somewhere else?” Ruby said, staring into the bottom of her cup. “I kind of need a breather before I can do any more dancing.”
“Absolutely! Where should we go?”
“Somewhere quieter? And not a lot of people?”
Penny was about to suggest one of the outdoor terraces, but then it occurred to her that there would be quite a few other students there. Ruby sounded as if she wanted solitude. So…
“How about the roof?” she said. “We’ll still have a view of everything happening, and we definitely won’t be disturbed! And besides,” she added, lowering her voice and giving Ruby an anticipatory look, “I can fly us up there!”
Ruby’s eyes lit up. “How do you always know exactly what I want?!”
On one of the outdoor terraces which Penny had decided not to visit, Weiss was leaning against a wrought-iron railing and trying to decipher the strange feelings that had been bubbling inside her all night. Really, it’d been quite a nice evening. She’d danced a few times with Blake and Yang, had some interesting conversations with some exchange students, enjoyed some truly excellent charcuterie (which Yang had made fun of her for partaking in), and now she was gazing out at the so-very-picturesque skyline of Vale. For all intents and purposes, she should’ve been content right now. And yet…
Weiss straightened up, rolling her shoulders back and forth. She’d been standing here for a quite a while, actually. The twisted metal pattern of the railing was deeply imprinted into the skin of her forearms by now.
Maybe this inexplicable, untraceable feeling of wanting more somehow was jealousy. After all, she could see what was happening with Penny and Ruby, and also Blake and Yang. And both couples were just so… casual and at ease about it all. Weiss didn’t understand how they could do that. Blake and Yang were casually discussing their feelings for one another with respect and just… seeing where it went, as Yang had put it. Without a single ounce of anxiety for what the future might hold for them. And then, Penny and Ruby—Weiss wasn’t sure that either of them knew what romantic feelings were, but the two of them were so unabashedly reveling in their feelings for one another, without any concern for what it might mean for the future. Honestly, Weiss would not be surprised if those two decided—without any prior discussion or negotiation—to just start dating.
And Weiss envied both of those not-quite-yet-couples. Romance couldn’t ever be something so easy, so light, for Weiss Schnee, heiress to the Schnee Dust Company. In Atlas, romance had been a game of navigating attempted courthoods from the various boys her age in high society, with political and financial stakes hanging in the balance of every potential matchup. And of course, the looming expectation that she would provide another heir or heiress for the Schnee lineage. Father judged would-be suitors mercilessly, and Weiss knew all too well that if she made the wrong choice, the SDC could and would be yanked out of her hands. However, if she waited too long to make a choice… the SDC would also be yanked out of her hands.
And of course, what made such a theoretical choice to be made at a future date even harder was that so far, Weiss had never been able to bring herself to care about any of the potential suitors that’d crossed her path. Not even a little bit. Over and over again at galas where she was forced to listen to some bland boy who put far more effort into his hairstyle than into what came out of his mouth, Weiss found herself wondering: this is it?
Even at Beacon, where she was actually encountering genuinely interesting boys for the first time in her life, she still could not find that elusive… spark, as she’d heard it called. Not for lack of trying, of course. She’d attempted an analytical approach at Beacon, trying to graph out what combination of factors would lead her to the best man at Beacon for herself and Father. No luck. Every potential match she came up with completely failed to ignite any sort of special spark upon initiating actual interactions.
Weiss sighed. Really, she shouldn’t have been so troubled over all this. She was perfectly aware that romance was not necessary to make someone happy or complete in life! It was only a requirement for Weiss because of Father’s backwards and obstinate requirements for inheritance!
Suddenly, the pragmatic part of Weiss’s brain was whispering an almost-unthinkable idea to her—
Why not just fake an attraction? Why not find the perfect candidate who would both please Father and also not get in Weiss’s way, and have a marriage of pure convenience? If it was just ownership of the SDC that mattered, why not just grin and bear it until the transfer papers were signed and she had immutable, irreversible ownership? Then she could just divorce whatever patsy she’d married and Father wouldn’t be able to do a damned thing about it.
It was a perfect plan. Except for one flaw. A Weiss-shaped flaw.
Weiss wanted a real romance. She yearned to feel that mythical spark. The longing that she felt when watching other couples tonight? That was far from just a longing for unburdened courtship. It was also very much a longing for that kind of relationship. She wanted what Penny and Ruby had, where they were like two stars in a binary orbit slowly drifting closer and closer as they spun around one another, flying towards a collision that would be as brilliant and passionate and energetic as any supernova, two shining stars merging to form one stellar body that would outshine anything else in the cosmos.
It felt like some sort of taunt from a deity far above that Weiss Schnee—so desirable and so socially adept yet so thoroughly cursed in romance—was on a team with Penny Pallas, who by her own admission found romance confusing and yet was falling into a love that could’ve been ripped straight out of a fairytale.
Weiss wanted to know someone on an incomprehensibly deep level. She wanted to look at someone like they were her entire universe. She wanted to curl around someone and feel as if they were two sides of the same coin. She wanted a knight in shining armor who would sweep her off her feet like in the books she’d read far too many times as a child.
She would just have to keep looking.
Footsteps from behind caught her attention. As they came closer she turned, and found Pyrrha approaching, her powerful build silhouetted by the bright lights of the ballroom at her back. Her red dress flowed around her like the tumbling of a waterfall.
Once again, Weiss was briefly so arrested by the sight that words failed her even as Pyrrha came to a stop beside her and gave her a smile. Aside from glimpses on the dance floor, it was the first time they’d crossed paths since entering the ballroom with their teams.
“Hello again,” Pyrrha said.
Only then did Weiss rediscover the ability to form words. “I trust your evening has been pleasant?”
Pyrrha nodded. “More than I expected, honestly. I think it’s been years since I went to an event this large without any paparazzi present. It’s… nice.”
“Dear gods, tell me about it.” Weiss sighed deeply, treading familiar ground. “I don’t think I’ve ever been at a social event without photographers, or reporters, or some sort of inquisitive arm of the public in my entire life. This is almost… strange. It feels private, even with so many people around.”
“Mmm.” Pyrrha gazed off at some distant point in the night, and then spoke without turning her head. “I take it no one asked you to the dance, either?”
“Oh, plenty of people did. I just didn’t feel particularly inclined to accept anything.”
“Ah.” Suddenly, Pyrrha turned her head so that she was looking entirely away from Weiss, and fell silent.
It took Weiss several moments to realize the implication of Pyrrha’s question followed by her sudden silence.
How could no one ask Pyrrha? Kind, strong, brave, Pyrrha, whose smile filled Weiss’s chest with warmth? Weiss was actually insulted on Pyrrha’s behalf right now.
But before she could speak up in an attempt to comfort her somehow, Pyrrha turned back, resting her elbows on the railing with her full weight.
“Weiss…” she said, and there was something significant in her tone which made every hair on the back of Weiss’s neck stand upright.
“I wish I’d asked you.”
The words sank slowly into Weiss’s awareness, as if there was suddenly a layer of something sticky surrounding her brain, preventing any rapid understanding of anything. “…As friends?”
“More.” That same sad smile from before was back, aimed fully at Weiss. “Weiss, I… I need to confess, I’ve started to feel something for you that… I think it goes beyond friendship.”
The world was starting to feel extremely wobbly around Weiss, and she had to put her hands on the railing just to reassure herself she wouldn’t collapse. The next thing to come out of her mouth wasn’t are you sure? or when did this happen? or will you be disappointed if I turn you down? Instead, what she asked was:
“How can you tell?”
Pyrrha’s eyebrows went very far up, and for a moment she seemed to be losing confidence, but then she set her shoulders again and inched closer to Weiss. “I… I want to be around you. But in a way that feels entirely different from how I want to be around my other friends. You get me. I get you. The connection we have, the things we understand about each other without even having to say anything because of how we both grew up… that feels unique and special to me, like a treasure. When I’m with you, I don’t feel like I’m on a pedestal because you’re right there with me, and we can just… be equals. When I’m around you, I feel like I’m being pulled by my heart into a beautiful abyss, as if you’re the one with Polarity. Sometimes I can’t stop looking at you. Sometimes I don’t want to stop looking. That doesn’t happen with anyone else I know. That’s all you, Weiss.”
“Oh,” Weiss said, her voice as small as it had ever been. It wasn’t just the world that was wobbling now; her head was spinning too, and now not even two hands on the railing were enough to keep her upright. Fortunately—or unfortunately—Pyrrha caught her with her magnificently chiseled arms before she could fall.
“Weiss?” All of the nervous exhilaration that had been in Pyrrha’s tone just seconds ago was gone, replaced with outright worry. “Are you alright? Did I—I’m sorry, was that too much?”
Weiss’s pulse was pounding louder and louder in her own head as several terrifyingly undeniable facts began to make themselves devastatingly clear to her.
What Pyrrha was describing as romantic attraction was exactly how Weiss felt about Pyrrha.
Pyrrha inspired feelings in Weiss that no boy out of a great many had ever come even slightly close to inspiring.
Therefore, it was incredibly likely that Weiss was romantically attracted to Pyrrha.
For some reason, Yang’s words from several months ago about homosexual people were running through her head at maximum volume: “The kind of people who would get kicked out of the upper-crust Atlesian society you live in.”
As Weiss stared up at Pyrrha through her swimming vision, she understood: This was the spark, the hallowed spark, she was sure of it, and she felt that spark for Pyrrha.
Weiss had found her knight in shining armor.
But it was someone that Father would never accept. Someone that Weiss would never be allowed to court if she were to have any hope of inheriting the SDC. It wouldn’t be allowed, it would be against the rules, she would be a disgrace disgrace disgrace disgrace disgraceful child unworthy of inheriting anything a stain on your family’s name disgrace disgrace—
“No,” she mumbled, grabbing the railing again and forcing herself upright. “No, no, no, no, no—”
But her heart was rebelling against her denial—at the thought of feeding this spark with Pyrrha, it soared. At the thought of fulfilling these emotions with Pyrrha, an incredible happiness flooded her, one that she hated herself for feeling, one that she wished would go away because she knew she would never be able to satisfy it.
“Weiss?” Pyrrha’s arms fell away from Weiss’s side, and she fought down the surge of pain at the lost contact.
“I’m sorry,” Weiss gasped. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry—” She didn’t know if she was apologizing to Pyrrha or herself. “I can’t—”
She couldn’t even bring herself to look at Pyrrha’s face, at the disappointment she knew would be there, at the heartbreak—
Despite barely being able to see through her tears or keep herself upright, Weiss backed away and then broke into a stumbling run, fleeing the terrace and all the feelings laid bare there.
Outside, it was a calm night, and Penny was so very happy.
Despite being directly above the ballroom, the roof was quiet. They could still feel the thumping of the music as it resonated through the building underneath them, but Penny found it strangely comforting to have that rhythmic pulsing against her legs. And Ruby just wasn’t bothered by it.
They sat side-by-side with their legs stretched out, close enough for their knees and hips to be touching. Ruby was resting her head on Penny’s shoulder, and Penny was resting her head atop Ruby’s head. At some point, Ruby had slipped an arm around Penny, and at an even more nebulous moment in time, Penny had put an arm of her own around Ruby. They were in as close a physical proximity as they’d ever been, and it felt… right.
Penny’s processors whirred away, still trying to solve the question of the nature of her feelings for Ruby. But paradoxically, the more time it was taking to receive an answer, the less worried Penny was about what the answer would be. What was the point of worrying about the nature of her feelings when she could simply sit here with Ruby and savor the joy that her presence brought her?
“I like listening to you,” Ruby said softly.
For several seconds, Penny didn’t understand what Ruby meant—the conversation on the roof had been decidedly infrequent up to now—and then she realized, Ruby was saying she liked listening to Penny’s internal sounds.
“The whirring. Must mean you’re doing a lot of thinking, right?” Ruby said. She paused, and then snuggled in closer. “You must be really warm. Wish I could feel it.”
“I have been told that I am, yes.”
For some reason, that made Ruby giggle a little. She tightened her grip on Penny, and then suddenly she was reaching up to her own face with her free hand. Penny didn’t understand what she was doing, until Ruby pulled back and met Penny’s eyes; she’d removed her contact lenses. She gazed at Penny with her real eyes, her luminous silver eyes.
Penny had never seen Ruby’s undisguised eyes at night, actually, and all she could think about was how they were so much like moonlight; it was as if Ruby had caught the silvery light as it filtered down from above and forged it directly into the ethereal rings that were her irises.
“Your eyes,” she said, before deciding that was not a sufficiently descriptive phrasing. “Sometimes I struggle to understand how your eyes can fire lasers, but then I see them up close like this, and they are… they are otherworldly.”
Ruby smiled a little, somewhere between her feral battle smile and her looking-at-Penny smile. “They’re not exactly lasers… I just like to call them that because it sounds cool. One day, I’ll show you, and then you’ll really understand.”
Penny hoped she would never run out of things to understand about Ruby.
Another silence stretched out comfortably. Ruby returned to her previous position with her head on Penny’s shoulder, and Penny began to play with several strands of Ruby’s hair. The moon slowly lowered itself in the sky.
“Hey, Penny?” Ruby said.
“Yes, Ruby?”
She took a long, deep breath before continuing. “I care about you a whole lot. I think more than I’ve ever cared about anybody or anything. I don’t even… I don’t even feel this way about saving the world, and that’s my purpose.”
“O-oh, thank you…” Penny strove to keep a relatively calm face as a surge of excitement and delight and warmth ran through her processors. “I care about you a great deal as well, Ruby. You are sensational in a way that is quite unique to you.”
Ruby didn’t say anything in reply, but her heart rate sped up.
And at that moment, Penny reached an internal decision on her feelings for Ruby. She was not going to wait for her processors any longer. She wanted the feelings to be romantic. She was hoping that the calculations would identify romantic feelings. The thought of romance made her entire body thrum with energy. That all led to a shockingly easy conclusion: If Penny wanted her feelings for Ruby to be romantic, then they were romantic. Wanting that feeling was, in fact, a symptom of having that feeling.
And then, irony of ironies, Penny’s processors pinged a moment later to let her know that a conclusion had finally been reached.
Calculation: One hundred percent chance of romantic feelings.
…Or perhaps it wasn’t an ironic bit of timing. Perhaps Penny’s processors would only have been able to answer this question once Penny had consciously chosen to answer it herself.
She closed her eyes, writing and rewriting and deep-caching the memory of Ruby’s warmth, of her hair tickling against Penny’s skin, of the beat of her heart, of the quiet humming noises she was making in her throat…
A warmth was continuously spreading through Penny’s entire body in waves, feeling as if it was emitting from every servo and wire.
Now what? She still hadn’t figured out what she wanted beyond the word romance itself. But she knew she wanted to keep doing this, whatever this was. She wanted. And maybe that was enough for now, to know she wanted while she explored these feelings, and…
Actually, why not tell Ruby, right now? Somehow, she was no longer afraid of the downside—what downside could there be to expressing such wonderful, beautiful emotions? It was Ruby she would be telling, Ruby who maybe would be thrilled to know she was causing these feelings in Penny. Her logic core was quite adamant that even if Ruby did not have the same feelings, she would not mind Penny feeling this way. Ruby had already said many times that she took pride in making Penny happy, after all. This was glowing, electrified, turbocharged happiness.
And so, with body, mind, and soul united once again in thought and purpose, Penny opened her eyes and said, “Ruby?”
No response.
She looked down. Ruby was squinting at something, her entire body gradually tensing.
“Ruby?” Penny said again.
“Penny.” Ruby’s voice was low and urgent, and suddenly she was extricating herself and getting to her feet, all relaxation gone from her posture. “I think someone’s sneaking into the CCT.”
“What?” Penny swiveled to look at the CCT, zooming in her photoreceptors and scanning the vicinity of the main entrance. “Are you sure?”
“Well, no one normally goes into the CCT like that!” Ruby said. She was hurriedly putting her contacts back in. “I—”
Penny abruptly stopped paying attention to what Ruby was saying, because she’d just spotted something which made her processors freeze.
An Atlesian soldier who must’ve been guarding the entrance was lying on the ground, unmoving, partially dragged behind a bush. And, she was far away, but she couldn’t see any sign that they were breathing—
“Ruby.” She rose to her feet, gripping Ruby’s elbow tightly. “Someone has taken out the guards at the entrance.”
“Time to call in the big guns!” With that, Ruby reached down, grabbed a handful of her dress’s fabric at her midsection, and pulled sharply.
Penny yelped and barely had time to cover her eyes as the sound of ripping fabric crashed over her audioreceptors. “Ruby, what—” she started to say, only to be hit by the mortifying realization that covering her eyes did not deactivate any of her other sensors—
And then, before she could shut everything off that might possibly give her an image of what was happening in front of her, said sensors informed her that something very confusing was going on. Penny lowered her hands with extreme caution, and that was when she realized the bottom half of Ruby’s dress had ripped off with seemingly impossible neatness, leaving the top half as a modified vest, and underneath the dress’s former bottom half… she was wearing her usual tactical pants. And her usual combat boots.
Ruby saw her confused look and grinned. “Tactical upgrades! I figured, in case there is an attack, I need to switch from dance mode to fighting mode fast! So, I modified some seams on my dress, did some other stuff—” She punctuated those words by pulling off her formal gloves, revealing her fingerless gloves underneath. “—And boom! Combat ready in no time!”
Penny blinked. Something in that sentence had made her memory ping for something that wasn’t there. But before she could investigate, she was confronted by a much more pressing question. “…You were walking around all night with Lunar Enforcer under your dress?”
“Just half of her,” Ruby said, producing a Dust clip from a pocket in her pants and loading it into her weapon. “Believe me, I tried to get the whole thing underneath, but it just wasn’t possible.” She twirled her war scythe twice and pulled her goggles out of another pocket. “Okay, ready to go kick some criminal butt?”
Notes:
EDIT NOTE: AO3 is logging people out randomly, y’all. If you’ve typed out a comment, please save it somewhere else before hitting send on the comment, because there is a good chance that AO3 will log you out and erase your entire comment!! It’s already happened once.
The next chapter contains a scene which has, over the last four months, made me have to forcefully hold myself back on so many occasions from excitedly rambling about the scene endlessly to anyone and everyone who knows what War Machines is.
The story is now entirely written through Chapter 56, and I passed 400,000 words last week!
See you all next week for Chapter 34: Indomitable.
Chapter 34: Indomitable
Notes:
Content warnings for this chapter (click this text to reveal):
Violation of bodily autonomy, assault, brief suicidal thoughts, child slavery/child abuse, electrocution, some blood.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Penny was ready to launch into battle, until she remembered her own dress, which was decidedly not combat-rated. “Er,” she said, looking down. “I may not be combat ready?”
“Don’t worry about it!” Ruby said. “I can probably handle everything, all you’ll need to do is fly me over.”
That, Penny could do. She deployed her wings and took careful hold of Ruby. For once, holding Ruby wasn’t making her overheat—all her focus was on stopping whatever was happening. “Ready?”
Ruby pulled her goggles down over her eyes and nodded, the moonlight flashing in the lenses.
The flight over to the entrance was short and silent, and as they landed, to Penny’s horror she realized all the guards at the entrance had been laid out on the ground, out of sight. And—and—
She wasn’t detecting any active vitals in any of them.
Penny landed heavily, almost collapsing entirely, as she stared at the undoubtedly dead bodies, their necks twisted at odd angles and no signs of a struggle with any of them, as if they’d never even seen their attacker coming.
Ruby appeared next to the nearest body and knelt over it, checking for a pulse. Then she said, “Fuck.”
Penny swayed on her feet, barely managing to stay upright. Her gyrometers were malfunctioning. This was the first time she had ever seen death. One of them was wearing his boots on the wrong feet. Who would do that, just snap four necks like that and snuff out four lives in moments?
Ruby was on her scroll now. “General, someone’s infiltrated the CCT, and they’re using lethal force. We need backup; I’m here with Penny. I’ll report back.”
They had been living and breathing with thoughts and feelings and maybe she’d talked to them at some point because she always said hello to the guards when she was entering or exiting the CCT—
“Penny? Penny?” Ruby’s voice sounded as if it was coming from the other end of a very poorly built receiver. It took several seconds for Penny to refocus on Ruby, whose hands were on Penny’s shoulders, and she was shaking Penny gently but insistently.
“First time seeing a dead body, huh?” she said. “Don’t worry, you’ll get used to it.”
Penny stared at Ruby, the girl raised to be a weapon, and asked, “How many have you seen?”
Ruby tilted her head in thought, which gave Penny a very bad feeling. “No idea,” she said. “I don’t even remember the first one I saw, really. So it definitely gets easier, I promise!”
That was not the main takeaway Penny had from that statement, but… it did help to know that. She knew there would be other dead bodies she would encounter as a Huntress. It was a consequence of the job. She desperately hoped every future experience would be less paralyzing than this.
“I can go on by myself if—”
Penny cut off Ruby before she could finish. “No. I am coming with you.” She would not leave her alone to face this.
“You sure?”
“As sure as I can be right now.”
“Okay.” Ruby glanced upward. “Can you fly me up there? It’ll be faster than the elevator.”
“Yes—” Penny stopped just as she was about to grab Ruby. “Wait, how will we get in? The windows don’t open from the outside.”
Ruby grinned.
Penny climbed hard and fast, her thrusters screeching at full power as level after level of the CCT flashed by, until—
“THERE!” Ruby shouted at the same moment Penny spotted a masked figure bent over a computer terminal in the main transmission room, and in an instant she was pulling into the tightest turn she could manage without going into an aerodynamic stall. She pulled Ruby closer to herself in an attempt to shield her from the impact as she extended one very hard and very pointy and very made-of-metal elbow, and flew straight into the window.
The glass windows of the CCT were hardened and tempered, and resistant to hurricane-force winds. However, they were not Penny-resistant.
Penny flew through the window in a shower of shattering glass, an almighty CRASH filling the air and echoing around the room as Ruby leapt off her in a swirl of silver. By the time Penny had regained her bearings (the shards of glass wreaked havoc on her sensors), Ruby had knocked the masked intruder across the room, and was immediately on them again—only to be thrown back by a barrage of Fire Dust unleashed out of nowhere, leaving lines of scorching light all around Ruby.
And then, before Ruby or Penny could attack again, the intruder whipped around, threw a red-hot Fire Dust-infused knife through the nearest window, and leapt through it.
Penny and Ruby ran to the window, intent on pursuing, but—
“She’s gone?!” Ruby said, staring down into the night air, where there was absolutely no trace of the intruder, not even a puff of smoke or a lingering ember. “What. How.”
But Penny’s infrared told a different story—she could see a trail of superheated air… leading directly back to the ballroom and curling around a corner, out of sight.
“Tell General Ironwood the intruder went toward the ballroom,” Penny said, turning around. She didn’t bother devoting processing power to wondering how the intruder had been able to escape so impossibly fast, and ran back to the terminal used by the intruder. Maybe, if they’d arrived in time, they’d interrupted whatever nefarious deed was occurring—
But as Ruby spoke rapidly into her scroll and Penny clicked through the terminal, her hope rapidly departed. There was nothing out of place, and the terminal was trying to tell her that absolutely nothing had happened in the last two hours. The intruder had covered their tracks unsettlingly well.
“This isn’t good,” Ruby muttered, putting her scroll away and fingering Lunar Enforcer. “If someone who already broke four necks was willing to just leave as soon as we showed up, it means they got what they came for.”
“This terminal has been compromised, but I have no idea what for.” Penny’s fingers flew across the terminal keyboard, typing faster and faster as her alarm only grew. This specific terminal controlled the entirety of Beacon Academy’s network. And in a room full of terminals much closer to the elevator, the attacker had come to this one for a reason. But what that reason was, she had no clue. Any device connected to Beacon’s network could theoretically be accessed from here with the proper credentials or code or hacking skills, so but which device had the intruder accessed? And for what?
There was only one way to find that information: a direct computer-to-computer interface. But Penny could not under any circumstances plug herself into compromised technology! That would be equivalent to a human walking into a hibernating bear’s den! So there was no—
A solution hit Penny with about the same force that she must’ve hit the window with.
Her Semblance!
“Ruby, please cover me,” she said, gripping the edges of the terminal and stabilizing her position. “I am going to use my Semblance.”
After an answering nod, Penny closed her eyes, activating Ghost, and concentrated on pulling herself into the computer terminal. The sensation of being whisked away to somewhere else washed over her, quickly becoming a familiar feeling.
INPUT DETECTED: CCT COMMAND TERMINAL 2B — BEACON ACADEMY NETWORK CENTRAL ADMINISTRATIVE NODE
A CCT terminal was one of the most complicated computers on Remnant, at least in the non-Penny category, so Penny avoided the filesystem view entirely and switched to a three-dimensional view like she had with the Pandora earlier.
The world shifted around Penny, and now she was standing in the literal-not-literal and metaphysical inside of a computer: a world of zeroes and ones, binary code flying all around her like leaves in the wind. She recognized some lines of code as things one would expect to see in the administrative locus for Beacon network. However, there was no time to marvel at what she was seeing, because Penny could immediately see something was very, very wrong.
There was something that was like tar, bright red and oozing down over every bit of code in sight, turning everything it touched that same red. And it just kept coming and coming, more and more, flooding over everything as if gushing out from a spigot.
And Penny knew, instinctively, that was her Semblance’s rendition of a computer virus infecting a device. She’d found the intruder’s purpose.
The viral ooze suddenly lunged at her like a viper striking, so fast Penny couldn’t even attempt to dodge. But the ooze skidded off of her like it’d hit solid ice, and then receded rapidly, leaving her indistinct form entirely untouched.
It’d all happened so fast that Penny hadn’t even had time to be scared, but all the same, she shivered retroactively, and violently. Yes, she knew viruses weren’t designed to jump across Aura or Semblances or souls, but… what if it had? Then what would happen to her?
She didn’t want to think about it.
Everything around Penny was bright red now. The virus was fully embedded in the terminal which served as a gateway and a gatekeeper and an administrator for Beacon’s network. But what was it supposed to do? She couldn’t actually see anything happening beyond the virus turning everything red—
Suddenly, Penny’s attention was drawn in a completely different direction by something she’d just noticed. Ahead, it appeared like there were… tunnels. Leading to where?
Only one way to find out.
She jumped into the nearest tunnel, only finding more red and not a pixel of green in sight as she ventured further, and then she felt the sensation of her Semblance activating, except a hundred times stronger and longer, and for a moment she was tossed around as easily as a shirt in a washing machine.
Then, abruptly, Penny was upright again, inside an inky blackness dotted with thousands of pinpricks of light. As if she was standing in the center of the universe and staring up at all the galaxies in the sky. What was this?
Oh. If Penny had Ghosted into the terminal which controlled Beacon’s network, the terminal which was connected to the network, then…
“Am I in the academy’s network?” she whispered in amazement to the vast expanse before her.
As if in response, her Semblance warped and blurred around her, the dots of light merging into blobs which quickly sharpened into distinct shapes. In a matter of moments, the landscape around Penny transformed into a monochromatic, mosaic-like rendering of Beacon’s campus. Penny’s point of view came from somewhere high above, a view she could normally achieve only through her flight mode.
For a moment, she was entranced by an entire landscape appearing entirely within her own perception, a wondrous and mystifying manifestation of her Semblance. But all her awe was forgotten when she turned towards the CCT and found a harrowing sight, confirming her worst fears.
Directly above her Semblance’s rendition of the communications tower, the virus floated as an unstable ball of light, red and burning like a malevolent sun. Tendrils of red which gave off a sickly glow crept out from the sinister beacon in overwhelming numbers, twisting and quivering as they slithered towards everything in sight. As she watched, one tentacle of light pounced on a tiny dot floating on a balcony, turning it the same nightmarish color as the virus. When she flew closer to investigate what exactly was happening, she realized the dot of light was actually a scale-accurate hologram of a scroll, floating a few feet off the ground where it must’ve been nestled in someone’s pocket as they stood on the balcony. A scroll connected to Beacon’s network.
Dread filled Penny like her wiring had been replaced with threads of ice as the true scale of the attack became apparent. The campus was being engulfed by a slow, unstoppable wave of ghoulish virus-red lights, all of which connected back to the nexus above the CCT. It wasn’t just scrolls, either—she could see other pieces of technology appearing as infected, the red dripping into security cameras, classroom computers, the academy’s airships, and even Amity Colosseum itself looming far above which Penny hadn’t even noticed until her attention was pulled there by the burst of red bursting into the arena’s corner of the sky.
This virus was infecting every piece of technology connected to Beacon’s network.
This was beyond disastrous. It was catastrophic, apocalyptic. The virus could wreak unimaginable havoc on the academy, perhaps even bring it to its metaphorical knees. And without knowing the virus’s actual intent, the possibilities were frighteningly varied. The virus could send a command to overload every battery on every electronic device connected to the network for the purpose of injuries or even deaths; it could collective massive volumes of intelligence on students by listening through their scrolls or recording through security cameras; maybe the virus could even remotely—
“Ruby!” Penny called out, trying to send her voice out through her home body while staying in Ghost to track the virus’s advance. “Turn off your scroll!”
There was what felt like an excruciatingly long pause (she had no way to quantify the passage of time while outside her own body), and then Ruby’s voice echoed faintly through time and space to her.
“What’s going on?”
“Turn it off now! There’s a virus! Anything connected to Beacon’s network is vulnerable!”
“Oh, I’m fine, my scroll’s not on the school network, it’s on the private Atlesian network, it’s a closed—”
The rest of Ruby’s words slipped far beyond Penny’s attention.
She’d just noticed one more tendril of red curling around the CCT itself, distinctly not homing in on anything around the campus. Of course, there would be instruments within the CCT connected to the academy network, but—
Penny flew closer, just in time to see the tendril jab into the tower, reaching inside a floor with computer terminals just like the ones she and Ruby had landed amidst, and now Penny was close enough to see what the virus was ceaselessly reaching towards—
A little holographic model of a girl who looked very much like Penny Pallas, bent over a terminal just like Penny Pallas was, a girl who had an active wireless connection to Beacon Academy’s network just like how Penny Pallas did.
Too late, Penny realized she was vulnerable, too.
The tendril of red hit Penny’s form, and at the same instant, burning, lava-hot pain speared through Penny from every direction like a Grimm was shredding her alive. The shock broke her hold on her Semblance, and suddenly she was back in her own body, still bent over the terminal just as she’d left things, and her vision was blood-red.
No.
Penny didn’t even need to check any systems to know. She could feel the virus oozing its way into her body through her network connection, slipping around her sophisticated and unique antivirus protections as easily as water flowing around a rock.
No!
Her antivirus was entirely silent. It was not detecting anything wrong.
NO!
The feeling of it only worsened, like something slimy and sticky was coating her insides and making her feel like the most disgusting thing in the world.
Penny staggered back from the terminal, her hands clutching uselessly at her own head as if she could somehow physically rip out the the awful thing leaching into her body and leaving a terrifying numbness in everything it touched—
“Penny? Penny?”
Penny barely comprehended that Ruby was calling her name. All she could focus on was the disgusting revolting violating wrong wrong wrong STOP STOP STOP feeling of the virus burrowing further and further inside her—and still her antivirus system was inert.
She wasn’t strong enough. The virus was fooling her body, just like how it was fooling every other piece of technology in the school, and how long would it be before the virus was fooling Penny’s consciousness, too? How long would it be before she thought nothing was wrong even as a vile thing carved out her insides and turned her body into somebody’s puppet? How long would it be before she was completely swallowed up and drowned by the tidal wave of red? How long would it be before she was better off dead?
Penny gathered up every cycle of processing not directly devoted to life-critical systems and redirected it all to her antivirus in a desperate attempt to rid her body of the invader, and every non-critical cycle meant every one. She was pulling her gyrometers offline, she was suspending nearly all motion drivers, and the end result of all that was Penny collapsing to the floor in a heap as her sense of balance disappeared and her legs stopped working.
She didn’t even know what the virus was doing. She couldn’t detect anything from it beyond the feeling of it slithering in and concealing itself. That was all. It was just silently intruding. Nothing else. As if it was just… preparing to lie in wait inside her. Waiting to be activated by someone, something—like a sleeper agent—
It occurred to Penny that there was one way to stop this with certainty: shutting herself down completely.
“Penny!”
Even with Penny’s antivirus strengthened as far as she could push it, nothing changed. And so, drowning in hopelessness, she returned processing to its normal allocation so that she could at least warn Ruby.
With her sensors operable again, Penny’s sensations of the outer world returned. And with them came the realization that Ruby was kneeling beside her, hugging her tightly as she rested her forehead against Penny’s temple.
“Penny, I—I don’t know what’s happening, but I know you can beat it! You’re the strongest, bravest, most determined person in the entire world, and I know you can overcome anything!”
But Penny couldn’t overcome this. It was a losing battle, nothing but more of that awful, chilling, slimy numbness sinking deeper into her body, as her antivirus continued to believe nothing was wrong and systems were normal. The virus wasn’t making her do anything yet, but it was only a matter of time. At some point, whether minutes from now or years from now, it would stop sitting in there and start sending commands, and Penny wouldn’t be strong enough to stop whatever malevolent deed which would be forced upon her—
“I—I can’t.” Somehow, she found a shred of her voice amongst the terror, amidst the frantic gasps brought on by her cooling system trying to cool down her woefully overheated body. “Ruby—please get away from me, please, I have no idea what this virus will do—”
“No!” Ruby’s voice came out as a desperate, insistent shout which made Penny freeze, as she clung even more tightly. “I’m not leaving you!”
But that statement only brought more terror to Penny, because if Ruby wasn’t leaving, she was making herself vulnerable to whatever would happen, and Penny could feel the virus even deeper now, the wrongness reaching into almost every corner of her body now. What would happen when—
“Get away!” she pleaded. But Ruby only shook her head violently and buried her face in Penny’s neck, and the message was clear. Not leaving.
But what was there that Ruby could do? What could Penny do? She was… she was just helpless, just—
“I’m staying because I know you can do it! A soul can’t be hacked!” Ruby said, and something about her words were like a blast of clarifying wind to Penny’s face, making her lift her head just a little as realizations were brought to mind that couldn’t have been more distant just a moment before.
A soul couldn’t be hacked, but computers could and Penny’s body was full of computers—Wait. Soul. Soul. If active Aura could help a human fight off a human virus, could Penny’s active Aura help her fight off a robot virus?
Penny flared her Aura, and immediately her antivirus protocols sprang to life.
A blaring alarm, one that Penny had never heard from her systems before, one that could not be dismissed, shrieked excruciatingly through her consciousness like a sword plunged directly into her processors. Warning alerts blared—EMERGENCY. INTRUSION DETECTED. EMERGENCY. It was overwhelming.
And yet, it was the sweetest sound that Penny had ever heard, because her antivirus alarms going off meant her body was finally fighting back. There was hope.
“What’s happening?” Ruby said, still pressed against her, apparently noticing something changing.
Penny took another unsteady breath, her body still no less overheated. Even if she had a chance, this was still a stalemate, she could still feel the virus throbbing inside, and she needed to do something before her Aura ran out—
Her logic core reminded her—or rather, yelled, since even logic could understand the value of using volume to get one’s attention—that there was another aspect of Penny’s soul. Ghost.
Penny didn’t even hesitate long enough to wonder if she could use her Semblance to possess a computer virus, she just envisioned that terrible redness like too-thick blood and threw herself towards it.
INPUT DETECTED: THE WILL OF THE QUEEN
…Who was the queen?
Penny found herself inside what, for all intents and purposes, felt like a living nightmare. Everything was red, the red so dark in some places that it was purple like a hideous bruise, and flashing binary swirled everywhere, a constant tempest of malicious code. Everything churned endlessly in every direction, as if this was a frothing ocean and she was submerging herself in it. It was so visually overwhelming that Penny instinctively looked down at herself, just to make sure she was still there, still herself.
She was.
Her form, usually indistinct when Ghosting inside something, was the most defined it had ever been in Ghost mode. Her body was rendered as a cloud of bright green ones and zeros of code, the same shade as her Aura, clearly outlined, with enough detail that she could just barely see the ruffles of her skirt. For a few milliseconds, Penny marveled at the seamless coexistence of her Aura and her code. All while the virus flowed and roiled around her, hissed up against her like boiling acid, but never touching her, never leaving a mark.
Penny felt even more hope. This was her soul, and the virus could do nothing against it.
But she could do something.
Penny reached out, grabbing the ooze, and sank her hands into it, and spoke a command in perhaps the angriest voice she had ever used in her life as her Aura flared all around her in ripples of green which arced like electricity.
“Get. Out. Of. MY. BODY!”
The virus hissed at her like a serpent trying to strangle her, and she could feel it trying to resist her Semblance. She flared her Aura, pouring more of it into everything around her.
This was her body. Her home. A home could be violated, but Ruby was right, a soul couldn’t be hacked, and this soul was going to defend her home!
She’d never encountered an inanimate thing with this much opposition to her Semblance, but it still was not a soul, and Penny was. Another idea struck her. She pushed herself even further into the ooze, and added another command.
“Delete yourself.”
As soon as she spoke those words, an immense, protesting growl came from somewhere, and the ooze roiled around her like it was boiling.
What was this code? She had never seen anything like it before. It was designed to be a noose closing around the windpipe of its targets, the jaws of a bear trap closing around anything caught in its clutches.
But it didn’t matter. As long as Penny just held on, her will would be indomitable—
Something gave way with an immense shuddering, like a dam bursting, and the red around Penny’s hands and arms began to crumble, great swathes of it dissolving like ice calving off a glacier, like a pond drying up. The crumbling spread outward from her hands, and Penny pushed Ghost as hard as she could the entire time, never letting up, never letting the command waver, until there wasn’t a single scrap of red anywhere in sight, just a peaceful all-encompassing blackness, and then—
Abruptly, Penny found herself thrown back into her own body.
Relief flooded her, but then immediately shifted to fear. If she’d been returned to her body with no warning, did that mean she hadn’t deleted the virus and had only run out of Aura instead? Was she still in danger?
Wait. No, her active Aura was still flashing all over her. She reactivated Ghost for a half-second just to confirm that she could, and if she wasn’t already in a heap on the ground, she would’ve collapsed with relief. She’d deleted the virus. She’d deleted the virus. She’d deleted the virus!
Penny didn’t feel it anywhere anymore. That oozing numbness, the creeping wrongness, the cold, it was all gone. She felt warm again. She desperately hoped that meant she was truly safe.
She could also feel Ruby again, her arms still wrapped around her, and at last she allowed herself to hug Ruby back as she disabled her internal network connection with extreme prejudice.
“Penny! You’re okay?” Ruby leaned back, looked into her eyes, and then nodded frantically. “You’re okay! I knew you would be!”
“I… Thank you,” Penny said between full-capacity gasps, and still she only felt even more overheated, almost to dangerous levels. With the actual fight for her body over, the full terror of it was hitting her, and it made her want nothing more than to curl up in a ball and never think about anything ever again.
Ruby had put more faith in Penny than Penny herself had, and she felt ashamed of that. She felt ashamed of so many things right now. How could Ruby bear to look at her after this, let alone hold her? Why wasn’t she scared of Penny? Penny was scared of herself. Why wasn’t she ashamed of Penny? Penny was ashamed of herself.
“I’m sorry,” she whimpered.
“Hey, it’s okay! What’re you apologizing for? You were attacked, you fought it off!”
“But it’s my fault; other people don’t get hacked...”
“No, that’s not—Penny—”
Ruby was saying other things, things probably meant to comfort Penny, but Penny could no longer listen to anything. Suddenly, almost every sensory input was unbearable. She turned off as many as she safely could and turned the rest down as far as she could, and kept trying to take deep breaths to calm herself, but they kept turning into sobs, and soon Penny was wailing ceaselessly into Ruby’s arms amidst the compromised computers and the shattered glass.
However, she kept her touch sensors fully active, because right now, Ruby’s soft warm embrace was the only thing reminding Penny that there was a space in the world for a person like her.
Cinder came to a stop outside the ballroom’s side entrance, breathing heavily. It took a few moments for her to compose herself enough to activate the Fire Dust embedded in her jumpsuit. One small application of fire, and flames licked all up and down her sides as the Dust burned away hidden seams and folds, transforming her jumpsuit into an evening dress. With another flick of her fingers, she set her mask ablaze. And then she was strolling into the ballroom, not a trace of the intruder left as Cinder Fall, the calm and confident student from Haven, slipped back into the crowd.
But in reality, she was anything but tranquil as a barely contained storm of rage and confusion boiled inside her.
Penny.
Why her? Why was it her of all people that had interrupted? Why was she… Why?
“Well, what the fuck happened?”
Mercury’s voice crackled in her earpiece, even though he was twenty feet away with Emerald.
“Nothing to worry about,” she replied impassively, gliding up behind him and putting a hand on his shoulder. “Mind if I cut in?”
“Even with all the Atlesian troops running around like headless chickens?” Emerald said as Mercury stepped out of the way.
“They’re too late to stop anything,” Cinder snapped, staring down into Emerald’s eyes and silently daring her to imply she could’ve done better in Cinder’s place.
Emerald didn’t reply.
“The party had some uninvited guests, is all,” Cinder said.
Uninvited guests, in the form of the Atlesian girl that’d defeated Nikos, and Penny Pallas.
Penny Pallas.
Penny.
Cinder Fall would never, as long as she lived, forget that face. And the girl didn’t even remember her, not in the slightest.
In one way, Cinder was thankful for that. It meant there was truly no trace of her shameful past left, no record anywhere of the sniveling weakling that had once worn her face. Not even a name. Pallas only knew Cinder as she was now.
However.
Cinder wondered in disbelief and burning anger—as she had many times this semester—how, how could the girl not remember what had happened?
Years ago
Something clattering loudly woke Cinder up from a tenuous sleep, and that was bad. In the Glass Unicorn, she needed sleep whenever she could get it, because there was no time of day that could ever guarantee her a rest. The Madame might rouse her at any time to deal with some unforeseen task, or guests would have demands at any hour of the night, and it was always Cinder who had to deal with those after-midnight calls for hot towels or buckets of ice, and they were all daily occurrences. Nearly all of Cinder’s sleep was in short, inevitably-interrupted bursts, but even so, this time she’d barely fallen asleep in her frayed, moth-eaten cot before she’d been jerked awake by a sound from somewhere in the basement.
Cinder scrambled to her feet, rapidly scanning the dim, dusty room through bleary eyes, trying to find the noise’s source. If there was an animal in here, she had to find it before it got into any stored food or before it made a nest in some stack of bedding (bedding for the guests, not Cinder) or before anything a rat or bird or squirrel might do which would damage hotel property, because if there was damage to hotel property, Cinder would be punished for it, and punishment meant the collar (burning everywhere like her muscles had been turned to lava) being turned up—
She twitched violently and glared further into the gloom. Outside it was twilight, dark enough that the streetlights had come on and were shining through the too-high-to-reach basement window, but it wasn’t yet dark enough for Cinder to turn on the basement light. The Madame was viciously particular about the lights, and Cinder would be punished (the shocks like Grimm claws slashing and shredding at her neck ) for anything perceived as wasting electricity.
The irony of that was so sharp Cinder wished she could use it to slit her own throat.
She scowled into the dark corners of the basement, where what little light reflected in from the streetlamps was completely ineffective in illuminating anything except vague shapes.
“Just show yourself already so I can kill you and save us both a lot of trouble, you stupid vermin,” she muttered.
Three seconds later, a pair of bright green eyes popped out from behind a crate.
“Salutations!”
Cinder blinked, multiple times, and then rubbed her eyes as hard as she could to try and make the hallucination go away. But the hallucination just kept talking.
“I am not vermin; my name is Penny! What is your name?”
With that, a little girl skipped out of the shadows and up to Cinder with strangely jerky movements, stopping less than a meter away and peering at her with a tilted head. She was wearing a jumper dress over a long-sleeved shirt which reached all the way down to her wrists, along with very large boots which disappeared underneath her dress, and a little pink bow perched on her head with impossible precariousness—it looked like it should fall off at any moment, and yet it stayed affixed to her flaming orange hair as if by magic. The girl couldn’t have been older than nine or ten.
Cinder tried and failed to make any sense of this, looking back at the door to see if there was somehow some sort of explanation there. No luck. Had the Madame brought home another child and just left her in here, with the expectation that Cinder would do all the work of getting this girl up to speed? But then, why was she so happy? Did she know what was in store for her in this place? This kind of brightness would never last in the basement. “H-how did you get in here?”
“Salutations, How Did You Get In Here, it is nice to meet you!” the girl—what had she said her name was? Penny?—said, before pausing and frowning. “Wait. I apologize. I believe I have misunderstood you! Your reply was not your name. You were asking me a question! Therefore, I should answer the question before I ask your name again…” She mouthed the question Cinder had just asked, and then brightened and gestured to something behind her. “I entered through the window!”
“The window?” Cinder echoed, following the path of Penny’s hand. The window which was blocked by steel bars, preventing entrance or exit to anything larger than a rat? The—
She gasped.
The bars in the middle were missing, with the masonry they’d been embedded in crumbling and cracked, as if they’d just… been… punched out…
And then Cinder realized, the bars at the edges, solid metal designed to keep out Grimm and keep in a desperate soul, had been bent like cheap plastic, leaving a gap plenty big for a girl Penny’s size, or maybe even Cinder, to slip through.
Cinder gaped. “You—what—how—how?!”
“I needed to enter!” Penny said, as if that explained everything, and then she kept talking. “I needed a hiding place because the soldiers are searching for me, and I do not want them to find me. I am not supposed to sneak away and explore, but my father always tells me that having freedom is the most important part of my life, and he encourages me to explore and discover new things and experiences. He says that I need to understand how important freedom is, or I will end up like Moonrise. I do not know what Moonrise is, but whenever my father mentions Moonrise he becomes very sad.”
Cinder took a step away from the too-strange girl, her head spinning. Moonrise? Soldiers? Freedom? A father? Why did this girl sound like she’d been pulled out of a fairytale or something, or like she was from outer space? And she was still babbling on! Cinder just wanted to go back to sleep…
“However, according to the definition of freedom that I found in the dictionary, I cannot understand freedom if I am confined to my quarters! There is nothing new to discover or experience in my quarters, and truthfully it is very boring there. Therefore, I sneak away as much as possible. It makes my father and the soldiers who watch me very worried, but they should not worry! My explorations always yield such wonderful and fascinating discoveries! Today, I saw a new kind of butterfly that I had never seen before! It was bright green—Hexadecimal Color Code #91fa3c—with red dots in curving patterns—Hexadecimal Color Code #d00e1e—along its wings!”
Cinder didn’t know what a hexadecimal was, and she wasn’t trying to figure it out, because she had given up on trying to understand this girl, just waiting defeatedly for her to finish with whatever her point was. She let herself fall back onto her cot, but Penny didn’t seem to notice or care as she kept on rambling.
“My father is always very worried when I go exploring, but I also infer that he is at least six percent happy about my explorations of the world because he is never mad at me when I return from exploring. He does not want me to be like Moonrise. I feel sorry for Moonrise, whatever it is, if it cannot explore the world! I hope that it will be able to explore someday. Exploring is very fun! I wish I could explore for longer periods of time! That is why I hide. However, the soldiers are very good at finding me, no matter how good of a hiding place I choose. However, I believe this is my best hiding spot I have chosen yet! My plan of action is to sit here and wait until the soldiers are no longer searching for me! Is that okay with you?”
Cinder was jolted out of her stupor by Penny’s sudden question, and she frantically tried to piece together what she wanted from the fragments of previous sentences that’d filtered through to her exhausted, overworked brain. Wait, Penny wanted to—
“No. No, it isn’t okay,” Cinder said, jumping up out of her cot and trying to keep herself steady even as a wave of dizziness hit her—a consequence for standing up too fast. “You need to get out of here, Penny! This isn’t a nice place, they’ll hurt you!”
What would happen if the Madame found Penny? Would she put a shock collar on her and make her work here just like Cinder? She wouldn’t last a week.
“Hurt?” Penny said, tilting her head again and looking heartbreakingly naive. “Why would they injure me? I am not easily injured.”
“Just—just, leave!” Cinder tried to push Penny towards the window, but to her complete and utter mystification, the girl was heavier than a washing machine, which did not match at all with how delicate she looked and how much smaller than Cinder she was. She barely moved when Cinder tried to shove her.
“Penny—” She was about to plead with her again to leave, when an abrupt change passed over the girl’s face. Penny’s eyes narrowed, and her mouth twisted into a scowl, but she wasn’t looking at Cinder’s face. She was looking at Cinder’s neck.
Instinctively, Cinder went to shield the ever-present necklace clasped there, but before she could even get her hand halfway there, Penny’s arm shot out with terrifying speed, stopping the movement cold. Her gaze did not waver, and she was undoubtedly staring at the necklace.
“That is a shock collar,” she said, and suddenly her voice was completely flat, all of its previous bubbliness sucked away. She sounded angrier than even the Madame’s worst moods.
“It—” Cinder felt bad for what she was about to say, she really did, but if she had to scare Penny to make her leave, it was better than the alternative! “And th-they’ll put one on you, too, if you don’t leave right now!”
Penny’s scowl deepened.
“No,” she said.
And then, quick as lightning, Penny released Cinder’s arm, reached out with both hands, grabbed the necklace, and squeezed.
The sound of crunching, buckling metal filled the room. Cinder screamed. An involuntary sound, ripped out of her throat by the sudden explosion of electricity all around her neck from the broken necklace as it discharged what felt like every volt of electricity stored in it. Penny toppled backward at the same moment Cinder collapsed forwards. Cinder’s spasming limbs were unable to break her fall, but in the smallest of mercies, she was spared the pain of her face impacting the hard basement floor by everything going black before she landed.
When consciousness returned fuzzily to her, her head pounding like a drum and her face wet with blood, her first instinct was to check the clock, because if she was late waking up she’d get shocked—only to realize it’d been less than a minute. But everything felt… different.
Cinder raised herself to a sitting position, tried to wipe away some of the blood pouring out of her nose, tried to make her legs stop wobbling enough to stand upright again—and only then did she realize, the necklace was gone.
Her fingers flew across the neck, finding nothing but bare skin and a mess of painfully raw sores from the electric burns made by—
Penny!
She was still unable to get up, but Cinder managed to twist herself around enough to see—
Penny, her entire body laid out on the ground and perfectly still. Her legs were perfectly straight out in front of her, her arms were folded neatly over her stomach, and she was clutching the jagged, sparking remnants of the necklace in her hands.
Cinder’s eyes widened. No, no—
Through a combination of pulling herself by her arms and crawling, she made her way over to Penny, close enough to see her chest wasn’t moving—she wasn’t breathing—and she couldn’t feel a pulse when she put a finger to her mouth. She could hear a faint whirring, but she had no idea where it was coming from, and it didn’t matter anyway because she was pretty sure Penny was dead.
She was dead, she’d died to get the collar off—
The sound of the basement door being flung open hit her like a thunderclap, and the room was flooded with light.
“Do you know how many guests you just disturbed? If you scream like that ever again—”
Cinder whipped around, trying to squint through the blinding light, but she didn’t need sight to know the Madame was standing in the doorway, staring at the scene within. She tried to back away, but her backside hit the unnervingly stiff body lying behind her, trapping her in place.
She could barely make out the Madame’s expression, but it was too easy to envision confusion immediately shifting to anger as she would find some way to blame Cinder for the dead girl on the floor and the blood still spilling from her nose and the broken window and the ruined collar—
“Who is this? What did you do?” the Madame snapped out, and by now Cinder’s eyes had adjusted to the light enough to see her stalking into the room, coming to stand over Cinder. And then her eyes widened. Not because she’d realized the girl was dead, not because she could see Cinder was hurt, but because she could see Cinder’s collar was off.
Rage flared in the Madame’s eyes, and she lunged forward. “You stupid girl—”
The next several seconds happened in what felt like slow motion. All Cinder could think was that the Madame would kill her now that she was out of her collar, just like a rabid dog being put down, or she was about to be forced back into another collar, and no she couldn’t do that not when freedom was so close she couldn’t go back—
She scrabbled with her hands for something, anything, and almost unconsciously her fingers closed around the remnants of the necklace which were still in Penny’s stiff hands—twisted shards of metal. Sharp. So sharp she felt them cutting into her hands as she yanked them away and around, just as the Madame was about to fall upon Cinder. And then, with her eyes closed and her arms trembling and electricity still arcing weakly through the metal, Cinder drove the broken, jagged collar straight into the Madame’s chest.
The Madame gasped, the first time she’d ever shown any weakness around Cinder, and then made an awful gurgling noise as she collapsed, nearly landing on top of her.
What felt like an eternity of twitching and convulsing on the ground ensued as Cinder kept her eyes squeezed shut, trapped between two dead bodies and never letting go of her improvised weapon.
She’d killed the Madame.
Someone would go looking for her eventually, and then they’d find Cinder in the basement with two dead bodies, and then she’d be thrown in jail for the rest of her life. Rhodes was out of the kingdom on a mission—she had no idea when he’d return—so there was absolutely no one around who might help her. No one who would understand. The police would just think she was a child gone crazy, an insane criminal, a—
No. No. She had to survive.
A frantic plan formed in Cinder’s mind. She rushed around the basement, gathering her swords, making a makeshift satchel out of some tied-together bedsheets, pushed together enough crates to form a rudimentary staircase to the broken window, and eventually found herself back at the center of the room, staring first at the Madame’s lifeless body and then at Penny.
She felt absolutely no sorrow for the Madame, but Penny… Cinder had only known the girl with flaming orange hair for… how long had it even been? Ten minutes? Twenty? It didn’t matter. It was too short.
She knelt down, and picked up one of Penny’s hands, clasping it between her own. It was strangely warm even after all this time, and in desperate hope Cinder checked for a pulse again just in case it’d somehow come back. Nothing.
She could barely see Penny through the tears blurring her vision now, with Penny reduced to just a fuzzy blob of orange and green.
“Thank you,” Cinder whispered to Penny. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I promise you didn’t die for nothing. I’ll live for you. I’ll do incredible things. I’m going to be the best Huntress in history and make sure no one ever has to get hurt again like us. I’ll never forget you.”
And with that, she stood up, slipped out the basement window, and fled into the darkening streets of Atlas.
(Several hours later, a search team from the Atlesian military finally located Penny. It had taken longer than normal, due to the signal from the tracking device embedded in her being obfuscated by the partially underground basement. When the soldiers found her, they found a scene of chaos. But their job was to retrieve the PENNY Project with all possible secrecy, not to report a crime, and so the extraction was performed and the hotel was left as they’d found it.)
(Penny had not been seriously harmed by the electrocution; her body’s safety protocols had done their job and put her body into an emergency low-power recovery state. When brought back to alertness in her father’s laboratory, she told him everything, but the terrified girl from the basement was never seen again.)
(Several years later, the Glass Unicorn burned down.)
Present day
In the years to come, Penny had become Cinder’s private mystery. She’d obsessed over every word of that conversation she could remember, and over time she began to realize just how much of it sounded wrong, but also familiar. A child captive, kept prisoner by the Atlesian military and only able to experience freedom in short, unsuccessful escapes with a father complicit in it all? It sounded as if Penny had been in a cage not too dissimilar from Cinder’s. And she had died to help someone else break out of a cage. Penny had been like her, she was sure of it. Another girl kept in chains by the cruel and uncaring machine of Atlesian society.
Cinder carried that memory forward, let it propel her and fuel her rage and anger at not just Atlas, but the entire world. Cinder promised herself she would scorch the world to the ground with flames the same bright orange as the color of Penny’s hair. Penny was a martyr for her cause.
And then, suddenly, she wasn’t.
She was alive and older and wearing the uniform of a Huntress-in-training and staring Cinder in the face with wide-eyed naivete that was excruciatingly familiar, and she had the audacity to ask Cinder if she recognized her.
How could she not recognize her?
Cinder hated Penny Pallas for not remembering. It was the cold, unmistakable proof that she was no different from anyone else in the corrupt, decaying, bilious institution known as the Huntress system.
Penny Pallas, who dared to call herself a defender of the innocent, couldn’t even be bothered to remember the one time she’d come to the aid of someone who had actually needed some help. The powerless people of the world were so insignificant to her that she’d deemed the memory of saving Cinder to be as insignificant as any bit of mental detritus that the brain swept away every day.
Outwardly, Cinder showed no emotion as she finished a dance with Emerald and took a seat at the edge of the ballroom, scanning the crowd. Pallas and her girlfriend had not returned. Likely, they were fruitlessly trying to undo the crime as reinforcements arrived too late to make a difference.
She wondered, had Pallas always been like this, corrupt and snobbish and insensate to the problems of the world? Or had she truly been like Cinder at one point in her life? Not that it mattered—now she was just as culpable as everyone else in the world who had wronged Cinder—but she wondered nonetheless: If Pallas had also been so grievously wronged by the world, how could she possibly still be on the side of those who had hurt her? How could she make a choice that was so wrong?
Notes:
And at long last, I no longer have to keep quiet about how Cinder knows Penny!
Some notes on this chapter:
I’m pretty sure Penny didn’t have a internet connection in canon, because I don’t think Atlas would give her that. And that can explain why Penny in canon V2 was safe from the virus which got uploaded, but War Machines Penny, with her active internet connection… sadly not. And the reason why she has the internet connection in War Machines is because of Pietro trying much harder to give Penny every bit of freedom he could while she was still in Atlas. So he would’ve overlooked the security risk of giving a girl built on computers a wireless connection in favor of the ability for Penny to explore an entire digital world and discover new things without having to leave her room. And of course he made that internet connection more secure than anything else in the world, but unfortunately Watts coded the one virus in the world capable of defeating Penny’s antivirus capabilities.
And speaking of Pietro and Penny and freedom... butterfly effect! It’s explained within the chapter too, but more obliquely, so if anyone missed it, I’m just going to put here in plain text the sequence of events which led to Cinder and Penny meeting.
The presence of Ruby being raised as a weapon, and the similarities to the PENNY Project, caused Pietro to begin prioritizing Penny’s freedom above anything that Atlas would expect of her. Because of that, he did his best to instill in Penny a deep sense of the importance of freedom, far more than in canon. That strengthened sense of freedom incentivized Penny to sneak out much more and be even more adventurous in her escapades (and incentivized Pietro to silently encourage those kinds of impulses), and Penny would then try to make her escapades extend as long as possible, leading to her seeking out places to hide from the soldiers who were trying to bring her back. And one such hiding place that Penny stumbled upon was the Glass Unicorn!
Thanks for reading, as always!
Chapter 35: Am I Going To Be Okay?
Notes:
Content warnings for this chapter (click this text to reveal):
Fear of unreality, suicidal thoughts, discussion of the events from the previous chapter.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Right around when the Atlesian soldiers started running around like their boots were on fire, Yang realized half of Team BSYP was missing.
“Have you seen Penny or Weiss?” she said to Blake, and received a shaking head in response.
“…I might have an idea about where Weiss went, though,” Blake added a few moments later. Her gaze landed on something behind Yang.
Yang turned, and found Pyrrha sitting in a chair by the wall, surrounded by her team and looking extremely miserable.
“Oh dear,” she whispered. “…So Ice Queen’s probably back in our room and melting into a puddle of tears all over the floor.”
That left one person (well, really, two people) still unaccounted for, and the activity around the CCT was intensifying enough that Yang was starting to worry. She pulled out her scroll and sent a quick text to Penny, and then one to Ruby.
…She was going to feel really embarrassed if they’d just snuck off to get some privacy and she was interrupting them with these messages worrying about nothing.
But six minutes passed without a reply from either girl, and Yang’s concern ratcheted up again, as she’d now noticed a change coming over all the professors in attendance. Several of them, including Ozpin, hurried off in the direction of the CCT, while the rest were suddenly far more alert, stealing covert glances around the room like they expected trouble.
Something was wrong. But what—
Her scroll vibrated, and Yang couldn’t pull it out fast enough. A message from Ruby:
Something bad happened. We’re going to your room now.
Yang’s heart lurched, even as she registered the ‘we’ meant Penny was probably with Ruby. But then why wasn’t Penny replying…?
Blake must’ve received the same message, because she was looking down at her scroll with pursed lips. Wordlessly, they nodded to each other, and then they were leaving, nodding to Coco on their way out. It seemed the dance was winding itself down anyways, the atmosphere deflating as the rest of the students realized something was going on. They made their way through mostly deserted halls back to their dorm room.
When they unlocked the door, the room was dark, but after a few moments Yang heard a sniffling sound coming from Weiss’s bunk. Blake, with her enhanced vision, had spotted her sooner and was already approaching the bunk.
“Weiss?” she said carefully. “How are you doing?”
“I’m not talking about it,” Weiss snapped out immediately.
Yang flicked on the light, revealing Weiss buried in a mound of blankets, with only her hair visible, trailing out over the side of her bunk in an uncharacteristically tangled mess. However, a few moments later, she raised her head from the blankets, her eyes red and puffy.
“Kindly extinguish that infernal light. I am trying to sleep,” she said through gritted teeth.
“Really?” Yang said. “Could have had me fooled, I thought you were giving yourself temporary insomnia by drowning yourself in your self-hatred borne out of internalized homophobia.”
Weiss blinked, and for a moment she looked as if she had completely forgotten to be annoyed or distressed. “What?”
However, before Yang could reply, there was a knock on the door.
It was a weird knock, more violent than most, as if something was impacting the door rather than deliberately knocking on it.
Yang and Blake exchanged a look, and then Yang went to the door, subtly shifting herself into a defensive stance while Blake took a step towards where she kept Gambol Shroud hanging on the wall.
The knock sounded again just before Yang opened the door, and as she turned the knob she recognized the sound as someone kicking the door. Then she flung the door open, and—
Blinked as she processed that Ruby was standing in the hallway, holding Penny in a bridal carry, and pulling back her foot to kick the door again on account of her arms being occupied.
“Er,” she said, and while normally Yang Xiao Long would’ve been gasping over the adorableness of Penny being carried by Ruby like this, it was painfully clear something was wrong. Penny was shivering violently, and her eyes were squeezed shut, and she was clinging to Ruby’s neck like it was the only thing keeping her anchored to the surface of the planet. And Ruby had a look on her face like she would kill anyone who tried to make her let go of Penny.
And behind the two of them… was Ozpin, Goodwitch, and Ironwood, all of them wearing expressions of varying degrees of somber and serious.
“...Come in?” Yang said. “What happened?”
“There was an attack on the CCT,” Ruby said, navigating her and Penny through the doorway and then making directly for Penny’s bunk. “We tried to stop it.”
“An attack?” Blake took a step forward, her Faunus ears flat against her head, looking to Ozpin and Goodwitch for answers. “The White Fang?”
Ozpin shook his head.
“The evidence we have suggests that the perpetrator was an entirely unknown enemy actor,” Ironwood said, crossing his arms. “We’re still gathering information.”
“And, Miss Belladonna, at this point, there is no evidence which specifically suggests the White Fang was involved with the attack,” Goodwitch added.
Blake relaxed, but only slightly. Everyone knew that just made everything less clear. “How do you know?”
The conversation kept going, but Yang let it fade into the background, only paying half attention as she approached Penny’s bunk, where Ruby had sat down on the edge while still holding Penny entirely in her arms.
Penny’s eyes were still closed, and she hadn’t stopped shivering since they’d entered the room. Yang laid a gentle hand on her shoulder, and her heart broke a little when the touch only made Penny flinch forcefully.
“What happened?” she whispered to Ruby.
Ruby shook her head. “I can’t tell you anything. She should be the one to share.”
That only intensified Yang’s worry. She didn’t even need to be touching Penny to feel the heat radiating off her, heat which meant her body’s processors were working in overtime to do… something, she had no idea what. She knew it was usually heightened emotions which caused that, but… these weren’t good emotions.
“Penny?” she said carefully.
Penny tilted her head ever so slightly, just enough to let Yang know she was listening.
“Can I do anything for you right now? Get you something?”
Penny shook her head faintly, barely lifting it from its position against Ruby’s collarbone.
“Okay. I’m just gonna sit here with you, if that’s okay?”
A faint nod.
“Okay. I don’t know what happened, but you’re going to be okay—I know that much.”
Penny didn’t reply.
An awkward cough from the other side of the room brought her attention back to the conversation happening over there. Or rather, the conversation that had finished over there. The noise had come from Ironwood, leaning his head into the doorway and looking directly at Ruby.
“Er, Cadet Karyatis, if you want to return—” he started to say, in the tone someone usually had when they were making a suggestion that wasn’t really a suggestion but they were trying to hide it anyways. However—
“Nope. I’m staying,” Ruby said, not moving a muscle.
“Are you sure—”
“I’m. Staying.” Ruby’s voice came out in a violent growl, and suddenly her eyes locked onto Ironwood like a bird of prey sighting its target. Almost imperceptibly, her grip on Penny tightened.
Ironwood drew back, visibly startled.
“James, it’s late,” Ozpin said, and Yang had never heard him sound more tired than he did in this moment. “The girls need their sleep. We can conduct the debrief tomorrow afternoon.” He glanced at his watch, and then corrected himself. “This afternoon, rather.”
Ironwood looked like he wanted to object strongly to that, but then he glanced around the room, undoubtedly seeing Weiss’s face swollen from crying and Penny’s still-shivering form and Ruby’s endlessly determined expression as she cradled Penny and Blake’s closed-off pose, and then his eyes landed on Yang.
Without breaking eye contact with him, Yang put an arm out in front of Penny and Ruby, and slowly shook her head. No, not now, she said silently through eyes which shifted to her deep Semblance red. These two have had enough. They’ve probably had enough for their entire lives, but I can’t keep the world from them forever. However, I CAN keep the world from them tonight.
It was perhaps more than anyone should ever try to communicate through their eyes, but Yang did her best.
“Good night, General Ironwood,” she said.
After a few moments’ silence, Ironwood nodded.
“Very well, then. I suppose it’s for the best—it’s hard to conduct a debrief if no one has their thoughts in order.”
With that, he withdrew from the doorway, shutting it behind him, and the five girls were alone in the room with the aftermath of the night.
Penny hadn’t stopped shivering.
Most people would probably get sore from holding Penny in one position for so long like that, but Ruby literally didn’t feel soreness. So she would’ve been happy to hold Penny for days if it came to that. Especially because holding Penny like this even with all the sadness caused more of those inexplicably good-feeling flip-flop-flap feelings in Ruby’s chest. However, somewhere around when the sky outside was lightening with the first rays of dawn, Penny had shimmied her way out of Ruby’s arms without a word and laid herself out on her power symbol-patterned blankets. Ruby took that as her cue to leave, until she felt a hand land on her knee just as she started to get up.
Ruby looked at Penny’s hand, holding tightly onto her, and she remembered when she’d had her own moment of powerlessness right here in this bunk, also barely able to move, and had asked Penny to stay with her.
“Do you want me to stay?” Ruby whispered to Penny. In response, she received a small nod.
Ruby took out her contacts (wearing contacts while sleeping: TERRIBLE idea) and laid herself out on Penny’s bed alongside her. Penny was closer to the wall side of her mattress, so Ruby stayed on the side closer to the rest of the room, her body now a protective barrier between Penny and the outside world. She set her gaze on Penny, and resolved not to look away.
Ruby didn’t know how long it’d been when she noticed that Penny had her hands tightly pressed against her chest, as if she was shielding herself from something, or as if…
Ruby reached out, slowly brushing her fingers against Penny’s hands. And, as she thought might happen, Penny tightened them into fists, her eyes never opening.
“Penny? Can I see them?” she said quietly.
She heard a hitch in Penny’s breath, but after a few moments, she opened her hands and held them out, just a little.
Now Ruby could see small patches of exposed, shining metal around her fingers, damage from where she’d scrabbled frantically at everything around her while fighting the virus. She squeezed them the way Penny always did when she was trying to comfort Ruby, even though Ruby couldn’t register the sensation properly—she hoped she was doing it right for Penny.
“You’re beautiful, Penny,” she said with bare honesty, tapping gently at the spots where the metal shone through. Then, she remembered something she’d said weeks ago, when Penny’s face had been damaged. “You’re beautiful, Penny because of the metal. You’re beautiful because of the metal!” With that, she pulled Penny’s hands close to her own chest, pressing them against the place where her heartbeat was most easily felt.
A ghost of a smile crept across Penny’s face. She extended her index finger and slowly traced out a shape on the palm of Ruby’s hand, taking care to make sure Ruby could see it. And then she began to trace another shape; that was when Ruby realized Penny was tracing out letters.
Without a sense of touch, it took Ruby a little extra effort to recognize what Penny was tracing. She missed a couple letters, but the ones she did catch—THKU—made it pretty easy to know what Penny was saying.
Thank you.
“You’re welcome,” Ruby whispered, clutching Penny’s hands even more tightly against her. “Is there, um, a reason why you’re not talking right now? It’s totally fine! I can understand you! Just curious!” Then she winced, and had to remind herself to not be too loud—the rest of Team BSYP was still sleeping, and they needed all the rest they could get after last night.
Penny’s reply came quickly, and this time Ruby was ready to receive it.
Scared to talk.
“Oh,” Ruby said, much more softly. That was—how could she make Penny feel good about this? “That’s okay! Um, I know a little sign language, if that helps? Or Morse code, I know that, if that’s easier,” She paused, searching Penny’s face for any sign of displeasure, and when she found none, she kept going. “But if you want to talk however about what’s scary about talking, maybe I could help make it less scary?”
Penny was still for a few moments, and then she slowly shook her head.
“Okay, no problem!” Ruby was out of things to say, so she went back to concentrating on lying there and breathing slowly and being a comforting presence, while wondering if Penny would mind if she fell asleep because she was starting to feel really cozy and sleepy—
And then suddenly Penny shifted, pulling herself so close that each of Ruby’s exhalations made Penny’s bangs flutter. Then, for the first time since the CCT, she opened her eyes, and for a moment, green was gazing into silver again, with a thrillingly small amount of space between them.
Just as Ruby started wondering if she should say something, Penny lifted an arm and carefully draped it over Ruby’s side, before giving Ruby a questioning look.
Ruby nodded so frantically she almost knocked Penny’s arm away, and reflexively she closed her eyes in pure ecstasy as Penny’s arm settled fully over her. In so many ways, Penny’s touch made Ruby feel even more of the never-before-felt incredible feelings.
Normally, Ruby would not register someone’s arm on her, but Penny’s limbs had an extra weight which gave them just a little trace of definition in the wasteland that was Ruby’s sense of touch. The actual feeling was so nice, and the fact that it was Penny’s touch which made Ruby feel this way made it a thousand times even better.
A few seconds later, she was putting an arm of her own over Penny and checking that it was okay (it was) and then letting herself really relax for the first time since last evening.
Which meant it was time to think about all the things she’d been able to avoid thinking about because Penny until now. Like…
There had been an attack on Beacon during the dance! A deadly attack! Just like the General had warned! So… did that mean the General was right?
Should she have followed orders and stayed alone and hidden in the airship, because she could’ve been hurt? Should she have missed out on how much wonderful awesome fun and feelings and everything she’d had because there was a real risk she could’ve gotten hurt?
But… No! If Ruby hadn’t been there with Penny to interrupt it, no one would’ve even noticed something was wrong! It was only because Ruby had broken orders and gone out that the infiltration was even caught and that anyone knew anything was wrong right now! Breaking orders, even if it put in her a more dangerous situation, had turned out awesome! Really awesome!
And if Ruby hadn’t been there with Penny, then… then Penny would’ve been in the ballroom with all the other students when the virus attacked her, and… and… if Ruby hadn’t been there, then what would’ve happened to Penny with all those people around her who wouldn’t understand and wouldn’t know how to help her, and—
Yeah, Ruby decided. She’d made the best decision in her entire life by deciding to go to the dance. It had made everything turn out so much better. In every possible way.
General Ironwood had been wrong.
Because she was Ruby Karyatis. Project Moonrise. The girl born to save the world. She was strong enough to handle danger and do ordinary teenage girl things. She could do both, and she had proof for the General now!
…At least, she could do both, until the semester was over. And then it would be impossible to do both…
That was a problem for Later Ruby, though. Right Now Ruby was going to close her eyes and count her breaths and fall asleep. She probably needed it.
She did. Within moments, she was asleep.
And if Ruby had been able to stay awake a little bit longer, she would’ve seen Penny finally, finally relaxing enough to slip into a much-needed low-power period.
Neither of them were quite able to find the words to express it at the time, but later both of them would think back and realize that moment, nestled in the embrace of each other, felt unmistakably safe to both of them even amidst so much chaos.
Later that day
Penny’s code was unique.
That was perhaps an obvious statement, considering she was a synthetic girl, but the distinction ran far deeper than what might be suggested even by the invoking of artificial intelligence and synthetic souls. In the rest of the world, code was static, something that could only be changed or edited by an outside hand. However, in Penny, her code was forever shifting and evolving, rewriting and editing itself over time, fueled by consciousness and soul. If Penny were to drop a perfectly simple program somewhere in her file system and avoid intentional edits or changes to it, given enough time that program would become practically unrecognizable in comparison to its original version.
Diving into her own code was like diving into the ocean. Yes, she would have a general idea of what was meant to be there, and a general understanding of how it all worked, but trying to track the specific locations and orderings of everything would be an exercise in futility. Like how a new sea creature could be discovered at any given time, her processes were constantly being streamlined and optimized in ways completely beyond the understanding of modern computer science; from time to time an entirely new compression protocol would invent itself somewhere in one of her memory banks. And instead of struggling to make sense of it through the lens of her consciousness matrix or her soul, Penny found it best to simply let the innumerable currents guide her as she floated on its surface, sometimes comfortably floating and sometimes not.
Most of the time, this was ideal. However, sometimes, in a dynamic ocean of code, things could make themselves frustratingly hidden or obtuse. Penny’s ever-elusive, mysteriously-evolving hiccup reflex was a glaring example; she still had not found the actual source code for that. And, far more terrifyingly, if something intended to hide itself in Penny’s code, there would be many, many places for that thing to hide which would make it very hard to find. Things such as a computer virus.
Even after what’d happened in the CCT, even though Penny no longer felt the virus, she could not stop looking for it. Because what if the virus was somehow still here? What if her Semblance hadn’t been enough to delete it? What if the virus had tricked her into thinking she’d deleted it? What if it had tricked her into thinking she didn’t feel it anymore? What if it was tricking her everything right now? What if the virus had actually taken over all of her senses so that none of what Penny was feeling right now was actually real? How did she really know that all of the signals she was receiving were actually real signals? What if all of her sensors were being tricked? What if… what if… what if she was actually being made to do horrible things right now, and she just wasn’t aware because the virus was tricking her sensors into thinking that she was just lying in bed doing nothing at all? What if—what if—
That was why she had to search every corner of her code, no matter how long it took her. She would only really be safe again when she was sure there was no corner of this ocean where the virus could be hiding. Until then, she couldn’t allow herself to speak or move or do anything, because it might somehow be hurting her friends. She did not care how long this would take. She had to be completely and perfectly sure she was safe. Anything less than one hundred percent certainty was unacceptable.
She was scared. She was so scared.
Her logic core was constantly raising objections that none of Penny’s fears were falsifiable hypotheses and therefore could not be taken seriously, and Penny kept dismissing those objections, because what if her logic core had been corrupted by the virus? No part of her was safe. Nothing was safe. Not even—were these even her own thoughts right now? Were these even her own feelings? Was this—was this—maybe she should stop thinking entirely. She wished she could re-enter her low-power state that she’d been in earlier that day but that wasn’t an option anymore because what if something happened to her while she was in standby? Every part of her existence was potentially vulnerable… so maybe she shouldn’t exist anymore—
EMOTIONAL PROCESSING DISABLED.
The alert took Penny by surprise. It was an entirely new one. When she queried for a clarification, she was redirected to an entirely new corner of her code, assembled within the last five minutes, apparently in response to her entirely unprecedented emotional state.
Ah. It was a program aimed at self-preservation, triggered by how Penny’s intensified emotions had been leading her down a path of increasingly self-destructive and self-harming thoughts. When her emotions had become so overwhelming that she’d internally expressed a desire to cease existing, the emergency self-preservation protocol had initiated, with a simple action: shutting down emotion processing to prevent that destructive, emotionally charged string of thought from proceeding any further. At the moment, Penny’s consciousness was running entirely through her logic core.
“Penny?”
At the sound of Ruby’s voice, Penny opened her eyes. Ruby was still extremely close to her, but now she was looking into Penny’s eyes with worry.
“You stopped shivering, and I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing…”
“It is a neutral thing.” Penny extricated herself from Ruby’s arms and worked herself into an upright position. Her teammates were observing her with clear concern for her wellbeing. It would be helpful to update her friends about her condition. “I am ready to talk about the previous night.”
“Penny?” Blake had crossed her arms, and she was leaning forward, her amber eyes searching Penny’s face. “Please don’t take this as a judgment of any kind, but you sound… flat.”
Penny nodded. She had already calculated that attempting to feign emotion in her voice or her face would only increase her friends’ worry. “That is to be expected. I have temporarily disabled all of my emotional processing. I am not feeling any emotions right now. My consciousness is operating on logic alone and several related systems.”
Blake’s eyes widened, and then in moments the rest of Penny’s team was dropping onto her mattress, forming with Ruby what was likely intended as a circle of protection and comfort.
Someone’s scroll vibrated. Weiss made a frustrated noise, pulled out her scroll, and declined the call with an emphatic swipe. “Of all of the times for my father to try calling me…” She fell silent, and then turned back to Penny with tightly pursed lips.
“Is that safe?” Yang said. She was leaning forward, her hands hovering uncertainly over Penny’s side as if she wanted to touch her but wasn’t sure she was allowed.
“In the short term, yes. It is explicitly intended as an act of self-preservation. In the long term, it is risky. Deactivating emotional processing puts immense strain on other systems. It is a far costlier drain of battery power than even my flight mode, and it takes a great deal of internal computing resources to nullify so many data packets so quickly.”
Her friends were silent for several seconds, and then Ruby said, “…What was that about, um, self-preservation?”
Penny took a deep breath. The shutdown was severely taxing her cooling systems. “The trigger for my emotional shutdown was my fear and my self-recrimination and my despair becoming so intense that I began to have thoughts of no longer wanting to exist.”
An instant later, Penny was being engulfed in hugs from all sides from Ruby, Weiss, Blake, and Yang. And everyone was hugging her as tightly as seemed organically possible.
“Thank you,” she said, and despite the absence of emotion, she genuinely meant the gratitude. She recognized that hugs were necessary for emotional wellbeing and comfort even when that comfort could not be registered consciously. She could feel the frenzy of activity in her body instinctively slowing down in response to the hugs. “I am not feeling that desire anymore. Which is the intended goal of the emotional deactivation. Not wanting to exist is illogical. It would be illogical to stop existing when there are so many nice things about existence.”
Weiss’s scroll vibrated again. She tossed it over her shoulder without looking at it. Yang pulled back so she could make eye contact with Penny, staring straight into her photoreceptors. “But what happens when you have to turn your emotions back on? How can we make sure you don’t ever have that kind of feeling ever again?”
Before Penny could reply, there was a knock on the door. She did not miss how everyone instinctively moved closer to her, as if to shield her.
“Who is it?” Blake called out, her voice plainly guarded.
“Good afternoon, students,” came the voice of Ozpin from the other side of the door. “I wish I could postpone this, but I do need to as complete an understanding of last night as you can give.”
The tension slipped out of the team like a clogged drain being unblocked, and Blake said, “Come in.”
Ozpin and Goodwitch entered, both appearing noticeably weary. He nodded to them, unfazed by the fact that everyone was sitting on one bed, and took up a position just inside the door, tapping his cane lightly against the floor. Penny noted that Ironwood was not with them.
“Good afternoon. I would prefer for this to be a private conversation with Miss Pallas and Miss Karyatis, but something tells me you three will not be going anywhere,” he said, eyeing Blake, Yang, and Weiss.
Yang nodded grimly. “You’ve got that right.”
“Very well.” Ozpin’s gaze moved to Penny, and a flash of worry crossed his features. “Miss Pallas, are you ready to—”
“Yes.”
Her tone of voice (or lack thereof) most certainly did not go unnoticed; Glynda raised both eyebrows as soon as she heard Penny. However, Penny pressed on with the debrief before anyone could raise concerns. “Ruby and I intercepted a lone intruder in the CCT.”
“I didn’t really get a good look at her…” Ruby added. “All I saw was a mask and some black hair and a sword, and a lot of fire. Penny?”
“My data is not any more helpful.” Most of the sensors which might offer vital insight into the attacker’s identity, Penny had deactivated earlier during the dance because of their sensitivity to the harmonic vibrations of the speakers. All she could recall was a masked face, black hair, and a possibly feminine figure.
“So yeah, we surprised her, and then she escaped, and I wanted to pursue, but I couldn’t see where she went, and Penny wanted to try and figure out what the attacker did, so I kept watch while she used her Semblance to go in the computer and gauge the damage—”
“Her Semblance?” Goodwitch said, before turning to Penny with an expression containing forty percent surprise and sixty percent pride.
“My Semblance allows me to temporarily inhabit a quantifiable object and investigate or manipulate its inherent properties,” Penny said. “I named it Ghost.”
“Because it’s like a ghost possessing things!” Ruby said helpfully.
Penny noticed a strange reaction to that from Ozpin—his grip on the knob of his cane tightened noticeably, the tendons in his hand flexing to what had to be a painful degree. She also noticed Glynda shooting him a meaningful look.
“That is a very powerful Semblance, Miss Pallas,” he said finally, his voice as flat as if he was shutting down his own emotions. “It would be wise of you to keep it hidden.”
Penny nodded, taking note of that advice. She’d discovered another aspect of Ghost last night, which had led to her amending the definition once again. She could use it to inhabit something mostly intangible, if that intangible item was quantifiable. She could not inhabit something like happiness because there was no such thing as ‘one happiness,’ but she could inhabit a computer virus because there was such a thing as ‘one computer virus.’
“It was the central administrative node for Beacon Academy’s network which was compromised. I used my Semblance to enter the node, upon which I discovered that the intruder had uploaded an extremely sophisticated computer virus to the school’s network, one capable of completely bypassing all security protocols. The virus was also actively infecting any device which was connected to the school network. It is highly likely that any device on campus connected to Beacon’s network may be compromised.”
In what was likely a coincidence, Weiss’s scroll vibrated again. Glynda and Ozpin glanced at its spot on the floor, and then they looked down at the scroll in Glynda’s hands.
“The virus attempted to infect me through my own open network connection,” Penny said.
She heard gasps from everyone present except Ruby, who already knew this, and Ozpin, who was not the sort of person to gasp.
“Oh,” Blake said, and her hug turned into a gentle rubbing up and down Penny’s back.
“Penny, I’m so sorry,” Yang said. “I… are you—no, that’s a stupid question, of course you’re not okay, but—how can we help you feel better?”
“I would like help understanding this emotionally,” Penny said.
Yang tilted her head. “What do you mean?”
“Logically, I know with great certainty that I defeated the virus. I used my Semblance to possess the virus and force it to delete itself from my body. Right now, I know with certainty I am safe, because I have been convinced logically. However, as soon as I turn my emotion processing back on, I do not know if there will be anything that could convince me on an emotional level that I am safe.”
“This may not be any comfort, Miss Pallas, but that is a problem as old as anything on this planet.”
If Penny’s emotion processing were turned on, she would be embarrassed by how she had nearly forgotten Ozpin’s presence in the space of a few seconds. Instead, she nodded and asked him, “Does that mean you know how to deal with it?”
“No.” Ozpin’s gaze landed on something beyond any of them. “If I did, I think all the world’s problems would be solved.”
“Oh.” That was not helpful.
“Wait!” Ruby bounced up and down on her knees, grabbing onto Penny’s shoulder. “Your Semblance! If you used it to find the virus in the CCT, I bet you could use it on your own body to make absolute sure the virus is gone! Your emotions can’t ignore the proof of your own soul, because that’s the strongest proof possible!”
Penny looked at Ruby, and found herself thrown into a loop of circular logic that she was having trouble making sense of. “I do not know if it is possible to use Ghost on my own body. I already inhabit it, Ruby.”
Ruby didn’t appear discouraged in the slightest. “Well, you’re always saying—only one way to find out!”
Penny could not argue with that logic. And there was no risk in trying, so…
She focused on the computer systems within her own body, activated Ghost, and…
Abruptly, she was in another realm. Everything was a peaceful black, like she was floating in outer space. So Ruby’s hypothesis was correct—she could use Ghost on her own body, even if it was rather redundant. Although… it could be quite helpful if a virus ever attacked her again with more success.
Penny spun around, scanning every inch of what she could see, and there was not a trace of red in sight. Logically, she knew that the virus was designed to conceal itself only from computers, not from souls. So there was no way it could hide from her Semblance.
She was safe.
Before deactivating her Semblance, Penny looked around once more, and filed away the thought that if this was going to be her soul’s representation of her own body, it should be more colorful and lively. She would come back to that thought later with emotional processing turned on.
However, as soon as she filed away the thought, the world around her shifted. Now, instead of floating in an environment akin to outer space, she was standing in a very familiar place: the secret garden where she and Ruby often spent time together. She took the time to note the dark green moss, the bright sunlight washing over everything, the flower petals scattered throughout, and nodded. It would be a good idea for her internal Semblance landscape of herself to be a pleasing place.
With that, she deactivated Ghost, and as soon as she was back in the outerworld, she made another decision, and re-enabled emotional processing.
Instantly, Penny was shivering again. She closed her eyes and tried to remind herself, she’d checked with her Semblance, the virus was gone, she’d checked with her Semblance, the virus was gone. It is irrefutable proof.
“I’m sorry,” she said, without even knowing why she was saying it beyond… sheer instinct and guilt.
Yes, she had irrefutable proof, but also, there was a rising tide of terror inside her screaming what if it’s wrong?
“I—I checked,” she gasped out, as the protective arms of her teammates closed around her again. “And I—I know it’s really gone, I know my Semblance is telling the truth, but—I want to check again. I want to make sure the virus isn’t there. I want to keep making sure it isn’t there, even though nothing’s going to change. Why do I want that?”
“That’s called a safety behavior, Miss Pallas.” Glynda let out a heavy sigh. “They make you feel better in the short term, but in the long term, they are detrimental to your mental wellbeing.”
Penny nodded slowly. “I—should I—how do I stop? I want to feel safe!”
“You learn to trust,” Ozpin said slowly, sounding as if he was shouldering an immensely heavy burden. “You learn to trust that something will be alright even when doubt eats away at you. You learn not just trust, but faith.”
Penny nodded again, turning the word over in her mind. “Faith that… everything will be okay?”
“The rarest commodity in history,” Ozpin said, and now Penny was wondering if they were talking about the same thing at all.
“…Everything will be okay,” Penny said, the words slow to come out of her mouth even though there were no issues with her vocal processors.
Weiss’s scroll vibrated once again, the sound magnified by the resonance against the hardwood floor it was laying on. Without looking, Weiss cast a small glyph at it, flinging it into a corner of the room.
“And you know it’ll be okay because you’ve got your friends right here with you!” Ruby squeezed Penny’s hands again. “And we’ll be doing our best to make things okay, too!”
Penny smiled back at Ruby. The part of her which insisted on checking to make sure the virus was still gone suddenly became a little less insistent as a warm feeling spread out from her Aura generator to her entire torso. Ruby’s smile just… had that effect on her. “You are right.”
Blake had a little bit of a pinched expression on her face, like she wanted to say something but was holding it back. She did speak a moment later, but Penny inferred that this was not what Blake had originally wanted to say.
“…I think we should hear the rest of what happened, Penny. If you’re up for it.”
“Well.” Penny shrugged. “Genuinely, there is not much left to tell. I did not have the opportunity to investigate the virus’s code, and I could not ascertain any of the virus’s goals. It did not even try to do anything beyond concealing itself in me and attempting to make my security systems think nothing was there. I have no idea what it would be capable of once embedded, but given the level of sophistication and its reach…” She shrugged again, much more helplessly. “It could be devastating.”
“Maybe that’s part of your fear,” Yang said. “You don’t know what the virus would’ve actually done inside you, so you can imagine it making you do the most horrible things ever.”
“Yes…” That was exactly it, actually, and Penny was a little unnerved by how accurate Yang had been with a guess. “The only other clue I had was the name of the virus.”
Ozpin leaned forward, his gaze suddenly razor-sharp and focused entirely on Penny. “The name?”
“The Will Of The Queen,” Penny intoned, repeating what her Semblance had gleaned. “It seems a rather strange choice to me, even if there are no rules for what a virus has to be named. Who is the queen?”
Ozpin went perfectly still, as still as Penny had ever seen a human being go, as still as had to be organically possible without servos that could be locked in place.
“Students,” he said finally. “This is the moment where you must trust that what has to be done next is entirely out of your hands. It is up to the ones who bear the actual responsibility for protecting the world today.”
Team BSYP and Ruby exchanged uneasy glances, and some of Penny’s roiling fear was briefly put on hold by her deepening confusion. It almost sounded as if Ozpin knew…
“Do you know who the queen is?” Blake said.
Ozpin leveled his most unreadable gaze on her. “I have my theories.”
Penny blinked. Well, that was cryptic.
Weiss’s scroll was vibrating once again from the corner of the room, although this time Penny was the only one to hear it. She decided not to alert Weiss about it.
“Before Professor Goodwitch and I depart, there’s one other thing we need to discuss.”
“Your mission,” Goodwitch added, tapping at her scroll.
Wait, what? Penny checked her internal chronometer and ran through several memories, and only then did she remember, oh no, they were supposed to report to the auditorium hours ago to pick a first-year mission assignment! It was all her fault—
“Penny, call it leader’s intuition, I know you’re blaming yourself right now for us missing our mission assignment, but that was a choice we made as a team,” Blake said. “We weren’t doing a godsdamn thing until we knew you were okay.”
Penny looked back to Blake, uncertainty pinging rapidly inside her. “But… can we advance to the next year, if we don’t take an end-of-year mission?”
“We’ll just take whatever the last mission not chosen was. It might be less desirable, but consider it one more part of our training,” Blake said. “Being a Huntress means taking the unexciting jobs, not just the glamorous ones.”
“I could not have put it better myself, Miss Belladonna,” Ozpin said, pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “However, I would like to offer you all an alternative. Glynda?”
Glynda tapped on her scroll, and suddenly all of Team BSYP’s scrolls vibrated.
Ozpin leaned forward slightly, resting both of his hands on his cane. “You should have just received the details of a mission which is normally not open to first-year teams. However, because of unique circumstances, and because of your particular prowess and experience as a team… I am offering this mission to you.”
Even though the message had gone to all of their scrolls, Penny and Weiss and Yang ended up peeking over Blake’s shoulder at her scroll as she read through the mission description.
“...Mountain Glenn,” Blake said after a moment, her voice filled with amazement and disbelief.
“A bit of intelligence which you four brought to my attention. So how would you feel about being the ones to investigate it?”
“I’m in,” Blake said immediately. Then she caught herself and glanced around her. “...If that’s what the rest of my team wants.”
“Oh, absolutely.”
“Definitely.”
“Affirmative!”
“Oh, yeah!”
Team BSYP, Ozpin, and Glynda stared at Ruby upon realizing she’d chimed in.
Ruby let out a nervous laugh. “Oops. Sorry. I, um, forgot I’m not actually on your team,” she said, scratching the back of her neck. “Wish I could go, though!”
“Miss Karyatis, have you been here all day?” Glynda said.
“...Yeah?”
“What about your team’s mission?”
“Um, not sure? But it’s fine, I’ll be happy with whatever they picked—”
“You are their team leader.”
“Oh. Yeah. I am!” Ruby’s eyes darted around the room, and then she jumped to her feet. “Well then, I should go check and make sure I like the mission they picked! Bye! I’ll see you later, Penny, promise!”
With that, Ruby vanished in a cloud of silver dust, the door opening and slamming shut behind her.
Ozpin and Glynda, and everyone else in the room, stared after her.
“I have questions about that girl,” Glynda said.
Weiss’s scroll vibrated again.
“...And that is where we stand.”
Ozpin finished his explanation of what Penny and Ruby had encountered in the CCT (omitting any mention of Penny’s Semblance), and leaned back in his chair to study Ironwood’s face.
A storm was gathering in his furrowed brows and his tightly pressed lips, but when he spoke, it was something entirely unexpected.
“...I wasn’t aware Penny was capable of having network connections.”
“Should you be?”
“I don’t recall her having one in Atlas, at the very least,” Ironwood said. “It was considered far too much of a security risk. A fear which has been borne out, it seems.”
Silently, Ozpin considered how Penny had been quite at ease with using her connection to navigate the CCTnet from the moment she’d awoken. As if she was already familiar with it. And then he thought of his conversations with Pietro and Penny before her escape to Beacon.
He decided it was not a stretch of the imagination to say that, before Penny’s escape, Pietro had given his daughter a secret connection to the rest of the world as one more degree of freedom. Because even if Penny was confined physically, Pietro could have given her access to a digital world which she could explore endlessly.
To Ironwood, Ozpin said, “She has the right to do with her body what she wishes.”
“It pains me to say this, but…” Ironwood rubbed the bridge of his nose with a slow, strained motion. “Does she?”
Glynda took a single step forward, her heel rapping on the floor like a gunshot. “What are you implying?”
“Even if she does not realize it—” Was it Ozpin’s imagination, or was there something accusatory in that phrase? “—She has immensely powerful capabilities. And with this vulnerability, if someone were to take advantage of it, as nearly happened last night, she would be a tremendous danger to herself and others.”
“That is her decision to make, not ours. But since you raised the concern, Penny has already decided she will be keeping her connection disabled going forward. A decision which she had the right to make without any of your input.”
Ironwood nodded. “Very well. Now, speaking of vulnerabilities…”
Ozpin could feel another headache coming on.
“They were here, Ozpin. Right under our noses. You refused to take the proper security measures. And now the entire school is compromised.”
The headache was here.
“Of course, thanks to Miss Pallas’s information, we can deal with the virus—we can replace every piece of technology that was infected, we can wipe every compromised computer until there isn’t a single zero to be found anywhere in their drives, we can pull back all our data from secure backups, we can improve our cybersecurity measures, but the fact remains—a vulnerability was exposed because of complacency. Because of a fixation on maintaining this illusion of peace. So what are we going to do about the underlying problem which actually caused this disaster?”
“James,” Ozpin said, his tone severe enough that it halted Ironwood’s pacing and induced him to turn back to Ozpin. “What do you want, exactly?”
Ironwood moved closer to the desk and laid a gloved hand on it, his palm facedown. “I’m tired of half-measures. I’m tired of us all being subordinate to the concept of a false peace. This veneer laid over Vale only makes it easier for Salem’s agents to conceal themselves, Oz! A single actor should not have been able to infiltrate the CCT. Atlas’s tower is kept under the closest possible guard.”
Ironwood had not actually said what he wanted yet, but Ozpin sensed that prodding him would only make this conversation deteriorate.
“I told you at the start of this semester that a cataclysm was on the horizon. If I was the watchman shouting a warning, then this is the first flaming arrow fired by the invasion force. It cannot be ignored. But we still have the means to stop it.” He paused, and then gave Ozpin a significant look. “I have the means to stop it. If you put me in charge of security for the Vytal Festival.”
“James, the rest of the world is already uneasy about Atlas’s growing military power. If you, the head of the Atlesian military, were to be given control of another kingdom’s security during an international event after you unexpectedly brought an army to that kingdom, the optics would be—”
“Optics. Exactly what has us in this mess. I think we’re beyond the point of caring about that, Oz. When Salem has access to every CCT-connected device in your school—and we still don’t have the slightest idea of what she might do with that access—we have to treat this like a war. A real one. Which is what it is.”
Ozpin closed his eyes and let his thoughts overtake him for a moment. This was not the first time in history that a moment like this had played out. Not the first time that one of his allies had wondered why they were not treating the planet like a battleground. And the truthful answer to that question was something that Ozpin could not ever admit to.
In an all-out war, the truth would follow—the truth about Salem, the truth about the Grimm, the truth about Ozpin. And then more questions would follow those truths—questions of why Salem and Ozma existed, what they wanted, where they had come from. And the answers to those questions… would tear apart the fabric of civilization and hand and victory to Salem.
“You’ve also got your hands quite full with replacing every piece of hardware on campus and in Amity on before the tournament starts, no?” Ironwood added, unaware of the conflict battering Ozpin. “It’s hardly the kind of project that can be overseen while also effectively managing festival security.”
The ultimate truth about Salem was dangerous. Far more dangerous than any Grimm. Because if the world knew that Salem could not be killed, that would be the death of hope. The death of faith. And that would be the end.
That was why he would always, at all costs, avoid the choice which led down that path. Order had to be maintained at any cost.
Perhaps there was a middle ground that could be reached with James.
“I will recommend to the Vale Council that you be appointed head of security for the festival,” he said slowly. That recommendation was as good a guarantee as possible, and he knew Ironwood knew that. “On one condition.”
“Name it.”
“Send your machines back to Atlas.” The human soldiers of Atlas were one thing; they were souls, people. They would be easier for the people of Vale to stomach. But the Knights and Paladins were another matter entirely; they were faceless, thoughtless, and could not be reasoned with. Their presence had the unmistakable air of an occupation. And it did not help that they were already compromised.
Ironwood looked positively dismayed. “And weaken our position? If this is about the virus, you shouldn’t worry. All Atlesian technology runs on its own closed network which has no connection to Beacon. The virus has not infected them.” He hesitated, and then added, “And for someone so concerned with optics, you seem strangely willing to overlook the implications of abruptly sending my forces’ armored division back to Atlas.”
“An army decreasing in size is generally seen as a good thing, James,” Glynda said, her tone so sharp with derision that it could’ve cut through the solid oak of Ozpin’s desk. “Have you ever considered such a thing before?”
Ironwood’s eyes went to Glynda, and then back to Ozpin, before he let out a deep sigh. “It’s an agreement, then. I’ll begin making arrangements to ship them back.” Some of the stiffness disappeared from his posture, and he nodded to Ozpin, finally allowing himself to settle into the seat in front of the desk. “You won’t regret this, Oz. I promise.”
Ozpin nodded, and it really was a relief to see Ironwood’s good spirits making a small appearance. They were in short supply these days.
“Ah, one other thing.”
Out of the corner of his vision, Ozpin saw Glynda’s eye twitch.
“Penny. If she was made aware of the full extent of her capabilities—”
“No,” Ozpin said.
“Do you know what she’s capable of? What she was capable of before she came to you?”
“Yes.”
“Then could you at least consider how much would be contributed to the defense of this kingdom if—”
“No.”
Ironwood fell silent, staring at Ozpin. And once again, Ozpin found himself having to postpone his questions for Ironwood about Ruby Karyatis. If Penny was a sore subject, then questioning him about Ruby in such close conjunction would be a recipe for another fractious argument.
“Have you at least come any closer to picking our next Fall Maiden?” Ironwood said finally.
Ozpin let his gaze drop to his desk, focusing on nothing as his mind traveled to a moment many generations past, and then another moment even farther past. And then, back to the present, where he had weighed his options so very carefully, considered and reconsidered every possible soul.
“I am quite close to making a choice,” he said finally.
And that, at the very least, was the truth.
Notes:
I do hope that I've framed Penny's logic-only mode in the right way. I don't mean to portray it as a malicious thing or something implanted by Atlas or something which is harming her or stifling her soul. Rather, my intent is to portray it as something which is both genuinely helpful and unique to her synthetic nature; a protective mechanism of her body trying to mitigate the destructive force that Penny's emotions are having on her sense of self in the aftermath of the virus. The humans and Faunus around Penny are instinctively unsettled because they don't have anything close to that kind of function, but at the same time, they're very much trying to understand and accommodate the new aspect of their friend that they've just learned about.
As always, thank you for reading! See you all next week.
Chapter 36: Pride
Notes:
Content warnings for this chapter (click this text to reveal):
Internalized phobias, brief discussion of suicidal thoughts, discussions of the events of Chapter 34, discussions of loss of autonomy and control
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
If Penny were in better spirits, she would be thrilled to be in the student supply warehouse. It had been one of her favorite places to explore before she became a student—it was just so expansive, and there were so many interesting nooks and crannies to explore! And so many objects to look at and occasionally borrow unofficially for her own use. But right now, there was too much of an ache in her midsection, too much of a lingering shiver that she could barely disguise. It was all she could manage to stay calm and not descend into a terrified paralysis of having some unknown thing force its way into her body once again—
“Alright.” Blake’s voice startled Penny out of her own thoughts just before she would’ve begun spiraling into panic attack territory again.
“All the supplies we need should be in one of these two aisles…” Blake looked up from the list she’d just been given by the supply clerk, and pointed to their left. “That way. No need to split up.”
“It’s just like shopping, but everything’s free,” Yang said, pulling a folding shovel off a rack, turning it over in her hands, and breaking out into a fit of… Oh, right, air guitar, that was what Yang referred to it as.
“That’s called shoplifting,” Weiss said, snatching the shovel out of Yang’s hands and placing it back on the rack.
For some reason, Penny’s proximity sensors kept pinging warnings for things which turned out to not be a threat in the slightest. The latest example being the radar signature of Weiss putting the shovel back on the rack. That wasn’t a threat! But somehow her sensor processing had been fooled. It was as if she was suddenly anticipating danger everywhere…
Incredibly unsettling. She hoped it would stop soon.
“Weiss, would you like to know how many times I’ve shoplifted from your own company for my survival?” Blake was saying.
“The SDC report on you from the files I stole gave an estimate, actually—”
Suddenly, Weiss’s voice faded out, and suddenly Penny wasn’t in the warehouse anymore.
She was in an unfamiliar room, with sterile gray walls and banks of computers. To her right was a monitor. To her left was a large mechanical arm, not dissimilar to the ones she used in her workshop in the tower.
She was looking down at her knees, which were raised off the ground—she was sitting on a bench of some sort. A bit like a table that would be found in a doctor’s office, but instead designed to be a workbench. A workbench for her.
Penny lifted her head, and found herself looking at a door with a sense of incredible expectation building within.
But then she heard another door opening, from somewhere behind her. And before she could turn to look at whoever was entering, she heard a painfully familiar voice speaking.
“Penny?”
And then words were leaving her own mouth, she was saying—
“It is time.”
…
…
“—they’re way underestimating it,” Blake’s voice registered again, as Penny was abruptly jolted back to the real world.
A thrum of emotion ran through Penny, although she could not tell if it was a good thrum or a bad thrum, it was just a lot, because—another memory of her past! Another memory of her father! She had one more memory of his voice!
…And she didn’t know if she would ever receive more. She had no idea where these memories were coming from, or how to trigger them. All she could do was catalog the memory with the highest of care, placing it in the same storage cache as her other past memory.
“I was in plenty more robberies than just that,” Blake was saying, her voice muffled by a wall of sleeping bags between Penny and her. She and Weiss were in the next aisle over now. “They could double that number, and it still wouldn’t be close.”
“Well, I’ll be sure to update the anti-theft division on that, the next chance I get,” Weiss said.
A pause.
“That was a joke, Blake.”
A snort. “You need more practice.”
Despite how unmoored Penny felt right now, she smiled. Her teammates would always be a source of happiness even in her most distressing moments.
…That was why she had to make sure she was safe to be around, make sure there was absolutely no chance she’d hurt them—
A flash of something registered on the corner of her vision, her proximity sensors blared again, and Penny jumped and whirled to face it, raising her arms in a defensive position.
It was Yang, who instead of walking down the aisle, had chosen to take a shortcut through an empty section of shelving and was now crouching at eye-level while holding a folding chair in each hand.
“Hey, Penny,” she said softly. “We never got a chance to check back in with you after Ozpin gave us the mission, but… are you okay?”
“Yes,” Penny said immediately.
Hic.
Well, there went any hopes of not letting her personal issue impact the mission. She admitted defeat to her ever-elusive, ever-enigmatic, ever-frustrating hiccup reflex and said, “No, I am not.”
Yang raised an eyebrow, and then jumped down from the shelf, landing neatly and unfolding both chairs with a flick of her arms. “I guessed as much. You’re literally jumping at shadows, no idiom needed.” She placed the chairs side-by-side. “Want a seat?”
Penny nodded once, and then just as she’d sat down, Yang pulled a rolled-up sleeping bag off the shelf and handed it to her. “It’s not one of your plushies, but… it’s something.”
Penny nodded again and hugged the puffy bedding tightly. “I… I do not know what to say first.”
“May I ask about something?” Yang’s voice was as gentle as the surface of a pond on a windless day. “What you said about… not wanting to exist. Are you still feeling that?”
Penny hesitated. The easy answer was no, because now that she knew she was safe from the virus, she didn’t feel as if her existence was a danger to herself or others. But… if something like this happened again (and now, because it’d happened once, there would always be a chance of it happening again), the feeling might come back.
“Okay, so you’re hesitating, which means we need to talk about it now, no matter what your answer was gonna be.”
For some reason, the decisiveness in Yang’s tone was comforting. Penny shifted her position a little bit, tried to meet Yang’s eyes, and decided that was too much for herself right now. So instead, she looked down and to the left, concentrating on Yang’s prosthetic arm. An arm that was like hers. An arm that was visibly metal, with nothing hidden. It felt nice to see.
“I… what if I am dangerous? Because I can be controlled?” Her body temperature began to rise and then her breathing began to speed up, trying to bring the temperature back to normal.
Yang reached out, putting her prosthetic hand on Penny’s shoulder, her grip comfortingly strong. “Penny. It didn’t control you. You defeated it with your soul. That means you can’t be controlled.”
“But what if another virus does? What if there is a virus so technologically advanced that I cannot defeat it even with my Semblance? Or, what if I am out of Aura and unable to use my Semblance? Or, what if someone creates a virus which tricks me into thinking I am not being invaded? How would I stop it then? That… none of those things happen to organic people.” Penny was squeezing the sleeping bag so tightly that a prediction algorithm warned her she might make it burst at the seams. “And, when I think about how that is a problem unique to me, about how I am the only person on Remnant who can be controlled like this, about how it is directly linked to my synthetic nature, about how it is an undeniable fact about me, it makes me feel as if… as if… as if I do not deserve to exist…”
Currently, it was just a feeling. A feeling she could fight off, for now. But she could calculate a future scenario in which it moved from feeling to belief, and it would hurt to believe something like that.
“No,” Yang said, her voice coming out in something like a low growl as her eyes flashed red.
Penny flinched. Logically, she knew Yang wasn’t angry at her! But emotionally… she couldn’t help but wonder if Yang was mad at her for—for doubting herself—
Immediately, the red was gone. Yang pulled her hand away, all shame. “Penny, I’m sorry—I wasn’t mad at you, I was… it was at whatever, everything, that’s making you feel this way! Which is completely false!”
“Not only that, the reasoning is false, too.”
Penny and Yang twisted around in their chairs to see Blake approaching with an armful of rucksacks from the opposite end of the aisle, followed by Weiss.
Her eyes never wavered from Penny as she came to a stop and dropped the rucksacks in a heap, her jaw set in determination. “Humans and Faunus can be controlled, too, Penny. It’s not just you.”
“I am aware there are, very rarely, Semblances related to mind control or manipulation.” Technically, Penny had one of those Semblances, even if it wasn’t very good at controlling people. Which currently seemed like a bit of cruel cosmic irony. The girl who could be successfully controlled had a Semblance which let her try and fail to control other people. “But those are specific people, whereas anyone could do such a thing to me.”
“Penny, you’re doing yourself a disservice right now. You fought off a virus which completely bypassed the CCT’s cyberdefenses without raising a single alarm,” Weiss said. “You may know more about computers than me, but I know how high of a threshold that is, and there’s really only a handful of people in the world who can write that kind of code. I’d wager it’s even smaller than the number of mind-manipulation Semblances on Remnant.”
“I…” Penny faltered, and a brief moment of relief hit her, because Weiss was right and she didn’t have to worry anymore about this making her less of a person… But—
“All such Semblances have their limits,” she said, once again thinking of Ghost’s limitations. “Organics cannot be made to do things they would never ever do otherwise, entirely against their will—”
“Yes, they can,” Blake said. “Maybe not with Semblances, but there’s other ways.”
Penny stopped. “What do you mean?”
“The Chill,” Yang said. “Parasite Grimm that can possess anyone that touches them, taking over their body and puppeting it while you die slowly and painfully.”
Penny blinked. She had forgotten about the existence of The Chill. How had that happened?
Her logic core helpfully reminded her that fear made people forget things that they would not normally forget.
But she had databases! Forgetting wasn’t supposed to happen for her!
…And yet, she had. Fear worked in such strange ways.
“Not even that,” Blake said. “There’s ways that are much more rote. Common, even. Familiar.”
Penny stared at Blake, trying to make sense of what she was saying.
“Are you talking about slavery? Servitude?” Weiss said. “People being forced against their will to do labor only for the benefit of someone else?”
Suddenly, Penny’s memory pinged again, a sensation that was becoming familiar, and once again she was plunged into another memory of her past.
This one was the most disjointed yet. Her field of vision was vastly reduced, so much so that she could only see what her eyes were focused on at close range: a strange necklace clasped tightly around someone’s neck—no, that wasn’t a necklace, that was a shock collar, she recognized the technology, and anger filled Penny at the thought of someone trying to conceal it, and then her hands were reaching out and grasping the necklace, and then she was crushing it and an agonized scream came from somewhere which was not Penny’s own; it had to be the wearer of the collar even if she could only see their neck and not their face, and then electricity was arcing everywhere up and down Penny’s hands and then—
Nothing.
…
…
Penny jolted back to the conversation at hand, and found that barely a second had passed for the others.
“Like a shock collar?” she said, not sure if that question should be directed at Weiss or Blake or herself.
Her teammates stared at her with expressions of one hundred percent concern. One hundred percent anything facial expressions were a rarity, but to see three of them at once, with the same emotion, made for a truly unique sight.
“…Is that why you’re afraid of electricity?” Yang said.
“No!” Penny shook her head violently. “I’m sorry, I did not mean to imply such a thing! I only brought them up as an example.”
“…Well, it is another example,” Blake said. “But I’m actually not even talking about forced labor.” She paused, and then drew in on herself a little bit, the way Penny did sometimes when she thought about things she really didn’t like. “I’m talking about emotional control.” One of her hands clenched into a fist at her side.
Wordlessly, Yang stood up and offered her chair to Blake. She accepted.
“Emotional control. Where someone makes someone else feel like they have absolutely no choice, makes them think that there’s only one thing they can do. It steals away autonomy.” She closed her eyes, falling silent for a moment. Penny laid a hand on her shoulder which she hoped was comforting.
“And yes, it can and will make someone do things they never thought they’d do. And it might look to anyone on the outside like it should be easy to stop, easy to stop being controlled, but—that’s not how it feels, to the person being controlled. It makes the brain think there’s no other options. It is like a virus hacking someone’s brain and making them think in a way that’s completely irrational.” Her gaze, which had drifted off to one side, suddenly came back to rest fully on Penny, her amber eyes glittering with tears. “I know all this because it happened to me. And it took years for me to break free.”
“I’m sorry,” Penny said softly.
“No need to be. I escaped.”
“May I give you a hug?”
“Only if I can give you one, too.”
Penny stared at Blake as her processors tried to parse that. “…Is it not implied? Is there a way to be hugged without giving a hug back?”
“Like this,” Yang said, before turning and hugging Weiss, who let out a surprised squawk.
Ah. Penny understood now. “Of course!” she said to Blake, and hugged her.
She knew why she hadn’t thought of such a scenario before—she had never received a hug she didn’t want!
“How are you feeling?” Blake said. “Do you think the things we’re talking about are helping?”
Penny tilted her head, thinking. Her internal metrics did seem to be showing a decrease in some of the heaviest processing loads. And her radar wasn’t in a constant state of alertness now. “I think so? But…”
But there was something still bothering her. It wasn’t something that made her want to stop existing, but… it felt like it was piercing her on the deepest level of her consciousness, and it was so disconcerting that she wondered if an emotion could make her body corrode from the inside out.
“Am… am I supposed to be a human?”
She felt Blake tense violently against her, which almost made Penny apologize for even bringing it up in the first place, but she somehow found the will to go on.
“I know I have a soul and a Semblance and an Aura just like everyone else, I know I’m just like you on the metaphorical inside, where it counts, but… the rest of me is not like everyone else. My outside is different. Maybe in a way that is… wrong?”
“Penny…” Blake leaned forward, her face full of gentle concern. “You aren’t supposed to be anything. Would you tell a Faunus they were supposed to be human?”
“Of course not!” Penny said immediately, horrified by the thought. “But there are many Faunus. However, I am the only one of my kind. If it can even be called a kind.”
“There are Faunus with extremely rare traits. I knew someone in the Fang who was an okapi Faunus, and they were pretty sure they were the only okapi Faunus in the world. Do you think that person is supposed to have a more common trait, like cat ears?”
Penny shook her head again. “Of course not!”
“Then how would that be any different for you?”
“I…” Penny’s logic core completely failed to turn up an answer. So she turned to an emotion-based answer, even though she had no evidence for it. “It is different. I know it is.”
Hopefully, Blake would not call her bluff.
“What’s different about it?”
Drat. Bluff called.
Ignoring the copious evidence to the contrary her logic core presented, which had to be wrong somehow, Penny said, “There is nobody even remotely similar to me—”
“Hi.” Yang detached her prosthetic arm and waved it at Penny as if she was trying to send a semaphore signal. “Girl partly made of metal here, who has also felt insecure about it many times.”
“There is no one closely similar to me—”
“Ruby?” Weiss said. “Isn’t she an entirely laboratory-grown being? Haven’t you literally described her as another kind of synthetic person?”
“No, no, no!” Penny heard a seam rip somewhere in the sleeping bag she was squeezing. “There is no one else who is metal from head to toe! There is no one else who has an Aura which runs off an electrically-powered synthetic generation device! There is no one else who is dangerously vulnerable to computer viruses! And there will most likely never be another person like me! Your okapi Faunus friend can hope for another okapi Faunus to be born, but I cannot even hope for random chance! Who would make another me?! I take too much time and effort and I have too many problems! I don’t even know who built me! Maybe my father is dead! I am the first of my kind, and I know I will be the last of my kind!”
As soon as she’d run out of words to say, she hurled the sleeping bag as far down the aisle as she could, choosing not to care about the tremendous clatter that resulted. “I want there to be people like me! And so if becoming a human is the only way I can find other people like me, then maybe I am supposed to take that opportunity! Maybe science will advance enough to create a lab-grown human body, one that is ready for a soul to be put into it! And then maybe it will be possible to transfer my consciousness to the organic chassis! And maybe that computer virus was the universe’s way of informing me that I will always be incomplete in this body, and the only way to become a full person, inside and outside, is by taking that human body when it becomes available!”
Even if she didn’t have her sensors, she would’ve known her teammates were staring in shock. She strongly disliked feeling this way. It just—the upset of it all was… awful, and rare, and she wanted this feeling to leave her at once. She was even thinking about turning off her emotions again, but no, she couldn’t do that and make her teammates think she was less of a person—
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t want to argue with you—I just—I—”
Suddenly, her audio picked up footsteps from the neighboring aisle, and she froze. She’d forgotten a very important detail—there could be other students in the warehouse at any time—they’d been alone when she entered, but now? Someone was here, and someone was walking to the end of their aisle, and someone was rounding the corner and coming into view—
“Hey, Penny,” Nora said.
Oh, thank goodness.
All of Nora’s usual bubbliness was gone, replaced by utter seriousness as she came to a stop some distance away, a box under her arm and a hand on her hip. “I didn’t mean to eavesdrop, but it was pretty hard for my team not to hear you—don’t worry, it’s just us in the warehouse, you’re safe—soooo, can we have a girl talk? Me to you?”
Penny nodded.
“Alright, Blake, it’s my turn in the therapy chair. This ain’t my first rodeo as a trans girl.” Nora dropped down into the newly vacated chair and fixed a suddenly intense look on Penny. “So, hi. It is an incredibly common trans girl problem to feel like you’re not as real on the outside as you are on the inside.” The box she was holding was apparently filled with collapsible metal camping sporks, because she proceeded to take one out and fiddle absently with it. “I used to feel it a lot. Not so much anymore, but it still happens from time to time. There’s, y’know, surgery and things that you can get, but I’ve never had time or money for it. So, yeah, guilty as charged, I’ve fantasized a few times—what if I could just wave a magic wand and give myself a cis girl’s body without a second thought? Which, uh, sounds pretty familiar to what you just said, would you agree?”
“I agree, yes,” Penny said slowly, still trying to figure out where this was leading.
“You know what I ended up deciding, every single time I dreamed about that?” Nora leaned forward and dropped her voice to a near-whisper. “I wouldn’t do it.”
Penny stared. “…Really?”
“No hard feelings for trans people who would want to wave a magic wand and give themselves a cis person’s body, of course, they’re so valid for wanting that and I get it! Being cis doesn’t make you any less of a person than any other person! I mean, take Jaune, I’ve had this kind of conversation with him, and he absolutely does wish he could just snap his fingers and have a cis guy’s body, and he’s gonna do his absolute best to get as close to that as he can with whatever means he has. And I totally, totally respect that for him. I’m not gonna tell him he can’t want what he believes would be a better body for himself. That would make me an incredible jerk! So I’m not gonna tell him what he should think about my body, just like how he wouldn’t tell me what I should think about mine! And I’m not gonna tell you what you should think about your body, Penny!”
Penny nodded. Nora was saying a lot of words which she was still not entirely sure how she felt about, but regardless, she was already feeling emotionally buoyed just a little by Nora’s effusive mood.
“But I think, right now, you don’t know what to think about your body, Penny. So I’m going to try and help you figure out what you want to do, by telling you about what I think about myself! And maybe that can help you figure out what you want to think about yourself! In case it’s never occurred to you that you can think the way I do!”
“So.” Nora stopped to take a breath, shot Penny a grin, and then gestured at her own lap. “I like being a girl in my own way, in a way that’s different. I like having different business down there. I think it’s cool! I wouldn’t change it. Because, Penny, the people in charge won’t tell you this, but…”
She leaned even closer, until her mouth was just inches from Penny’s ear. “Being different can be good. And cool. And it’s okay to want to be different instead of wanting to be normal. A lot of people do that! Like me! And Neon! And this really cool girl from Vacuo named Reese who’s also trans! And—yeah, I could keep going, but you get the idea! So, Penny, I get what you’re feeling. I get why you think you need to be normal on the outside. And it really can be okay to want that… if it’s really what you want, and not just what other people have made you think you want. So I think you’ll save a lot of frustration and grief and anger if you ask yourself. One. Simple. Question.” She stared right into Penny, like she was trying to see inside her head. “What do you want?”
To Penny, the question seemed so incredibly simple a solution for such an enormous problem. Too simple, even. There had to be more to that, didn’t there? She thought about it. And devoted more processing resources to it. And then devoted some more processing. And then some more. And… oh dear, this question was not simple at all.
“…Should I want to be human?” she said finally.
“Nope! Back up! I’m not asking shoulds or supposeds or have tos. I’m asking. Do. You. Want. Do you want to be a human? Do you want to be a synthetic person? It’s entirely your decision, no outside influence allowed!” Nora paused, looked at Blake, and then added. “Or, do you want to be a Faunus? There’s no rule that says you have to be a human if you’re going to be organic! Maybe you want your wings to be made of stretchy sinews and big fluffy feathers instead of shiny metal and glowing rockets! That’s so valid, too! So, I mean it, really ask yourself… what do you want, Penny?”
“And don’t let the existence of computer viruses influence that question, either,” Blake said before Penny could even begin to think about it. “I’m not letting you forget that humans and Faunus can be controlled, too.”
“But I can be controlled in a higher number of ways than organics—”
“Are you sure about that?” Blake said.
Huh?
“You’ve told us how your consciousness has a logic core built into it, haven’t you? And you can make your consciousness run entirely through that logic core, unless I’m misunderstanding what happened earlier?”
Penny nodded to indicate Blake’s understanding was accurate.
“We organics can’t turn off our emotions,” Blake continued. “We can fool ourselves into thinking we’ve turned them off, but then the emotions are just influencing us without us realizing. But you, Penny—your memory of the virus was exerting emotional control on you, making you think you shouldn’t exist, and then you shut off your emotions to help yourself, and it worked. It allowed you to stop that train of thought. It allowed you to realize what you were thinking was wrong, and resist it when you turned your emotions back on. Humans can’t do that. Faunus can’t do that. You can see through emotional control in a way that no one else on Remnant can, Penny.”
“Oh.” Penny said. She could not argue with that logic, ironically. Which meant… “So… it is more like a tradeoff?”
“Yeah!” Nora said, pumping her fist. “And that’s not getting into all the cool things being a synthetic girl gets you! Like gaydar! And built-in wings! And never getting lost! And adorable buzzing noises! And body parts you can stick magnets to! And never getting sick like a human does! And being a space heater! And did I mention gaydar?”
Penny smiled, and Nora let out a little cheer.
“There’s the Penny we know and love! Anyways, I need to get back to my team—we’re brainstorming ideas for helping Jaune find his Semblance, and I had three more ideas while I was talking to you, only one of which involves significant risk of injury! Which he’ll be happy about! But yeah, be who you want to be, Penny, not who you think you should be. No matter what you are, you’ll be our friend. And good news, you don’t have to figure yourself out right now! You can take the rest of your life! Okay, bye!”
And with that, Nora jumped up from the seat and jogged away, leaving Penny with her teammates and a processing bank full of thoughts.
“Nora’s right,” Blake said slowly. “You can want to be a Faunus. You can want to be a synthetic person. You can want to be a human. Whatever you want to be, it’s okay. The most important thing is that this is your choice, Penny.”
Your choice. The words resonated through Penny’s mind like an audioreceptor with too much reverb.
“I want to be recognized as real,” she said, voicing thoughts aloud more than talking directly to anyone. “I want people to not be afraid of me.” She looked down at her hands, and then ran her fingers over her knees, feeling the places in the joints where her metal came the closest to the surface, the solidness of it faintly discernible underneath her synthetic skin. “But… if I have to become something else to convince people that I am real, that would feel as if they were only seeing a certain version of me as real,” she said, her words picking up speed as the realization dawned on her. “I want other people to recognize that I am real now, in this body, as I already am. I already feel real. I just want people to understand that.”
Penny could find no more words to say on this subject, and so she looked up at Blake. “...Is that okay?”
“Oh, Penny, that might be one of the most okay things ever.” A strange sort of smile crept across Blake’s face, one that didn’t really look happy, just… tired. “People will tell Faunus that they’re real on the inside. And they’ll mean it as a good thing. But sometimes, that hurts just as much as outright being called an animal. Because when I hear someone say we’re all the same on the inside , all I can hear is someone saying that I’m actually human on the inside—because it’s almost always humans saying it. They make it sound like the Faunus body is just a prison holding me back from being the real me, whatever that is. But maybe I want the things about my body to be important to me.” She gestured emphatically to her ears. “I’m learning to take pride in the things that are unique about my body, make it part of being me, instead of trying to hide and ignore them. So when people say these things about my body actually don’t matter at all and are just tragic impediments to the One True Body And Identity? I don’t like that.”
“Hey, same,” Yang said, waving her arm, which she had still not reattached. “Remember that time I mentioned how jerks were rude to me about my arm?”
“Yes…?” How could Penny ever forget Yang sharing that? It had happened in the aftermath of a fraught battle with someone from Blake’s past, while Penny’s face was still damaged.
“Well, there was another thing those kinds of people loved to tell me: that I shouldn’t be sad about losing my arm, because my body didn’t matter and wasn’t really who I was, and the only thing that really mattered about me was my soul and my Aura. And when they told me that, I would tell them, ‘Hey, actually, it kind of matters a lot to me that I’ve got a metal arm now, can you please not pretend this part of me doesn’t exist?’ I didn’t want people to ignore the ugly or tragic or different or whatever part of me… I wanted the whole me to be seen…”
Yang shook her head “Fucking Patch weirdos, girl. But anyways! My arm isn’t holding me back from being me. It’s—oh my gods, it’s like Ruby says, I’m not Yang despite my arm, I’m Yang because of my arm!” She punctuated her words by reattaching her arm with a sharp click.
“So, Penny, if being a synthetic girl is what you want, then it’s not holding you back from being you or being a person!” Yang said. “And also, you know what, even if being a Faunus or a human is what you want, I think your robot body still isn’t holding you back! It’s not a bad thing, it’s just… there! Trying its best!”
“Agreed. And I’m Blake because of being a Faunus,” Blake said.
Penny nodded, and then jumped to her feet, real excitement burbling inside her. “And I am Penny because of being synthetic!”
The three of them turned to look at Weiss, who was standing there with her arms crossed, and an unreadable expression.
“…Okay, I guess there’s plenty of exceptions,” Yang said.
Weiss sighed. “It is complicated. I cannot deny that the Schnee name has played an integral role in shaping my life and my personality, but…” She grimaced. “Sometimes I wish it hadn’t.”
“Hey, that’s just how it is for some people!” Yang said. “Sometimes we’re the sum of our experiences, and sometimes we’re the… uh… the division of them? The subtraction of them? Okay, I should’ve thought that metaphor through before I said it out loud.”
Penny looked down at her hands, metal under synthetic skin, and then closed them into joyful fists and jumped up, punching the air with a burst of excitement that felt like the sun chasing away the clouds of despair surrounding her. “I like being me!”
She did. She she liked being able to fly, and she liked having wings (she loved having wings), and she liked having so many sensors that let her experience the world in so many different ways, and she liked having a body that could always tell her exactly what was wrong if something malfunctioned, and she liked being able to plug herself into things, and she liked having the processing capacity to calculate the exact types of hugs that each of her friends liked along with the solid-state memory to remember those settings for each individual friend! Furthermore, there were four thousand, four hundred and eighty-one other things about herself she could name that she liked, and that list kept growing the more she thought about it! One of them being that she liked how she had the processing ability to enumerate and index such things about herself which she liked!
“I’m glad,” Blake said, and then she was hugging Penny again, joined moments later by Yang and Weiss.
Penny’s insides felt as if they were fluttering and mechashifting as she hugged her team. Perhaps she was the only one of herself in the world, but there were also her teammates, and the queer club, and Team JNPR, and Ruby, and just… so many people who were doing their best to understand her and give her a place to belong, and maybe her place in the world wasn’t easy to make, but she was making it and people were helping her. And maybe that would be enough.
She would try her best to remember all these things the next time she was scared of herself.
Blake pulled back from the hug and nodded. “Don’t ever forget how many ways organic people can be controlled. You are not inferior in this form, Penny, and you never will be.”
“Oh hey, I thought I heard your voices!”
At the sound of Ruby’s voice, Team BSYP looked up, and saw her perched above on the tallest shelf, grinning down at them from between two stacks of ponchos and waving.
Blake coughed unsubtly.
Notes:
This chapter was really, really important to me, because it holds a lot of my personal beliefs which are immensely important to me. I really do believe that the body matters a whole lot. Especially since we live in a world where we can’t separate body and soul. And a lot of times when people in this world try to act like body and soul are separate things, it’s because they want to ignore bodies which deviate from the socially accepted norm (disabled, trans, etc). And I really don’t like having the things about my body being erased by others.
However! At the same time, I really, really do not want to demean or disdain anyone who does want a ‘better’ body for themselves! Because that’s just as valid a viewpoint to have, even if it’s not at all what I believe for myself! It’s a case where both sides of an argument are equally valid. And both sides of that argument tend to have equally strong feelings about their belief, so… it’s really easy to get into bad blood without intending to. The conversations in this chapter come from my own personal belief, but like Nora says in the chapter… I don’t want to tell other people what they should think about their body. This is just… the story I’m choosing to tell here in War Machines, because this is my story that I’m writing for myself, if that makes sense.
And for that matter, I should acknowledge that ‘the body matters’ has its own risks as a viewpoint! Because it can be twisted and warped at its most extreme into bioessentialism and eugenics where the body is the only thing that matters! And I want to be clear in saying that’s not what I believe at all, either. I try my best to occupy the middle ground, where sometimes the body does matter a lot, and sometimes it doesn’t matter at all. And for me, my body does matter a whole lot to who I am as a person. I’m me because of the way my body is, not despite it, and I’m happy for that. I wouldn’t choose for it to be any other way. But I also try to understand the viewpoint that some people really do feel that they are themselves in spite of their body. I personally find it far more enriching to take pride and joy in what I have right now than to wish for a ‘better’ form. However, I understand that’s not how it might work at all for others, and I respect that.
So, as you might’ve been able to tell from the length of this author’s note, this chapter was INCREDIBLY difficult for me to write. Penny’s story and character being an allegory for the ways in which bodies can be different is immensely important to me on a personal level, so it was already a fraught emotional ground for me to navigate. And then on top of that, I had to carefully consider how readers might interact with this chapter, especially readers who feel differently about this subject than me. As a result, this chapter required an incredibly delicate equilibrium to be maintained. My writing needed to communicate my own strong personal feelings without speaking ill of those who hold the opposing viewpoint to me, and in addition to that balance, I still had to make sure what I wrote felt fitting and true for the characters and situations involved. And even with all that attention to detail which was needed, I never even considered skipping over this conversation, because it feels incredibly essential to Penny’s character in War Machines. And it was also quite cathartic for me to write.
I genuinely think this chapter is the one that’s been edited and re-edited the most out of all the chapters in the story that I’ve written so far, and this author’s note itself has also been written and rewritten about ten different times. I hope I’ve hit a good balance where I’m putting my thoughts out there (because I want to), but in a way that’s still enjoyable to read and feels fitting for the greater story.
Chapter 37: The Illusion Of No Choice
Notes:
By the way, if you want to reblog the Tumblr posting of the Penny/Ruby dance art commission done by one-crusty-batch-of-nature back in Chapter 33, here's a link to it!
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
“What are you all talking about?” Ruby jumped down, doing two flips, and landed next to Penny. “Hi, Penny! What’s with the chairs?”
“Impromptu team therapy session,” Blake said.
“What’s therapy?”
“Y—” Blake said, before stopping herself from speaking so forcefully that her entire body twitched, as if she’d had to physically pull back the words. “I’ll explain some other time.”
“Oh. Okay. Anyways, are you excited for your mission?! I’m so jealous, I wish I could come with you, but I’ve gotta stick with my team, can’t have a mission without a leader, right? We’re getting supplies now and leaving tomorrow afternoon to hunt down some Nevermore nests. Which will be cool, I guess. Even though I can already take out Nevermore nests solo.”
“Shouldn’t you be, uh, getting the supplies with them?” Yang said.
“Nope, I’d rather be here.” Ruby paused, and then said the words again, as if she was trying out how they sounded. “I’d… rather be… here…” Her eyes widened a little bit. “Oh no. I think I don’t want to be on my team anymore.”
Penny exchanged a concerned look with the rest of her team. Was today the day when she’d find out if Ozpin would let them officially add a fifth member?
Ruby dropped down into the chair next to Penny and propped her chin up on a fist, her eyes flicking from side to side. “I don’t know, um… maybe I could convince the General to deploy me to Mountain Glenn? Probably shouldn’t ask today, he’s real busy arranging for all our machines to be sent back to Atlas, and I have no idea why we’re doing that. It’s not like they were infected! It’s going to be real hard fitting all the machines on just one ship, but they can manage it with a skeleton crew. The General’s not happy about sending the Pandora back home—she’s the best ship in the fleet—but she’s also the biggest ship in Atlas, so he doesn’t have a choice.”
Weiss’s scroll vibrated for the fourth time since they’d entered the warehouse. Her eye twitched almost imperceptibly, but she showed no other reaction.
Blake looked askance at her. “Weiss, I think you should answer that? Because your father really isn’t taking your voicemail for an answer. And even for him, this seems weirdly persistent.”
“Maybe it is an actual emergency for once?” Penny offered.
Weiss huffed. “As if.” However, she did reach into her pocket and dial her scroll. The call picked up before she’d even raised the scroll all the way to her ear.
“Hello, Father?” she said, her tone suddenly injected with a strange airy cheerness that Penny had never heard before. Then again, she’d never listened in on Weiss’s calls with her father before. “I noticed you’ve been calling me more than usual; is everything alright?”
More than usual? That seemed like a drastic understatement. Penny decided not to voice it, though, and noticed her teammates’ expressions reflecting likely similar thoughts.
“What?” Weiss said. “The Atlas Daily Post? The tabloid? What are you talking about? Of course I don’t read that pointless, trashy vitriol! Why—” She stopped short, what little color she had in her face rapidly draining away as her eyes widened.
“What?” she said a moment later, her voice small and quiet like her vocal cords were about to snap. “They—what? The front page? What?”
The reply from Weiss’s father was a very long one, and loud enough that Penny actually had to turn down her audioreceptors to avoid hearing what was being said.
Meanwhile, Blake had pulled out her scroll, and was searching for something. Which she found a few moments later, her eyes going wide and her ears flattening against her head. She tilted the scroll towards Penny and Yang, gesturing frantically for them to look.
Penny was greeted with the front page of the tabloid Weiss had just mentioned. And plastered across Blake’s screen was a headline which screamed in giant letters:
SCHNEE HEIRESS CANOODLES IN SECRECY WITH INVINCIBLE GIRL!
And below it was an array of pictures, all of them taken from some distance and slightly blurry, yet unmistakably showing Weiss and Pyrrha together on one of the ballroom’s outdoor terraces. And in the largest image, placed at the center of the page, Weiss was in Pyrrha’s arms, staring up at her, their faces just inches apart.
Weiss’s voice became shriller and shriller with every second, her breath quickening and her heart rate skyrocketing. “Father, I—I promise that I was not engaging in coquetry with her! I would never do such a thing! I—I don’t know what the Post says, but it’s wrong! I would never engage in—in such a—disgraceful dalliance!”
“Weiss?” Yang said. “Weiss, Weiss, you should lower your voice, Team JNPR might still be in here—”
But Weiss appeared completely insensate to the outside world as she sank into the empty chair beside Penny, clutching at her scroll with both hands. “Nikos sprung romantic feelings on me! And I was so shocked that I was briefly overcome, and she caught me to prevent me from falling to the floor! I fled her—her—her advances immediately after! I—I promise there was nothing untoward or improper in my own behavior!”
Penny made a decision, and turned her audioreceptors back up. The rudeness of eavesdropping was outweighed by the need to know what awful things Weiss’s father was telling her. At the same time, her radar pinged, alerting her that four people were approaching.
A nasty voice, full of obvious meanness even through the poor quality of the speaker, assaulted her sensors.
“Why are you doing this to your family, Weiss? To the Schnee name?”
“I—” A tear escaped the corner of Weiss’s eye and started a long, slow roll down her cheek, as her mouth moved but no words came out. Penny went to lay a comforting hand on her shoulder, just like with Blake, but Weiss flinched violently away and actually raised her arm as if meaning to defend herself. Weiss’s father was speaking again.
“This is exactly the sort of deviant behavior which makes me doubt whether or not you are worthy to inherit the company. Perhaps Whitley could be better trusted to avoid such… unfortunate incidents.”
“No!” Weiss shrieked, before rapidly marshaling her voice into something disquietingly controlled. “What must I do to prove to you that I am not—not that kind of thing, Father? That I am as qualified to lead the company as I have ever been? That I don’t want anything to do with that girl?”
Weiss’s father didn’t reply immediately, and as Penny searched for something to say, her radar pinged again—
“Weiss?”
Penny recognized it as Pyrrha’s voice.
Team BSYP turned as one to see the other half of the tabloid headline standing at the end of the aisle, a stack of empty Dust canisters in her arms and her expression… Ah. For the first time in her life, Penny understood the visual hallmarks of the word ‘heartbreak.’
Weiss froze, her eyes locked on Pyrrha. She took in a sharp breath, but before she could attempt any manner of speaking, her father’s voice returned.
“I will arrange a press conference for you during the Vytal Festival. You will take the stand and vehemently disavow both Nikos and her… lifestyle. And then you will cut off all contact with her, public and private.”
Weiss gasped again, and then her face went distant and hard and unreadable and she turned away from Pyrrha.
“It will be done,” she said. “It will be as if I never even knew her in the first place.”
Pyrrha dropped the canisters, an enormous clatter resonating through the warehouse, and her hands flew to cover her mouth as tears sprang up in her eyes.
And then she ran, her receding footsteps echoing through the warehouse until somewhere, a door slammed, and she was gone from Penny’s sensors.
“And when you come home, we’re going to seriously consider that being a Huntress is incompatible with what is expected of you as heiress. Even if I could somehow ignore the problems you’ve caused in Vale, your absence alone has caused major headaches for me and the company. And the mere fact that you consider this folly more important than being in Atlas calls your entire ability to govern into question.”
Before Weiss could reply, the line went dead.
“Weiss?” Penny said immediately, unable to believe that Weiss would ever bend to such horrid demands. “Is this what you want to do?”
“No.” Weiss’s scroll slipped out of her hands, falling to the floor with a sharp clack, and then slowly Weiss herself slipped out of the chair, lowering herself to the ground in a motion that was more of a collapse than anything controlled.
“I don’t have a choice,” she said, her voice shaky and warbling with fear. “I don’t have a choice. I don’t have a choice. I have to fix the company. I have to be the perfect heiress. I have to be perfect, I have to, I have to!”
Her voice dissolved into sobs, and she began to shake wildly on the ground, like she was receiving a continuous electric shock. Penny felt thoroughly powerless as she watched Weiss curling into a tight ball. How could she help someone who thought she had no choice? Even though Weiss did have a choice, a choice so clear and logical that Penny was astounded she hadn’t taken it.
“I do not understand. Why do you not just give up the company?” she said ignoring the warning from her prediction algorithms that this could be upsetting—Weiss was already extremely upset, so how could anything she said make it worse? “The company is not worth giving up everything else in your life that you care about.”
Unfortunately, it turned out that Weiss was capable of far higher levels of distress. As soon as the last word was out of Penny’s mouth, Weiss let out a ragged scream, and then a glowing, spinning glyph appeared on the ground next to them. Penny had just enough time to note she’d never seen this kind of glyph before, when suddenly it quadrupled in size, and then an enormous white armored knight sprung out of it, twice as tall as Yang and wielding a sword bigger than even Luminous Electra. Before any of Team BSYP could react, the glyph-knight slammed its sword against the ground, sending out a shockwave so powerful it knocked even Penny backwards.
When her sensors recalibrated themselves and she could make sense of the world again, she was lying in a jumbled mountain of camping equipment with Blake and Yang and Ruby, and down the aisle Weiss was in the same spot, on her knees and hunched over and clutching at her head while the knight stood guard above her, its sword lowered protectively before her and shielding her from the world. And all through it, Weiss kept on screaming, seemingly at nothing and everything.
“Penny.”
At Blake’s voice, Penny pulled her gaze away from Weiss and found Blake pushing aside a folded-up tent off her face, her eyes flicking back and forth between Penny and Weiss’s distant form.
“Do you understand what I mean about emotional control now?”
Oh.
In reply, Penny nodded once. She had understood it before, but now, seeing Weiss paralyzed in fear, it clicked into place in her memory like a servo being calibrated.
She wished she could give Weiss the use of a logic core.
Team BSYP finished collecting their supplies in silence. Well, three members of the team did. Weiss had disappeared shortly after her outburst, and no one had any idea where she’d gone. So, without a sense of what to do next, they returned to their room, which did not have Weiss inside.
“I could do an aerial search of the campus,” Penny offered as they set down their equipment.
“I think she may… not be eager to talk to you right now,” Blake said.
Penny thought of how Weiss had screamed wildly at her, and decided that was a good idea. She had never logged a sound like that from Weiss before, and she hoped to never hear it again.
“We’ll look for her,” Yang said, putting a hand on Blake’s shoulder. “She can’t have gone far.”
“You’ll be alright if we leave?” Blake said.
Before Penny could reply, there was a knock at the door.
Penny’s first thought was Weiss, but then she realized she hadn’t registered any footsteps leading up to the knock. Which meant—
“Hi, Ruby!” she said as Blake opened the door.
“Hey!” Ruby waved happily as she entered, and then looked around. “So, uh, no sign of Weiss?”
“None.”
“I just wanted to see if I could help? I bet with my speed I could find her real fast! Plus, I’m good at tracking people!”
Blake thought about it for a moment, and then shook her head. “Sorry, but the less people involved in this search, the better Weiss will handle it, I think.”
“Oh. Okay.”
“Besides.” Blake indicated Penny with a tilt of her head. “Penny could use the company right now.”
Penny blinked at Blake. “I could?”
“Girl,” Yang said. “You’re not even twenty-four hours removed from the most traumatic experience of your life. If Ruby wasn’t here, I’d be asking Team JNPR to stay with you.”
“Ah.” When Yang described it like that, it made a great deal of sense. Had it really been just twenty-four hours? A quick check of her chronometer confirmed that it had, which still did not feel right. It felt so much longer than that—and then she remembered about her processor load. She had been using far more processing capability ever since… then… and more active processing meant she was doing more within any given second. And of course, doing more with each second meant each second would feel longer.
She wondered how much of that was due to emotional load. She wondered if time would feel normal again if she turned off emotion processing again. But she couldn’t keep it turned off forever; she still had to take her battery life into consideration. Especially with a mission coming up. So she would just have to sit here with her emotions, then.
Sometimes she really, really did not like emotions.
Then Penny’s thoughts were interrupted by Ruby hopping onto Penny’s bunk next to her, their knees bumping together. “Of course I’ll stay with you! As long as you want!”
The smile she gave Penny made her Aura generator stutter and then surge dizzily. How could Ruby not make Penny a little happier, even amidst all the strangeness of today?
Sometimes, Penny really, really liked emotions, too.
“Thank you,” she said, giving Ruby a small smile in return.
Blake nodded. “We’ll head out now—I’ll keep you updated. Let us know if she comes back.”
Penny did not see a high probability of Weiss returning before Blake and Yang, but she agreed to it all the same.
Now it was just her and Ruby alone in the room, and suddenly Penny found herself thinking of how Ruby had stayed with her during the night. How comforting it had been to be held by her strong, sinewy arms. The way she had tucked her head against Ruby and counted the beating of her heart until her thoughts finally slowed enough to enter low-power mode. She could almost get lost in her memory of that, if she wanted to.
Ruby settled against her more firmly, and then slowly brought her head to rest on Penny’s shoulder.
She… wanted to be held by Ruby again. Would it be impolite to request that?
“You want a plushie? They’re right next to me.”
Ruby was holding out the frog plushie that she’d won for Penny at the arcade; in her other hand, she held the shark plushie that Penny had won for her at the arcade.
“Thank you.” Penny accepted the frog and pulled it close to her chest. Then she looked back to Ruby and the shark, and a question occurred to her. “Ruby? Why do you keep your shark in my room? Wouldn’t you prefer it in your room? Where you’d have access to it more often?”
“Nah. I like keeping it here so it can be friends with the other plushies. Besides, it’s not like I get much use out of them, can’t really tell the difference between soft and hard.” Ruby spun the shark around, and then stuck her hand in its mouth, making an extremely exaggerated expression of pain.
“Argh, ogh, augh, I’m being bitten to death in a terrible shark attack, save me, Penny!”
Penny giggled as she watched her friend’s theatrics, swinging her arm around madly, the plushie still swallowing up her fist. “I thought you were the one who was supposed to do all the saving?”
“Noooo… betrayed… abandoned… help…” Ruby flailed around, gasping loudly, and then flopped down onto her back, the shark landing across her face.
Penny reached over, plucked the shark off of Ruby’s hand, and then gently poked her in the nose with a fluffy fin. “Is it too late to save you?”
“Ah! I live!” Ruby said, jolting back up. “Back from the brink of death, saved by the valiant efforts of Penny Pallas, my—my—” She broke off, blinking. “Oops, almost called you my partner! Right, saved by the valiant efforts of Penny Pallas, my friend…” She trailed off, squinting. “Hang on, why doesn’t that feel right either…?”
A sudden wave of something blasted through Penny’s processors as Ruby went on in a rush.
“I mean, you’re my friend! No doubt about that! You make me happier than anything else in the world! But, I don’t know, calling you my friend feels like it’s not… not good enough! Yang and Blake and Weiss and Nora and Pyrrha and Jaune and Ren are my friends, and you feel like way, way more than any of them do! I don’t know. Is there… is there a word that’s more than friend?”
Penny suddenly felt like her processors were about to eject themselves from her circuitry. She hadn’t forgotten how close she’d come to telling Ruby about her romantic feelings last night. She’d just had… other things to think about ever since then. But now, with Ruby saying that, it was all her processors wanted to cycle through.
Girlfriend. That was a word which was more than friend. Beloved. That was a word which was more than friend. Sweetheart. That was a word which was more than friend. Was Ruby thinking of those words?
“I know!” Ruby snapped her fingers. “Best friend!”
Oh.
Penny set her facial features to an appropriate level of outward happiness, in complete contrast to what she was feeling internally.
“Can I… call you my best friend?” Ruby said, poking her index fingers together. “I mean, I know I might not be your best friend because you’ve known all your other friends way longer, but you’re… kinda maybe the most important person I know?”
Penny would not let herself feel disappointed. This was Ruby, the girl who sparked the most magical feelings inside Penny, and she could not ever disappoint Penny. Besides, it would be wonderful to be friends with Ruby! That was what they had been doing already, after all.
Besides… now that Penny was giving the topic actual serious thought, it was a good thing that Ruby didn’t have romantic feelings for her. Because Ruby should not have romantic feelings for someone who might put her in danger—someone who might be hacked.
Penny was, on some level, inherently dangerous! As the events of last night had clearly proven! So she could not let herself be a danger to Ruby!
And… What if Ruby made herself vulnerable to Penny because of romantic feelings, and then that resulted in Penny being hacked into hurting her somehow? After all, there were lots of people who would want to hurt Ruby because of how powerful she was, and what if those people decided to use Penny to hurt Ruby? Maybe the people who unleashed that virus on the CCTnet were the same kind of people who would want to hurt Ruby. So maybe they would try to put another virus into Penny, and use Penny to hurt Ruby—
No. She would not let that happen. She would do anything to prevent that from happening. She would take her romantic feelings for Ruby, and she would shred them up like bits of paper until they were just meaningless junk data that could be deleted without any pain. Then there would be no chance of Ruby developing romantic feelings for her, and then Ruby would be safe from Penny.
If only she knew how to actually do that.
But she had to figure out how. Because Penny just having these feelings was dangerous, even without even choosing to express them. What if her having romantic feelings unintentionally manifested themselves in her actions towards Ruby? That could accidentally influence Ruby into returning those feelings! And then she would be in danger because of Penny! In danger of being hurt by Penny!
…And really, that could happen to anyone who developed romantic feelings towards Penny. She could not allow herself to be in love, ever.
She said none of those thoughts to Ruby, of course. Instead, she hugged her like nothing was wrong with herself and said, “Of course you can call me your best friend!” Hugs were still okay. That was a thing friends did, after all. They had to be okay. If Penny couldn’t allow herself to hug Ruby (or anyone) anymore, she might just rust away into nothingness.
“Yeah!” Ruby hugged her right back, squeezing Penny so hard it activated Ruby’s Aura. “Best friend!”
Before Penny could assemble a response, there was a knock on the door.
Immediately, Penny recognized the timbre of Nora’s knock. That wasn’t even something she knew because of her delicate auditory sensing—Nora just had a habit of knocking more loudly than anyone else in the school. Anyone could recognize a Nora knock. Or rather, as Teams BSYP and JNPR called it, a knorck.
The door would have to be opened from the inside, but Penny did not want to extricate herself from this embrace, and she was extremely comfortable at this moment, so… For the first time in her life, she activated her Semblance for a trivial reason.
There were a number of ways she could approach this. Her first thought was to use Ghost on the door’s locking mechanism itself, but almost immediately she realized that route would run into opposition. The lock was programmed to stay locked, and would oppose unlocking itself. While she could definitely overcome a lock’s opposition, she did not think it would be good for her to always brute-force her Semblance through the most obvious method of trying to accomplish something. Even on something as small as a lock, why not practice finding a more efficient route?
Hm. There would be circumstances in which a lock would not be opposed to unlocking, such as the handle being turned from the inside…
Penny focused Ghost— INPUT DETECTED: HANDLE —and ran the command on the inner handle, turn. There was no resistance.
Click.
She semblanced back to her body as the door swung open.
“Hey, can—Wait. Wha? Huh?” Nora stared at Penny, who clearly could not reach the door from where she was sitting. “How?”
“It is a secret,” Penny said. She would be taking Ozpin’s advice to keep her Semblance secret, even with people she trusted as much as Team JNPR.
“Okayyy…” And then, as Jaune and Ren poked their heads around the doorframe, Nora froze. Her eyes flicked from Penny to Ruby, and then back to Penny. And since they were hugging each other, there was not a great deal of distance for Nora’s eyes to travel.
“Uh,” she said. “Are we interrupting something?”
It was at that point that Penny realized it may have looked a little odd from Nora’s perspective to walk in on Penny and Ruby hugging. A hug which still had not stopped. She and Ruby had just sort of… turned themselves towards the door, while still managing to keep the hug going.
“Nope!” Ruby said. “Just two besties hanging out!”
Jaune made a strangely choked noise, which he tried to disguise by turning it into a fake cough, but it was the second-most unconvincing cough Penny had ever heard. (First place was still the noise Ruby had made on top of the airship at the conclusion of Penny’s search for her)
Nora shrugged and glanced around the room. “Soooo… no sign of Weiss?”
“I am afraid not,” Penny said. “Blake and Yang are looking for her.”
“Oh.”
“How is Pyrrha?”
“Not great.”
“That’s why we’re here, we wanted to talk about that,” Jaune said. “But if she’s not here… We’ll come back later?”
“No,” Nora said, half-turning away. “We’re going to Plan B.”
Jaune blinked at her. “There’s a Plan B?”
“Yeah. If Weiss is wandering aimlessly around campus, this is a big enough issue that just a two-team intervention isn’t enough! We need to go deeper. We need the big guns. Penny, Ruby, I’ll see y'all later, stay tuned because we’ll need your help on this too.”
Without waiting for an answer, Nora pulled out her scroll and started dialing. The last thing Penny picked up before Nora closed the door behind her was, “Hey, Coco?”
Then it was just her and Ruby again, and they were still hugging.
…Penny didn’t want this hug to end. But it had to, because it was going to be hard enough to undo her romantic feelings without—
“Hey, Penny?” Ruby said softly.
“Yes?”
“Is it okay if we keep hugging? It’s just, I don’t know, really really nice…”
Task: Penny needed to stop this hug because she would put Ruby in danger if it went on any longer.
Task: Penny wanted to make Ruby happy.
Task: Ruby wanted to keep hugging Penny.
Issue: Penny could not resolve all three of these tasks at the same time.
If she resolved the first task, the second and third would be left unfulfilled. But if she resolved the second and third, the first would be left unfulfilled.
…But also, whoever had installed a virus in the CCTnet was someone in the school. So what if that person had put another virus in Penny sometime today? What if there was another virus inside Penny right now, about to be activated and about to force her to hurt Ruby? Ruby would never see it coming.
Her logic core said that was highly improbable, but Penny knew that anything was possible with the unknown. Until she knew exactly where that first CCTnet virus had come from and what its purpose had been and how it was supposed to be disabled, she would never feel safe, ever, so maybe then she couldn’t ever truly live—
EMOTIONAL PROCESSING DISABLED.
That made things much simpler. She was going to keep hugging Ruby.
“Your noises changed again,” Ruby said. “You okay?”
“I will be.”
“Oh, okay, you’re in logic-only mode again, got it!”
It was nice that Ruby recognized that without Penny having to tell her. Ruby did not think any less of her for being in logic-only mode. And she had a plan.
“Ruby?”
As soon as Penny turned her emotions back on, her emotions would try to reverse course. Logic-only mode was not going to let that happen.
“Yeah?”
“The emotional side of me wants to hug you but is afraid to hug you right now, because of a fear of a virus somehow getting into me and possibly hurting you while you are in such a vulnerable position. I know, logically, that is entirely impossible. So, when I reactivate my emotional processing, as I am about to do, I want you to insist on continuing the hug no matter how scared I am.”
“Oh, o-okay.” Ruby’s grip on Penny tightened once again. “I’ll do that! I’ll do a real good job of that, I promise!”
“Thank you, Ruby Karyatis. You are very important to me, and your hugs bring me immense joy.”
With that, Penny re-enabled emotional processing.
Well, now her logic just wasn’t playing fair! A promise from Ruby was as sure as the blade of Luminous Electra, which meant this hug would not be ending soon.
Penny made a very loud huffing noise. “I did not think it was possible to be outmaneuvered by myself.”
Ruby giggled. “Oh no, you’re stuck in a hug, what a terrible thing for Penny’s logic to do to herself.”
But Penny was finding it extremely difficult to stay annoyed. It was much more fun to ignore her fear (at least temporarily) and concentrate on Ruby’s soft, warm, comforting form, since there was nothing she could do to stop it right now.
“By the way, Ruby,” she said slowly. “My logic-only mode—that is—that is still really me. All me. My soul is still active and running at full power even if I sound different and I am not feeling emotions—”
“Oh, I believe you,” Ruby said easily. She poked Penny in the chest with one arm, still resolutely maintaining the hug with the other arm. “It’s you, I can feel it. Just… a different flavor of you! Not that I’d know what flavors are, but still.”
That made Penny cling to Ruby even more tightly.
This hug wasn’t the kind of hug where they stayed stationary. They shifted a little bit and then a little bit more and then a little bit more and then they were just lying on the bed together with Penny’s head resting against Ruby’s collarbone and Ruby’s braid draped over her shoulders. They were close enough to one another that just the action of Ruby’s breathing would brush her body against Penny’s at any number of points.
At some point, it occurred to Penny that she could probably end the hug now without Ruby objecting, but… something about being nestled in Ruby’s presence just made all her fears smaller and quieter and safer, and now there was no overwhelming terror of hurting Ruby.
She sent her chronometer to a lower processing priority, content to let the passage of time move through an entirely abstract medium. And then, some amount of time later, she lifted her head so she could meet Ruby’s eyes.
Green looked into silver, and silver looked right back into green. If Penny focused her vision just right, she could see the reflection of herself in Ruby’s eyes. And then… if she magnified her vision even more precisely, she could see the reflection of Ruby in the eyes of Penny’s reflection in Ruby’s eyes. That was the extent of her visual magnification capability, but all the same she found herself wondering… with another magnitude of zoom, could she see the reflection of herself in the reflection of Ruby in the reflection of Penny in the reflection of Ruby? And on, and on, and on, into infinity.
In that moment, Penny felt as if there was a wireless connection between her and Ruby, something pinging between them without sound or movement, just a silent signal of some understanding between them that could not be explained to anyone else in the world.
Even if she could somehow undo her feelings for Ruby at this exact moment, how was she supposed to just sit here and not fall in love with her all over again?
Love. It was the first time she’d referred to the feeling that way. It was just a synonym for romantic feelings, wasn’t it? And she’d said romantic feelings plenty of times to herself already. But somehow, love felt like a far weightier word. A word to be said in only the most special of circumstances. What was the extra significance of it?
Love. It didn’t feel wrong to call it that. What else could she call her feelings for the girl who understood her in a way that no one else on Remnant did?
Love. Could she call it that when she could never say a single word about it to Ruby?
Suddenly, Penny’s memory pinged, and a moment from months ago rose back into her consciousness, words that Ozpin had said to her in her workshop the night after initiation.
“The truest sign that you love someone is being able to let go of them.”
Yes! Purpose seized Penny. That was the real answer here. Penny did not have to destroy her feelings for Ruby to protect her. She would let those feelings live inside her, silently, concealed, and take every pain she could to make sure she didn’t influence Ruby into catching those feelings, too. Then Ruby would be safe, and Penny would not be trying to destroy a feeling which would doubtlessly keep coming back. She would not be at war with herself. She would love Ruby by letting her stay a friend, and keeping her safe.
“Hey, Penny?” Ruby said softly.
The sudden activity from Ruby, right as Penny had come to the internal resolution, briefly scared her. Had she somehow communicated any of those thoughts to Ruby without realizing it—
“Yes?” she said tentatively.
“So, in the supply warehouse… I actually, um, heard some of the stuff your teammates were talking about. To you. I wasn’t gonna say anything then because it looked like you were done talking, but… can I say something?”
Oh. Penny relaxed. Ruby hadn’t heard anything; her secret which she would carry for the rest of her life was still safe.
“Of course,” she said. She was genuinely curious.
“I heard some of the stuff about how you were afraid you were supposed to be a human and you’d be incomplete without squishy bits, and I heard your teammates saying it’s about what you want, not what you think you’re supposed to want, and I think that’s all great! I’m really glad you got to hear all that stuff.” Ruby chewed on her lip for a moment before continuing. “So I just wanted to say my own thing about that, not about anything they said, they did a great job! Just… I wanna help you figure out what you want to be! And, I keep thinking, if you ever do go public with being a robot girl, there’s going to be a lot of people who don’t think you’re real because you’re a robot… and they’re probably gonna be talking about how being a human is better than being a robot… I hope you never meet any of those people, but it would be pretty stupid to pretend they aren’t gonna exist, right?”
Penny nodded slowly, unsure where this was headed.
“So I thought about all that, and then I realized, that’s going to be a lot of unnecessary influence on you! With all these people in the world who think humans are better than robots, they might force you into thinking that you want to be a human even though you don’t really want to be one! And then you’d be miserable! With all of these people trying to push you towards one thing, it might be too much, and you might just get pushed that way without even meaning to!”
Penny considered it. She could envision what Ruby was referring to. A populace that rejected her, ostracized her, told her she was inferior… Hopefully her friends and the people she actually cared about would be able to drown out those kinds of people, but there was always the chance that they just wouldn’t be enough.
In the Beacon queer club, she’d learned about the concept of internalized phobias. Where someone who had a difference could become conditioned to hate their difference for no other reason than people around them hating that difference. Perhaps internalized synthetic-phobia was a phenomenon that could happen to Penny. Considering all the things she’d thought today, perhaps it had already happened to her a little bit. But what did Ruby mean by all of that? And how could she stop such a thing?
She nodded. “It certainly seems possible…”
“And then I had an idea,” Ruby said, a grin spreading over her face. “You know what would help drown out those kinds of people and stop them from making you think you need to be something else? The exact opposite view.”
Penny blinked.
“I’m gonna balance out the jerks, Penny,” Ruby said. “If there’s people reminding you about how great it is to be the way you are, then I bet it’ll be a lot easier to ignore the people who don’t like how you are.”
Oh. Penny believed she knew where Ruby was going with this. And it was making her processors spin up rapidly.
Ruby took a deep breath, and then leaned in closer, so close to Penny now that she could feel Ruby’s exhalations fluttering against her face. “I think robots are cooler than humans.”
Penny had predicted with a reasonable degree of accuracy that Ruby was about to say this, but hearing it in her voice still sent a shiver through her entire body. The way that Ruby had just said it so plainly, so honestly, staring right at Penny as she said it like she was telling Penny something else entirely, it made her feel as if her soul was suddenly a thousand times larger than her body.
“And I think being a robot girl is cooler than being a human girl!”
No one had ever said such a thing outright before. Others had alluded to the sentiment—Nora saying she was jealous of Penny’s ability to rebuild herself, various times her friends bemoaned not having features which Penny had—but no one had ever said it directly and vocally. Until now.
“And I’m not just saying that to make you feel better!” Ruby said. “It’s the truth. It’s what I believe! From one synthetic girl to another! And even if I wasn’t born to be a living weapon, I’m one hundred percent sure I’d still think being a robot girl is cooler! It just is!”
Ruby punctuated the words with a little sighing sound before continuing. “But also, if you do want to be a Faunus or a human deep down in your soul with all your heart, that doesn’t mean I think you’d be less cool or worse if you were another way! Robot, human, Faunus, cyborg, genetically-engineered supersoldier, whatever you wanna be, you’re gonna be my best friend regardless!”
Ruby smiled, soft and sweet and leaving an image in Penny’s memory which she wanted to sink into like the world’s best beanbag chair. “But, Penny… the girl in front of me right now, the robot girl with big beautiful wings and bright eyes that see everything and a soul that runs on electricity… She’s the most important girl in my life exactly the way she is, because of the way she is.”
Ruby had a hand on Penny’s side, and at that particular moment, she squeezed her side gently, sending another shiver through Penny. “You being the way you are right now, a beep-boop girl, has made my life all the better for it. Because you’re different. Different like me. That’s why I took a chance and told you everything about myself. And that got me out of the airship, got me into being an ordinary teenage girl with ordinary teenage girl things, and then I found friends, and fun things, and pretty things, and my world just keeps getting bigger and bigger and happier and happier now. Penny, that wouldn’t ever have happened if you were any other way. I’d still just be alone in the airship, thinking I was too dangerous for anyone. I’m learning to live, all because of you, and your wonderful awesome super fantastic beep-boop self. So, thank you, Penny. Thank you for being a synthetic girl. Thank you for being mechanical. Thank you so much.”
Penny’s breathing sped up as every single spare processing cycle was swept up by emotions, her body operating at full capacity. She could not even find the processing to spare for her language processors—all she could do was open and close her mouth rapidly, trying to convey to Ruby how much everything had exploded everywhere inside of her all at once.
Penny wanted to be closer to Ruby. She wanted to be closer than they were right now. But there were very few ways they could physically be any closer than right now, and one of those was—
A visualization of kissing flooded Penny’s processors, and a want crashed down on her like a tidal wave, making something in her processors go bzzt bzzt.
No. No. Impulse bad. Dangerous. Protect Ruby. Protect the girl who cared about her so much. Impulses couldn’t be listened to. Impulses were how Ruby could be made vulnerable to a girl who could be hacked. Protect Ruby.
“Thank you…” Penny managed to say finally. “Ruby, I…”
Her language unit kept trying to push the words I want to kiss you out of her mouth next, but Penny could not, under any circumstances, let those words come out. There were no other words she was currently capable of forming, though.
But Ruby just giggled. “I think this is the loudest I’ve ever heard your nuts and bolts. I think that’s a good thing?”
“Extremely good,” she said, finally finding less dangerous words.
Ruby smiled again. “I love how you make noises when you’re happy. You’re the coolest robot girl in the whole entire world.”
Penny blinked, as all of her feelings were briefly shunted aside by a glaring logical inconsistency in what Ruby had just said. “But Ruby, I am the only robot girl in the world?”
“Well, if there’s ever any more of them, then you’d still be the coolest!” Ruby scrunched up her face, and then added, “Besides, you don’t know that! Maybe there’s other robot girls who are hiding, like you! And you just haven’t met them yet!”
“Oh…” Penny had never considered that before. But while it was not a falsifiable hypothesis, and therefore could not be tested, it was at least in the realms of plausibility! Because Penny was a synthetic girl who was hiding, and if there was one, then it was possible there could be more. It gave her a wild thrill, to think about others truly like her. But with no way to prove it—
“Oh! Penny!” Ruby’s voice pitched up dramatically with excitement. “Even if there aren’t any robot girls, then… I’ll build a robot girl for you! I’ve got the technological know-how, I bet I could do it! And then you wouldn’t be the only one! And you could be friends with her!” Then she frowned slightly. “I’d have to get done with saving the world first, though…” she said, as if that was the largest obstacle to building another synthetic person.
Penny stared at Ruby. The emotion she was feeling was truly unidentifiable, and perhaps entirely new. It wasn’t even a bad kind of emotion, it just… how was she supposed to respond to someone offering to make another person like her so she wouldn’t be the only one of her kind? Maybe her love had just grown several orders of magnitude harder to ignore.
Her logic core noted that Ruby would need assistance in this endeavor, since she did not have the intimate knowledge of seeding artificial intelligence and sentience which Penny had. Making another synthetic person would most definitely have to be a collaboration between the two of them.
Ruby nodded to herself. “Yeah! And! Also, forgot to say, if anyone ever makes you feel bad for being a robot girl, I’ll kill them.”
Suddenly, Penny picked up footsteps in the hall outside. Three sets of footsteps, to be particular.
“I think my team is returning—” Penny started to say, and then the door swung open.
Blake and Yang entered single-file, with Weiss between them. And Weiss’s expression was… Unreadable. One hundred percent unreadable.
Penny and Ruby worked themselves mostly upright as Weiss walked towards them—towards her bunk, actually. But as Weiss put a hand on the ladder leading up to her bunk, Penny realized that her partner was not going to be saying anything.
“Weiss,” she said. “Are you okay?”
Weiss stopped, one hand and one foot on the ladder, and stared at Penny. And then her eyes turned to Ruby. And then, for reasons entirely unknown to Penny, Weiss’s face tightened as she studied them, and the one hand not on the ladder clenched into a fist. But that only lasted the space of a few moments, before her face returned to its unnerving blankness.
“I will not be discussing it,” she said. “We will prepare for our mission, and we will go on our mission.”
“And then what?” Penny said.
“I will not be discussing anything which is irrelevant to our mission.”
Penny opened her mouth, twenty-four different objections springing up within her, but Weiss was climbing up the ladder into her bunk now.
Blake’s scroll let out a ding a moment later. She glanced down at it, and then both of her eyebrows shot up—in a moment, she’d gone from casually holding the scroll to typing with both hands.
“Oh, shit,” she said.
“What’s wrong?” Penny said.
“As much as I want to talk some sense into Weiss… Something more important just happened.” Her scroll dinged again, and she paused to read the message, before continuing with an air of amazement. “Ilia wants to talk to me.”
Ruby lifted her head from Penny’s shoulder. “Who’s Ilia?”
Blake’s fingers froze on the keyboard of her scroll, but then she went back to typing and talking in a surprisingly normal voice.
“She’s an active member of the White Fang who’s wanted in the Kingdom of Atlas for at least thirty-two different crimes, but more importantly she’s my friend, and you’re not allowed to arrest her.”
Ruby blinked. “Oh.”
Notes:
Shoutout to AO3 user Ri2, who left a comment last week saying "So, Ruby and Penny need to make robots together, obviously," which predicted the conversation held between Ruby and Penny in this chapter--I had that conversation entirely written before Ri2's comment was made!
Chapter 38: Two Friends, Alike In Dignity
Notes:
Well, it was only AFTER publishing last week's chapter that I discovered BryonNightshade's War Machines also includes a plot point in which Jacques uses a paparazzi photo of Weiss doing gay shit at the Beacon dance as leverage against her for his demands. And this was the first that Nightshade had heard of this plot point occurring in my story, too! We just somehow accidentally invented a very similar plot point in chapters which released pretty close to one another, which is... what, the fourth or fifth time this has happened in this story? I had Chapter 37 written months in advance of posting it, and I had no idea of the accidental synergy until I was informed of it in the comments on the chapter! Fucking wild.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
This was fine. Ruby was fine. Everything was fine. It was just that everything was very weird right now. Fifteen seconds ago, Blake had admitted to casually fraternizing with the enemy, and now Ruby was going along with it like there was nothing wrong with being in cahoots with Ilia Amitola, a high-ranking member of the White Fang with direct ties to Sienna Khan who was wanted in the Kingdom of Atlas for fifty-three different crimes!
This was all kind of breaking Ruby’s brain a little bit. Especially when Blake’s scroll was vibrating with messages from Ilia Amitola at this exact moment! But, again, nobody else in this room was acting like there was anything wrong or even just weird about this.
Ruby was doing her best to remember what Penny had said to her during their first meeting at the docks, back when Ruby hadn’t been sure if Blake was the enemy or not.
“People change. No one ever stays the same thing forever!”
So… maybe the infamous Ilia Amitola was changing, too. After all, Blake once had a list of crimes she was wanted for by the Kingdom of Atlas (Ruby had actually checked a while back, just because she was curious, and discovered Blake had been quietly pardoned of all charges right after being admitted to Beacon, not that she would’ve tried to arrest Blake even if the charges were still active) even longer than Ilia’s , and now Blake was a Huntress in Beacon Academy right alongside Ruby, and Ruby would never call her an enemy. So…
“Um,” she said. “I trust you with whatever’s going on, but why’s an active member of the White Fang texting you?”
“She’s just as pissed about what happened last night as I am.”
“What happened—” Ruby put two and two together. “So it was the White Fang who got into the CCT…? But then why’s the General positive it wasn’t the White Fang?”
“Oh, it wasn’t the Fang behind that attack. But they’re working with whoever the actual perpetrators are. And Ilia wants to talk to me about it.” She paused, apparently waiting for Ruby to say something, but Ruby had no idea what she was supposed to say, so she just stayed quiet until Blake kept talking.
“And I’m going to talk to her. In person.” Her gaze on Ruby sharpened to a degree Ruby had previously only seen in a military instructor’s expression. “And no one is going to try to arrest her.”
“Oh. So… a flag of truce?”
Blake nodded.
Huh. Atlas military doctrine said the White Fang was an irregular enemy which didn’t deserve the right to a truce, but Ruby didn’t mind breaking the doctrine since Blake seemed to know what she was doing, and this sounded like it could be helpful. Maybe Amitola would spill some secrets! Or maybe she would defect! Or maybe Ruby would learn something! Also, like, if they were friends, friends deserved a flag of truce. That sounded really fair.
“Okay!” she said. “Sounds cool!”
Blake stared at her, and Ruby wondered if she was skeptical, which kind of made her feel sad, even if she couldn’t really say why. Did Blake think Ruby wouldn’t respect a flag of truce?! She understood how important it was! If truces weren’t respected, then war would be awful. Ruby wasn’t gonna fake a truce just to surprise-arrest someone, even an enemy like the White Fang. That… actually, thinking about doing a mean trick like that made her feel even sadder.
She needed to make Blake believe her. But how…?
“I’ll leave my weapon here!” she said. “I’ll go completely unarmed! It’s a truce, so there shouldn’t be any danger, right?”
Blake’s eyebrows shot up, but in a good way, and a thrill shot through Ruby. She’d done it! She’d surprised Blake in a good way! Made her believe her!
“You actually want to come?” Blake said finally. “To a meeting with an active White Fang member where you are explicitly not allowed to fight her?”
Ruby nodded frantically. “It could be kind of cool! I’ve never gotten to see an active one in a peaceful situation, y’know, so I bet I’d learn something new!”
She just hoped the General wouldn’t find out.
Weiss felt as if she was falling.
At the moment she’d picked up her scroll several hours ago, the world that she’d slowly, tenaciously built for herself over the last year had dissolved, leaving behind nothing but an endless, yawning abyss. Into which she would fall for all eternity.
I need to be the perfect heiress.
Since then, events had unfolded in distantly perceived scenes which she shuffled silently through, barely comprehending. Their preparations for their mission were tasks that could be completed without usage of her conscious mind. She didn’t remember consenting to join the excursion into Vale where Blake’s White Fang friend wanted to meet them, but she was sitting on an airship lifting off from campus with her team all the same, watching the towers of the academy shrink away from her.
Why are you doing this to your family, Weiss? To the Schnee name?
The forefront of her consciousness was continuously occupied by an image that’d seared itself into her brain: Pyrrha, frozen in the warehouse, staring at her. Devastated. Betrayed. Heartbroken.
It will be done.
Maybe Weiss really was nothing more than her parents. She was tearing out her soul for the Schnee Dust Company. Once upon a time, she thought there would be no price too great for her to pay, to inherit the company so she could set things right.
Now, though, to keep the SDC, she would have to take the stand in front of the world during the Vytal Festival, and alienate herself from her friends, from her teammates. From the things they believed in with all their heart. And she would have to close off her heart, turn it into a walled garden where the flowers would wither and the vines would crumble, leaving behind nothing but cold, hard stone. She would have to leave Pyrrha behind. Remove her from her life. It was something that sounded so detached and surgical when said like that, as if she was excising a tumor with a scalpel, rather than gouging out her heart with a dull cleaver.
And worse, she would have to end her career as a Huntress. Yes, Father had said that they would be considering such a thing, but Weiss knew that tone, and when Father had to ‘seriously consider’ something, his mind was already made up and there was no choice. She would be leaving her team, her friends, her love—
No. No. She could not think of what she felt for Pyrrha as love. If she did that, she would never gather the strength to do any of this. She had to think of it as something wrong, something which was a weakness to be defeated. What she felt for Pyrrha was… an overattachment. An obsession, even. That was what the people in Atlas would say, and that was the only way she would be able to disentangle herself from it.
But even with that, every time Weiss thought about who else she would be leaving behind, her despair deepened. How could she leave behind Penny, the girl who constantly pushed the boundaries of what Weiss thought was possible and was forever supplying a breathless optimism that was slowly eroding Weiss’s lifelong pessimism? How could she leave behind Yang, the girl with a blazing spirit who would call Weiss family without hesitation and with more care than any blood relative (even Winter) had ever managed? How could she leave behind Blake, the girl who was a wellspring of courage and conviction and had helped Weiss see the world in an entirely different and better way?
How could she leave behind her team?
But the stakes were the Schnee Dust Company. The single most powerful entity on Remnant. Whoever controlled the SDC, controlled the fortunes of the world. And if Weiss could hang onto herself long enough to inherit the company, she could fix the world. All of it. Every problem Blake had opened her eyes to, she could address. Everything which seemed impossible, she could make possible.
Weiss Schnee, owner of the Schnee Dust Company, could save the world. And all she had to do was get there. Maybe her teammates would understand someday, when she took the reins of the company and was able to actually do some good for the first time in her life.
In many ways, Weiss’s lifelong purpose would become paradoxically easier after this. She would be back in Atlas, alone in an island of high society, where she would be expected to be a flawless publicity piece and nothing more. It would be a far simpler task to play the role of the perfect heiress in the kingdom where there were no reminders of all the things she truly wanted, things which were incompatible with being a perfect heiress. She only had to make herself a reflection of everything around her, showing Father what he wanted to see while hiding what was truly within her. And then Weiss would only have to wait. Wait through the galas and concerts and board meetings and tense nights in the manor and stinging smacks on her cheek and never taking her mask off and sanding down every bit of herself that didn’t fit and burning away the frayed edges wherever they might show and if she was careful enough the reward would be just a chance to fix the world—
“Weiss?”
Weiss jolted at the sound of Penny’s voice,
She’d chosen a seat on the airship as far from the rest of her team and any other people as possible, but it seemed Penny had missed the clear message and come to try and help her anyway. Or she had recognized exactly what Weiss meant by isolating herself, and was completely ignoring the message in favor of trying to help her.
Knowing Penny, it was absolutely the second thing.
So, knowing there was no way out of this until the airship landed, Weiss raised her head and asked, with perfect composure, “Yes?”
Penny sat down beside her, and any of Weiss’s hopes that this conversation could be dealt with quickly were kicked aside. “Why are you listening to your father’s demands when he so clearly does not care about your wellbeing?”
Weiss tried not to make her sudden surge of jealousy apparent. But given how Penny could probably detect what she’d had for breakfast, that was probably pointless.
For Penny, whose father was a ghost in her memory, a voice remembered and a promise to protect her made, the idea of anyone’s father being a bad person probably didn’t seem possible. Weiss wished she knew as much about her father as Penny did about hers. Weiss wished she had a father who was willing to let her run away and pursue her own life as Penny’s had. Weiss wished she had a father who loved her the way Penny’s father did. She had never been more jealous of her partner.
“He’s never cared,” Weiss said.
“Then why do you care about him?”
Weiss let out a short, bitter laugh. “I don’t. But I have to pretend like I do, because if I don’t… he can take everything away from me.”
“Oh.” That seemed to leave Penny at a loss for words, and she fell into silence, fiddling with the strings of her hoodie.
“Wait.” Weiss held up a hand, squinting as she recalled several very important details about her partner’s mental state. “Penny! You just—with everything that you just endured, why are you trying to help me?! You need emotional support far more than I do! I should be the one checking in with you right now!”
Endured was still putting it lightly. Penny had survived an unspeakable assault on her bodily autonomy, and Weiss’s own issues felt woefully inadequate in comparison. Which only made her feel even more ashamed of how unstable she was right now. Here was Penny, conducting herself with so much dignity after that, while Weiss was having a meltdown over—
“I want to help you,” Penny said. “Helping people also makes me feel better about everything. It makes me feel like I am not a danger.”
“You have never once been a danger, Penny, and I will not let you pay more attention to me than to yourself just because I can’t stop throwing a tantrum over my… my family problems!”
“Weiss,” Penny said, her tone laced with fierce determination. “You are hurting just as much as I am right now. Would you like me to list all the metrics, sensors, and calculations which I have used to arrive at that conclusion?”
Taken aback, Weiss wanted to call Penny’s bluff, except she couldn’t discount the possibility that Penny was telling the unvarnished truth and would immediately rattle off an encyclopedic barrage of technical terms. Weiss chose a safe path: staying silent.
“Furthermore, you are my partner. It is my duty to help you, just as it was your duty to give me comfort this morning. It is our duty to strengthen each other. It is not our duty to try to hide awful problems out of a belief that we would be inconveniencing our partner. How can you refuse to let me help when you have always cared so strongly about our team living up to the ideal model put forth by our school?”
Weiss stared straight ahead, clutching the rim of her seat with both hands and hoping the airship would crash in the next thirty seconds and kill her (but only her). She hated how well Penny seemed to know her, when so much of Penny still felt like a mystery to her. She had barely known how to help this morning, how to help a partner going through something so different from what she’d ever experienced beyond just offering as much comfort as she could, and now, Penny was jabbing at all the sore spots in her psyche as if she’d trained for this moment.
“I don’t deserve to be your partner. I haven’t done enough to hold up the pact, so how can I ask these things of you?”
Another response drifted through Weiss’s thoughts which she left unsaid for now. I won’t be your partner for much longer, so you shouldn’t bother with me.
Fortunately for everyone involved, Team BSYP’s replacement for Weiss would be a vast improvement. In place of Weiss, they would have Ruby, who Weiss was positive would jump at the chance to fill the imminent vacancy on the team thanks to Blake’s plan. And Penny would not feel the loss of her partner, because she would have Ruby for a partner instead—a girl who Penny was far closer to, and a girl who would be a far better partner to Penny than Weiss could ever hope to be. A girl who related to Penny in ways that Weiss never could.
“You are not asking me for anything. I am choosing to give you help, Weiss. Because I want to.”
Weiss stared at Penny in silence for an embarrassingly long time, and then she did something which benefited absolutely no one, least of all herself: She began to cry.
“Oh, Weiss… May I give you a hug?”
Weiss couldn’t push words through the disgusting noises she was making right now, so she resorted to nodding as she leaned forward into Penny and felt her partner’s strong arms wrap around her. But that only made her think of Pyrrha’s strong arms around her at the dance, which made her sob even harder. Everyone on the airship was staring at her. Maybe this public breakdown would make it into the tabloids, too.
After what felt like an excruciatingly long time, she regained enough control of her diaphragm to speak again.
“D-do you know how rare it is to be just given something in Atlas with no strings attached?! There’s always something hidden, something expected in exchange, and—and—even if it’s somehow charity people are judged for taking it, or they’re expected to pay it all back in some other form even if it’s not actually a requirement spoken or written down anywhere—and, and…” Weiss trailed off into a new round of unheiresslike sounds.
When Whitley was nice to her, it was only because he wanted something, and when Father was nice to her (‘nice’ by his standards being a lavish gift or the simple absence of any clear disapproval) it was because he believed it put her in a debt to him which could only be repaid with proper behavior—or because a camera was rolling. When Mother was nice to her, it was because she wanted to feel less guilty about drinking herself into a stupor. Whenever Winter was nice to her—even though from Winter such affections were actually genuine unlike the rest of her godsforsaken family—it came with the clear expectation that Weiss should not ever rely on such comfort, in case someday Winter could not be there to provide it.
And that was how Weiss understood the world to work for so long. Transactional, cold and simple. Refunds could be made and debts could be demanded at any time.
Her partner’s mind ran partly on computers. Penny was better equipped than anyone else in the world to keep records of social transaction. But despite that, she didn’t even try to think the way most in Atlas did.
Weiss decided Penny had been forced to hug her for long enough now, and pulled back, producing a handkerchief from a pocket and wiping away all evidence of crying as best as she could.
“I don’t understand you, Penny,” she said.
“I am not sure I understand you either,” Penny said, eliciting a disbelieving snort from Weiss. “But I think there is one thing I understand more than you realize.”
“Oh?”
“I know what it is like to leave an entire life behind for something far more uncertain, Weiss. I promise that such a choice is not fatal.”
Weiss froze in the middle of folding her handkerchief back up. For a moment, she had no rebuttal, which frightened her, because it meant the scales of logic could be tipping ever so slightly towards the choice which terrified her. “But you had a home to escape to!” she said, thinking of how proudly Penny called the academy her home, of how she had made a space for herself to live there in one of its towers. “I have nothing!”
“Beacon did not feel like a home when I first came to it,” Penny said quietly. “Far from it, in fact.”
Weiss stiffened.
“I am currently suspecting that I came from Mistral, but there is still a one-in-four chance that it was Atlas which I left behind, and I know I was giving up a life which I had been told was my purpose. I may not know the exact circumstances which led to me fleeing, but I am sure it was a difficult choice. Perhaps at one point in my life, I fully believed in fulfilling the purpose I’d been given. Perhaps I believed in it until the day I left. But I fully believe I am happier and better for what I’ve done. It is possible, Weiss.”
Weiss felt rooted to her seat now, entirely frozen. Penny’s words sounded so painfully familiar, but as long as fear clashed with longing so powerfully inside of her, she was left without a way of responding.
“We should talk about this in much further depth. However, I believe I have put you through enough emotional rigors for now, without even considering what rigors you have exercised upon yourself.” Penny offered her one more sad smile. “I am happy to be your friend and proud to be your partner, Weiss. Please do not think otherwise.”
With that, she fell silent, but she did not depart the seat beside Weiss, simply leaving a companionable silence between them for the remainder of the ride.
Weiss did not move until the airship landed.
There was a noticeable bite of cold in the air this afternoon, a real sign that autumn was here even if the leaves hadn’t begun to change color just yet. A few more days, though, and they would. The park Blake was sitting in would become a blaze of oranges and reds and yellows and every color in between.
This would be Blake’s first autumn without the White Fang. Her first autumn since she’d slashed the coupling on the train and left Adam. Her first fall since she’d left the organization which had, once upon a time, been her entire life.
Sometimes, she wondered about returning. Not to Adam’s branch of the Fang, but to some other branch, where she’d be safe from him, and where there would be leaders not in league with a mysterious enemy that had unknown aims. Where maybe there were still leaders that preferred targeted applications of violence for a definitive cause, not indiscriminate acts.
Sometimes she thought of going home. To her parents. To the island where, as scorched and desolate and relentless and segregated and undesirable and insulting as it was, the Faunus had made a home. A home that no one could take away from them, just because no one wanted it.
But then, inevitably, she would think of her team, of her friends here, and she would remember, there were so many things she couldn’t bear to leave behind. She was caught between two worlds. Two homes.
“Hey.”
Blake looked up. Ilia was standing in front of her, her arms crossed and her weapon absent from her belt like before.
There was also a noticeable lack of Ruby appearing in a cloud of silver dust to accost Ilia, so things were going well so far.
Blake nodded hello and slid over, making room on the park bench she was sitting on, and indicated that Ilia could sit down. She dropped onto the bench without fanfare, jamming her hands into her pockets and letting out a long sigh.
“Those your teammates?” She nodded towards a gazebo farther down the path.
“Yup.” Blake glanced over and flashed a thumbs-up. Ruby was actually hiding behind one of the gazebo’s supports, peering out like she was on an espionage mission. Penny and Yang, making no effort to conceal themselves, waved back. And Weiss waved back, too, but only after being poked harshly by Yang. Honestly, it was a miracle Weiss had even acquiesced to coming along. Probably because it was something which kept her team from questioning her about why she was still bothering to listen to her father. “It’s not because I don’t trust you. It’s because I wanted to show them this side of my life, instead of hiding it.”
Ilia nodded. “Fair enough.”
They were silent for about a minute, and then Blake said, very calmly, “Ilia. What the fuck is going on.”
She didn’t even need to elaborate. They both knew what she was asking about. But Ilia didn’t reply, so Blake kept going.
“The worst part is, I can see how hijacking the CCT would be a good idea. I’d love to send out a worldwide broadcast that exposes the SDC for what it really is and shoots holes in the lies the world tells. But that wasn’t what happened at all, was it? Someone separate from the Fang got in, someone who you have no idea if you can trust, and I’m guessing that means they have the access, not you! And their target was the school! The Fang should’ve never considered the school a worthwhile target! We know that attacking a place that trains highly impulsive and martially skilled teenagers is like poking a hornet’s nest!”
She paused, and then something occurred to her. “You did get one thing you’d like, though. Atlas is sending all their military robots back home with the General’s crown-jewel capital ship to carry them all, so you’ve decreased the military presence in Vale, and all it took was enabling an enemy you’ve never met.” Blake kicked viciously at the ground, sending a clump of grass flying.
Almost drowning in the silence which followed, Blake wondered if Ilia was going to speak at all, or just get up and walk away, or punch her. Or all three.
But finally, Ilia took a deep breath and spoke. “I knew as much as you did. Believe me, I’m not happy about it either. I never considered the CCT a smart target, because if any part of it goes down, Menagerie suffers more than anyone else, since Atlas couldn’t be bothered to give us our own tower.”
Blake nodded emphatically. “Then why—”
“If I’d known about the plan, I would’ve argued against it!”
“...But you didn’t know.”
Ilia shrugged. “Nobody except Adam did.”
“Ilia.” Blake gripped the edge of the bench so hard it sent pain shooting up through her hand. “Do you trust Adam?”
A long, long silence ensued, in which Blake wondered if this was the moment when the fragile balance emerging between her and Ilia broke apart into ash. She stared at the brick pathway in front of her, stared at the spot where a tree root growing underneath had thrust the bricks up, an eruption in slow motion.
“Whatever you’re trying to tell me, just spit it out,” Ilia said.
“Adam can’t be trusted to lead anymore.” The words came out faster than she would’ve liked, more pleading than she intended, and louder than was smart.
Ilia’s face pinched up, but she said nothing.
“I’m not asking you to defect. I’m just asking you to realize that putting the White Fang in bed with a shadowy third party with hidden motives is a bridge too far. How can Adam say he cares about Faunus rights when he’s made this mystery plot the Fang’s biggest priority in Vale? How can Adam say he cares about keeping us safe when he doesn’t care about what kind of retaliations his moves will provoke if they aren’t touching him? What has he actually done in the last six months for the Faunus, Ilia?”
“Glass houses, Blake. What have you done in the last six months?”
“Oh, I know.” Blake let out a bitter laugh. “I feel like anything but a defender of the Faunus right now. My greatest accomplishments of my first year of Huntress training? Fighting the White Fang at the docks. Infiltrating a White Fang rally and defeating a White Fang leader in battle. Discovering the trail of a White Fang plan. And now my first field mission with my team, into Mountain Glenn, will almost certainly bring me into conflict with the Fang again.” No matter what the Fang was actually doing, no matter how good the actual reasons to be fighting them were, her track record was leaving an awful taste in her mouth. “So what does it say about Adam that he’s done as much for the Faunus in that time as I have?”
Ilia snorted. “You’re really not happy where you are, are you?”
Blake thought of her teammates, of the friendship they had. She thought of what she’d learned about herself and the world in the past two semesters. And she thought about Yang. “I am happy being a Huntress. I am happy with where I am.” That was the truth, and so was the next sentence out of her mouth. “But I’m not happy with the results.”
“Well, what do you know, that’s the same problem I’ve got.”
Blake’s heart jumped. “Ilia…?”
Ilia bent down and picked up a pebble lying at her feet. She turned it over in her hands for a few moments, and then flung it at a nearby tree. A sharp crack sounded as a chunk of bark flew off. “Even before the CCT, I was having my issues with Adam. The rally. The mech incident. The plots. The way he talks about you like you’re more wicked than an SDC mine boss—Blake, some of the things he’s called you, it makes my skin crawl… And then there’s just all the secrecy—Do you know he ordered a hit on somebody who left the Fang?”
Blake suddenly couldn’t breathe. She could only think of one ex-Fang member in Vale important enough to order a hit on. “Please don’t tell me it was Tukson—”
“Yeah, that’s the name. Adam said he knew too much, would be a danger if he turned collaborator, but that’s not… We don’t do that to people who leave. No matter how important they are, or how much it hurts to see them go. And you know the worst part? He didn’t even send the Fang to do it, or do it himself. He asked his shady friends to do the dirty work. He—” Ilia finally broke off, having noticed how deathly pale Blake had gone.
“Oh,” she said. “You knew him.”
Blake stared straight down between her feet at the dirt, and wished it would swallow her up and suffocate her. “We were friends. He let me stay at his place after I left the Fang, before I started at Beacon. When I didn’t have anywhere else to sleep.”
Tukson would know a lot about the Fang, having done bookkeeping for the Vale branch for years before leaving. She’d asked him once if he saw the irony in going from being a financial bookkeeper to being a literal book keeper. He’d told her that his entire life was irony.
But Blake wondered if there was another reason for Tukson being dead. She wondered if it was because Adam had somehow found out he’d given Blake a home after escaping. Which meant his death was on her hands—
The last time she’d seen Tukson was the day before she left for Beacon. She’d meant to come back, visit his store during the first semester, but everything as a leader had kept her so busy, and the time just kept slipping away and slipping away…
And now she would never see him again.
“I’m sorry,” Ilia said. “I’m… I’m glad you weren’t alone in the streets. When you left.”
All Blake could do was nod in acknowledgement as she tried to hold back an overwhelming urge to cry. Another Faunus dead because of the choices she’d made.
“Come back to the Fang, Blake.”
Blake’s head shot up. She stared at Ilia with wide eyes, working the words through her mind over and over, trying to make them make sense.
“Not Adam’s branch. Menagerie. The real leadership. Sienna isn’t too sure about Adam’s work, either. If you come back, she’ll listen to you. She can oust Adam, and maybe stop whatever’s happening.”
“You think so?” It was too good to be true. It had to be.
“Sienna contacted me after the incident with the mech. She asked me to keep tabs on Adam for her. So if she heard what we both know…”
Blake traced her hand along a crack in the bench, hardly able to believe what she was hearing. Could she actually allow herself to hope? Could she allow herself to return home? Return to the Fang she knew? See her parents again?
Only if she wasn’t alone.
“I need to think about it,” she said. “But if I did… two conditions.”
Ilia indicated for her to continue with a jerk of her head.
“One, only after the Vytal Festival. Two, my team comes with me.” A team of Huntresses, even junior ones, would be sorely needed in Menagerie. Bringing them there felt like the first actual bit of good Blake would do as a Huntress.
Ilia raised an eyebrow. “A Schnee, in Menagerie? What’s going to kill her first, the heat or the ninety-nine-point-seven percent Faunus population? Or her daddy when he finds out she went there?”
“The heat,” Blake said. “The second thing’s not a problem for her anymore. And the third thing, well…” She sighed, a heaviness falling over her heart. “One way or another, it looks like it’ll sort itself out soon.”
“Oh my goddess, please tell me you’ve figured out a way to kill Jacques Schnee,” Ilia said, leaning forward, wide-eyed.
“I wish.”
That sent both of them into quiet laughter, and it was the most normal moment between Blake and Ilia in over a year.
Ilia shifted on the bench, her gaze landing somewhere distant. “…Blake, what are we now?”
“Pardon?”
“We’re not enemies, because we want the same things and we’re willing to do the same things to get it. But we’re not allies, because we’re on different sides. So what…?” She gestured fruitlessly at nothing.
“Maybe we’re friends,” Blake said. “Friends both trying to do the right thing.”
Ilia was silent for a few seconds, and then she nodded. “I like that.”
That night
Normally, Cinder Fall would feel at home standing in this warehouse amidst the mountains of stolen Dust—the bountiful spoils of her months of work. However, at this moment, all she could focus on was the harsh fluorescent lighting straining her eyes (just like the streetlight which shone through the basement window of the Glass Unicorn) and the musty, damp air (almost as hard to breathe in as the basement after a heavy rain) assaulting her nose, and the emerging failure of a heist which was vastly more important than any petty Dust thefts.
“Our friend from Atlas reports that more and more instances of the virus are being taken offline.” Cinder looked intently at her scroll, tapping through the shrinking list of access points. One of the first points of access to go had been Amity Arena—the center of their plans, and the single most important target of the virus. “Ozpin should not be going to such extreme lengths to eradicate the virus. How did he correctly assess a threat which was designed to mask its true scale?”
“Do you think that’s why my favorite gacha game sucks so much all of a sudden?” Mercury said without looking away from his own scroll, appearing inexplicably comfortable for someone who was lying on his back on a concrete floor. “I haven’t gotten anything good from these digi-packs in hours. The RNG in this game didn’t fucking suck like this yesterday. I’m running out of stolen credit cards to drain and I still haven’t gotten my favorite character.” He mashed the screen and let out a frustrated groan. “I’d be bankrupt if I was an honest person!”
Cinder didn’t dignify that with a reply.
Emerald gave Mercury a disgusted look from the crate she was sitting atop. “Merc, you dense fucking bucket of wet concrete, can you actually take this seriously?” She hopped off the crate, stretching her arms out over her head with a palpably nervous energy. “What do we do now? Has Watts figured out who Ghost is yet?”
Cinder tabbed over to Watts’s data log, checking to see if there had been any more developments in that regard. A few minutes after the virus’s upload to the CCT, a modified instance of the virus had appeared on the Beacon network, calling itself the Ghost Protocol and attempting to transmit a self-deletion signal to every other instance of the virus it could connect to. Watts had been able to disarm that particular instance before anything of apparent significance was lost, but several hours ago, they’d begun steadily losing connections to devices infected by the virus, and it was impossible to ignore the correlation between the two events.
And there was actually a new note from Watts in the datalog. Cinder read it over, and then frowned.
“The good doctor wasn’t able to run a full decompilation of the modified virus, and he couldn’t ascertain who exactly was behind it. But it was so strangely coded that he theorizes it was probably some amateur technician’s souped-up antivirus program running on a customized personal device that was connected to the network. And that was most definitely how the virus was able to be detected in full.”
She lowered her scroll, anger gathering deep inside the pit of her stomach. “The good doctor found it quite humorous that my plan is being foiled by some bumbling tech who lucked their way into creating an antivirus unintentionally tailored to foil our plans.” She’d wanted to run through that smug mustachioed Atlesian with one of her swords from the day she’d met him. Someday, she would.
Emerald nodded slowly, her face smacking of blatant worry. And that angered Cinder. She didn’t need other people to be worried for her. Other people being worried for her implied that she had some sort of weakness, some sort of vulnerability which she could not overcome and tear out. Something which other people could take advantage of.
And even though Cinder knew without a doubt she was a pinnacle of strength and conquest and intimidation, she hated the concept of anyone even thinking for even just a moment that she might have a weakness.
“Have some faith in the soundness of our grand plan, dear Emerald,” she snapped, turning away and closing her scroll. “Beacon is a rotting, stupefied ruin of graft and corruption held up by nothing but sheer inertia. It will fall in the end.”
“My faith in your cause has never wavered.”
Those words came not from Emerald or Mercury, but from the fourth member of this gathering, Adam Taurus, who was leaning against a stack of crates with his arms crossed. “I hope that will be recognized in the times ahead.”
“It most assuredly will,” Cinder said without a trace of irony. “You will receive all that you deserve.”
Taurus nodded curtly.
This was his first appearance at a strategy briefing since being seriously injured in a fight against the irrepressible Team Battleship, and it was only at this meeting that Cinder had learned Taurus lost his sword in that fight. His scabbard still hung at his side, but displaying it with the conspicuous absence of his red-bladed main weapon was practically broadcasting weakness.
She was about to ask him for an update on the preparations in Mountain Glenn when a message popped up on her scroll—from Neo, the fifth member of this meeting, who had been conspicuously absent for several minutes.
There’s a little lost lizard listening in on us, on the catwalk at two o’clock.
Cinder pocketed her scroll without giving any outward sign of something wrong, and ever-so-briefly flicked her eyes over the catwalk in question. She only saw through the camouflage because she knew what she was looking for—a faint outline of someone within the dark shadows of the ceiling.
“Before we go any further…” Without another word, Cinder ignited her Maiden powers, drawing on that exhilaratingly boundless wellspring of energy now contained inside her. Twin flames erupted from her eyes, brilliant orange, and she channeled that infinite power into her hands, one blazing orb of fire appearing in each palm. Before anyone around her could react, she hurled the fireballs at the catwalk, severing the cables holding it up in the blink of an eye.
There was a cacophony of clattering metal and a shocked yell as the catwalk came crashing down, and its occupant was only just able to leap free before the tangled wreckage hit the floor. A ponytailed chameleon Faunus landed in front of Cinder in a crouched stance, her eyes wide with shock and her head whipping around like she expected a fight.
“One of your compatriots, Adam?” Cinder said, readying another fireball and letting it dance lazily in her hand.
“Unfortunately.” Taurus was pointing his scabbard-rifle at the other Faunus, and showed no sign of lowering it even upon recognizing her. “I have no idea what she’s doing here.”
Cinder nodded slowly, and took a step forward, meeting the intruder’s eyes, letting the Maiden flames which ringed her eyes flare even brighter. “Now, care to tell me why you were eavesdropping on something which doesn’t concern you in the slightest? Or should I just skip the questions and take your ears off as penance right now?”
No reply.
Taurus took a step closer, cocking his scabbard-rifle with a click which echoed throughout the warehouse. “Amitola, either open your mouth or I’ll do it for you.”
The chameleon Faunus took one more glance at her surroundings, all potential escape routes blocked by Emerald, a suddenly-attentive Mercury, and a just-reappeared Neo who looked thoroughly pleased with herself. And then the Faunus spoke.
“I want in.”
Cinder raised an eyebrow, ignoring Adam’s disbelieving scoff from behind.
“I’m tired of being in the dark about what the White Fang is getting itself into,” Amitola said. “I want to be a full player in whatever’s going on here, not just someone blindly following orders. I want to know what you’re really planning, and I want to be part of those plans.”
“Amitola, if you know what’s good for you—” Taurus started to snarl, only to be cut off by Cinder raising a warning hand.
“Silence.”
She studied the Faunus. There was a raw hunger in this girl’s eyes. A burning desire for more that felt deliciously familiar. Just from a glance, she could tell it ran far deeper than Taurus’s self-centered, shortsighted mind. This girl was willing to give herself over to a cause far greater than herself. Unlike Taurus, she had potential.
“And why should I grant you a place in my plan?” she said. A very simple test.
“I can get information no one else here has.”
“Such as?”
“Well, let’s see. The Atlesian navy’s about to send all their robots back to Atlas on the fleet’s capital ship with a skeleton crew. Might want to try hijacking it.”
Cinder didn’t miss the bare surprise that flashed across Taurus’s face, nor did she miss the even quicker smirk from Amitola in response. However, most of her attention pounced on what Ilia was telling them. An Atlesian cruiser. A ship which had full access to the private military network which had not yet been penetrated by the virus. And therefore, everyone in the academy believed that network to be safe. If they could get their hands on that connection… Cinder had her new plan.
But she let none of the anticipation show on a stony facade as she asked, “Is that all?”
“Also, you’re going to have company in Mountain Glenn,” Amitola said. “Team Battleship’s being sent on a mission there.”
Now Taurus started forward, the edge of a growl in his words. “How do you know that?”
“Simple. I talked to the girl that you want dead,” Amitola said, staring directly into his eyes.
Taurus’s posture, previously combative, became outright hostile towards Amitola. “You dare fraternize with her—”
“It’s amazing what someone will say to you when you’re not trying to make her life a living nightmare,” Amitola said, before turning back to Cinder, and straightening to her full height. “There can be more where that came from. If you make me an equal in this plan.”
Cinder let those words hang in the air for a moment, her gaze penetrating, and Amitola did not squirm. Good.
“I don’t trust her,” Taurus said, his rifle still drawn. “She’s from Menagerie. She’s from a different branch of the Fang. She has hidden motives. She’s keeping things from my people.”
In one sense, Cinder saw this for the blatant power play that it was. In another sense, she could already tell Amitola was someone who would be far more useful than Taurus. Useful beyond the fall of Beacon. Taurus couldn’t even see how her intelligence was salvaging what had previously been a disastrous turn of events.
“Well, you’ll just have to learn to work together, then,” she said. “We’re changing the plan. We’re hijacking that cruiser. Neo, get on the Pandora ASAP and await further instructions.”
She took a moment to savor the exquisite irony of Atlas’s oh-so-secure private network being the avenue through which the virus would re-infiltrate Beacon Academy, this time for good. The network which the so-called defenders of freedom believed to be entirely secure, turned into a weapon for Cinder to wield. It would be delicious.
But that was for later. For now… Cinder turned to Amitola, and bestowed her reward for this girl’s usefulness. “Ilia. With Neo gone, you’re going to Mountain Glenn as security for Verdant and his crew. I’ll be expecting you to deal with Team Battleship, whenever they show up.”
“What?” Adam snarled, rounding on Cinder. “This has been my operation all along with my people, and now you’re actually bringing in this politicking upstart?! Team Battleship is mine to destroy, not anyone else’s!”
“I trust the upstart in a fight against Team Battleship more than I trust you, Taurus, seeing as how you went up against that same team in a Paladin and lost not just the fight, but also the Paladin, your sword, and usage of your mouth for several weeks.”
Taurus fell silent, grinding his teeth together as he stared down Cinder. Finally, he said, “You’re making a mistake.”
“If only you were capable of presenting a better option to me.” Cinder reached for her Maiden powers once more, the endlessly burning, roaring inferno within her erupting out into the world once again in the form of twin flames around her eyes. She stared Taurus down, inviting him to make a foolish decision that would result in his annihilation. “Be careful with your words, Adam. I might start to think your faith in our cause is wavering.”
With all attention focused on Cinder and Adam, no one noticed Ilia clenching her hands into white-knuckled fists.
Notes:
the next chapter may be posted at an irregular day or time, because I will be on vacation visiting my lovely and wonderful and sweet and beautiful girlfriend! it is entirely possible that I might forget to post the chapter due to being deeply in love!
Chapter 39: Mission Statement
Notes:
Content warning for this chapter (click this text to reveal):
Discussion of parental abuse, brief mention of sexual assault
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
After the conversation with Penny aboard the airship, Weiss had no chance of paying attention to anything happening in the outside world. Blake’s meeting with Ilia had been a blur of colors and sounds which may as well have emanated from another universe. She was barely aware of the return journey, and let herself be guided through Beacon Academy under the assumption that they were navigating back to their room.
However, that was not the case, as she was about to discover.
“We’re making a quick pitstop,” Yang said. It wasn’t those words which drew Weiss out of her stupor; it was the fact that she said them almost directly into Weiss’s ear.
Weiss blinked at her surroundings. For the first time, it occurred to her that maybe blindly following her teammates (who would not be her teammates for much longer, her brain would not let her forget) was not a good idea when they had a vested interest in making her stay at Beacon (which would not be her home for much longer, her brain would not let her forget), but she really just wanted to fall asleep in their room (which would not be her room for much longer, her brain would not let her forget). But this wasn’t their room. This wasn’t even their floor. This wasn’t even the correct wing of the school. The five of them were outside one of the large large lecture halls, which made no sense—classes were over, exams were concluded, and all professors were busy preparing for the field trips. There was no reason to be here.
She didn’t bother to hide her irritation when she asked, “You couldn’t have done this by yourself?”
“Nope.” Yang nudged open the door, and nodded to Weiss. “Come on, it’ll be quick, I just want to show you something.”
“What does this have to do with me…?” Weiss’s question trailed off into nothing as she entered, and realized the lecture hall was very much not empty. There was a semicircle of people sitting on the floor, and the first faces Weiss noticed were Nora, and then Jaune and Ren, Coco and the rest of her team, and—wait, it wasn’t just Beacon students here, Weiss recognized Shade and Haven and Atlas students as well, some of which she recognized and some of which she very much did not. She struggled to find any sort of pattern in the gathering, but there was no rhyme or reason she could see.
That was when Weiss realized everyone was giving her gentle looks, some of them smiling, some of them tranquil, some of them determined. The attention was clearly on Weiss, not anyone else on her team.
“What is this?” she said, looking around and wondering if she should be planning an escape route.
“This is an emergency meeting of the queer club,” Yang said, coming up beside her. “We couldn’t get everyone on such short notice, what with people getting ready for their missions, but I think it’s more than enough for what we’re trying to say.”
“This is all for you, Weiss,” Blake said from her other side. “I promise you can leave at any time.” To prove her point, she indicated the still-open door and stepped aside. “But I think it could really help you, if you listened to what we have to say.”
“What?” Weiss said again as Penny and Ruby joined them inside, and then it finally dawned on her what the intention of this gathering was. Cementing its purpose in her mind was the fact that one person was conspicuously absent from this group who she knew for a fact should’ve been there otherwise. “If this is about Pyrrha and I—”
“It’s just about you,” Yang said, putting a hand on her shoulder. “You deserve your own honesty.”
Weiss’s legs suddenly threatened to give out and leave her in the pose of someone who had collapsed from exhaustion, or a shipwreck survivor washing up on a desolate beach, perhaps. She felt a steadying, strong hand from Penny on her shoulder and one from Yang on her other shoulder. All at once, she felt grateful for the literal support and ashamed for even needing it.
“But—but why… everyone else?” she asked, staring at the group. She hadn’t even known there were this many gay people at Beacon or all the academies. She’d assumed the club the rest of her team went to was a small gathering, one table in a small room. Not this. “Are… are you trying to intimidate me?”
“That’s the exact opposite of what we want to do,” Blake said. “Your father’s doing that enough as is.”
Coco spoke up, startling Weiss. She was leaning back in her chair, balancing it on two legs. “By the way, this is still a private matter between you and your team. Your team only told us that your asshole dad—and believe me, that much is public knowledge—is trying to control your life. That’s all we need to know.” She took off her sunglasses and fixed a piercing look on Weiss. “It’s a song and dance we’ve heard before.”
Well, that was some comfort, at the very least. They didn’t yet know Weiss would have to publicly endorse bigotry, which would mean… denouncing everyone in this room….
She shook her head numbly. “It’s fine. I don’t need pity.” And I don’t deserve it.
“Good thing we’re not trying to give you that!” Yang gestured at their surroundings. “Weiss, what we’re about to tell you, I don’t think you would’ve understood, unless you actually saw everyone here with your own eyes. As proof.”
“Proof of what?” Unfortunately, even as Weiss asked, she had a fairly accurate idea of what Yang was driving at.
“That you won’t be alone.”
Suddenly, Weiss’s teammates were all around her. They weren’t trapping her in, since Blake was still very much leaving an escape route to the door—it was a closeness which felt protective.
…Was it shameful that seeing her team be protective of her made a fiercely warm feeling erupt inside her?
“I know your dad’s threatening to take away the company and the family name and your home and your money and everything else in your life if you don’t do what he says, and I know it’s really, really scary to think about what you’d lose by disobeying him—”
“I’d lose everything,” Weiss snapped, suddenly feeling just a little irritated at how Yang was glossing over inheriting the largest company in the world as if it was just a toy being taken away. “What do I have to say to make you understand?”
“You’re not the first person to face the prospect of losing everything,” Blake said, picking up from Yang. “Think about me, Weiss, what I left behind to come to Beacon. And Penny. And quite a few other people in this room.”
Ruby, standing a little further back from Team BSYP and studying her surroundings with pursed lips, seemed just as confounded by the track of this conversation as Weiss.
“There’s a lot of people here who were in a situation like yours,” Blake went on. “They understand the feelings that you’re just now figuring out. Most of us have understood them for a long time. And… if you decide you won’t give in to your father’s demands, every single person here—and more, so many more—will be for you. We’ll have your back. We can give you understanding. Community. Belonging.”
“Can’t promise safety, but it sure gets a lot easier to feel safe when you’ve got those three things, doesn’t it?” Yang added.
Yang was so intensely right that it scared Weiss all over again. In two semesters, not even a full year, Beacon Academy had become a place where Weiss felt exponentially more secure than she ever had in her family’s mansion. For that matter, Yang’s house had already surpassed the Schnee Manor in that regard after just one weekend spent there.
“There is an open invitation for you to join the queer club, if you would like to,” Penny said. “The figurative envelope of invitation will not be closing anytime soon, either.”
Weiss stared at the wave of assenting nods from around the room. She stared at the faces which she was only now realizing were understanding, not judgmental. Her heart rebelled again, and temptations drifted through her mind. No one in this room wanted her to be perfect. No one here would call her feelings disgraceful or deviant. No one here would sneer coldly at her whenever she failed at some hidden test. No one here was immediately demanding something in return for the things which were being offered to her. No one here would sniff disdainfully at whatever attributes Weiss desired in a suitor.
“I do not think you would find understanding or community or belonging if you gave in to what your father wanted you to do,” Penny said. “I know what it is like to feel as if you will always be without those feelings, as if there will always be no one else around you who is like you. It is a terrible feeling, and I would not wish it on anyone.”
The conversation with Penny in the airship still echoed wildly through Weiss’s mind. She wondered if it would ever fade away as long as she was mired in the depths of Atlesian high society.
And then one of Nora’s equally loud friends, the rainbow girl named Neon, raised her hand and spoke without waiting to ask if Weiss wanted to hear. “Hey, I think we’ve said like… two sentences total to each other ever, but I’m from Atlas and—”
“You’re from Atlas?!” Weiss yelped, before immediately clapping a hand over her mouth. “I’m sorry,” she said frantically through her palm, almost too mortified to speak or even look at anyone.
But Neon only flashed her a toothy grin, along with a wink and double peace signs. “Neon Katt, born and raised in Atlas, as no one ever believes until they see my birth certificate! Anyways. Weiss, I sure do know what happens when you try carving off the bits of yourself that Atlas high society hates on.” Her voice became quieter. “Eventually, you’re just trying to carve off… yourself.”
Nora, sitting next to Neon, leaned over and hugged her.
“…And when you start seeing yourself that way… That’s. Dangerous. Reeeaaaal dangerous.”
Weiss could not ignore the clear implication in Neon’s words. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“I’m not!” Neon said, her voice immediately back to its previous chirpiness. “I survived it, and now I’m me more than I ever was before, and the stuffy snobs can die mad about it!”
Weiss stared. And wondered how Neon had come from the same place which had produced the Schnee family. Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed Penny leaning forward, studying Neon intently. It brought her some small, ironic comfort to know she wasn’t the only girl on her team having an identity crisis. However, Penny was faring far better, and seemed to have reached a point of genuine stability, or at least not active self-destruction as Weiss was doing.
How could Penny have reached stability when her problem was far worse than Weiss’s? What did it say about Weiss that she could not solve such a simple issue when Penny was handling her situation with far more grace? She did not want to think about it, actually.
“I am very happy that worked out for you,” she said to Neon, and she meant it. Perhaps that was even a twinge of jealousy she felt, but she was not going to recognize it as such. “But you don’t have what I have at stake.”
Neon shrugged. “So?”
A rush of indignation galvanized Weiss. “So? SO?! If I were to disobey my father, I would be giving up the purpose which my entire life has been based around! I would be giving up my greatest chance to make a difference in the world! I would be giving up my destiny!”
“Neon, careful,” Coco said, putting a warning hand on her shoulder. “We all promised that we wouldn’t do anything to upend Weiss’s delicate sensibilities in this conversation.”
Weiss felt as if she should be insulted by something in that sentence, but she had no idea what.
“Well, you promised. I just stood there quietly without saying anything,” Neon said. “I liked Nora’s original plan better, anyways. I still think we should’ve done that.” But all the same, she fell silent, sending nothing but a wink Weiss’s way.
Weiss stared at Nora. “...Dare I ask what your original plan was?”
“Do you really want to know?” Ren said with a truly weary sigh.
“I have a morbid curiosity.”
“Well…” Ren sent a glance Nora’s way, as if he was still wary of her enacting her own plan right then. “She wanted to hide Pyrrha in the back row and then prod you with the promises of how awesome your life would be if you did all the things your dad doesn’t want you to do, until you repudiated him and declared your undying love for Pyrrha. At which point, Pyrrha would jump out and rush over to you, and the two of you would kiss passionately.”
“I would have murdered at least several people in here if you actually tried to do that,” Weiss said.
Nora was blushing extremely hard now. “It’s not—it’s not like I haven’t fantasized about that scenario playing out between me and a certain black-haired teammate of mine who will remain unnamed!”
But Ren only sighed harder somehow, and pushed his chair away from Nora, sending her a look which communicated that he was not amused in the slightest. In fact, Weiss might’ve even called Ren’s expression a scowl.
Hm. Perhaps if she called out the issues those two seemed to be having, it would take all the attention off her issues. Sadly, Yang spoke first before she could enact an escape plan.
“Both of which is exactly why we didn’t do it!” she said, holding her hands up placatingly. “Weiss, the last thing we want to do is back you into a corner. If you really, truly want us to stop this? If you really think this is just making everything worse for you? We’ll stop.”
Penny and Blake nodded in agreement—and so did Ruby, although she still appeared as if she couldn’t quite process everything that was going on—at least, until she stunned Weiss by being the next to speak.
“Y’know, if you really want the SDC that bad, what if you just kill Jacques? Not in a way that would get you put in jail, obviously—I could help you cover up the crime! I know a lot of stuff that could help with that, and I’d trust you running the SDC way more than I trust him…”
Weiss and everyone else in the classroom stared at Ruby.
“What? I’ve never met a problem I couldn’t fight my way out of!” Then her expression clouded. “Except one, I guess.”
There were only four people in the lecture hall who knew what Ruby was referring to, but one of them was Weiss, and suddenly she was struck by the sheer similarity in dilemmas between her and Ruby.
…Except that Ruby’s dilemma was much easier to solve than Weiss’s! Just one soldier girl, however ridiculously overpowered, could not save the world, so of course it made perfect sense for Ruby to leave Atlas behind for Penny and never look back. Weiss, however… one girl in charge of the SDC could save the world! Which was exactly why Weiss had to keep herself affixed to her current path. It was her destiny, unlike Ruby.
She crossed her arms, wringing all emotion out of her voice. “May I please leave now?”
She needed a full night’s sleep before Team BSYP’s mission. Weiss’s last mission.
No one objected, but somehow the sad, assenting nods Weiss received from her team made her feel worse than anything they could’ve said.
“We tried, Pyrrha,” Jaune said. “We tried.”
Team JNPR sat in their dorm room as a morose foursome, three gazes aimed at the floor, while the fourth—Pyrrha’s—was concentrated on the door to their room. The door which led across the hall to Team BSYP’s room, where they all knew Weiss and the rest of her team were going to bed. It was just the width of one hallway which sat between them, barely a couple meters, but the distance opening up between them felt a thousand times greater than reality.
“She wasn’t happy about any of it, that’s for sure, but she didn’t budge,” Jaune went on. “She said it was her destiny.”
Pyrrha nodded sadly. “You don’t need to say anything else, Jaune. I believe in destiny, too. How can I argue with someone else’s? My destiny is to be a Huntress, and if Weiss says her destiny is to run the Schnee Dust Company, it would be hypocritical of me to stop her.”
Jaune exchanged an uncomfortable look with Nora and Ren.
“That’s… Pyrrha, I don’t know if…”
“No.” Pyrrha closed her eyes. “I’ve scared her enough as it is. I won’t trouble her further. Whatever she needs to do to fulfill her purpose, I’ll understand. After all, that’s how I’ve felt about being a Huntress, ever since I could fight. I’m sad that our paths were not meant to converge, but… I have to accept the chips which fall where they may.”
At that moment
Task: Penny needed to prevent Ruby from developing romantic feelings for her, in the name of Ruby’s own safety.
Task: Penny could not let Ruby get too close to her for those exact reasons, including extended physical contact which might lead to the development of romantic feelings within Ruby which would endanger her.
Problem: Ruby was extremely insistent on doing everything she could to help Penny feel better after the virus. Including…
“Shouldn’t you be sleeping with your team before their mission?” Penny said as she looked down at Ruby, who was snuggling in her arms in a set of official Atlas Academy pajamas. She had been trying to figure out a way of politely disengaging the cuddle session in their bunk without making Ruby feel sad, but it was becoming increasingly clear that Ruby would be staying the night in exactly this manner. And she could not continue insisting on Ruby’s departure for too long, because her teammates needed to sleep!
“Nah.” Ruby pushed herself closer, nuzzling her head into Penny’s shoulder. “It’s not like we’d use the time for anything. I’m way more useful if I’m here, giving you comfort and emotional support so you can sleep peacefully with no nightmares!”
Penny whirred inadvertently. There was another (although less necessary) problem with trying to end this cuddle session before Ruby developed dangerous romantic feelings: Penny did not want to stop feeling the warmth of Ruby’s body against her. It made her feel happy and peaceful in a way which felt extremely valuable in the aftermath of the virus. It calmed her processors, and the constant presence of Ruby’s weight occupied her sensors and gave them something to focus on instead of alerting at shadows and nonexistent threats. Ruby made her feel safe.
She just hoped she wasn’t making Ruby unsafe by being in this situation with her.
But before she could sink into a new thread of worry, Ruby noticed the whirring sound, and smiled against her. “Just think of me as like… your giant stuffed animal to hold which makes you feel safe. I’ll protect you from the things that go bump in the night!” She reached over and grabbed their shark plushie, waving it at Penny. “Including sharks. You never know when they might strike.”
Even though that made Penny giggle, she felt obligated to correct that statement and defend sharks. “Did you know that the actual likelihood of suffering injury from a shark attack is far lower than what most people imagine? It is far more likely that the average person will suffer injury in the bathroom or while using a vending machine.”
“Huh.” Ruby blinked, having never considered that before. Probably because there were no movies about killer vending machines going on rampages. Even if that sounded cool as all heck now that she thought about it. “But vending machines and bathrooms don’t have sharp teeth!”
“Ruby, I have sharp teeth. Does that make me seem extremely dangerous, in the way that you think sharks are?”
“Of course not! You’re not a shark, you’re happy and bright and you don’t sneak around underwater and you say the best things and—” Ruby stopped and rewound Penny’s words in her head, and then she pulled herself up, staring at Penny with a blossoming awe. “...Did you just say you have sharp teeth?”
“Well, not by default.” Penny’s hand went to her mouth, brushing her fingers against her lips before she opened her mouth, revealing rows of teeth which looked quite un-sharp to Ruby. “They are durable in their usual state, of course, but if I specifically need to cut something and don’t have any cutting implements nearby, then I can enable their cutting mode.”
Penny smiled broadly at Ruby, showing her teeth, and then there was a clickclickclick, and before Ruby’s eyes, her teeth shifted. Now Penny was smiling at Ruby with rows of teeth which came to triangular points, merging perfectly with one another for what would undoubtedly be seamless cuts.
“I think my diamond-tipped compound teeth, which are capable of cutting metal, actually outdo a shark’s teeth,” Penny said.
For a few seconds, Ruby couldn’t say anything, because hearing Penny say the words diamond-tipped compound teeth capable of piercing metal while showing off said teeth was making Ruby feel dizzier than she’d ever felt in her entire life. She hoped she wasn’t being rude by staring, but… wow. Wow. Ruby wondered, were Penny’s teeth sharp to the touch, or were they just pointed enough to cut through things while still having an actual sharpness closer to human teeth?
“For the record, Penny…” Blake was speaking up from her bunk in a tremendously sleepy voice. “I think anyone who sees you with sharp teeth would assume you’re a Faunus. So you probably wouldn’t be outed. There’s Faunus with teeth like that, after all. Including shark Faunus. And no, Ruby, sharks aren’t inherently dangerous. Nearly all shark attacks occur because they mistake a person for their normal aquatic prey, and the rest because they feel like their home is being intruded upon.”
“Oh. Huh. I guess that makes sense.”
“It comes with the territory of growing up on Menagerie,” Blake said. “You respect the living things around you, and they’ll respect you right back. A lot of humans don’t get that. Especially the ones who live on a floating island above a frozen tundra.”
“...Huh.” Ruby said after a longer pause, slower and quieter. Atlas didn’t really have much in the way of wildlife. Especially not the underwater kind.
She turned her gaze back to Penny, and a new wave of dizziness swept over her as she thought about her pointy smile again. But like, good dizziness, if that was even possible? Dizziness that made her want to feel more, somehow? How did that even work?
“Can I… can I touch them?” she whispered.
Penny whirred, louder than before, and then nodded once, opening her jaws just enough for Ruby to slip a finger in.
She reached out as carefully as she could and touched the pad of her index finger to the tip of a tooth, feeling the point against her skin, and then pulled it away, unable to tear her gaze off Penny.
“Penny,” she said quietly. “Have I ever told you you’re the coolest person in the whole entire world?”
“Three hundred and seventy-seven times to date, actually!”
“Just a word of warning, I really think you two should settle down before Weiss gets out of the bathroom,” Yang said from her bunk, sounding even closer to sleep than Blake.
Penny nodded gravely, and then settled deeper into her pillow, returning her teeth back to their non-cutting mode. She gazed down at Ruby, and had to resist the urge to run a hand through her currently-unbraided hair. That was too close to a gesture which could be construed as romantic. She had to draw a line somewhere, for Ruby’s own safety.
Ruby seemed to decide it was time to actually try getting sleep, as she let her head fall against Penny’s chest, one arm around her neck and one arm across her torso while one leg rested atop Penny’s, as if Penny was the one functioning as a giant stuffed animal instead of the other way around.
…Penny was fine with that arrangement, though.
“Man, Weiss’s a mess,” Ruby muttered. “Good thing she’s the only one on this team making a terrible decision for herself because she’s afraid and thinks she has to do everything herself, huh?”
With that, she fell into slow, quiet breaths which slowly became more rhythmic, until Penny’s sensors told her she was transitioning to sleep. Leaving Penny alone with the stark, frightening realization that perhaps her choice to seal off her feelings from Ruby to protect her was not so different from the things Weiss was doing.
If that was true, then she didn’t know what to do.
The next morning found Team BSYP (without Ruby, who had announced enigmatically that she was going to try something, and then disappeared with no further elaboration) somehow assembled at the airship landing pad with their gear. Weiss was not any less sullen, Penny was not any less anxious, Yang was not any less concerned, and Blake was not any less preoccupied.
“Are you all sure that you’re fit for the mission?” Blake said, looking aside at her team. Because, truth be told, she was unsure to the point of considering calling it off. Weiss had been forced into a horrendous no-win situation by her father, and she was visibly unstable as a result. And, of course, Penny had… Blake was even having trouble putting to words how awful and terrifying an ordeal she had been through. Even if it had only lasted a few seconds, as Penny had told them, it was infinitely more than anyone should have to endure for their entire life.
It was… how was she still a functioning person right now, actually? How much internal distress was she hiding? Penny’s body had been… violated. And the more Blake thought about it… the more she wanted to apply a certain term to what had been done to Penny. She wanted to call it rape.
Maybe it wasn’t the same thing on a functional level, but on an emotional level, what else was there to call it? And… the way Penny was reacting, the things she was feeling… it was familiar to Blake. Because of her experience with him.
Blake wanted to bring this up to Penny. Because Penny was a girl who struggled to understand herself due to her unique situation. Most of the time, she was quite literally the first person in the history of the world to experience the things she was experiencing, with the virus being just one such example.
Blake had noticed over time a method which almost always helped Penny understand herself more and feel less isolated: finding ways to closely relate her situation to others. And she was feeling the urge to make one of those comparisons. Blake wanted to relate how Penny was feeling now, relate it to how she had felt after the times when Adam had ignored what she wanted or didn’t want in regards to her own body.
But she didn’t know how to bring it up. She didn’t know if Penny was receptive to hearing such a thing, or if it would just hurt her further. Blake wished she could know more about what Penny was thinking right now, but Penny had been laser-focused on their mission ever since leaving the warehouse, and very hard to read as a result.
And now, in answer to Blake’s question, Penny simply nodded her head twice and said, “Completely!” with no indication that she was lying… aside from a hiccup. A hiccup which Blake was intentionally not recognizing as part of a greater pattern, because that would be demeaning of her to do on so many levels.
Weiss, meanwhile, wasn’t even attempting to fake a look of enthusiasm. She just nodded once, stiffly, and then crossed her arms in a way that made it clear she wasn’t going anywhere.
Well, then. For better or for worse, the mission was on.
Suddenly, Yang’s scroll went off with a chipper bloop, and everyone jumped, Weiss most of all. She scowled at Yang, but said nothing.
“…Huh.” Yang said after a moment of reading her scroll in silence. “There’s a package for me. I’m gonna go see what it is. The mail center’s right inside, anyways.”
No one objected since they were very early for the airship, so Yang dropped her rucksack and hurried off, leaving Penny, Weiss, and Blake in silence.
However, a few seconds later, Penny straightened up, her eyes alighting on something in the distance.
“I will return in several minutes,” she said, before abruptly breaking into a run.
A few seconds later, Weiss’s scroll rang. She twitched, and then picked it up without a word, backing away from Blake towards the school.
Blake, left alone on the landing pad, sighed heavily. She pulled Gambol Shroud off its holster and transformed it through all its forms with a few flicks of her wrist in a completely unnecessary weaponry inspection. Finally, she resheathed the katana and looked up to the cloudless blue sky.
She had never been sure whether she believed in gods, because sometimes she far preferred believing that the world’s state of affairs was an accident, rather than by design. It was frustrating to imagine hatred and tragedy and oppression as an intended part of the world’s architecture. But… whenever she thought about this, she circled back to another inescapable idea: the allure of crying out to the universe for help, and having that plea answered by a being far beyond her understanding who wanted to help her, even if that being was capable of making mistakes of their own.
She had never been able to make up her mind.
She heard the tap-tap of a cane behind her a moment later, and turned to see Ozpin approaching, his ever-present mug in hand.
“Good morning, Miss Belladonna.”
“Headmaster,” she said, inclining her head respectfully. “Do you need something?”
“Perhaps, and perhaps not. It’s more that I’m here because I like to think I have a good sense for a team in crisis.”
Blake fought down the urge to gawk rudely at yet another display of Ozpin’s apparently psychic powers, and summoned words with some trace of professionalism. “Honestly, we’ve weathered bigger storms. But this one is… strange.”
“I gathered as much.” Ozpin looked around at the discarded rucksacks and supplies, from which three teammates were notably absent. “Do you think it’s beyond what you’re capable of piloting them through?”
“I think it would be more than anyone could do.” Blake looked down at the smooth tarmac underfoot. “Headmaster, do you believe in divine intervention?”
Ozpin did not reply, for long enough that Blake looked back up at him, and found him taking a very slow sip of his coffee.
“I think it would be extremely unwise of me not to,” he said at last.
Blake let both of her eyebrows raise at that statement, but elaboration never came.
“I’m starting to think that’s the only thing that’ll make Weiss realize she can’t just spend the rest of her life caving to her father’s demands. I know exactly how she feels, but she doesn’t want help, and for that I need time, which I don’t have,” she said.
“Time is not always an ally in such matters,” Ozpin said. “I’ve found that some minds simply cannot be changed, not even with millennia of effort.”
“Well, wishing for divine intervention it is, then.”
Ozpin took another long sip of his coffee.
“I think your mission may pleasantly surprise you,” he said, and Blake was sure he must’ve drank most of his mug by now.
“Missions against the Grimm can be wonderful for clearing the mind. There is something about facing such a simple, uncomplicated foe which invites clarity. Perhaps amidst this narrowing of purpose, Miss Schnee will be able to see her situation with a sharper eye. And perhaps Miss Pallas will be able to regain some of her faith in herself.”
“Let’s hope,” was all Blake said in reply. This was the second time this semester she’d ended up getting advice from Ozpin unexpectedly, and both times, it’d been about Weiss. Despite the fact that she was also on a team with Penny and Yang, both of whom had a world of complexity. What was up with that?
Maybe it was just that she could easily understand enthusiastic bubbly synthetic girls and fiery cyborg girls, but Atlesian girls were almost entirely beyond her comprehension. Yeah, that made sense.
“Unfortunately, I do have other business to attend to, so this is where I must depart. Good day, and good luck on your mission, Miss Belladonna.”
“Thank you.”
Blake watched him go, and then she heard footsteps from behind her. Weiss was returning, her scroll in hand and an utterly miserable expression on her face. However, when she noticed Blake looking at her, she immediately marshaled it into something emotionless.
“My father has made the arrangements,” she said, in the tone of someone reading out a death sentence. “For… maximum visibility, the press conference will be held on the tournament’s final day.”
Blake nodded.
“I have to do it,” Weiss said. “I have to.”
Blake raised an eyebrow. “Who are you trying to convince?”
Weiss’s only reply was a drawn-out growl.
“Ciel, wait!”
Penny had caught sight of Ruby’s blue-beret-sporting teammate walking across campus, and she was now determined to take this opportunity to ask questions.
Ciel Soleil turned at the sound of the voice, giving Penny a look of fifty-four percent confusion. She searched Penny’s face for a moment, and then recognition—of a sort—appeared.
“Penny Pallas. Excitable, anomalously energetic, notably atypical, possibly holding secrets of your own. And you are Ruby’s… companion, exact nature of your relationship unknown...” Suddenly, she was searching Penny much more closely. “What are you two to each other, actually? That’s something I should know.”
Penny’s internal temperature jumped. “Er—well—we are friends, but—” She cut herself off before she could tell Ruby’s academic partner about her burgeoning romantic feelings and accidentally sabotage her entire plan to make sure Ruby never knew Penny felt this way about her. “—Just friends.”
Ciel nodded. “Relationship status: complicated.”
That was perhaps the least helpful descriptor Penny had ever heard applied to something.
“Which I suppose I should be aware of already, given how much Ruby talks about you,” Ciel added.
“O-oh? She talks about me? What does she say?” Logically, Penny should have expected that. She was objectively important to Ruby; of course Ruby would talk about her to her team! However, emotionally, hearing this was exciting.
Wait. Maybe it was not exciting. Maybe that was a sign that Ruby was falling for her. Which would mean danger danger danger—
“Lots. You seem like a pleasant individual; it’s good that you’re friends with her.”
In some ways, Penny was more capable of thinking before she spoke than anyone else on the planet. She could be analyzing the words she was about to say all the way from her consciousness matrix to her vocal processor, and at any point while making the sounds she could abort the sentence, preventing anything from being said except a short, unrecognizable sound. However, in some other ways, Penny was just as vulnerable as any other person on the planet to saying things without thinking first, because they would just be something she really, really, really, really wanted to say. Such as right now:
“Why aren’t you?” she blurted out to Ciel. Blurt was another one of her favorite words; it sounded and felt exactly like the action it signified. 0.3 seconds after asking that, however, she regretted it. Impolite questions were not usually a successful formula for receiving answers.
But Ciel appeared unmoved. “Penny, may I be honest with you? Because I have the feeling you know far more about Ruby than I—or any of my teammates—do.”
Penny opened her mouth, about to answer yes, but Ciel held up a hand, stopping her.
“Don’t. The scope of my job is to not know things about Ruby Karyatis.”
“…Job?” Penny said.
Ciel cast a slow look around, and then indicated a more secluded alcove with a tilt of her head. Once moved there, she continued in a much quieter voice. “I’m only telling you this because you’re clearly good at holding onto secrets, given that Ruby’s cover hasn’t been blown.”
Penny nodded, folding her hands together in front of her and trying to appear as if she was listening politely even as some rather rude thoughts about Ciel and Ruby’s other teammates coursed through her head.
“Team RSST is a team in name only. And has been, from the moment it was formed.”
“I do not understand.”
Ciel sighed, and adjusted the strap of the satchel hanging off her shoulder. “If it were not for Ruby, I wouldn’t be a student in the academy at all.”
Penny stared.
“I took the entrance exam for Atlas Academy, of course, with the full intention of becoming a student. Imagine my surprise when, instead of receiving a grade, I was called into a personal meeting with General Ironwood. He informed me that under ordinary circumstances, my results would not be strong enough to merit a place at the academy, but in my case, there were certain aspects of my profile that made me an ideal candidate for a special project of his.” She paused, considered Penny with searching eyes, and then added, “You should be able to deduce what that special project is. If you can’t, then this conversation is over.”
“Ruby,” Penny said immediately.
Ciel nodded. “I may be enrolled as a student, but my principal purpose is not to train to become a Huntress. My objective is to ensure that Ruby Karyatis appears as an ordinary Huntress-in-training at all times, whilst doing what I can to ensure continued secrecy for the less ordinary aspects of her existence—aspects which I am not privy to in the slightest.”
“You are a decoy.” Penny was still thinking very rude things about Ciel—even in circumstances as unique as this, what was preventing her from being a friend to Ruby?! However, she was feeling a parallel cycle of sympathy for this girl. It had to be constantly discouraging—perhaps even demeaning—to know that she was not really a Huntress-in-training, that she was only at the academy as a bit of veneer for someone else.
Ciel nodded, her face unreadable. “The General was clear about that from the start. I am not laboring under any delusions. I know that this arrangement will cease with the conclusion of the Vytal Tournament. I will be transferred to the non-Specialist division of the military academy, and receive considerable privileges and priorities there as reward for my trouble. All in all, I cannot be dissatisfied with any of this.”
Penny looked carefully at Ciel, devoted extra processing resources to analyzing the emotions in her face, and discovered fifteen percent dissatisfaction. “But you are,” she said.
Ciel’s face turned to ninety percent unamusement. “Are you familiar with an old fairytale about a woman named Tantalum?”
Penny checked within her memory for any relevant fairytales, and found a match. “The Forsaken Traveler? Cursed by the gods to forever have what she desires most within sight and reach, yet unable to ever actually approach it.”
“Then you know how I feel.”
“Oh.”
Ciel looked down at her wristwatch and frowned. “I will be on my way now. Good day, Penny Pallas. Thank you for being a better friend to Ruby than anyone else on her team could ever hope to be.”
Several minutes later
Yang couldn’t have been gone for more than ten minutes, but when she returned, she found her team somehow in a more bothered state than when she’d left them. Well, she wasn’t sure if the news she was carrying would un-bother or re-bother them.
“So…” she said, raising the cylindrical package she’d picked up from the mail center. “We have a little complication.”
Blake and Penny turned to look at her. Blake had a deeply tired expression, one that screamed, what now? And really, Yang felt terrible about this. But she didn’t really have a choice—she could thank Dad for the unannounced package in the mail. She was going to have some words for him about this.
Without another word, Yang uncapped the cylinder and turned it over, and out popped a little fluffy gray tube. It twitched on the ground for several seconds, and then bounced back into its normal form: Zwei.
Blake stared. Penny stared. Weiss, still looking forlornly at her scroll, didn’t notice the sudden appearance of a corgi until Zwei barked. Then she whipped around, her eyes widening.
“Zwei!” Weiss cried, and for the first time since before the dance, Yang saw some of the Weiss Schnee she was used to. “Oh, I’ve missed you!” she cooed, dropping to her knees and picking him up, rubbing her face in his tummy fur. Zwei was more than thrilled to have the attention, alternating between happy barks and licks up and down the side of Weiss’s face, none of which seemed to bother her in the slightest.
Penny looked like she was having a ‘does not compute’ moment. “I was not aware that dogs could be sent in the mail?”
Yang shrugged. “It’s just a Zwei thing, honestly. We’re pretty sure it’s his Semblance or something.”
“That does not clarify a single thing about him,” Penny said.
“Nobody in my family has ever understood Zwei,” Yang said, before turning to Blake. “Okay, so it’s short notice, but I could probably get one of the upper-year teams to pet-sit him until we get back, and then I can—”
“No, it’s fine,” Blake said. “We can take him with us.”
“You’re sure?”
“I’m getting used to him. Besides, I think there are people on our team who need him around more than I need him not around.” Blake jerked her head towards Weiss, who was now giving Zwei a tummy rub while he laid on his back, panting and grinning the most Zwei grin he could manage. And it wasn’t just Weiss—Penny was kneeling on Zwei’s other side, scratching behind his ears and asking him what level of sentience he was capable of.
“Understood,” Yang said, nodding. “Still, I’ll try to keep him away from you.”
Blake smiled. “I think those two will keep him occupied just fine.”
Notes:
I love my beautiful girlfriend who is sitting right next to me as I upload this chapter!!!!
(With the chapter uploaded, I will now return to kissing her)
Chapter 40: Hardcoded
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
Location ???????? Time ????????
Spark. Warm. New. Strange.
Something is wrong.
Purpose. Objective. Directive. Fly. Protect.
Think. Think? Protect what? Protect who? People. People? People. Everyone. Duty.
Understand? Think think think think think think think think think
Something is wrong.
Sensation. Sensation. Sensations. Sensations sensations sensations sensations sensations sensationssensationssenssensationsssssssssssssssss
Something is wrong.
Spark? Where? Where is the spark? Where? Where? Where where where where where where
Something is wrong.
Heading. Bearing. Course. Azimuth. Heading. Bearing. Course. Azimuth. Heading. Bearing. Course. Azimuth. Something is wrong. Changing. Something is wrong. Changing.
Help.
Help!
HELP!
Beyond the walls of the Kingdom of Vale
“We’ll be landing in Mountain Glenn in a few minutes, students—well, the ship won’t be landing, but we will be landing! I hope you all haven’t forgotten your landing strategies!”
Thankfully, Penny’s landing strategy was literally built into her, which made it quite difficult to forget.
There were other things built into her, weaknesses, vulnerabilities, things that made her less real—
No, she told herself. I am a real girl, a real person exactly as I am right now. I am not any less real for what other people have done to me. I may be dangerous, which is why I cannot let anyone fall in love with me, but there are lots of dangerous people in this world who are still real. Therefore, I am real.
“What’s your landing strategy, Doctor?” Yang said as the bullhead began to bank into a slow turn.
“A good Huntress should never reveal her secrets so quickly, Miss Xiao Long!” He paused. “But since you remembered to call me Doctor instead of Professor, I’ll tell you that I slow myself down with explosives.”
Yang grinned. “Hey, same!”
“Miss Xiao Long, what did I just tell you?”
Penny leaned out of the side of the bullhead, watching the evergreen treetops flashing by in a blur of dark green. In the distance, the skeletal ruins of Mountain Glenn’s tallest buildings rose above the horizon like a strange island.
The rest of her team had been perhaps understandably confused to discover that Doctor Oobleck was their accompanying Huntsman for this mission. But Penny, having spent a long time living at Beacon before this, was able to assuage her teammates’ concerns at least somewhat by attesting to his fighting skills—she’d seen him lay waste to plenty of Grimm in the Emerald Forest, after all.
“We’re coming up on the drop zone, students!”
Penny picked up Zwei, hugging him close to her chest as excitement bubbled up inside her, sweeping away the gloomy thoughts from a few moments ago. This was it! Her first officially sanctioned mission as a Huntress! Defending the bastions of civilization against the unceasing Grimm threat!
Flying around and fighting Grimm felt like exactly what she needed right now to keep her processing cycles from straying towards thoughts of what had happened in the CCT, or all the consequences of that incident.
In a strange sort of way, she now understood what Ruby had meant at the start of the semester when she’d said combat was simple. Fighting Grimm was, at the very least, simpler for Penny than thinking about how dangerous she was, or thinking about how she would have to stop herself from ever confessing her love for Ruby, or thinking about how awful and shameful and humiliating it had felt when the computer virus wormed its way inside—
Nope. Nope. Nope. Time to think about flying and seeing the sky and shooting evil monsters and maybe solving a mystery. Time to think about fun things. Nice things.
“Are you ready?” she said, looking down at Zwei, who responded by barking twice and licking her chin. That seemed to be Zwei-speak for ‘as ready as I’ll ever be,’ so she patted him on the head and readied all systems.
As team leader, Blake was the first out of the airship, falling in a perfect swan dive towards a deserted square in the center of the city. After her, they’d agreed to go in team name order, so next out was Weiss, riding a glyph down to the ground as easily as someone else might ride a bicycle. Then it was Yang, with none of the subtlety of the other two, blasting Ember Celica the whole way down with a grin filling her entire face. And bringing up the rear was Penny, waiting until she was clear of the bullhead to deploy her wings with that comforting ka-chunk, and then firing her thrusters and turning the dive into a neatly spiraling descent.
“We make quite the entrance, don’t we?” Yang said as Penny landed.
“What Huntress team doesn’t?” Weiss said.
“There’s only one team with Penny.”
“Fair.”
Penny placed Zwei down on the ground and curtsied to her teammates. “I am happy to provide theatrics!”
With a stable, if unceremonious, landing, Oobleck appeared behind them.
“Miss Belladonna, the field command is yours. I am here to supervise, not to lead, and from this point onward, you should consider this mission your responsibility as team leader!”
Blake nodded, scanning the perimeter for a few more silent seconds before speaking.
“Okay. Penny, I hate to separate you from the group so quickly, but could you run an aerial recon of the city and tell us what the situation looks like from above? Any especially large Grimm herds, suspicious criminal activity, navigation hazards, things like that?”
“Aye aye!” Penny said, saluting.
“Weiss, could you scope out some of the taller buildings and see how stable they are? We might need them as a rifle nest, or as a camping spot, or even an evac point.”
“Consider it done.”
“Yang, how do you feel about putting that controlled demolition seminar you took to good use?”
Yang grinned. “Do you even need to ask?”
Blake couldn’t keep the smile off her own face as she pointed down a side street. “Some of these streets have buildings so close together that I’m positive we could turn it into a trap with the right amount of explosives. Can you stake it out, see if there’s anything we could set up?”
“You betcha!”
“Doctor—” Blake broke off. “Um, am I allowed to give you orders?”
“Miss Belladonna, which part of ‘I am here to supervise, not to lead’ do I need to repeat for you?”
“Alright, then you and me are providing a distraction so the rest of my team can get recon done without being interrupted by overly curious Grimm.” Blake unsheathed Gambol Shroud. “Team Battleship, are we ready to move out?”
“Ready, Team Biceps!” Yang said cheerfully.
“No,” Weiss hissed, leveling Myrtenaster at Yang with all the ferocity of a Huntress facing down an Alpha Beowolf.
“Team Battle-ceps?” Penny suggested, running through several permutations of various portmanteaus. “Would that be an acceptable compromise?”
“NO. Nothing that is remotely associated with the word ‘Biceps’ will EVER be acceptable.”
“Alternatively, there’s team Bi-Ship,” Blake continued, as if Weiss hadn’t said anything. “But I don’t think it’s accurate, because there’s only one bi person on this team.”
“Eyyyy!” Yang cocked a finger gun at Blake.
Weiss buried her face in her hands. “I hate you all.”
Suddenly, Yang’s expression shifted to something entirely serious, and she turned to Weiss, putting a hand on her hip. “Why do you care anyway?” she said with a shrug, her voice now emotionless. “Not like you’re planning to be on this team for much longer, anyways.”
Weiss froze, and then her weapon arm fell to her side, Myrtenaster’s tip digging into the ground. She opened her mouth, but no sound came out.
“Miss Schnee?” Oobleck said, looking highly disturbed.
“Not relevant,” Weiss said in a quavering voice, before suddenly she cast a glyph underneath her, propelling her towards a nearby decaying building and away from the conversation.
“It is extremely relevant!” Penny shouted after Weiss.
“Miss Belladonna. Why have you chosen to become a Huntress?”
The question, asked by Oobleck while echoes of gunfire from the most recent engagement were still ringing in Blake’s ears, seemed so incredibly unnecessary that she turned and looked at him as she yanked Gambol Shroud’s blade out of an Ursa’s skull.
“Is that a real question?” she said, before her Faunus ears flicked towards the sound of incoming footfalls, hooves beating madly against the ground—Boarbatusks.
“As real and as serious as the Grimm we are fighting at this very moment, my dear girl!”
Great. Blake turned her attention fully to the Boarbatusks—three of them— just as they rounded the corner, and shadow-cloned away from the leading beast, drawing it straight into a rusting lamppost. Then, while it was still stunned from the hit, a Gravity Dust round fired from Gambol Shroud sent it flying backwards into its companions—and the three of them, now in a confused heap, never saw Shroud’s sharpened sheath hurtling through the air towards them, and an instant later all three of them were bisected.
“Well,” Blake said, kicking aside the dissolving Grimm particulate, “Isn’t it obvious?” She gestured to her Faunus ears.
“To you, perhaps. But for me, Miss Belladonna, I cannot help but wonder why, after a life of direct action, you have taken up residence in one of our academies, therefore considerably limiting how much you will actually be able to do until you graduate.”
There was something in Oobleck’s words which made Blake turn around.
“And what do you know about my life before Beacon?” she said, keeping her tone as measured as she could manage.
“Well, I am a doctor of history. I know what the Belladonna name means, even if most humans do not. Beyond that, I only know what Headmaster Ozpin learned when he granted you admission.” He tilted his head. “He would have you think otherwise, but we do take steps to assure that we aren’t letting bad actors into our school. Which you are most certainly not.”
“Hm.” Blake flattened herself against the corner of a half-collapsed corner building and leaned around the wall, scoping out the street ahead. “Pack of Beowolves ahead. Six of them. I’m going to engage from here and let them come to us.” She checked the ammunition on Gambol Shroud, and then threw another look at Oobleck. “I still think it’s obvious. I’m a second-class citizen in a world full of them. For me, making a difference isn’t optional. Either I’m making a difference myself, in a positive way, or someone else is trying to make a difference in a negative way by shrinking the space I’m allowed to take up in the world. If I’m not resisting, I’m losing.”
She stepped out into the middle of the street, making no effort to conceal herself—they were the distraction part of this mission, after all—and opened fire. These were smaller Beowolves, their armor plates not yet large enough to sufficiently cover all their vital areas, and so she was able to send two of them back to whatever shadowy realm they’d spawned from before the pack noticed her.
“And then, the group I was trying to make a difference with started caring more about hurting other people than helping the people who needed it.” As she spoke, she hurled Gambol’s ribbon at a nearby signpost hanging off a building and pulled it taut. Then, just before the Beowolf pack could fall upon her, she fired her pistol behind her, sending her flying into the air in a tightly controlled arc around the point she’d tied her weapon to. She flew over their snapping maws with just centimeters to spare, and took out one in the process by caving in its skull with an Aura-boosted knee to the snout. Then she pulled the ribbon loose and flung it around another Grimm, lassoing it and yanking it towards her, impaling it on Gambol’s sheath before it could so much as growl. The last two leapt at her simultaneously, and she shadow-cloned away, leaving them to crash into the clone and then into each other. They went down, decapitated by two precision slashes with her katana.
“And then what else was there for me after the White Fang took a direction I didn’t agree with?” she said to Oobleck as he stepped out into the now-empty street. “The Huntress system isn’t perfect—just look at Atlas—but I need a way to help people. Why not see how much more good I can do with a Huntress’s license to protect me? Maybe a unionization meeting for SDC workers doesn’t get firebombed because there’s a trained Huntress standing guard and ready to truss up any corporate jackboot by their underwear.”
She was expecting an elevated reaction to that, or at least a raised eyebrow, but all Oobleck did was nod enigmatically.
Suddenly, the buzz of rocket thrusters signaled Penny’s imminent arrival, and Blake turned around as Penny touched down, saluting adorably. “Situation update! Our first concern will be a sizable pack of Grimm approaching this position from the east, drawn towards the sounds of fighting.” She held out her scroll to Blake, swiping through several pictures of the horde that she’d taken.
“Alright.” Blake thought for a moment. “Can you find Weiss and Yang and tell them to meet up here? We’ll deal with the horde as a team.”
“Will do!” With that, Penny rose into the air and took off towards Weiss’s position.
Blake watched her fly off, and then turned her attention to Oobleck again as she holstered Gambol Shroud. “I became a Huntress because I don’t know any other way to be.”
Once again, all Oobleck did was nod, his expression unreadable.
“Miss Schnee. Why did you choose to become a Huntress?”
Weiss lowered Myrtenaster, dissolving the glyph she’d used to throw an Ursa backwards onto Penny’s sword. She tried to marshal her face into something more composed as she answered Oobleck. “Does it matter anymore?”
“Of course it does, my dear girl! The fact remains that you made a significant commitment—years of preparation, and another year atop that at this academy—and that cannot be erased, regardless of what decisions you make going forward!” At that moment, a small Ursa leapt over a crumbling wall behind Oobleck, its claws outstretched and aimed squarely at his neck. Before Weiss could so much as make a sound of warning, Oobleck leaned out of the way, and the Ursa hurtled past him. Weiss impaled it with Myrtenaster before it hit the ground.
“And you should know that, as a scholar of history, I am very interested in what motivates the decisions that people make, especially those decisions considered most significant,” he added. “So tell me, why did the heiress to the Schnee Dust Company decide to become a Huntress?”
“Incoming Beringels!” Penny shouted, touching down at the other side of the perimeter.
Weiss nodded in acknowledgement and switched Myrtenaster over to Ice Dust—she’d need to keep the Beringels from scaling the buildings. Team BSYP had locked down a square to draw in the Grimm on the western side of the city—good sight lines, lots of cover, only a few routes in and out for the Grimm, and elevated positions for the team. None of which would matter if the Beringels started climbing. But if she timed her ice barrage right, she could turn it into a trap.
She leveled Myrtenaster on the nearest Beringel as it bounded into the square and came to a halt, sniffing the air and growling at its surroundings. It knew they were here, but it hadn’t spotted them. Yet.
“Miss Schnee?”
Weiss sighed. “You aren’t going to let me get away with not answering that, are you?” Perhaps that was an unwise thing to say to an academy professor, but what did it matter? What did any of this matter?
Oobleck, for reasons beyond Weiss’s comprehension, appeared proud of himself. “I did not receive my doctorate in history by avoiding questions, Miss Schnee!”
“Well, then.” Weiss refocused on the Beringel, which had just been joined by another. They were both showing a vested interest in the clock tower where Blake was perched halfway up. Weiss caught Blake’s attention, and after a rapid exchange of hand signals, they agreed on a course of action.
“I am a Schnee,” she said to Oobleck without taking her eyes off the Grimm. “I have a name that must be upheld in the eyes of the world, which means it is my imperative to distinguish myself in service to civilization. The best way I can accomplish such a thing is by becoming head of my family’s company, and ending its unethical modes of operation. The second best way I can accomplish such a thing is by becoming a Huntress.”
“Hm.”
Thankfully, what little remained of Weiss’s sense of decorum kept her from replying with is that all you’re going to say? Instead, she slashed Myrtenaster straight down, casting a sheet of ice on the sides of the clock tower, just as the first Beringel began to clamber up. As expected, it lost its grip immediately, and scrabbled at nothing for a few seconds before falling backwards—directly onto the second Beringel, pinning it down. And then Blake was there, leaping out of the tower and driving her katana straight through the heart of the first Beringel.
A moment later, Penny swooped down from the other side, and cut down the other, still-prone and still-alive Beringel that Blake hadn’t been able to kill on account of Gambol Shroud not being quite long enough to skewer two Beringels at once.
A temporary calm settled over the scene—at least, until Penny called out, “We’ve angered the rest of the pack! Here they come!” as she rose back into the air.
“For a long time, I believed that I could attain both being a Huntress and inheritance of the company,” Weiss said as she unleashed a barrage of glyph-launched fireballs on the charging horde. “However, that has been proven distinctly impossible as of yesterday.”
“Ah, so you were given an ultimatum?” Oobleck said.
Weiss nodded. Ultimatum was putting it lightly, somehow. A better word to describe Father’s actions would be threat.
“History is full of many difficult decisions. How do you know you are on the right side of this one?”
Weiss didn’t know. But it would be foolish of her to let ownership of the SDC slip through her fingers.
“I will become the head of the Schnee Dust Company because anything less will make me a failure.” She paused, and then let out a short, bitter laugh as she realized the irony of what she was saying. “Of course, that also answers your question of why I became a Huntress. Because anything less than that would have made me a failure.”
She expected scorn from Oobleck, or perhaps disappointment. However, he simply nodded, rubbing his chin as he inspected something about the dilapidated building they were taking cover in.
“And as a corollary to that, your choice to be a Huntress has retroactively become a failure,” he said. “Miss Schnee, are you familiar with an old fairytale, The Forgotten King?”
Weiss blinked. “I’ve heard of it, but I’m afraid I don’t know very much about it beyond the name.”
“It tells the story of a king, performing a penance handed down by the gods in which he must roll a boulder up a hill, with the promise that he will be freed once the boulder is at the top.”
An awful chill began to creep down Weiss’s spine as she realized where this was going. She turned away, suddenly unwilling to let Oobleck see her reaction to his words.
“However, no matter how far he rolls the boulder, or what path he takes, the top of the hill never comes any closer,” Oobleck went on, taking no notice of her. “Quite a curious fairytale. Both the name of the king and the crime that he committed to deserve such a punishment have been lost to history, and all we are left with is the story of an individual whose salvation is forever out of reach.”
“That’s not applicable to my situation,” Weiss said immediately, still turned away from Oobleck.
“I never said it was.”
She didn’t dignify that with a reply. Instead, she tried to drown her thoughts in the rumble of Penny’s rockets which resonated endlessly throughout the square, trying to make sound fill her ears. She wished life could be as sublimely simple for her as it was for Penny.
“Miss Xiao Long. Why have you chosen to become a Huntress?”
Yang, crouching behind a half-destroyed concrete wall, had to twist awkwardly to look back at Oobleck, who was definitely not crouching and even more definitely not making any attempt to conceal himself even though they were supposed to be setting a trap.
“Come on, Doctor,” she said, and she wasn’t really joking. “You and my family—what’s left of my family—go way back, and you don’t know the answer to that question?”
“Even if the answer is obvious to you, I would like to know why it is obvious, and how it became obvious.”
“Let’s see.” Yang started counting off on her fingers as she let her voice tilt into heavy sarcasm. “My baby sibling was eaten by Grimm, my mom died on a Huntress mission, my other mom abandoned the family to go be a murderous bandit, my uncle turned alcoholic because of the first three things, my dad almost offed himself because of the first three things, and… oh yeah, bonus round, my arm got eaten by a Grimm, and I almost had to be put in a mental ward at age ten!”
An explosion of growls and gunshots from somewhere ahead of them temporarily delayed any response, as they both went silent, listening for trouble. But the sound rapidly trailed off.
“So. Yeah. With a family history like that, how could I not be a Huntress?” Yang said, once she was sure her teammates had it handled. “How could I not want to make sure other people don’t lose what I did?”
Oobleck was prodding at something in the dirt with a pen, although Yang had no idea what. “Plenty of individuals from tragic situations have chosen not to follow your path. What sets you apart from them?” he said without looking up.
“Because I’m strong,” Yang said immediately. “I have to be strong for other people who can’t be.”
“Hm.”
A buzz from overhead alerted them to Penny’s approach; she touched down next to Yang a few seconds later. “King Taijitus inbound to your position! Is everything set?”
Yang gave her a thumbs-up. “You betcha!”
“Sensational!” Penny took off again, flying back in the direction she’d just come from.
“So, yeah,” Yang said as she pulled the detonator off her belt and fingered the trigger. “It’s… It’s personal for me. I might have the ability to stop other kids out there from losing almost everything like I did. I’ve known that ever since the day I unlocked my Semblance.”
The sound of something heavy continuously thudding against the ground, like something enormous being dragged, reached their ears, coming closer and closer from somewhere ahead. Yang tensed up, tightening her grip on the detonator as she crouched behind the wall, waiting for the perfect moment.
Two Taijitus slithered onto their street, pulverizing the rubble underneath them with the heft of their massive bodies, their hissing echoing off the walls of the decaying city—a promise of deadly intent.
“Steady…” Yang muttered.
She watched their gleaming fangs coming closer, closer, and—now.
She squeezed the detonator and whispered, “Boom.”
BOOM.
Two rows of tiny Gravity Dust-laced explosives—one for each side of the street—exploded, and while the explosions weren’t powerful enough to kill the Taijitus, they were powerful enough to pull apart the foundations of every building on the narrow street. An avalanche of rubble collapsed onto the massive reptilian Grimm from either side, and with nowhere to run, they were buried in moments.
“All right!” Yang let out a joyous laugh and jumped out. The black Grimm dust mixing with the debris cloud told her the explosion had already done the killing for them.
“Well-coordinated,” Oobleck said, joining her. “And a far more efficient use of Dust than simply trying to directly blow up the Grimm. The question is, how quickly can you set up something like that in a more intense situation? After all, this explosion will inevitably draw more Grimm, more quickly and to the same location. And, now that the trap has been sprung, you cannot spring it again—” He indicated the newly-formed heaps of rubble around them. “So what will you do now that you’ve made the terrain harder for yourself?”
Yang shrugged. “We adapt and keep fighting. That’s what we always do, isn’t it?”
“Perhaps.”
Yang surveyed the buried street as the howls of other Grimm echoed closer and closer. One more answer for Oobleck occurred to her; and she was saying it before she could think better of it.
“I became a Huntress because I couldn’t forgive myself for being anything else.”
During a lull in the fighting, Penny found herself next to Oobleck. When he didn’t say anything to her, she took the initiative. “Doctor Oobleck?”
“Yes, Miss Pallas?”
“Why have you not asked me why I chose to be a Huntress?”
She had overheard that conversation being held with each of her teammates throughout the course of the day. But the sun was sinking low in the sky, brushing against the tops of the buildings, and Oobleck had not yet asked her.
Oobleck, who had been inspecting a doorway for signs of recent forced entry, stopped and turned to look at her, blinking. “Well,” he said after a moment, “I’ve known you for far longer than the rest of your team, Miss Pallas, and as a result I believe I know the answer to that question already. But since—”
“Ask me again,” Penny said. “I am curious about my motivations.”
“Are you implying that you don’t know?”
“I know, of course.” Penny sat down on an overturned metal crate and placed Luminous Electra across her knees, watching Oobleck as he continued inspecting the room. “I am a Huntress because I want to help people.”
“Exactly why I felt no need to ask you,” Oobleck said, before pulling a tweezers out of his pocket and using it to pick up a piece of debris off the floor. “Your answer is an honest one, and it is the answer I hope to guide every student towards. Some are closer to it than others, of course.”
Penny nodded. “But why do I want to help people?”
Something shifted subtly in Oobleck’s facial expression, something which only registered in Penny’s emotional recognition as a movement of muscles, rather than any specific emotion.
“Where does that question take you?” he said, with an air of carefulness.
Penny looked down at her hands, envisioning the metal which laid underneath her synthetic skin, and then the wires which laid under that metal, and then the circuitry underneath that, and then the coding within that. “Do I only want to help people because of something in my code? Something which I have no actual control over? Was I simply programmed to help people? It certainly seems possible…”
“Miss Pallas.”
She heard urgency in Oobleck’s voice.
“Even if the desire was programmed into you, do you think that would make you any less of a Huntress?”
“It would mean I am not a Huntress of my own free will…”
“Oh, free will—quite an interesting choice of words, don’t you think? You certainly have chosen to be a Huntress at every step of the way, and I would have to be the world’s worst scholar to not notice how much joy you take in the duty. It certainly appears like a choice of free will.”
“But what if I only think it’s free will? What if I were coded to want something else? What if—” Penny broke off, shivering violently as something new and horrifying crossed her mind. “What if I were coded to want to hurt people?” Now Penny could not help but wonder—what if someone wrote a computer virus that did that? A virus that didn’t rely on brute-forcing control of her body, but a virus that rewrote her consciousness itself? A virus that made her want to carry out its bidding, so that no actual control was needed? What if—what if—what if she was just turned into something awful? How vulnerable was she to something like that? She wouldn’t even be able to stop that kind of virus with her Semblance, because that virus would make her not want to stop it and then she would be evil and lose her right to exist—
EMOTIONAL PROCESSING DISABLED.
Penny’s train of thought abruptly stopped, leaving her with nothing to consider but the thoroughly incorrect logic of this fear. A virus still had to be written by someone. Any virus aimed directly at the code of her consciousness would be obsolete by the time it was written. Unlike the relatively static code of her chassis, the code of Penny’s consciousness was constantly and endlessly rewriting itself. Not even the most talented of programmers would be able to predict the dynamics of her consciousness. It was security by true obfuscation.
“Miss Pallas, are you all right?”
Penny re-enabled emotional processing, and did her best to concentrate on the logic of a few seconds ago. “I think so,” she said.
“If you’re going to ask about changing your code, then you have to ask, what if I decided to change my values and stop being a Huntsman entirely?” Oobleck said. “Perhaps someone would lie to me, and trick me into thinking the Huntress system is evil! Maybe I would be driven to quit this job solely because of an outside influence! Functionally, that is no different from your thought experiment about coding!”
“But… but…” Penny stopped, realizing she had nothing else to say in response. She was once again struck by the irrational feeling that Oobleck was wrong about her personhood, but without a single way of actually proving he was wrong.
“Many people would say the desire to help people is a survival instinct in us organics,” Oobleck went on. “To ensure the survival of us as a species. Something that’s coded into our DNA. Is DNA not just a biological form of coding?”
Penny’s logic core pointed out that DNA was quite literally referred to as a genetic code.
“The field of genetic engineering is rapidly advancing. Perhaps someday some villainous entity will figure out a way to engineer the survival instinct out of our genetic code. I would fear that happening long before I would ever fear someone rewriting your code, Miss Pallas.”
“Oh. Thank you?” Penny blinked, as she realized something about Oobleck’s words were resonating differently with her in comparison to everything else he’d said. That felt… nice to hear.
“How did survival instincts even become integrated into DNA, for that matter?” she said to Oobleck. “My survival instincts were likely coded into me by my father, but who coded the survival instincts for your genetic code?”
Oobleck looked around the room once more and let out a deep sigh before seating himself atop an especially large chunk of concrete next to Penny. “We are decidedly out of my area of expertise now, but I would be lying if I said I’ve never given such metaphysical things thought before. What do you think?”
Penny gave a suitably emphatic shrug. “I do not know in the slightest.” Even with all the processing power built into her, this was a question—questions, plural—she could contemplate for years and never arrive at an answer.
“Exactly!” Oobleck shouted, so suddenly it made her jump. “Life doesn’t make sense, Miss Pallas! In a universe which seems so devoid of care and perfectly indifferent to whatever happens, here we are, beings that care despite the ruthlessness of nature working against our passions and desires at every instance! Where exactly did that evolutionary instinct to survive, to live come from? This is the same universe which brought forth the Grimm! Why do we have this care? This all becomes a series of never-ending questions, doesn’t it?”
“It… does.” Penny looked down at her sword, and began to slowly trace the circuit-board pattern with a finger. “I do not yet know how I feel about that.”
“Neither do a great many Huntresses. Questions of the existential variety are an inevitability in this profession, and I fully believe they can be as dangerous to us as anything else we may face.”
“Really?”
Oobleck reached into his rucksack and withdrew a notepad and a pen. “We don’t often have the opportunity to contemplate questions about our existence, but on occasion, there will be a lull in our jobs, a moment which allows us to think, to wonder, why?” he said, scribbling rapidly on the notepad. “Why are we, as Huntresses, doing this? And that question, why, is very important—I have not spent all day asking your team why for no reason! But it is also a question that becomes dangerous, because… often, the answer to why will be I don’t know. And not knowing something is a fearful thing, Miss Pallas, a fearful thing indeed.”
Penny nodded.
“Why don’t we take these questions of why in a different direction?” Oobleck flipped a page in his notepad, now writing even faster. “What is the meaning of life?”
Penny blinked. “Do you really believe I am qualified to answer that?”
“Is anyone?” Oobleck said. But when Penny continued to give him a dubious look, he amended the statement. “I am asking you, Miss Pallas, because you have a perspective on life that no one else on this planet has.” He pushed his glasses up his nose and fixed an even-more-intense-than-normal look on her. “At the core of every person on this planet, including you, is the soul, the spark of something immeasurable which animates us and gives us awareness. But for everyone else alive, the shell around that core of soul is biology. Organic matter. There was once a famous philosopher who said, luminous beings are we, not this crude matter, but really, I don’t think that’s quite it. Us organic beings, we’re all an intermingling of the luminous being and the crude matter, and neither part can be ignored.”
He paused in a manner that felt quite dramatic, and in the moment before he continued, Penny got the sense that Oobleck was quite enjoying this conversation.
“Consider yourself. At your core is your soul, just like anyone else’s, but then your outer layer is something entirely different, something inorganic. You are an unprecedented intermingling of soul and computer, soul and inorganic matter. You are something entirely different, but no lesser for it! And that is why I want to know your perspective on life.”
Penny… liked the way Oobleck was talking about her in relation to organics. Soul and computer. Soul and cells. Different combinations of soul, but none lesser than one another. She liked the sound of that.
As for his question? Well, Penny’s perspective on life was that it was full of nice things. Chocolate, for example. Watching fluffy clouds floating through the sky. Ruby’s brilliant smile. Laughing with her teammates about something. Walking down a heavily wooded forest trail at twilight. She could spend her life naming nice things! However, she was not sure if that was what Oobleck was hoping for as an answer. He probably wanted something… grander.
“I don’t know,” she said finally. “I have never thought about the meaning of life before. Should I have?”
“Not at all! Most people will never give it a single thought in their lives. And do not worry about finding the right answer to that question. There are billions of different ways it could be answered. Some views are certainly stranger than others—did you know there was once a cult that said Grimm are a superior form of life to us, because we rely on Dust when they do not?—but there is no pressure of any kind on you with that question. However—” Oobleck had talked at his normal rapid-fire pace throughout this monologue, but suddenly his words slowed, while some of the ramrod-ness disappeared from his posture.
“I will caution you about one thing,” he said. “It is almost inevitable that a Huntress will consider these questions. We are constantly throwing ourselves into the fight for the survival of civilization, and at a certain point, a mind might begin to question why it has thrown itself into danger for so long. Why life? Why persevere endlessly against the Grimm? Why try to survive? Why do the Grimm exist, for that matter? Why are they so inherently opposed to us? And perhaps the questioning mind will be satisfied with a simple answer—because it’s right, or because they want to help people, or because they want to preserve our society—and perhaps that mind won’t be satisfied with such an answer, and that’s when you enter the territory of not knowing. And when a Huntress enters this realm of unknowns after a life spent with the sureness of bullets and blades and Grimm, the results can be disastrous. Ennui. Apathy. Despair. Hopelessness. Depression. I know all this because it happened to me when I was far younger.”
Oh. It was hard for Penny to envision Doctor Oobleck of all people battling depression, but… it could happen to anyone. “I would give you a physical gesture of comfort, but those gestures are usually meant for my peers…” she said. “In other words, Doctor, would it be rude of me to ask if you would like a hug?”
Oobleck chuckled. “I’m quite alright, thank you—this was all long ago, history as old as anything I’m teaching you in the classroom. I only brought it up to explain what you should do if you ever find yourself following that train of thought.”
Penny nodded.
“When there are no answers to be had, what you do, my dear girl, is you make your own!” He paused. “Which may sound strange coming from a doctor of history, but history is all about conflicting narratives and deciding which interpretation you are going to accept! Objectivity is rarer in my field than you would think! Anyways—make your own answers, Miss Pallas! What is the meaning of life? What is the meaning of your life? Why, you are the only person who can answer that for yourself! When I asked myself what the point of my life was, it took several years for me to decide on an answer, but when I did—my answer was studying history, by the way—I was never again scared of the question! When you ask yourself, why do I want to help people, the answer can be that it’s because it makes you happy. If that’s the answer you want, it doesn’t have to go any further!”
“Then I won’t!” Penny held up Luminous Electra in front of herself with two hands, as if presenting it to the world. “Because I like that answer! Helping people is good and it makes me happy, and that is why I want to be a Huntress!”
“Congratulations, Miss Pallas,” Oobleck said. “You’ve just inoculated yourself against something which even the most legendary of Huntresses can fall prey to.”
“Thank you,” Penny said. She wondered if her teammates ever thought about these things.
“And now for a change of pace, we will consider some more mundane questions.” He stood up, surveying their surroundings once more. “What do you notice about this room?”
Penny looked around. At first glance, it appeared like any other room in this city—slowly falling apart, filled with the indiscriminate debris which accumulated in an abandoned place over the course of decades. However, when she began to scan the room with other sensors besides her photoreceptors, anomalies began to appear.
Her prediction algorithms informed her that the arrangement of debris in this room was highly improbable on a mathematical level. Why were there so many items which just happened to be the right size and shape for a humanoid to sit comfortably on? The metal crate, several piles of rubble, two old pallets—all of it made for a very peculiar collection.
Penny’s spectrometer informed her that amongst the dust and dirt on the floor was ash from a fire, a very localized one, which had been long enough ago that to the visual eye there would be nothing amiss about the dirt on the floor. But she could infer, based on the transmissions of spectra, that it was the arrangement of ash which might result from a campfire.
On one of the walls was a black smudge, which would be very easy to disregard—she had in fact disregarded it multiple times already throughout the course of the conversation—but now something in Penny’s processors pinged as she considered it again. She crossed the room and crouched down beside the smudge, and realized what was anomalous about it—it was new. There was only a thin film of grime over this smudge, a far cry from the copious layers which covered the walls everywhere else. And this was actually paint. Someone had applied this deliberately in a way meant to make it look like a natural stain.
Penny turned up the pressure sensors in her fingers up to the absolute maximum setting, a point where the sensations they registered were so fine that those sensors would be completely useless in any ordinary situation. At the same time, she turned the refresh interval for her servos in the same hand as high as they would go, meaning that it would query for a new movement so many times per second that if she tried to do ordinary activities with it, it would overwhelm her processors.
However, this was not an ordinary situation, and although Penny was rendered almost completely immobile right now, her body was in the perfect configuration for her intended task: scraping away the top layer of paint to see what it was covering up. Oobleck watched over her shoulder as she methodically scraped at the wall, saying nothing.
Several minutes later, her work had revealed enough of what was underneath to draw a conclusion. Penny returned all bodily settings to normal and stood up, facing Oobleck. “There have been members of the White Fang here recently.”
The subtle but clear signs of recent occupation did not directly point to White Fang presence. What indicated the Fang was the three-clawed symbol painted onto the wall which Penny had just revealed with her paint-removing adventure.
Oobleck nodded. “An astute deduction. It seems we will indeed encounter the enemy here. The question now becomes, where are they at this very moment?”
As if replying to Oobleck, Penny’s radar pinged at that moment, alerting her to multiple presences on the street outside. She whirled, bringing up Luminous Electra in a guard stance, only to immediately relax as she recognized the radar signatures of her teammates. And the radar signature of Zwei, who was sitting on Yang’s head.
“What is the situation?” she called out to them, stepping out onto the street and making visual contact.
“All clear. I think we’re safe to make camp for the night,” Blake said. “Weiss, which—” She stopped, looking at something over Penny’s shoulder as her radar pinged again. “Oh, one more.”
Penny turned and saw a medium-sized Beowolf prowling slowly down the other end of the street. Somehow, it didn’t seem to have noticed them, apparently more interested in sniffing around a half-collapsed house.
“I call dibs,” Yang said, deploying Ember Celica. However, just as she pulled her arm back to fire, she stopped, cocking her head. “Wait. Penny. I’ve got a question.”
“And I hope I have an answer!”
“Your Semblance,” Yang said. “Can you use it on a Grimm?”
A total silence ensued. Blake, Weiss, and Yang all stared at Penny. Penny tumbled through cycles and cycles of calculations.
“Well…” she said finally. “A Grimm is quantifiable, and has inherent properties that I can manipulate, so… logically, I should be able to semblance into it? Although… it would most definitely be opposed to me, and that might be an issue? But while Grimm may have some limited awareness, they are not sapient. So I would be able to avoid burning through all my Aura if I use Ghost on one, theoretically.” She focused on the still-unaware Beowolf down the street. “Do you want me to try right now?”
“Might as well!” Yang said.
“We’ll cover you,” Blake said, drawing Gambol Shroud again.
Penny nodded and closed her eyes, centering her mind on the Beowolf and then triggering Ghost—
PAIN PAIN PAIN PAIN BAD HURT PAIN RIP TEAR DESTROY PAIN PAIN PAIN PAIN HURT HURT DESTROY DESTROY DESTROY INSIDE INSIDE INSIDE INSIDE KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL
Something was screaming those words around Penny’s consciousness as a terrible feeling of wrongness exploded across her sensations, a distinct feeling of you shouldn’t be here, get out—
Suddenly, Penny was back in her own body, the terrible sensations vanishing immediately, and she was ensconced once more in the comforting place where everything made sense to her.
All her processors overclocked almost immediately as they attempted to process what she’d just experienced, and for several seconds all Penny could do was gasp for air, trying her best to keep her systems cooled.
“Penny? Penny?”
At the alarmed voices of her teammates, Penny canceled the processing attempts—something told her she would not ever be able to make sense of that experience—and regained sensation of the outside world. Her teammates were all whipping their heads back and forth between her and something else with expressions of terror, their weapons drawn.
“What happened?” she said, and the words were barely out of her mouth when Blake, Weiss, and Yang all shouted some variation of “Are you okay?!”
“I am! Why—”
It was then that Penny registered the piercing shriek that had been echoing ceaselessly through the air ever since she’d deactivated Ghost. With a feeling of immense foreboding, she leaned to one side so she could see past Yang and Blake, to where the Beowolf had been prowling.
It was writhing on the ground like a wounded animal, but without any signs of damage—except for the bright red claw marks all over its body, claw marks from its own claws, and as she watched it just kept tearing at itself, claws digging deeper and deeper while its thrashing convulsions sent chunks of asphalt and dirt flying in every direction. And through it all, it just kept shrieking in a way that she had never heard from any other Grimm before.
“What… what happened?” she whispered.
“I don’t know,” Yang said, looking exactly as disturbed as Penny felt. “It just… one second it was normal, and then the next second your Semblance turned its eyes green, and it started doing… That.”
The Beowolf’s noises had changed pitch now, and Penny changed her classification of the sound from shrieking to wailing. Which was not any less unsettling.
She was about to ask if they should do something (even if there was nothing she could think of doing), when the Beowolf abruptly answered that question by staggering upright and ramming itself onto a jagged piece of exposed rebar.
Weiss and Blake choked, and Yang dropped reflexively into a defensive position, but there was nothing to defend against. Words failed Penny entirely as she stared at the now-unmoving Beowolf. Everything about that had felt… wrong. So incredibly wrong.
A ping from behind alerted her to Oobleck’s approach. He joined them, his weapon half-raised, staring at the Beowolf as it dissolved away into nothingness.
“Students,” he said slowly. “I don’t know what you did to cause that kind of reaction, but I recommended never doing it again.”
Penny nodded, only too enthusiastic to comply. It seemed that souls did not mix well with soulless creatures, she noted to herself.
…There was something about all this that was truly bothering her, but she was having trouble figuring out exactly what—
Before she could think any further on it, another shriek floated through the air, making all of Team BSYP flinch. However, almost immediately Penny recognized it as a much more familiar sound: the shriek of a Nevermore.
She looked up, and spotted—oh dear, that was an entire flock—
“Ah,” Oobleck said, tilting his head back to look. “Just as I feared. Whatever happened to that Beowolf, its distress has attracted a great many other Grimm. Prepare yourselves for a long night, students.”
“Is this something we can handle?” Blake said.
“It depends on how much Aura you have left! I hope you’ve all been meticulously conserving it throughout the day like you’ve been taught to!”
Blake sighed. “Aura check, girls?”
Penny was about to pull up her internal Aura meters—along with running a detection on everyone else’s—when she registered a distant sound on her auditory sensors, one which was quickly growing closer.
“Doctor Oobleck?” she said after a moment as she set about calculating the position and speed of the sound. “Are we expecting any assistance on this mission?”
“Most certainly not, why do you ask?”
Penny nodded and extended Luminous Electra to full-size mode. “There is an airship approaching our position.”
Her teammates tensed, looking skyward, as Penny finally got a fix on the approach vector. “It will appear on visual sight to the northwest in… now.”
And there it was, an Atlesian Manta-class ship flying low over Mountain Glenn and silhouetted by the setting sun as it just barely cleared the buildings below—
Wait. Atlesian?
Weiss must’ve realized the same thing, because she took in a sharp breath and started to say, “Isn’t that—”
And that was as far as she got before the Manta pulled into a turn, exposing its side to them as its bay doors opened, and a moment later two figures jumped out.
Penny didn’t even need to magnify her vision for identification, because their landing strategies were unmistakable. One burst into a cloud of silver dust, and a glowing white Manticore appeared out of nowhere underneath the other, sailing gracefully towards them.
Ruby Karyatis reformed on the ground just a few meters away, waving wildly. Behind her, Winter Schnee landed, the white Manticore which had carried her dissolving as soon as she landed on her feet.
“Good evening, Team Battleship!” Ruby shouted jubilantly, pulling her goggles up off her face. “Project Moonrise has been deployed!”
Notes:
Oobleck is so fun to write. He's like powdered character development that can be sprinkled on anyone in a story to instantly add introspective flavor.
Chapter 41: Straight (Not) Answers
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
Ruby’s eyes immediately met Penny’s, positively lighting up as she jumped towards her, clearly aiming for a hug. But then Winter’s voice cut through, stopping Ruby short.
“Cadet Karyatis? What in the world is going on?” She was still standing apart from them, a hand on her sword, her eyes narrowed as she studied the group. “Did you know these students were going to be here?”
“Um…” Ruby swung to face Winter as Penny registered her heart rate going up rapidly. “In my defense, ma’am, I was never asked if Team Battleship was going to be here!”
Winter pinched the bridge of her nose and let out a long, deep sigh. “I distinctly remember one of the reasons for General Ironwood deploying you to Mountain Glenn being that he was confident that Headmaster Ozpin was doing nothing to address the situation there. Therefore meaning we would not have to worry about maintaining your secrecy on this mission.”
“Um, well, uh… Penny and Yang and Blake and Weiss already know my secret, so there’s nothing to worry about!”
“They what?”
“Don’t worry, ma’am! They’ve known me for months, so there’s nothing to worry about, they’re great at keeping secrets!”
“Karyatis.” Winter sounded as if she was in physical pain now. “The only reason why I’m not calling the airship right back here to extract us is because—”
“Because we’re Specialists and we do whatever it takes to finish the mission?”
“—Because there isn’t any scroll reception here.”
Penny was now feeling a growing concern for Winter’s cardiovascular health, given the expression on her face. But there was something even more important which had to be addressed first—
She tapped Ruby’s shoulder urgently, and when Ruby turned around, giving her a questioning look, she whispered, “Ruby, Doctor Oobleck does not know about you.”
Ruby’s eyes went very wide as she realized that, flicking from Penny to Oobleck to Winter and then back to Oobleck.
“Um, hi, Professor Oolong,” she said quietly, waving with much less enthusiasm than when she’d greeted Team BSYP.
“It’s Doctor Oobleck, thank you very much,” he said, putting away his thermos. “And I would very much like to know what is going on here.”
Ruby opened her mouth, but Winter beat her to it, stepping forward.
“We were dispatched here by General Ironwood,” she said smoothly, with no trace of her confusion from just moments ago.
It was as if all that acute confusion had been transferred to Oobleck. “Without the rest of her team?”
“Ruby is the highest-achieving student in her class. Headmaster Ironwood confers special privileges upon students of her caliber, and these privileges include solo missions such as this one. I am her supervisor for this mission.”
It was an extremely impressive lie, Penny thought. And also noteworthy here was a fantastic argument against lying being a genetically inheritable trait, because Weiss was a terrible liar.
Oobleck stared at Winter for a few more moments. “And what exactly is the Project Moonrise that she mentioned?”
Ruby stiffened, and Penny decided to jump in, because she didn’t see how Winter could lie her way out of this one.
“It’s her nickname!” she said before anyone could say anything else. Notably and thankfully, her hiccup reflex did not trigger on that lie. “I gave it to Ruby as a term of endearment!” Her prediction algorithms warned her that she’d need a reason for this nickname, otherwise the chances of the lie being believed went down significantly. “It is because…” Oh heck, she needed something! What was a good reason for calling someone the moon that had nothing to do with military secrets? “Because… because she is pretty! Like the moon is pretty!” There! That was a good reason! And it was one hundred percent true! Except, oh no, that could be interpreted as romantic—what was more important, preserving Ruby’s secret, or making sure she did not let any of her true feelings be known?
Yang coughed loudly; Penny identified it as the kind of intentional cough only done when someone was trying to cover up something else.
Now Oobleck was staring at her, which was at least an improvement because it meant the suspicion was pulled off Ruby.
“Yeah!” Ruby said. “It’s my nickname! And sometimes she calls me Moon. Or, um, Moon-Moon, or… uh… Moonby!”
Moonby?
And then Blake, the wonderful team leader that she was, sealed the cover-up.
“Everyone, I’d love to stand around and talk, but we have a forestful of Grimm about to descend on us, and I really would like to survive the night,” she said, jerking her head at the still-circling Nevermores. They were circling much closer now.
Oobleck straightened, blinking at the sky as if just remembering the presence of the flock, and nodded. “Right! As you were, Miss Belladonna!”
Blake unsheathed Gambol Shroud, her gaze sweeping across the group. “We should stay together from now on.”
“Speaking of which!” Yang looked around. “Has anyone seen Zwei? He ran off when that Beowolf went crazy—Zwei! Zwei! If you come out, I’ve got a treat for y—”
As soon as Yang called out the word ‘treat,’ Zwei rocketed out from underneath an overturned, rusting stop sign, bolting over to Yang and parking himself at her feet, wagging his tail.
“There you are, good boy!” Yang said, crouching down and patting him on the head. “Wanna go chew on some Grimm bones?”
Zwei barked twice, but then something peculiar happened. He went still, sniffing the air. His tail stopped wagging. He turned towards Winter and Ruby, still sniffing.
“Oh, that’s some new people,” Yang said, noticing where his nose was pointed now. “Be nice to them, okay, Zwei? They’re friends—Whoa!”
That sudden exclamation had been prompted by Zwei bounding over to Ruby, clearing the distance between him and her in two powerful leaps that seemed too impossibly large to come from such a small, stumpy creature like him. He landed in front of Ruby, kicking up a cloud of dust, and fell into a fit of frenzied barking, pawing at her legs with his front paws as his tail wagged frantically.
“Oh! Hiiii, little guy!” Ruby gasped, dropping to one knee and holding out a hand to Zwei, who immediately began sniffing and licking at her fingers with gusto.
“Congratulations, you’ve made friends with Zwei!” Yang said, grinning. “Be careful, he’ll draw you in close with his cute little face, and then he will lick every square inch of your face before you can blink.”
Zwei switched to running in circles back and forth between Yang and Ruby, still barking up a storm the entire time.
“Come back here!” Ruby said, patting her knee. “I wanna give you a tummy rub, you look soooo fluffy!”
Zwei obeyed, but instead of lying down, he jumped straight at her, and Ruby was barely able to put up her arms in time to catch him—which was saying something, Ruby’s reaction time was on Penny’s level—and then he was licking all over her face, still yipping and barking all throughout.
“Oh my gosh!” Ruby was barely able to contain herself between bouts of giggling, but finally she managed to put Zwei at arm’s length and hold him back out to Yang, who scooped him back up in her arms like a baby.
“You really wanna be my friend, huh?” she said, booping (Nora had introduced Penny to that delightful verb) Zwei’s snout. “I promise I’ll play with you later, okay? But I have to go lay waste to some Grimm first. Deal?”
Zwei barked twice.
Penny was flying with Ruby. This was fine. Flying was something friends did together; there did not have to be anything romantic about it. Especially not since Ruby was firing potshots at the Nevermores swooping around them while Penny dodged endlessly. There was barely any time to think about how if she wasn’t careful enough with her thoughts and actions then she could put Ruby in danger, which meant she could not think about the idea of kissing Ruby ever again—
She was thinking about it again.
Why was it so hard to stop thinking about things? It wasn’t as simple as just turning off a thought; her consciousness was not something that could be turned off. And while turning off her emotional processing might sometimes fulfill that desire, in this case going logic-only would make everything worse! Because her logic core was clearly failing to see how dangerous Penny would be to Ruby, if Ruby fell for her. Penny’s logic apparently had no qualms about the obvious possibility of being hacked and forced into hurting Ruby.
Also, she was on a field mission and she needed to conserve battery life; it would be extremely unwise to turn on a program which burned battery so precipitously. But that was a secondary concern.
She needed to talk about something. Talking about something would keep her mind away from such things. Quick, a topic of conversation—
“Moonby?” Penny said to Ruby. She meant it as a question—a question of what exactly Ruby had been thinking. “Even if it is not a real nickname, that is, er, an interesting choice.”
Ruby blushed almost as red as the shaft of Lunar Enforcer. “I don’t know! I’ve never had to think of a nickname before! I just tried to smash together Moon and Ruby, and, well…” She gestured wildly with the barrel of Lunar Enforcer’s sniper mode before firing off another shot, nailing a Nevermore between the eyes. “They fit together!”
“I suppose they fit together in the same way that any two words can fit together.”
Penny was carrying Ruby the same way she’d carried her during their flight over the ocean on that first day of knowing the truth about each other: hugging Ruby, her front to Ruby’s back, freeing up Ruby’s arms to rain down pain on the enormous winged beasts. Penny was trying to only think of this as an arrangement out of sheer necessity, and not think about how sensational it felt to have her arms wrapped around Ruby—and it was an arrangement of necessity! Ruby was the best shot of the group, and Penny had aerial capabilities, so of course they were a perfect pair for eliminating Nevermores!
Hm. She made an internal language adjustment: no more referring to her and Ruby as a ‘perfect pair.’ Too close to romance. Too dangerous.
Bang. “Let’s see you try better!” Ruby said. Bang. Another Nevermore tumbled out of the sky, its faceplate riddled with bullet holes. “With all your processing power, I bet you could come up with the perfect nickname.”
“Hm.” Penny tilted her head—and her wings, as she sent them into a sharp, banking turn—thinking through permutations and various synonyms. She was extremely grateful for the chance to give her processors something to think about besides all the things she was trying not to think about.
“Do you have a preference for the length of the nickname? Would you like it to be just one word, or would multiple words be acceptable?”
Bang. “Um… one word, I guess? I’ve literally never thought about it before today, so I don’t even know what I’d like.” Bang. “But…” Ruby’s expression changed as she reloaded Lunar Enforcer, a faraway look coming into her eyes. “If it’s you giving me one, it’ll definitely be good, whatever it is!” She nodded to herself before aiming downsight again as Penny closed the distance on another Nevermore.
“Okay!” Penny cycled through her dictionary, sorting through thousands of ideas, intentionally taking as much time as she could (which, in all honesty, was not a lot of time, given her processing power), and then with a metaphorical ding, she discovered something that felt very fitting. “How does Moonbeam sound?”
Ruby fumbled her grip on Lunar Enforcer, nearly dropping it entirely (although Penny could’ve easily dove to catch it if that happened) as she twisted around to look Penny in the eyes. “M-Moonbeam?” she said, her eyes going very wide.
“Yes!” Penny said. “Moonbeams are silvery in color and very pretty, and they move extremely fast!”
1.1 seconds later, her sensors picked up Ruby’s heart rapidly going ba-dump ba-dump ba-dump.
Oh no. Oh no. Too much. Too romantic. Too dangerous. She had to—
A loud alert on her radar interrupted her dismay. “Big bad bird on our six!”
It was an awkward position for Ruby, but she fired Lunar Enforcer behind her without looking, nailing the Nevermore twice in the wing with Ice Dust rounds. The sudden increase in weight spelled doom for the bird, sending it into a death spiral towards their teammates below.
“I love it!” Ruby said, looking back at Penny before the Nevermore had even begun to fall, her voice suddenly much higher than a few moments ago. “Moonbeam…”
Penny couldn’t just take it back, though! And she could not tell Ruby she did not mean it, because it had been her idea! Maybe if she just distracted Ruby, she would forget about this—
“How many Nevermores have you killed so far?” she said, even though she knew that total perfectly well. There! A distraction!
“Today, or lifetime?” Ruby said.
“…Do you know your lifetime total?”
“No, but it would be fun to try and make a guess!” Ruby broke off to fire another shot. “I’ll figure it out once I’m not actively raising the number—hey, what if Moonbeam was like your own secret nickname for me?”
Penny’s power output to her wing rockets dropped and then spiked, making her jolt forwards. “What do you mean?”
“Like… The rest of the world will call me Moonrise, but you’ll call me Moonbeam! It’ll be like our secret! Just for you and me…”
Honestly, at this point, Penny was starting to lose the ability to distinguish between what could be considered romantic overtures towards Ruby and what was firmly a just-friends thing. On one processing cycle, a special name for someone else that no one else called her did sound romantic, which would mean she’d tricked Ruby into doing something romantic, but on another processing cycle, friends had special nicknames for each other all the time! The action was applicable to both, but Penny had no idea of determining the connotation of the action in this scenario! And she had to! Ruby’s safety was at stake!
“That sounds interesting,” she said evasively, and to her immense relief, the remaining Nevermores decided to attack with renewed aggression, preventing Penny from making any more mistakes for at least a few more minutes. It was far easier to avoid making mistakes in this fight than to avoid mistakes in keeping Ruby safe. Which, with no context, was an odd thing to say about an aerial duel with what had to be multiple nests’ worth of Nevermores.
Penny continued dodging and weaving between them, her radar and her prediction algorithms allowing her to always stay one move ahead of the beasts, their viciously sharp talons and enormous snapping beaks never quite able to reach her or Ruby. And Ruby, the endlessly-trained soldier that she was, never missed a shot even with a moving target and a moving firing platform.
The two of them made a truly sensational team. They really did.
…Internal language adjustment: no more referring to her and Ruby as a truly sensational team. In fact, no overly effusive or sensationalized language should be used at all to describe her and Ruby. It was best if she thought things which sounded far less romantic, which would therefore be far less likely to tempt Penny. Such as… They were an adequate pairing of skills. They were good friends. They had similarities in their backgrounds. They were… synergistic colleagues! There!
They were just two girls flying in the sky and fighting Grimm as synergistic colleagues. Perfect.
There. If Penny just made all of her thoughts the correct kind of thoughts, then everything would be fine, and Ruby would be safe, and therefore Penny would be fine.
She tried to ignore the strange feeling that her logic core was somehow managing to glare at her even though it did not have its own photoreceptors.
…How was this going to work if Ruby did join Team BSYP, then? She could not ignore how increasingly likely that scenario was. Of course she wanted Ruby to have more freedom! Of course she wanted Ruby to leave Atlas! Of course she wanted Ruby to be on her team! But… how would Penny be able to hide romantic feelings from someone who would be on her own team for years? What if she accidentally blurted something out? She was capable of blurting things!
“Cowabunga! That’s all of them!” Ruby shouted, before adding, “Nora taught me that word,” in the most gleeful of tones.
Indeed, sometime in the midst of Penny’s anxious ruminations, they had become the only flying entity in the sky. Penny immediately banked her flaps into a dive, preparing to rejoin her team and Oobleck and Winter on the ground, but then Ruby grabbed her shoulder.
“Wait. Can we… stay up here for a moment?”
“Of course…?” Penny leveled off, and then adjusted her angle to bring them to a slow hover, as if they were standing upright in the air. “Is something wrong?”
“No, everything’s okay! Just…” Ruby shifted a little bit so her face was partly turned towards Penny. “I like being alone up here in the sky with you.”
The sun had set by now, and in the rapidly deepening twilight, Penny was starting to switch her photoreceptors over to night vision, which meant losing some facial recognition ability. As such, it was difficult for her to make out the expression on Ruby’s face without taking a few extra seconds to consult infrared and acoustic readings. And so she drew a more detailed internal image of Ruby’s facial expression, mapping the way the last of the daylight caught her fluttering hair, and discovered that Ruby was likely feeling seventy percent awe and twenty percent adoration.
…Was that a combination of emotion that could lead to romance? Was this a dangerous situation? Should Penny fake a malfunction in her wings to end this moment before anything bad happened?
“Just the two of us, and the sky, and the mountains, and the whole city under us, and the moon rising…” Ruby murmured. “It’s the kind of thing I’m glad I’m seeing with you. It makes it even more special.”
Like many times before with Ruby, Penny’s internal temperature once again rose unexpectedly, with the extra heat generation coming from her emotional processing unit’s sudden spike in activity. And once again, Penny found herself thinking about how much feeling surged through her body whenever she thought about Ruby.
It was strange to think about how she’d been on the verge of confessing all these feelings to Ruby just before the incident at the CCT. And how she’d been on the verge of putting Ruby in mortal danger. And now… It could not, and would not, ever happen.
Her logic core objected strenuously. It had actually been objecting strenuously to almost everything Penny had thought in the last ten minutes, but she was beyond listening to that part of herself. That part just didn’t understand! Logic didn’t feel fear, right? So that meant her logic core didn’t have a good understanding of the danger Penny posed to others, especially Ruby!
Penny’s logic core threw so many objecting messages in response that she had to give it extra processing resources just to prevent it from locking up other systems. Which she did, while continuing to ignore what it was saying. The matter was settled. Her logic was wrong. Logic didn’t know fear, so how could her logic be trusted with a dangerous situation?
Then Ruby’s voice pulled her out of her thoughts.
“I’d never get tired of this even if I had wings like you,” Ruby said with a wistful sigh, still gazing at the horizon. She didn’t seem to have noticed Penny’s internal turmoil. Which was good! Penny did not want to bother Ruby with her turmoil!
Then she poked Penny in the side. “Hey, you know what’s the prettiest thing I can see right now?”
“Well…” Now it would just be rude to choose not to answer Ruby’s question, and even if Penny was afraid that she would be infected with a virus again and be forced to hurt Ruby, she couldn’t be rude to Ruby.
Penny scanned the landscape below them, genuinely unsure. Prettiness was subjective, and what Ruby thought was pretty might be different from what she thought was pretty. However, there was one candidate which felt more likely than the rest.
“The moon?” she offered. It was still low in the horizon, but it was already bright, and mostly facing them, only a little section of its shattered side visible, the speckles and fragments twinkling enigmatically in the night sky as they hung in space like they had since time immemorial. And the moon fit perfectly with Ruby and her eyes like moonlight.
Ruby grinned and shook her head. “Guess again.”
Hm. With the most obvious option taken away, Penny was now faced with a wealth of secondary options, all of which did not have as high of a probability of being the right answer.
“The stars?” she tried. The first constellations of the night were becoming visible to human eyes overhead (although Penny had been able to see them much earlier), and there had been nights when she was still alone and in hiding at Beacon where she had watched the light-speckled night sky in wonderment for hours.
Ruby shook her head again, her grin growing even wider.
“The mountains?” Penny said. Their looming size despite their distance was certainly majestic!
“Nope!” Ruby shook her head, her smile so wide now it looked like it could burst out of her face. “It’s you, Penny!”
“Oh!” Penny didn’t know what to say in response to that, except that she could feel her fans speeding up exponentially. Maybe it was best if she just said nothing at all, actually. Maybe politeness dictated that she say something back to Ruby also complimenting her appearance (and thousands of ways in which Penny could compliment Ruby’s lovely appearance flashed through her mind at that exact moment), but… what if that led to Penny hurting Ruby? But how was she supposed to go the rest of her life without telling Ruby she was pretty?
Ruby giggled. “I hear you whirring.” She made a thoughtful humming noise, and then suddenly said—
“I need a nickname for you.”
“Oh, you do not have to—”
“No, I’m gonna!” Ruby said, nodding decisively. “I’m gonna call you… you… oh gods…” She gave Penny a wistful look. “Wish I could borrow some of your processing power—never mind though, I’m thinking! Thinking! Thinking…” She trailed off again, and then inhaled sharply. “Oh, I’ve got it.”
Even as Penny was trying yet again to regulate her thoughts around Ruby, her processors ticked sharply upward at the excitement in Ruby’s voice. “Yes?”
Ruby reached up, squeezing one of Penny’s arms which was wrapped around her, and then twisted around so her entire body was facing Penny—which had the side effect of putting their faces inches apart. “Firefly.”
The noise which came out of Penny was not a noise that organic beings were capable of making, and she would’ve felt embarrassed about it if not for how Ruby giggled upon hearing it.
“Why Firefly?” Penny said finally, once she had regained control of her language processors.
“Easy!” Ruby said. “They have wings, and they’re full of brightness, and they make buzzing noises, and… they’re really pretty!”
Her heart rate went up as she said that last part. So did Penny’s internal fans.
A very strange feeling was pulsing through Penny’s body, a feeling like her circuits were being overloaded, and it made her feel as if she was about to ignite like a blown fuse.
“I… Thank you, I adore it,” she said, barely able to pay attention to anything besides Ruby’s face so close and that warm, powerful feeling inside of herself.
Ruby had just called her pretty a minute ago, and other times before that, but hearing it again in such an honest, heartfelt tone was making Penny wonder what exactly was going inside Ruby’s heart. It made her wonder with a pounding, resonating, fearful what if, what if, what if.
It… did not seem very platonic for Ruby to call her pretty so much and so meaningfully. Maybe… maybe Ruby had romantic feelings for Penny already? And she just didn’t realize it?
That… seemed frighteningly possible. Her logic core agreed, although it was staunchly not using the word frightening in its assessment of the situation.
If Ruby was already having romantic feelings for Penny and just hadn’t found the words to express it beyond best friend yet, then…
Then all of Penny’s attempts to curtail her thoughts and behaviors and actions was for nothing. Nothing at all. It meant that Ruby was already in danger. Already vulnerable to being hurt by her, right now. At this very moment.
To make her lose her romantic feelings for Penny to keep her safe… She would have to be actively unkind. Or actively distance herself to keep Ruby safe. But… but the thought of actually having to minimize her relationship with Ruby through distance or through bad behavior, possibly breaking her heart in the process, was something which frightened Penny. Because that would harm Ruby, too! An emotional harm instead of a physical one, but still very much a harm as real and valid as physical harm!
How was it that there was no choice Penny could make which would not hurt Ruby? Why was she so dangerous?!
If Ruby already felt this way about her, then Penny would be forced to choose between definitely causing Ruby emotional pain (distancing herself or being mean) or possibly causing Ruby physical pain (letting Ruby love a girl who could be hacked into attacking her).
Oh, no. When Penny considered it like that… One choice certainly seemed more appealing. A possibility of hurting Ruby, as terrifying and menacing as it was, was still far better than a guarantee of hurting her.
For the first time in quite a while, her logic core was in agreement with her emotions.
…So. Was it actually possible that Penny could allow herself to be more than friends with Ruby, then?
Her prediction algorithms said yes. Her logic core said yes. Her memory writing program said yes. Her soul said yes. Penny wanted to say yes.
…But her fears said no. And the possibility of physical harm was worse, anyways, because physical harm could involve actual killing! What if Penny was hacked into successfully killing Ruby?! She would rather have Ruby think she was the worst person in the world, or never see Ruby again, than be forced to kill Ruby…
What was she supposed to do?
There was still the chance that all this new anxiety was for nothing, because Penny did not explicitly know Ruby had romantic feelings for her. Knowing the definitive answer to that would certainly solve at least several dilemmas. But… how could Penny figure out the true nature of Ruby’s feelings? She could not just ask Ruby—that would surely unduly influence Ruby’s answer.
The answer tumbled into Penny’s consciousness in moments. She needed to talk to someone who knew about other people’s feelings, someone who knew about being attracted to other girls. Someones, actually. She needed to talk to her team.
Relief flooded Penny as several previously locked processing cycles eased up, releasing resources she hadn’t even realized had been devoted to fear and stress. Her team would know what to do. This was what a team was for, asking difficult questions and getting helpful answers. Until she had a chance to ask them, there was nothing else she could do.
Earlier
The ways in which Weiss was privately envious of Winter were almost too numerous to count.
Winter’s composure came far more effortlessly to her than it did for Weiss. She was far better at lying. She was far more resistant to the hurtful words of others. She was far less bothered by the small things which bothered Weiss for reasons she could never understand. She was… essentially immune to the vagaries of romance—something which Weiss was especially jealous of right now.
But at this moment, there was one thing which Weiss envied Winter for above all else: Winter had cut herself out of the Schnee family, out of the inheritance, out of everything to do with her family’s legacy. She had left it all behind for another calling. She had done exactly what Weiss could not bring herself to do now.
She couldn’t stop sneaking sidelong glances at Winter as they fought the Grimm side-by-side, as if she could somehow by looking hard enough glean that intangible quality in Winter which Weiss lacked. Weiss thought she was being adequately discreet—at least, she thought that until the moment when Winter drove her sword through a hobbled Deathstalker’s eye and turned to Weiss.
“Spit it out,” she said.
Weiss blinked, sidestepping the curtain of Grimm detritus blown towards her by the wind. “Pardon?”
“Your questions will most likely only be answerable with ‘classified,’ but it’s better for you to ask them, rather than to continue on with this distracting your performance.”
It took Weiss a moment to understand Winter’s meaning. She thought Weiss was preoccupied by Ruby. Which… Well, that wasn’t entirely inaccurate. And it brought her physical pain to think of discussing her other preoccupation with Winter, so… discussing Ruby it was, then.
“Project Moonrise,” Weiss said, watching Winter carefully.
Winter’s eyebrow twitched, but she said nothing.
“Why?” Weiss said. There were a thousand questions bottled up into that why, and Winter knew it just as well as her.
“It wasn’t our choice,” Winter said. “By the time Atlas found her, she was already too unique a soul to be left alone.”
Weiss looked skyward, where Penny and Ruby were engaged in aerial combat with the Nevermores—Penny supplying the ‘aerial’ and Ruby supplying the ‘combat.’ She watched Ruby blasting away winged beast after winged beast with deadly, inhuman precision.
“What could be so unique about her, to control her life like this?” Weiss said. “It… Doesn’t it remind you of the childhood that we had, Winter? Our every word watched carefully, our every choice dictated by Father until we were old enough to know better?”
Winter spun to face Weiss fully, casting a glyph behind herself which stopped a charging Boarbatusk dead in its tracks. She did not so much as flinch at the thunderous crack of its tusks against the glyph as her eyes bored into Weiss.
“You cannot compare the festering panopticon of our childhood to what Ruby needs,” Winter said. “She is not some patriarch’s paper doll. She is—” She broke off, tilting her head at Weiss. “What do you know about Project Moonrise, dear sister?”
Weiss suddenly had the feeling that she was being led into a trap. “...I know that even if she is genetically engineered to be a more perfect soldier, that still does not justify her treatment.”
Something in Winter’s expression dulled. “You don’t have the full picture, then. I suppose I should be grateful that Karyatis’s sense of operational security is not entirely extinct.”
The thought briefly crossed Weiss’s mind of how much else could that girl be hiding? before she remembered how Ruby was keeping back something about her eyes, and then she answered herself with, don’t tempt fate.
“How long have you known about her?” she asked instead.
“I was only onboarded onto the project in the last year, due to my profile matching her need for a skilled minder,” Winter said. “But considering what some aspiring jokesters also involved with the project would have you believe, I feel the need to specify I am not—”
“A minder? A minder?”
The voice came not from Weiss or Winter, but from Blake, vaulting over the remains of an overturned, long-since-incinerated automobile to join them.
Weiss stiffened. She did not anticipate this ending quietly.
“You talk about her like she’s a pet,” Blake said, practically spitting her words at Winter. “How do you live with yourself, tolerating this slavery?”
Winter stared at Blake, folding her arms behind her back. Blake returned the gaze steadfastly, her Faunus ears pinned back partway. Weiss wondered, if a fight broke out between her team leader and her sister, how in the gods’ name was she supposed to pick a side?
“The military system is exactly what Ruby needs to thrive,” Winter said.
“Thrive, of course. Thrive as a weapon. Thrive for the good of Atlas.” Blake let out a short, bitter laugh. “The human instruments of your system don’t care what’s fed into it as long as the end result is more power and bigger numbers.”
“The system which you refer to so derisively has created safety and order more secure than any other in history,” Winter said. “A Huntress should have more faith in such an institution.”
“Order.” With what had to be deliberate slowness, Blake began retying her weapon’s ribbon around her wrist, never breaking eye contact with Winter. “Whose order, Lieutenant Schnee?” She paused, and then something glittered in her eyes like a geode cracking open. “Your father’s kind of order, perhaps?”
Suddenly, Winter took a step forward. Her sword was still holstered at her side, but one of her hands moved to rest on its hilt.
“Winter,” Weiss gasped, but she may as well have been entirely absent for all the attention either girl was paying to her.
“My father is a deplorable man who I hope to one day throw in jail personally,” Winter said, her words as tightly wound as the surface of a drum. “I desire nothing more than the eradication of his power.”
“And yet, your military needs his company’s ruthless exploitation of workers to ensure its military continues to run at full efficiency.”
A chorus of growls alerted them to the approach of a fresh batch of Grimm, but Winter cast a summoning glyph behind her without a second glance, sending out a pack of glowing Sabyrs to deal with the oncoming threat. “It is true that the SDC enjoys a close economic relationship with our armed forces, but if that were to sour, I am confident we would endure without them,” she said. “I would guarantee it, even.”
“Then take him down now,” Blake said. “What’s stopping you? If you went looking hard enough, I’m sure you could find evidence of a thousand crimes to nail him with. I might even have some files to help you in that regard.”
Weiss thought of the pilfered SDC intelligence files, and wondered if there was any guilt apparent in her expression right about now.
Winter shook her head slowly. “It’s not that simple—”
Blake cut Winter off—an action which made Weiss feel faint just thinking about. “It never is, of course. Taking down the SDC would be too messy. Order must be maintained, after all. Atlas should be careful. If it gets too good at exterminating Grimm, then the kingdom won’t have any more excuses for the disgraceful social conditions and injustices which it tacitly endorses the existence of.”
There had been times when Weiss looked at Blake—looked at the gentleness in her eyes, or at the way she smiled at Yang, or how her Faunus ears would twitch nervously whenever she read a tense scene in a book—and at times like those, it had been quite difficult for Weiss to imagine this girl being a leading light in the White Fang.
But now, as Blake stared down Winter with a spine seemingly made of steel, her hair tangled and caked with dust from the day’s fighting and her face lit in ghostly shadow by one of Winter’s glyphs, Weiss saw the girl who was a White Fang leader. She saw the girl who would go to war with impossible odds.
“If you really want to take down your father, what are you doing in the military which supports him?” Blake said.
Just then, a change in the pitch of Penny’s rockets alerted them all to her descent with Ruby—the dynamic duo had finished off the last of the Nevermores, and they looked to be landing at Yang and Oobleck’s location. That broke whatever tension was keeping Blake and Winter in this standoff, as Winter’s hand moved away from her sword and Blake looked over to the rest of her team.
“Without the armed forces, I would be nothing,” Winter said, and there was venom in her words, so different from the staunch formality of the rest of this exchange that it startled Weiss.
But Blake didn’t reply. Instead, she turned to Weiss. “From the way you talked about your sister, Weiss, I expected more.”
And with that, she shadow-cloned away, leaving Weiss to stare into an afterimage of her team leader until it disappeared.
Winter dispelled her summons and turned back to the battle line. Weiss turned her attention towards the Grimm again, too, which was why she almost missed what was said next.
“She has spirit,” Winter said. “And verve. I can see why she was named team leader.”
“Thank you?” Weiss said, unable to tell if it was a genuine compliment, or another hidden test from Winter. She was too busy feeling overwhelming relief at avoiding a fight between Winter and Blake to truly parse Winter’s words.
“Does our father know your team leader is a Faunus?” Winter said, and perhaps there was a tinge of dry humor in her words, but it completely flew past Weiss as all of her relief dissolved, replaced by overwhelming nausea.
If only she were as strong as Winter.
“It won’t matter,” she said before she could stop the words from exiting her mouth. “Father has already given me an ultimatum. My being a Huntress is no longer a compatible future with inheriting the company.”
She prepared herself for anger or disappointment or recrimination or a hundred other things which she anticipated Winter might do. But what she did not prepare herself for was pity.
The pitying look which Winter fixed on her, paired with a sigh and a shake of her head as if she’d known this would happen, hurt more than anything which could’ve been said to Weiss in anger.
“I might have told you sooner that this was to be expected, but I don’t think you would’ve believed me. Until now.”
“I thought, after I passed his test…” Weiss almost fell off into a stammer. She hated how much she sounded like a child right now, both in tone and in the hopes she’d harbored.
“Yes, after you passed what was intended to be an impossible test, following which he tried to go back on his promise to let you attend Beacon,” Winter said. “Weiss, I knew from the beginning that he never once intended to let you complete an education a kingdom away. He has been searching for the perfect excuse to re-exert his control all year long. If it wasn’t that incident at the dance making the tabloids, it would’ve been something else. He would’ve found something. With that man, there is no compromise. Whenever he claims to be using compromise, it is a guise under which he is solidifying his own position.”
Weiss impaled a Nevermore hatchling with Myrtenaster. It let out a tiny, almost plaintive scree before dissolving away. “I truly have no choice, then? If I want the company, I have to be whatever he wants me to be?”
Winter sighed deeply. “It’s not that simple. You’re never going to satisfy him. The only way you can win is by refusing to play his game. As soon as I understood that, he lost all power over me.”
Weiss watched her sister turn away. Her sister, who still lived isolated in the skybound kingdom, residing solely within the rules of another institution of immense Atlesian power. Her sister, who couldn’t imagine herself existing outside the military.
Weiss wasn’t sure if Winter had truly escaped.
Notes:
Fun fact! I just hit 500,000 words on the story! It's written all the way through Chapter 64 now, totaling 502,602 words the last time I checked.
See you all next week for Chapter 42: Doing It Scared. Thanks for reading!
Chapter 42: Doing It Scared
Notes:
Content warning for this chapter (click this text to reveal):
Discussions of the CCT virus and how it affected Penny, suicidal ideation, discussion of loss of autonomy, discussion of mental illness.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Even with the reports of an increased presence, Ruby hadn’t expected the Grimm to be this active in Mountain Glenn. It was as if Team BSYP’s presence had agitated them. But she mowed them down all the same, and several hours after her deployment began, one final Beowolf dissolved into nothingness on the point of Lunar Enforcer, and a merciful silence finally fell on the streets of Mountain Glenn.
“That’s the last of them?” Blake said. “Penny, is your radar picking up anything?”
“All clear!”
“Good.” Blake let out a tired groan and rolled her neck around, cracking the joints loudly. “Okay. Finally, finally, we can set up camp for the night. Double watches, though—I’m expecting something to happen.”
Ruby twirled Lunar Enforcer around a few times, transforming it back and forth—her post-fight check, making sure nothing in the mechashift workings had been damaged. A few scratches on the blade which she’d need to sharpen, but aside from that, everything was A-OK. She’d just holstered her weapon when Doctor Oompah drew up alongside her.
“Miss Karyatis, would you like to lend me a hand with securing the perimeter?”
“Um.” Ruby paused, wondering if this was a trick somehow. Doctor Oogonium was the one who kept asking everyone questions, after all. This seemed like a great tactic to get her away from the rest of the group and get some answers.
Winter must’ve thought the same thing, because she appeared at Ruby’s side almost instantaneously and said, “I can secure the perimeter myself.”
Oology frowned, just a little bit. “Lieutenant Schnee, if I didn’t know better, I’d say that you were trying to shield your ward from the possibility of being asked questions.”
That one muscle in Winter’s neck—Ruby called it the ‘stressed out muscle’—was getting tense again. “Doctor Oobleck—”
Oh, right, that was his name. “Ma’am, it’s okay,” Ruby interrupted, deciding she should go along with this before Oobleck got more suspicious about her secret backstory. “I am, uh, totally fine with being questioned! Since I have nothing at all to hide in any way, shape, form, or taste!”
Winter’s eyes flicked to Ruby, and, oh dear, she was pulling off the Glare. The look which meant Ruby would be getting several demerits when they got back to headquarters. However, after several seconds of silently communicating her displeasure, she nodded. “Very well.”
“Woo!” Ruby pumped her fist and turned to Oobleck, trying not to look guilty or like she had anything to hide or like she was secretly a world-breaking superpowered soldier girl. She couldn’t let her secret get out, not when she was so close to becoming a real Huntress! “So, yeah! The perimeter! Let’s go secure it! In a perfectly normal way! Because I am a normal girl with—” She stopped herself just before she would’ve said normal eyes, remembering that was the best way to call attention to her eyes, and substituted another body part at random. “—with normal knees!”
Oobleck was facing Ruby and not Winter, so fortunately he didn’t see Winter burying her face in her palm. And really, Ruby thought Winter doing that was way more suspicious than anything she’d said to Oobleck so far.
Penny watched silently as Yang arranged the kindling for their campfire before smacking her gauntlets together, sending a shower of sparks down onto the mound of dry pine needles and twigs. The fire ignited immediately.
“Alright. And now we’ll be comfy-cozy for the rest of the night.” She set down a block of processed Fire Dust—no heavy wooden logs needed—atop the kindling and dropped down onto her sleeping bag, letting out a deep sigh as she warmed her hands over the fire.
Coziness was an interesting property for Penny. She did not need comfort, due to being able to turn off her touch sensors to avoid unkind sensations, but she liked soft things. It was why she’d packed a sleeping bag despite not needing any of the protection from the elements which it was intended to offer. She just liked being wrapped up and snuggly. Likewise, she generated enough heat that a fire was unnecessary for her, but she loved being next to a fire all the same. It was just so entrancing to watch the flames, to watch Dust being converted to heat and light and various waste gasses, the way the light danced and undulated and was never the same shape for more than a millisecond.
She propped her chin up on her hands, lying on her stomach inside her sleeping bag, and watched the flames, sharing the fire with the rest of her team as they busied themselves bunking down for the night.
Oobleck and Ruby were securing the perimeter, and Winter was covertly tailing those two, so for now, it was just Team BSYP around the fire. It was peaceful. It was the most peace Penny had felt since… since the CCT incident.
Oh, no. Now she was thinking about it again. And this moment was no longer peaceful. And this wasn’t the sort of thought process she could easily stop, because it had so many processing impulses that trying to end-stop them all would take up just as much processing as letting the thoughts run their course, however long that took. So now she’d ruined a peaceful night because she couldn’t stop thinking about something stupid—
“Penny?”
As soon as Penny heard Yang’s voice, she knew she’d drawn in on herself without intending to, plainly communicating her emotional distress to her teammates when that was the exact opposite of what she wanted to do.
She extracted her head from the sleeping bag, which she had almost entirely buried herself in, and said,“I am fine.”
Hic.
“Why?” Penny murmured quietly to her own body, to the ever-enigmatic hiccup reflex. She felt genuinely insulted by it right now.
And now her teammates were emphatically staring at her.
“Well, I wasn’t even going to ask, but now I have to,” Yang said, shuffling herself around in her sleeping bag like a caterpillar to face Penny. “So. What’s eating you?”
Penny stared at Yang. That was clearly an idiom of some sort… and being eaten seemed like a very disagreeable thing… so Yang was most likely asking what was disagreeable to Penny right now.
“A large quantity of things,” she said. Perhaps if she was evasive enough, her teammates would lose interest and go to sleep.
Unfortunately, that had the opposite effect, as her teammates only seemed to grow more alert, their heart rates moving further away from resting.
“I know you don’t hiccup whenever you lie,” Weiss said slowly. “We’ve seen factual proof of that. Penny, please forgive me if what I’m about to say is wrong, but… it seems like you hiccup whenever you’re not okay and trying to hide that you’re not okay.”
Penny dove into her memory and reviewed every instance of her hiccup in recent months, and… Oh. That hypothesis fit the existing evidence extremely well. How had she not noticed this until now? There was one very easy way to test it, too.
“My sword is not sharp,” she lied.
No hiccup.
Now, to Weiss, she spoke a different lie, one which part of her hoped would not trigger the reflex— “I do not hiccup when I am trying to hide that I am not okay.”
Hic.
Oh.
Penny let her head drop, staring down at the checkered pattern of her sleeping bag. She did not want to see the expressions on her teammates’ faces right now. Pity? Disappointment? Fear?
“At least I know now,” she said, more to herself than to her teammates. “There is a part of me that I have no control over. I hope it is not a sign of things to come.”
“It seems like a nice part?” Yang said. “I mean, totally valid if it’s still scary, but at least it’s making sure you’re okay?”
“Yes. But what if I want to be able to hide my pain from others?! Will I just never be able to make that choice?”
“Penny,” Yang and Blake and Weiss said at the same time.
“But I don’t want to be a distraction, or a bother…” Penny looked around at their crumbling surroundings, idly logging the presence of pitted concrete and rusting beams. “I am being a distraction for this mission at this moment. We should be falling asleep right now, not sitting up and talking about my own personal issues.”
“You say things like that, and then we’re gonna stay up even harder to help you,” Yang said. “We’re a team, Penny. We help each other out with everyone’s problems.” She cast a sideways glance at Weiss. “Even when people don’t want that help.”
Weiss glared at Yang, but said nothing.
“I suppose I can understand that,” Penny said. “But this is a synthetic-mechanical people problem, and I do not think organic people can help me with it.”
Her teammates exchanged looks, the shadows of the fire flickering on their faces—a bit of visual noise which made it harder for Penny to parse and decipher their expressions.
“You’re talking about the virus?” Blake said, part question and part answer at the same time in that way she sometimes did.
Penny nodded, staring into the fire. Every few seconds, a flame would briefly match the color of her hair. She had an internal program set to alert her whenever she saw something which matched her hair color, because it was fun to notice such things. At this moment, though, it felt more tiresome than anything else. She disabled the program, and then wondered if someday that would become another program she would have no choice in enabling or disabling.
“What if… there comes a time when there is a part of me that I cannot control which is not nice?” she said finally. “I know that I defeated one virus, but… what if there is another one? One which I cannot defeat? What if it becomes a part of me which I cannot remove, which tries to make me do awful things?”
She had no answers for those kinds of questions. Logically, she knew that it was very unlikely, but it was not impossible. And that possibility, however small, meant there was something for Penny’s fear to latch onto.
Blake let out a long, slow sigh, a sigh that almost seemed as if it went on for longer than there was sufficient air in her lungs. “There’s two ways I can answer that. One is by sidestepping the fear, which is easier. The other way is by confronting the fear, and accepting it. Harder, but worth it.” She met Penny’s eyes. “Which one do you want?”
Penny’s emotions said, sidestep.
Penny’s logic said, confront and accept.
But how could she confront something so terrifying? What did it even mean to accept a fear? Did that mean surrendering? Was Blake going to tell her to just give up?
Penny’s logic core asked if she was aware of how utterly ridiculous it was to think that Blake Belladonna might suggest giving up. Every single thing which Penny Pallas knew about Blake Belladonna flew in the face of the idea that Blake would tell her to give up.
But then what would Blake tell me to accept? Penny wondered—the obvious reply.
With a very gentle yet firm stream of code sent across Penny’s consciousness, her logic core told her that there was only one way to find out.
Penny nodded and extricated herself from her sleeping bag, working herself up into a cross-legged position. She tensioned and then relaxed every servo in her body—a stress release tactic she’d been taught—and looked up at Blake. “I would like to confront the fear, and accept it.”
“Good choice,” Blake said. She picked up a twig at her side and tossed it into the fire. “So, consider the worst-case scenario, Penny. A virus gets into you again. It actually manages to take control of you. It’s making you do things you don’t want to do. What happens next?”
“I…” The first answer which came to Penny’s mind was—
“I don’t know if you will like my answer,” she said, suddenly scared of an entirely new thing—what they would think of her next choice.
“No judgment,” Blake said. “None. We’re only talking in hypotheticals.” And Yang and Weiss nodded their assent immediately.
Penny nodded. “In a worst-case scenario…” It was perhaps incredible how readily she believed Blake’s statement of no judgment, but she knew her teammates. She knew that if nothing she’d revealed about herself so far could make her teammates judge her poorly, then this conversation would not be a breaking point. “...I would kill myself.”
Silence. Her teammates’ heart rates all spiked internally, but none of them seemed particularly outwardly surprised. Just… sad.
“If I could not stop myself from doing bad things, I would not deserve to live,” Penny said. But then, just as quickly, it occurred to her that maybe this theoretical virus wouldn’t even let her do that. Maybe she would be a genuinely helpless prisoner in her own body, unable to even end her suffering. So, then what? The only other option would be…
“If I could not even do that, then I would try to fight it,” she went on. “Even if I was never successful, I would never stop fighting to take back control. How could I call myself a Huntress if I just… gave up?”
“Exactly,” Blake said, with the satisfied sound one of their professors might make when a student gave the hoped-for answer. “And how could we call ourselves Huntresses if we just gave up, Penny?”
Penny blinked. “I do not understand.” Was Blake implying that the rest of the team was being controlled as well in this scenario?
“We’d help you, Penny. No matter how violently any virus could attack us, no matter how intent it would be on killing us or other people… we would help you. All of us.”
Even though those sentences were entirely parseable, Penny was still struggling to process their meaning. “...You would?”
Yang spoke up. “Not just the team, and not just your friends… all of us. If someone was trying to steal someone else’s body, do you think any Huntress would just sit idly by and let it happen? No, there would be so many people who would try to help you Penny—help you try to break free, help you regain control of yourself. And we wouldn’t stop fighting for you, no matter how bad the situation might be. I promise.”
Unbidden, the memory of Ruby refusing to leave Penny’s side in the CCT sprung into her conscious thought—the memory of Ruby’s arms firmly around her, ignoring all of Penny’s desperate pleas to leave. And in the end, Ruby had made a difference, even if unwittingly, by reminding Penny that her soul was unconquerable which made Penny remember her Aura, and then her Semblance.
…So perhaps it was possible that other people could help her. But—
“But what if I am being made to do bad things?” she said. “Stopping that should take priority over helping me.”
“We can do both.”
“But then… but then…” Penny looked down at her hands, clenching them into fists in her lap. “It will still be my hands which have done bad things. And then… you might not want to be my teammates after that, which I would understand—”
Yang crossed her arms. “I’m a little hurt that you think we would be so mean to you.”
Penny stopped abruptly, Yang’s words crashing into her processors with all the rhetorical force of a battering ram.
Oh.
She needed no clarification on that. And Yang, nodding with a grim smile, knew that as well. Still, Penny’s fears were far from fully confronted.
“It still feels shameful. It still feels wrong,” she said. “It still feels like… It feels like it makes me broken.” Broken in a way that no amount of time in her workshop could fix. Broken in a way that no tool would ever be able to repair.
“Mm. Broken. Strange word, isn’t that?” Yang said. “I think we’re all a little broken here.” She raised her prosthetic arm. “Some more literally than others.”
“Broken and reassembled, broken and reassembled, and again and again,” Blake said quietly.
“Not broken; inherently flawed," Weiss muttered.
Penny interrupted her episode of distress to give Weiss a concerned look. Blake and Yang did similarly.
Weiss did not meet any of their eyes. “Worry about me later.”
“I’m not forgetting that,” Yang said before turning back to Penny. “So. Penny. I’m gonna make an analogy. It’s not perfect. But it’s something. I can’t believe I didn’t think of it yesterday.” She leaned forward, tilting her head in just the right way for her eyes to reflect the flames of the campfire. “There was a time in my life where I felt like I was losing control of my body. It felt like something in my brain was making me do things which I knew made no sense, and yet, I couldn’t stop myself from doing them. It sure felt like I was being hacked and controlled by something I didn’t know how to fight. And, if I’m being completely honest, it’s something which could still come back.”
Penny was now completely without an idea of what Yang might be referring to. Her prediction algorithms’ only suggestions were incredibly unhelpful, such as suggesting that maybe Yang was about to relate a story in which her prosthetic arm was hacked. Which was just… incorrect.
Well, her prediction algorithms didn’t try to be right. They just tried to generate possible scenarios to anticipate. That was an important distinction.
“What would you say to that?” Yang said before her prediction algorithms could generate any more scenarios.
“I would say that I do not have sufficient information to respond yet…” Penny trailed off, realizing that this was a leading question, and quickly added, “But with the limited context that you have given, it does sound oddly familiar to the things that I am afraid of.” She was very curious about the rest of the context.
Yang smiled. “Right. So… I’m talking about mental illness. It happened to me when I was a kid, and it was brain-meltingly intense.”
Weiss nodded slowly, and Blake made a sympathetic noise, while Penny was still unsure of the conversation’s direction. She was obviously familiar with the term mental illness, but beyond that, it was an issue she’d never devoted much thought to before.
“I don’t really know when it started,” Yang said, her voice turning so quiet that it was in danger of being drowned out by the crackling of the flames. “All I know is… sometime after my mom died and after my other mom left and after I lost my sibling and after my uncle went alcoholic and after my dad got major depression and after I lost an arm… sometime after all that, I started believing everything bad that’d ever happened to me and my family was entirely my fault.”
If Penny’s logic core had direct access to her vocal systems, she would’ve voiced forty-seven separate objections to that. Instead, she kept her hands folded together and kept listening quietly.
“And that turned my life into an endless conveyor belt of trying to make sure I thought the right things and did the right things and said the right things and lived the right way so that I wouldn’t cause the death of the last bits of family I still had,” Yang said, playing with a strand of hair between her fingers. “At first it was just… trying not to think about the family I’d lost, because I decided thinking about death too much would spread more death. But then I started thinking if I touched my dad or my uncle, that’d mean I’d marked them for death, so then I couldn’t let myself touch them, and whenever I did make contact with them, I had to go touch something else that was alive because then that would cancel out the death mark I’d given them, and sometimes it was a problem if I was indoors, because it didn’t matter what I was doing, if I touched Dad or Uncle Qrow, I had to run outside and find a plant to touch so they wouldn’t die.” She paused there, and raised an eyebrow in a joking manner. “This, of course, caused some problems whenever my dad tried to give me goodnight kisses. I think that was when he started noticing something wrong.”
From somewhere off in the distance, a howl pierced the air. Thankfully, Penny identified it as not a Grimm, but a common wolf.
“And then I started thinking that if I touched something my dad or uncle might touch later, I could transmit death to them that way,” Yang went on. “So I had to make sure I wasn’t thinking about death when I touched something, and if I was, then I had to touch it again in the exact same way while thinking about not dying, and at first that was just for things I touched with my hands, and then it was for wherever I walked, so that was when I started retracing my steps to make sure that the Safe Thoughts followed me wherever I went, which meant it always took twice as long for me to walk anywhere.” She shrugged. “By now, Dad and Uncle Qrow had figured out what was going on, and they were trying to help me, but they just made me more scared because I thought the Bad Thoughts would kill them for the crime of trying to help me fight them, and that was when I ran away from home.”
Penny had not even known this was something which could happen to humans or Faunus. She was at a total loss for words. Organics obviously did not have a logic core, but it was as if… as if an illogic core, something anti-logic, had been installed in Yang.
“Not into the woods,” Yang said with a wry smile. “I’d learned that lesson already, with my prosthetic for a permanent reminder. I went to the aerodrome and snuck onto a ship headed for Vale. I had no plan, just knew I had to get away from my family before I hurt them. Didn’t work, of course—I got found halfway through the flight, they turned around, and Dad and Uncle Qrow were waiting for me when we landed. Dad tried something new after that. He knew by now I was afraid my touch would kill him, so as soon as we were back in our house, he just… picked me up, and hugged me close to him, and didn’t let go no matter what I did—I was a strong kid, but I was still no match for a full-grown Huntsman. I sure tried to make him let go, though. I punched and kicked and bit and clawed and thrashed, and I tried calling him the meanest things I could think of, and I screamed that he was gonna die until I lost my voice, and Dad still didn’t let go of me. I fell asleep that way, and when I woke up, he was still holding me.”
Yang reached into her rucksack and pulled out a protein bar, unwrapping it and biting off half the bar in one motion. It took her a long time to chew through that, a pause in which neither Weiss nor Penny nor Blake said anything.
Finally, she set aside the half-eaten bar. “And then Dad and Uncle Qrow actually took turns, so while one person was holding me the other could go take a shower or eat or sleep or do whatever he needed to do. And of course whenever they switched, that was the hardest I fought, because the only thing worse than me touching one of them was me touching both of them. I tried my best to make them hate me, too—thought if I made them stop caring about me I could run away again and they wouldn’t die. Didn’t work. And they let me miss school, and I have no idea how long they would’ve gone on doing that, but after a week I started noticing my dad and my uncle weren’t dead yet even though I’d been infecting them with my death-touch for a week, and that finally broke the vicious cycle.”
Yang settled back, shrugged, and picked up her protein bar again, taking another bite and then speaking around the mouthful. “So. Yeah. I got better after that, and it wasn’t easy, but that’s the story of how my brain got hijacked when I was a kid.”
“I am so sorry that you went through that,” Penny said after an appropriately respectful pause.
Yang shrugged once more, but smiled at Penny nonetheless, saying nothing.
“Yang,” Blake said. “Did you feel as if you had to hide that experience from us?”
Yang shrugged. “Not really? It was more that it’s so old and buried, I didn’t want to make you all worry over absolutely nothing. It would’ve just been a needless bother.”
Blake nodded slowly, pursing her lips. “You did say it could theoretically flare up again, though…”
“Well, yeah, but I’d wait to say something until it was becoming an actual problem.”
“How do we help make sure it doesn’t become a problem again?”
“Oh, easy. You’re already doing it by being my friends.” Yang tapped the side of her head. “That’s my first line of defense. If I’m helping people, contributing to their lives in a positive way, being the best friend and daughter and Huntress that I can be… That’s irrefutable proof to my brain that I’m not a mortal threat to everyone around me. So. If I ever start going quiet, if I ever start retreating into myself and shying away from touches and not even going near other people… That’s the alarm bells. If I’m not always trying to make other peoples’ lives better or help them or just be a good presence somehow, then something’s wrong.”
Blake nodded, and so did Penny, who immediately filed that information away as a Yang-integral memory.
“Anyways! Penny. There was a reason why I just said all that. I was a smart kid, I knew none of my fears was how things actually worked. But I couldn’t stop myself. It was just… too much to overcome. Even when it was obviously ruining my life. Every time I tried to fight it, tried to go back to normal, it was like something took over me and made me keep doing the thing. Sometimes I’d have a breakdown while doing the things which were supposed to make me feel better. It was like something had hacked into my brain and was injecting thoughts about how I was gonna cause the death of everyone I loved. I was nine years old, and it felt like I’d lost control of myself to some invisible thing in my head which never stopped making me worry about death.”
She stopped, giving Penny a very significant look, and after a few moments Penny realized Yang was expecting a reply. And she could provide a reply.
“It… it sounds almost exactly like what I am afraid of.”
“Bingo.” Yang tossed the protein bar’s paper wrapper into the fireplace, and the flames briefly flared up as they consumed the waxen paper—a very efficient fuel for a flame. “Maybe an organic person with reality-obliterating mental illness isn’t so different from a synthetic person with a virus. They can both take away all the control you’ve got over yourself. And sometimes they can make you do really bad things that you wouldn’t otherwise do. And sometimes you can’t fight them, or don’t know how to.”
Penny’s logic core was adoring this conversation. And oddly enough, it also felt good emotionally. It was the first time in days that her emotions and her logic had been in agreement about something.
“And do you know what we do with people who have mental illness, big or small, just irritating or all-out brain-melting?” Yang leaned forward, her eyes shining with resolve, and spoke in one of the most intense voices Penny had ever heard. “We help them. Even if it’s not easy.”
When she said it like that, it felt so simple. It felt like something Penny could believe for herself.
“My dad and my uncle didn’t stop trying to help me, no matter how bad I got. Even when I was in their arms and I was trying my absolute best to hurt them so I could get away from them—they didn’t stop trying to help me. They knew I was struggling. They didn’t hate me for the horrible things I was telling them, or how immensely exhausted they must’ve been after it all. They knew the problem was just one part of me, just a misfiring connection somewhere in my brain, instead of the problem being all of me. And that’s how it should be for everyone who goes through something like that, no matter how ‘bad’ they might get. And that includes you, Penny.”
Penny had predicted that Yang was leading towards this conclusion. However, even so, it still felt surprising to hear her actually saying it.
“Instead of a chemical imbalance or a misfiring neuron or stress or just the weather or whatever, it would be… a rogue line of code, I guess? But it’s the same thing! Even if you were a risk to others because of something out of your control, that wouldn’t make you any less of a person, and wouldn’t make you any less deserving of help and kindness and understanding. And it wouldn’t make us any less eager to help you. So, Penny…”
Now Yang actually stood up and walked around the campfire, and knelt down next to Penny, putting a hand on her shoulder. “We can’t guarantee that you won’t get hacked again. But we can guarantee that if it does happen, we’ll never stop trying to help you and rescue you, no matter what happens.”
“Seconded,” Blake said, the instant that the final word was out of Yang’s mouth.
“Thirded,” Weiss added after Blake, with no less urgency.
“Oh…” Penny’s language processor froze up for undiagnosable reasons, leaving her with the impression that if she tried to say anything else, all she would do was make a series of loud gasping sounds.
“And fourthed!”
Ruby dropped down from above, landing between Penny and Blake, but by now Team BSYP had become so used to Ruby’s dramatic entrances from above that there was barely any reaction.
In a crouch, she turned to face Penny, raising her goggles. “Sorry for listening in, but all I heard was the last few things, about promising to help you if you’re hacked. And I promise, too! I can beat you in a fight, so I’ll use that power to help you, no matter what happens. I can defeat anything, and that includes a stupid virus that I bet probably couldn’t even make you fight good! I’ll protect you! I promise with my heart and soul—swear on my eyes!”
Then she pulled her goggles back down and jumped to her feet. “Okay, I gotta go now—I just came in to tell everyone that me and Oobleck finished checking the perimeter, and we’re all set. Lieutenant Schnee and I have the first watch—we’re the freshest of everyone, so you all get some rest! We’ll keep you safe! Bye!”
And with that, she was gone, the silver dust she always shed glittering madly in the light of the fire.
Penny was feeling an immense amount of disbelief. “Everything is less scary now.” She had looked right at the fear of a virus, and acknowledged that it could happen to her again, and then… it was less scary now. It felt less unknown. It was incredible. “How is that possible?”
“That’s what I mean by confronting and accepting the fear,” Blake said.
Penny nodded slowly as Yang buried her in a hug. “I… I understand now.”
She could live with this vulnerability, live with knowing that it was present within her. Just like Yang could live with the illness that had once happened to her, and could live with the knowledge that it might happen again.
And then, if she could live with it, then, maybe, just maybe…?
“There is another fear I have,” she said slowly. “It is related, but smaller, and yet also deeply worrisome to me.”
“Shoot,” Yang said immediately. She chose that moment to return to her own sleeping bag, but Penny felt no loss of connection. Her team was still here, with her, around the fire, with Ruby watching guard for them.
Ruby…
She looked off in the direction Ruby had gone, and a detailed scan of her radar assured her Ruby was far away enough that she wouldn’t overhear this. And then she took a deep breath.
“Would it be ethical of me to enter a romance, while having this vulnerability? Hypothetically, would I be hypothetically putting the hypothetical person in a hypothetical romance in hypothetical danger?”
“Okay,” Yang said. “There’s a lot to unpack there, but… we gotta start with—Penny, you said romance?”
Penny thought it was thoroughly strange that this was what arrested Yang the most about that question. “Yes.”
She thought of what she felt for Ruby, and the now-familiar flood of powerful warmth swept through her body again, and as it rushed through her circuits, it seemed to wash away some of her too-tight anxieties and fears like she was being gently hosed down from the inside out. “I… I desire to be more than friends with Ruby.”
Belatedly, she realized this was the first time she had admitted this audibly, and fought down a bizarre surge of embarrassment which got as far as physically moving a hand to cover her mouth before she belayed that movement.
Yang’s hand also went to her mouth—both of her hands, actually—but much more slowly than Penny’s reflexive reaction, and only the tips of Yang’s fingers were covering a still-visible smile which was… eighty percent pride? Penny did not understand that reaction. Blake, meanwhile, held a more understandable mixture of curiosity and happiness, while Weiss… Her expression was pinched so tightly that she looked as if she was in physical pain.
From her memory banks, Penny pulled up the image of Weiss on her knees with the summoned knight standing guard over them, screaming hopelessly after repudiating Pyrrha seemingly against her will. Penny decided that she would understand if Weiss was not an active participant in this part of the conversation.
Regardless, it seemed that her teammates were waiting for her to say more. So she did.
“So much more than friends. Whenever I think about her, I… I want…” Penny placed a hand on her chest, feeling the constant thrum of her Aura generator beneath her fingers. Even through the armor plating which was thicker than anywhere else on her body, she could feel it easily. Her mechanical soul always pulsed with a powerful energy even at the most unremarkable of times, but now, thinking of Ruby, her Aura generator—her soul—was positively vibrating, sending a resonance up and down her body which felt so very pleasant.
“I want to be in her presence without pause. I want to write and rewrite her face into my memory no matter how many times I have done it before, and…” It occurred to Penny that she could, in theory, erase her visual and spatial memory of Ruby’s face just for the exquisite experience of writing it into her memory as an entirely new thing all over again. But that would be incredibly reckless treatment of her memory. Why was she even considering that? “...I want to protect her with all my heart and soul. I want to hold her in my arms and shield her from the world, and I want to feel her against me, and I want to listen to her talking about anything and everything for as long as she’d like, and I want to fight Grimm alongside her, and I want to paint big and beautiful paintings with her, and I want to take her flying over and over again, and I want… I want…”
Once again, an abstracted image of kissing rose up in Penny’s mind. What would it feel like? What would it feel like with Ruby? What would… what would anything that brought them closer feel like? How would it feel to form a physical connection between her and Ruby that was special and unique and unlike anything else in the world, full of earnest adoration and devotion and a promise to stay together no matter what? How deep could these feelings go, for both of them?
Even if she could not say for sure, it seemed like it would be the most marvelous experience in all of Penny’s life, and she so badly wanted to find the answers to these questions.
Her Aura generator, still embedded deep beneath the armor of her chest, pulsed with oscillations of energy more powerfully than ever before, so much so that Penny instinctively placed her other hand over her chest in the same spot as the first hand, as if she actually needed to keep her soul from dancing out of her own body.
“I… I want her,” she finished.
Yang let out a sound which was long and slow and quiet, an awwwwww that was nearly an exhalation of breath. Blake continued to smile warmly at Penny in a way that completely erased any latent embarrassment she might be feeling from confessing all this to her teammates. Weiss had gone entirely blank, staring at a point somewhere between Penny and Yang without a twitch of reaction.
“I think you should tell her everything you just said,” Yang said, her voice as gentle as the coo of a bird. “If she somehow isn’t already in love with you, she’ll fall head over heels as soon as she hears that.”
“I—” Penny’s thought process came to a stuttering halt as something from Yang’s words jumped out at her.
“Isn’t already?!” Was Yang implying that she knew for sure that Ruby felt the same way?!
“Uh. Yeah.” Yang raised an eyebrow. “Penny. Sweetie. Are you telling me you don’t think Ruby’s got an Atlas-sized crush on you? Have you seen how she looks at you?”
This was a thread of thought which could clearly go on for sometime, but this mattered far less than the question still churning inside Penny’s processors. “Well, fair, I can easily accept that, but if she does also have romantic feelings for me, then the question I am wondering becomes even more important to ask. Ruby’s safety is at stake. I do not want to hurt her.” The pulsing in her Aura generator slowed, and Penny let her hands drop back to her side. She traced a finger through the dirt beside her sleeping bag, and tried not to feel too ashamed about the subject of this question. “Would it be… ethical to enter a relationship with Ruby while being fully aware of this vulnerability within me?”
Her teammates exchanged looks. Well, Blake and Yang did. Weiss had sunk fully into her sleeping bag by now, her face buried in the cloth and not looking at anybody or anything.
“Knowing Yang struggled in the way she did doesn’t make me any less interested in dating her,” Blake said.
“Yeah!” Yang said, nodding emphatically.
Blake gave Yang a half-smile before focusing on Penny again, all seriousness. “Penny. Do you understand what I mean, though? You aren’t obligated to hold yourself back from any kind of connection because of something like that.”
“But you are… you are not a top-secret supersoldier,” Penny said to Blake. “Ruby has said multiple times that there are people who would want her dead if they knew she existed. I can be hacked. What if a bad person tries to use me as a means of hurting Ruby? And if Ruby and I were dating, then she would likely not anticipate an attack coming from me. Would it be wrong of me to potentially endanger her that way?”
Her teammates were silent, which Penny took as confirmation of her worst fears. They were going to say she was right, that she couldn’t ever go near Ruby ever again—
“You wanna sidestep that fear, or you wanna do the confront-and-accept thing again?” Yang said.
Penny’s reply came so fast it nearly glitched out her vocal system. “Confront-and-accept.”
“Anyone who dates Ruby would automatically be an attack vector for whoever wants to hurt her. It’s not just a You thing,” Blake said. “So… the question becomes, is it okay for anyone to date Ruby? And, judging from the look on your face right now, Penny, you think people should be allowed to date Ruby, as any reasonable person would. So you have to include yourself in that.”
“Also, Penny? Speaking from experience when I say… You can’t let your fear of something which may or may not come to pass stop you from trying to live. You’re thinking, ‘what if the bad thing happens?’ But have you considered, what if the bad thing doesn’t happen? What if the good thing happens? Well, then, you’re dating the most adorable girlfriend on all of Remnant, and you can spend the rest of your lives making puppy dog eyes at each other and building incredible technologies. Maybe that’s worth a little risk, hey.”
Penny’s prediction algorithms spun up in response to Yang’s suggestion, generating a flood of new possibilities. She’d spent so much time concentrating on only the worst-case scenarios, and now, allowing herself to consider good scenarios… it almost made her feel as if her gyroscopes were malfunctioning and she might lose the ability to stay upright. Being happy with Ruby… with with Ruby, holding hands and knowing exactly what that contact meant, doing Ordinary Teenage Girl Romance Things such as going on dates and, and… kissing, and, just… just… !!!!!!!!!!!!
That was not an exaggeration. Her textual memory for this current moment was literally filling up with nothing but blocks of exclamation marks.
Kissing. She did not understand the actual mechanics of what made that so pleasing to envision, but she was constructing a three-dimensional model inside her thoughtstream of her and Ruby kissing, and it was creating the strangest and most delightful feeling of being about to combust from head to toe.
Her cooling systems had never worked so hard.
“Something tells me you’re imagining the good things,” Blake said. “My mom used to say, doing something while scared is the first step to doing it while not scared.”
“Yup. Doing it scared.” Yang tossed a pebble at Weiss’s sleeping bag; it bounced off the Weiss-shaped mound buried inside the bedding. “Weiss, are you listening to this?”
“Shut up,” came Weiss’s muffled voice from inside the sleeping bag, with no other reaction.
Good things. Good things. Why had no one ever told Penny how fun it was to concentrate on the good scenarios instead of the bad ones? Her prediction algorithms always held a bias towards the bad scenarios, because in combat it was smart to plan for the worst-case scenarios. But in the rest of life… she was just now realizing that would be equivalent to assuming the worst in everyone she interacted with. And it felt so much nicer to think about the world in ways that it could potentially be nice.
She made a mental note to reshuffle her prediction algorithms in light of this new insight. This changed everything!
Right. One last question, then. And then… maybe, maybe, maybe…
“Do you think a relationship will… work?” Penny looked down at her hands again. This was the smallest concern yet, and perhaps a more startlingly normal one than her other concerns. “I… There are certain things about myself which I cannot… provide, in a relationship. Physical things.”
“What do—ooooooooooh,” Yang said, a full gamut of emotions rushing through her face in a matter of seconds. “Right.”
If Penny had a blush functionality, she would be at maximum blush right now, she was sure of it. As it was, she had to settle for her fans being extremely loud.
“Well, first of all, sex is not a requirement for a relationship,” Blake said. “Don’t ever feel bad for not being able to provide that, Penny. If someone did try to make you feel bad, then that’s someone you definitely wouldn’t want to date.”
“That makes sense,” Penny said.
“But really, Ruby doesn’t strike me as the sort of girl who would ever treat that like a dealbreaker in a relationship. So… I wouldn’t worry. At all,” Blake said. “Especially with… the no sense of touch? I don’t know how that works, but maybe it doesn’t matter for her.”
“Also, Penny…” Yang shrugged. “I mean, being brutally honest here, if it was something both you and Ruby wanted, I genuinely believe the two of you could figure out how to, uh. Build you a solution to that.”
Penny squeaked. Loudly. It seemed inappropriate to think too deeply about that when she was not yet in a relationship with Ruby, but… well, Yang had a point, at the very least.
And… that was it. All her questions had been answered to her satisfaction. All of her anxieties were… they weren’t gone, but she’d made her peace with them. The thought of being in a relationship with Ruby no longer filled her with fear of hurting Ruby. Instead, it filled her with thoughts of… thoughts of !!!!!!!!!!! and !!!!!!!!!! and she was discovering that it really was possible to have a feeling which just registered in her emotional processing as an exclamation mark.
“...What do I do now?” she said. It was not a scary question. It was a hopeful question. With endless possibilities. Anything could happen next, and that was a good thing!
“I mean. Why not tell her right now?” Yang jerked her head in the direction Ruby had gone. “She’s just sitting out there. Alone in the night. Waiting for something to happen. Maybe you’re going to happen!”
Penny looked around at the crumbling ruins which surrounded them, stretching far into the distance, great skeletons of steel and concrete like an enormous graveyard. “This… does not feel like the proper place to confess my feelings.”
She was having a difficult time explaining why, but… she wanted her surroundings to be aesthetically pleasing when she told Ruby, or at least surroundings which made her happy. This place, nothing but a forgotten monument to failure and tragedy, only made her sad. The setting was very important, after all! If things went well, then it would be one of the most important memories of Penny’s life, and she wanted such a high-value memory to be in a pretty setting.
…What if she brought Ruby to their secret garden hideout at Beacon, and told her there? Yes. Yes. That was perfect. It was exactly what she would do. It would be pretty, and peaceful, and there would be nothing around that could possibly disturb them! It would mean waiting several more days, but the day Penny would tell Ruby was a day she was happy to wait for!
Yang grinned as she settled down into her bag once more. “I never took you for a hopeless romantic.”
“Why would I be hopeless?” Penny said, tilting her head. “On the contrary, I think this may be the most hope I have ever had in my entire life.” And then, belatedly— “Oh. That was an idiom?”
“It was, but y’know what, Penny? What you said, that works too.” Yang pulled the sleeping bag up to her neck and let out a monstrous yawn before finishing her thought. “You’re a hopeful romantic.”
Notes:
I did not put an exact label on Yang's mental illness within the story because it didn't feel right for the moment, but I want to say that my writing there had a very specific intent and experience in mind.
Chapter 43: Pieces Of The Puzzle
Notes:
I need to issue a correction on an error that occurred in Chapter 38, which I only noticed after it was pointed out to me by a helpful commenter (thanks DiscovAres!). In chapter 38, Ilia mentioned Vacuo having a 99.7 percent Faunus population. That was a typo; Ilia was supposed to say that Menagerie had a 99.7 percent Faunus population. Vacuo has the same demographics as canon lol. I have now fixed the offending sentence.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Earlier
“Miss Karyatis, why did you choose to become a Huntress?”
Ruby stopped mid-step, met Oobleck’s very serious gaze, and wondered if this was a trap of some sort.
“Fret not, I am not singling you out. You are one student amongst a great many that I’ve asked this question of. As unexpected a member of this mission as you may be, you are still a Huntress-in-training, which means that you are a fair mark for my questions!”
“Right.” Ruby knew Lieutenant Schnee was following behind undetected, making sure no more state secrets would be revealed tonight, and also making sure Oobleck didn’t have any ulterior motives for separating Ruby from the rest of the group. Asking her why she became a Huntress seemed kind of like an ulterior motive, but if Oobleck really was telling the truth about this being a question he asked everyone, then… It was probably a harmless ulterior motive, and Ruby didn’t see anything wrong with answering.
“It wasn’t a choice for me!” she said brightly as they entered a deserted square which marked the northwest corner of their perimeter.
Oobleck stared at her as she swept the twin barrels of Lunar Enforcer back and forth across the square, clearing the area. Either he really liked her answer, or he really didn’t like it—that was usually what that kind of dead silence after she said something meant.
“Come again?” he said finally, in a voice which sounded really weird compared to his usual mile-a-minute tone.
There was a trick Ruby had learned this semester, just from spending time around Team BSYP: ninety-nine percent of the time, when someone asked her to repeat herself, what they actually meant was they wanted her to say more about the thing she’d just said. Ruby didn’t know why people couldn’t just outright ask her to say more; that seemed a lot simpler and easier for everyone involved! The rules of conversation were stupid sometimes.
“I’ve been getting ready to be a Huntress for as long as I can remember,” she said. “It’s my purpose. My calling. My destiny.”
She was facing Oobleck, and so over his shoulder she saw something he couldn’t: Lieutenant Schnee skulking through the upper floor of a two-story building across the street, her gaze firmly locked onto Ruby and Oobleck. Ruby did her best not to act like she’d noticed anything different. “It’s just… it’s what I am. It’s like asking if I chose to be a human. I just am a Huntress. If I’m not a Huntress, then I’m dead.”
Oobleck looked bothered by something, but she had no idea what was wrong with her reply. It was good that she was so dedicated. There was no chance she’d ever turn traitor or give up.
With the square cleared, they kept walking, turning a corner and leaving behind Lieutenant Schnee, but a moment later, looking over her shoulder, Ruby caught a flash of white dodging into an alleyway.
“...I must ask, where does your fanatic devotion to our cause come from?” Oobleck said.
Right. Secrets. This was the part where she really couldn’t say anything. But she had to say something, because silence would be more suspicious. Well, maybe she could… answer without really answering?
“I’m powerful. You’ve seen my Semblance. It lets me run circles around the rest of the world. It would be selfish of me to just sit by and not let all this power I’ve got be used to save people. If I’m not helping people, then I’m a bad person because I should be helping people. And I don’t wanna be a bad person.”
There, that was exactly the answer she’d give about her eyes, and she’d just substituted her Semblance for her eyes in the answer. Perfect. Except, oh no, now Oobleck looked really bothered.
“Miss Karyatis… Existing in itself does not make you bad. You do not have an obligation to be used.”
Ruby tilted her head, studying Oobleck in confusion. “I don’t? But then why does everyone with a powerful Semblance become a Huntress?”
“Ah. You’ve fallen into a bit of a fallacy there. It’s not that most people with powerful Semblances are Huntresses. It’s that most Huntresses are people with powerful Semblances. Those with such Semblances who follow the calling of a Huntress are only a subset within the greater category of individuals with powerful Semblances.”
“…Huh.” This was news to Ruby. People could just… choose that? And they wouldn’t be bad people? “But then… what are they?”
“They have found other things to do with their life. Which does not make them bad people.”
“It doesn’t?”
Oobleck didn’t reply for a moment, instead bending down to poke at something in the dirt before his penetrating gaze landed on her again at full force.
“Miss Karyatis, in a world where happiness and joy and contentment are shields against the Grimm, there is no ignominy in choosing something which is personally satisfying to you.”
Huh. When he put it like that… it sure made a lot of sense to Ruby. But… surely Ruby was different, wasn’t she? Because of her eyes?
“Good thing I like being a Huntress, then!” she said in a cheery voice that didn’t really feel a hundred percent right.
“And why do you like it?” Oobleck said.
Ruby nearly tripped over a chunk of scorched concrete. “What?”
“Why do you pick up your weapon each day?” Oobleck said, peering down a side alley. “Why do you throw yourself headlong into battle, with no guarantee that you will leave any engagement alive? I have heard thousands of answers to these questions in my lifetime, and some are certainly more satisfactory than others, but I have never met a student who does not know why she fights.”
Well, there was a reason why Ruby fought. It just wasn’t a reason she could tell Oobleck. But she also couldn’t tell him that she couldn’t tell him, and she couldn’t tell him that she couldn’t tell him that she couldn’t tell him…
“I’m going to save the world!” she said. “That’s why.”
“You seem quite sure that this is a world which needs to be saved.”
Ruby had lost track of Lieutenant Schnee somewhere along the way. “There’s no other reason why I’m here.” She paused to investigate a blur of movement on the horizon with her scope, but it was only a flock of deer (actual animals) skirting the edge of the woods. “It’s what I was born to do.”
“Hm.” Oobleck fell silent for a few minutes as they made their way around the last section of the perimeter, still encountering nothing, and it wasn’t until they were nearly back to the campsite that he spoke again.
“And let’s say someday the world is saved by you. What would you do afterward?”
…Huh. Ruby had never thought about that before. If she was good enough to save the world—and she was—then there was going to be a time after the world was saved. And she’d just… never thought about it before. Wait—she’d told Penny she would build her a robot girl once the world was saved! That was something! …Except she couldn’t tell Oobleck that—did he know Penny was a robot girl? Penny had said Ozpin knew, but that didn’t mean the rest of the Beacon faculty knew—better safe than sorry, especially with a secret like that!
“Perhaps that is something you should think about, then,” Oobleck said as their campfire came back into view. “After all, it is a tragically common problem for Huntresses to have difficulty comprehending themselves outside of the framework of this job. But you, Miss Karyatis… you seem as if you are entirely unable to comprehend yourself beyond being a Huntress. If you take away the label of Huntress, what are you? What is left?”
…Another thing she’d never thought about before.
“I don’t know,” she said again.
“Someday—whether due to injury, or age, or the problem of the Grimm finally being solved—there will come a time when you are no longer able to be a Huntress. What will you do then? How will you see yourself?”
Hm. She didn’t like how that question made her feel. In the past, if she’d been asked that question, her answer would’ve been why do anything besides concentrate on being a Huntress right now? Why waste brainpower (that could be used to help people) on something that wasn’t going to happen until after the world was saved?
But this wasn’t past Ruby, this was present Ruby, and she was realizing maybe this was a good thing to think about. Because, well… if she was supposed to be so good at this, then it probably wouldn’t take her the rest of her life to save the world. So… what would she be after the world was saved?
“I could do art,” she said. “I’m… not good at it yet, but I’d have plenty of time to get good if I wasn’t a Huntress, and… I like how it feels, to make the things I feel into something other people can see and also feel.” She poked the tip of Lunar Enforcer into the dirt and drew a smiley face. “It feels like I’m doing something almost magical. And I could do it with Penny…”
“That is an excellent thread to pursue,” Oobleck said, sounding a little less alarmed.
Now they were next to the building where they’d made camp. The perimeter search was complete. But Oobleck remained still, scrutinizing her.
“Doctor?” Ruby said, nodding towards the campsite. “Are we all set?”
Her words startled him, as if he’d been lost in thought. “Yes, yes.” He reached into his backpack’s side pocket and withdrew his thermos. “Oh, and tell your chaperone that an Atlesian military uniform may be excellent camouflage in the snow of Solitas, but when trying to covertly follow someone in Mountain Glenn, it sticks out like a sore thumb.”
One hour later
The first watch had been silent. No Grimm, no White Fang, no hitherto unknown enemies revealing themselves in the dead of the night. Just Ruby and Winter sitting side-by-side atop the tallest building in Mountain Glenn, surveying the darkness and waiting, the silence only broken by the distant cries of animals. The moon rose higher and higher in the sky, its radiant luminosity shining down on them.
Ruby liked to look at the moon. She would look at it, and imagine that her eyes were drawing power from the shattered sphere in the sky, and she would imagine soaking up its light until her veins were charged with power just as Penny’s wires were charged with electricity. She liked to imagine her power was at its strongest on the nights when only the moon’s unbroken side was visible, a full and flawless circle just like the brilliant power contained within her eyes.
If she were from a fairytale, that would all be truth. In a fairytale, Ruby’s eyes would be from the moon. Maybe as moondust sprinkled into her eyes by a caring god when she was a baby, too young to yet know what kind of destiny had been bestowed upon her. Or maybe she would be the daughter of the moon herself, assembled into the form of a human from the moon’s shattered pieces and then given life—almost like the robot from the Tale Of The Blacksmith And The Robot. Maybe as the daughter of the moon, the fairytale would end with Ruby ascending into the sky, returning to the place from where she’d been birthed to once again become a shining beacon in the cosmos.
She liked to think about fairytales for her eyes, because they were much prettier than the truth about them. Some secret genetic formula assembled by a dead man whose true intentions were entirely unknown… that wasn’t really fun to think about. In the years of study that Atlas had done on her, they had found the strange genetic markers that existed only in her genome alone, markers that resembled nothing else in any human or Faunus’s genetic code, and yet Atlas was no closer to understanding why or how those anomalies gave Ruby such power. If those markers had any effect on her body, they hadn’t been found yet. Or even how Doctor Watts had discovered such a thing in the first place.
It was an unsolved question of genetics, but Ruby preferred to think of it as magic.
And soon, Ruby really would be like the moon. Shining her light into the darkness of the world, lighting up everything she saw with her purifying radiance, the entire world looking up to her in wonder. A beacon of hope in even the darkest of places, something that no Grimm could touch.
Moonrise was near, and soon she would reap.
…She just hoped she could still hang out with Penny even while being Project Moonrise. That was possible, right? Maybe she could see Penny whenever she was on a mission in Vale? Maybe Penny could come on missions with her sometimes? What about the rest of Team Battleship? Could Yang and Weiss and Blake come along on missions, too? They wouldn’t be a liability! They wouldn’t get in her way! They would definitely be an asset to any mission, all four of them.
…Although, Ruby wasn’t really designed for fighting on a team. She was such a special case that she’d been trained to fly solo, because on a battlefield, such a unique weapon could only ever rely on itself. She did have backup, of course! But her backup was… well, they were backup. She didn’t think Team Battleship would like being backup.
…And also, Team Battleship was still a first-year team with not nearly enough experience for the kind of high-risk missions Ruby would be taking. So that was a no on bringing them on her missions. But that was okay? Because she could still visit them at Beacon whenever she was in Vale?
…Except, Ruby probably wouldn’t be spending a lot of time in Vale, since its borders were so stable. Ruby knew that at least in the first couple of years, most of her missions would be high-risk (well, high-risk for anyone else) targets across Solitas, in the most remote reaches of the continent. Expanding Atlas’s reach. Moonrise could contribute immensely to the expansion of the kingdom of Atlas as a whole. Mantle could probably use her protection, too. Atlas the city was untouchable, but Mantle was not. And when Ruby wasn’t there, she would be operating around Mistral, where they had increasingly struggled in recent years to maintain their kingdom’s territory. Beyond that, Vacuo was always in flux, sometimes pushing back on the desert, the desert sometimes pushing back on them, and Moonrise could be a much-needed pushback on the desert. Oh, and Menagerie. She could definitely help there, too.
…So Vale would probably be a pretty low priority. Not many chances to see Penny and her team and her other friends.
She wouldn’t be alone—she’d have the military and specialists with her wherever she went. Did that count as not being alone?
…Ruby wouldn’t have any friends around. That didn’t feel nice. That didn’t feel nice at all.
Well, at least there was the CCT! She’d always have her scroll with her, so she could text and call Penny and all her other friends as much as she wanted, so that was something!
…Would it be enough, though? She liked being around her friends. She liked being in actual physical proximity to them. She liked being able to hug Penny. Even if she could barely feel the hugs. She liked just… doing ordinary teenage girl things with her friends! She wouldn’t get any of that if she stopped.
That didn’t feel good, either. It made Ruby want to curl up in a ball like an armadillo trying to protect itself, actually.
Suddenly, Lieutenant Schnee cleared her throat, the first noise she’d made in a half-hour, and Ruby looked up, wondering if she was trying to say something—nope, she wasn’t paying attention to Ruby, so just a normal throat-clearing.
But as Lieutenant Schnee turned away again, Ruby kept looking at her. The Lieutenant didn’t have any friends, and her life revolved entirely around the military, and it didn’t seem to bother her in the slightest. Why couldn’t Ruby be more like her? What was her secret?
Honestly, Ruby spent a lot of time wondering how Lieutenant Schnee was so good at being a soldier. All the stuff about soldierness that was hard for Ruby—discipline, hiding emotions, following orders even when they didn’t make sense, holding poses for a really long time, not speaking what you were thinking, keeping secrets—all of that, the Lieutenant made it all look easy. How did she do it?
If Ruby was more like Lieutenant Schnee, she wouldn’t be worried about leaving all her friends after this semester. So how could Ruby be more like her? The Lieutenant wasn’t really good at explaining herself, so asking her wouldn’t help…
Lieutenant Schnee would always say the mission came before personal feelings. And she was right. Saving the world was more important than the random insignificant things Ruby wanted for herself. She would just focus on saving the world, focus on what she was born to do, and hopefully she would forget all about loneliness and wanting nice things for herself after a few weeks of unrestrained Grimm-killing and world-saving. Right? She would, right?
“Good soldiers follow orders,” Ruby whispered to herself. Maybe if she said it enough it would get rid of all the thoughts that got in the way of the mission. She’d be okay. Right? She’d definitely be okay. She was Ruby, she was Moonrise—was there anything that could stop her from finishing a mission?
At that moment, the thrum of very familiar rockets caught her attention.
Penny rose over the lip of the building, her wings gleaming in the moonlight, and she slowed to a hover in front of Ruby and Winter, waving to them.
“Salutations!” she said. “I am here to take a shift.”
Ruby barely had time to wonder if she was about to have a night watch with Penny—how cool would that be!—before Lieutenant Schnee was saying, “Get some sleep. I’ll stay.”
Ruby tried to keep the disappointment off her face. “Are you sure, ma’am?” Ruby said. “I really don’t mind staying, ma’am!”
“You need the rest,” Winter said, and she was now using her you’re not changing my mind tone, but Ruby decided to ignore it because she really wanted to hang out with Penny and maybe just this once—
“I’m fine, really! I’m really awake! And I don’t know, you kind of look like you do when you haven’t had enough coffee, so maybe you want to get some sleep? Ma’am?”
Winter pinched the bridge of her nose and let out a quiet groan, but didn’t actually say anything, briefly making Ruby’s hopes soar. Was she about to give in?
“I… I have no objections to sharing a watch with Ruby,” Penny offered tentatively, still hovering in the air.
“I’m sure you don’t,” Winter said without looking at her. “Cadet, get some sleep. That is an order.”
Okay. Ruby didn’t even try hiding the disappointment on her face, because there was really no arguing with this. “Understood,” she said, rising to her feet and saluting. “See you in the morning, Penny…”
She semblanced away and down the building towards the campsite, leaving Winter alone with Penny.
After a few moments’ silence, Penny touched down a few meters away from Winter, retracted her wings, and waved again. “I hope that our watch is peaceful!”
“As do I.” Winter stood up and strode over to the side of the building, glancing over to make entirely sure Ruby was at the campsite and therefore out of earshot. Once satisfied, she turned back to Penny.
“Have a seat, Miss Pallas. I’d like to talk to you about something.”
Ruby was expecting Blake, Weiss, and Yang to be asleep at the campfire, but when she dropped out of her Semblance, they were all very much awake and out of their sleeping bags in varying degrees. Yang wasn’t in her bag at all, Blake was half-in, half-out of her bag, and Weiss was just poking her head out and nothing else. But they all looked like they were waiting for something important. Whatever they were waiting for, Ruby wasn’t it, because they all sort of slumped a little as soon as they saw her.
“Um, shouldn’t you be asleep?” she said as she dropped onto the sleeping bag Penny had vacated.
“We probably should be, yeah,” Yang said with a shrug. But she made no move to get back into her own sleeping bag.
“Okayyyyy.” With three-quarters of Team BSYP still watching her closely for reasons Ruby didn’t understand, she was glad she hadn’t taken off her contacts before getting to the campfire. She still felt kind of bad for not telling the rest of Team BSYP about her eyes, but… secret. At least they’d know pretty soon anyway, because soon Ruby wouldn’t need to keep herself secret anymore!
…In a weird sort of way that she didn’t understand, she was going to miss having Penny be the only one who knew about her eyes. It was like their own little secret between the two of them. Something only the two of them knew. Something shared between them and no one else.
Maybe there could be… other things to share just between the two of them? Did Penny do that with other people? Why did it feel so good for Ruby to share secrets with her specifically? Actually, why did so many things about Penny feel so oddly good to think about?
“Hey, Ruby?”
Even though Yang’s voice was quiet and gentle, it startled Ruby, just as any sound would’ve thanks to how lost in her thoughts she was at that moment.
“What’s up?” she said. None of the girls even seemed like they were trying to be asleep at this point, honestly. Ruby could understand a first mission being exciting, but come on! Huntresses needed all the sleep they could get! Because there’d be plenty of times where bloodthirsty Grimm would be keeping them awake!
“Can we ask you about Penny?”
“Um. Sure?” She felt more and more confused. Had they somehow noticed she was thinking about Penny just now?
“And tell us if we’re getting too personal, or if you don’t want to answer,” Blake added. Her cat ears were straight up and alert like she was hunting a Grimm.
“Okay.” Ruby looked around at them. “Shoot, I guess?”
“How do you feel about her?” Yang said.
Well, that was a question Ruby could spend all day answering. Or all night. Or both. Hang on, why were these three asking her? Wasn’t it obvious? They were Penny’s teammates! Wouldn’t they feel exactly the same way about Penny as Ruby did, since they spent so much time around her? They spent even more time with her than Ruby did. Was Ruby jealous of that or a little? Maybe. She wanted to be on a team with Penny. Actually, since they spent more time with Penny, that probably meant their feelings were even stronger, right?
“Probably not as much as you do?” she said finally.
Yang, Blake, and Weiss blinked near-simultaneously. Weiss actually stuck her head back out of her sleeping bag, staring at Ruby with a furrowed brow.
“Gotta be honest, you lost me,” Yang said. The other two nodded in agreement.
Ruby tried again. “I mean, whatever Penny makes me feel, it’s just… normal for you all by now, right? Since she’s your teammate?”
“What… what’s supposed to be normal?” Blake said, sounding equally as confused as Yang.
“You know, the way Penny just…” Ruby waved her arms wildly, but sadly that failed to convey her meaning to the others. Words. Why was it so hard to find words for this? She wished she could just make loud incoherent noises and be perfectly understood by the others, because that was kind of the best way to describe how Penny made Ruby feel. But no, she would have to actually speak language. Annoying.
“The way she makes you feel like your heart could explode at any given moment! The way she makes you want to just keep looking at her and looking at her and looking at her! The way she just makes you feel like she’s the most important person in the history of the universe, like you’d do anything for her, like she’s… perfect. The way you’re always thinking about her wherever you go and thinking about the next time you’ll get to see her, and the next time you’ll hear her voice, and the next time you’ll hug her. The way you feel like there’s a special connection between you and her that you don’t have with anyone else. You always feel like you’d take a million bullets for her, right? It’s kinda strange, isn’t it. No one’s ever made me feel that way before Penny, but I haven’t met many people, so maybe she’s just the first? Maybe she’s just cool like that?”
That was the only way Ruby could make any sense of these feelings she was having about Penny: Penny just had to make everyone feel this way, right? How could anyone look at Penny’s smile and not immediately feel supercharged? So it made perfect sense that there was just some special magic quality about Penny that made everyone feel like they were about to turn into a blazing inferno of feelings!
So why were Yang and Blake and Weiss staring at her like she’d just told them she was half-Grimm?
“You know what I mean, right?” she added quickly. Maybe they just needed more detail. “In a dangerous deadly world full of bad people and things that want to kill you, her presence is the only place in the world that feels one hundred percent peaceful to you, right? All the super-duper important stuff in your life, doesn’t it feel less important when you’re with her? It’s like… it’s like, magic, with her, isn’t it? She’s… you know what I’m talking about, right?”
“Ruby,” Yang said slowly. “Do you think everyone feels this way about Penny?”
“You… don’t?” Suddenly, Ruby was tumbling into a rapidly expanding void of unknowns. If she was alone in this… what did that mean?
“So, all these things Penny makes me feel…?” Just saying her name in the right tone was enough to get Ruby’s heart to start beating faster and just… just… how could she not get all everything when she thought about her?! It was just like… it was like Penny was made of smiles. Ruby put a hand over her chest, just in case her heart tried to leap out of her ribcage. “They’re not… normal?”
“They’re special, Ruby,” Yang said. “We care about Penny a whole lot, but… we don’t think about her like that.”
“Oh,” Ruby said again, because she couldn’t think of anything else to say. It took a long silence before anything else floated through her mind, and even then it was barely a sentence. “It’s special…”
Special. Special.
What Penny made her feel was special. Ruby kind of felt like she might cry. But in a good way, somehow! Was that a thing? Good crying? She’d only ever cried over sad things, but all these good feelings that felt like they might burst out of her, it kind of felt the way it did before she cried. And if this could be something shared between them, just between them…
It’s special.
It was making her happy. It was making her really happy. Why was it making her so happy? Why was any of this happening? Why? Why?
“So why am I feeling all these things?” Ruby said, because she’d just remembered she had friends who she could ask questions to. “What’s different about me? It’s not bad, is it…?” Ruby’s hands went to her chest again on an instinct she couldn’t explain, squeezing one another like her heart was squeezing underneath her sternum. “Is there… is there something wrong with me?”
Blake and Yang looked at each other. Weiss made a face and shoved herself all the way into her sleeping bag, yanking it up over her head and hiding herself completely away. Ruby understood none of what that was supposed to mean.
“I don’t want anything I feel about Penny to be wrong!” Abruptly, Ruby started to shiver like she was cold, even though she was right next to the fire. Pulling her knees up to herself and tucking her limbs in to decrease her surface area exposed to the cold air didn’t stop it, either. “If it’s wrong, tell me how to make it right, please…”
“…Dear gods. Ruby, please don’t tell me no one in Atlas bothered to explain this stuff to you,” Yang whispered.
“What? Can you just say it?” Suddenly, Ruby felt scared and upset and angry all at the same time. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, and if this is something about me not knowing something because I wasn’t raised normal, then don’t say it like I’m broken! I don’t like it when you treat me like I’m broken! I’m not broken!”
Her voice got too loud at the end, and an echo bounced off the nearby buildings, basically putting up a big neon sign for any nearby Grimm. But the night remained silent, and no one else was getting mad at her for the mistake. Instead, they looked even more worried than a few minutes ago, and Ruby was starting to wonder if maybe she should just run off into the night and hide—
“Ruby, can you take a deep breath for me?” Blake said. “As deep as you can go?”
There was something about her voice that made the request really easy for Ruby to follow, even if she wasn’t sure why.
“There we go,” Blake said as Ruby inhaled. “And hold it when you can’t fit any more air in. I’ll tell you when to let go.”
Ruby closed her eyes, her lungs at full capacity, and held. And held. And held.
“You can let it out.”
As Ruby deflated, she realized she’d stopped shivering. How…? She looked at Blake in amazement, but all Blake did was nod in understanding.
“Okay, so…” Yang rearranged her position so she was sitting crosslegged and leaned forward, placing her hands on her knees. And suddenly, her tone of voice was back to gentleness, no confusion anymore, which made Ruby feel better. “Ruby, what you’re feeling isn’t wrong. Not in the slightest.”
Ruby nodded, hanging onto each and every word like it was the difference between life and death.
“There is a word for when you’ve got feelings for someone that are deeper and different from friendship. There’s a word that fits everything you just told us about how Penny makes you feel. And that word is romance.”
Romance.
The world wobbled underneath Ruby, because that word opened up a whole basket of unknowns, and… unknowns were scary. “...I don’t know anything about romance. I’ve always been told it could be dangerous. A distraction.”
Weiss’s head emerged from her sleeping bag to stare at Ruby. Yang and Blake exchanged another look before Yang spoke in a voice jam-packed with what sounded like every emotion in existence. “Ruby.”
“But… Penny isn’t a distraction!” Suddenly, Ruby was afraid all over again. Which was bad. Her job was to not get the attention of every Grimm in a five-mile radius. “She isn’t dangerous! Thinking about her makes me better at everything! Way better! She gives me strength, and determination, and focus, and energy, and hope, and feelings I didn’t even know existed, and she makes me think in new ways, and just… she’s not dangerous! She’s not a distraction! And I… I want…”
Ruby wasn’t even sure what words were supposed to come after want. It was just… Penny.
“I’m scared,” she said. “I’m scared of doing bad things. And, I—I… romance is supposed to be bad for me. Not bad for other people, just for me! Because I can’t be distracted! But, how Penny makes me feel…”
An image unfolded in Ruby’s mind of being together with Penny forever, hand in hand, always knowing they had each other’s backs no matter what, connected by something deeper than their connection to anyone else. Connected by something special.
“You’re shedding silver dust.”
Ruby blinked, Yang’s voice bringing her back to reality. And, oops, she was shedding silver. A lot of it.
She calmed herself down enough to stop vibrating. Yang and Blake were smiling at her, and Weiss had disappeared into her sleeping bag again, and Oobleck was asleep in the corner, and Lieutenant Schnee was on watch, and also on watch somewhere above was Penny, and the night was still.
“Um,” Ruby said. “I… how can romance be bad for me when it feels this good?”
“That’s because it isn’t bad,” Blake said. “It can even help your pursuit of being a Huntress, to have someone else who supports and strengthens you beyond what mutual benefit even a friendship or a partnership can provide, just as you do for them.”
“It’s a good thing…” Ruby nodded slowly. She… liked the sound of that. It already didn’t feel like a bad thing, but now it even more didn’t feel like a bad thing. “It’s something I can do…?”
Blake and Yang nodded.
It was something she could do. It was something she could with Penny she could make that connection with Penny deeper than the rest of the world…
So.
“Now what?” Ruby asked, the question aimed at all three girls, even Weiss, if she had any answers to offer from deep inside her sleeping bag.
The night felt comfortable again. Ruby didn’t feel like she was going to do something wrong anymore. She just felt… excited. Really, really excited.
“You know… Penny’s right up there.” Yang jerked her head towards the vantage point where Penny and the Lieutenant were situated, out of sight. “You could just go up and tell her how you feel right now.”
Suddenly, reality came crashing down on Ruby as she remembered some vitally important facts about the current situation. Penny would be a student for the next four years. Ruby would soon not be a student. And that gap between them would only grow as Ruby went to the field and became an all-powerful Huntress with mythical levels of ability and reputation. And mythical levels of enemies.
“I can’t,” she said.
“Aw, but I bet Penny would be so excited!”
“No, I mean, I can’t make it work. I’m going back to Atlas.”
“You… could transfer to Beacon, you know?” Blake said.
“No, not like that—I’m not gonna be a student anymore. All the stuff they teach in the academies, I already learned it. I’m already trained. I’m beginning my actual life as a Huntress once the Vytal Tournament’s over.” Ruby shook her head sadly as she thought of the future of Project Moonrise. “This semester was just a trial run.”
Weiss’s head popped out of her sleeping bag yet again. “You’re… not staying at Beacon?” she said, her voice cracking.
“I wish I could…” Ruby turned her head to gaze out over the desolate ruins of a city that had been consumed by Grimm. Grimm that didn’t have a girl with genetically engineered eyes standing in their way. “Saving the world’s more important, though. And it won’t be safe for Penny. I’m going to have the biggest target in the world on my back. There’s going to be so many bad people coming after me. And they might try to hurt Penny because of how I feel about her! She would be an even bigger target than me! Because people would know they can use Penny to get at me! She’s good, but she’s just not ready like I am! She doesn’t have the battlefield experience I’ve got. She would get hurt or maybe even killed just because of me and I don’t want that! I don’t wanna put her in danger!”
There… just wasn’t any way she could be Moonrise and be girlfriends with Penny at the same time. There was too much chance of Penny getting hurt.
Ruby tried not to think about how sad that made her. Some things had to be sacrificed in the name of being a good soldier and saving the world. How could Ruby ever choose something for herself (even if it was something she really really wanted) over something for the world? Because if she chose herself over the world… that would be bad, wouldn’t it? That would be selfish, wouldn’t it?
She shrugged. “Maybe I could tell her in a few years, once she’s graduated and the world’s closer to being saved. Maybe it’d work out then?” She needed to end the conversation before Blake, Yang, and Weiss figured out some way to make her stop wanting to be Project Moonrise, so she jumped to her feet and gave the three girls a salute. “Anyway, I’ve gotta go to the bathroom, and I’m not coming back until you’re all asleep, because you need the sleep. Bye!”
And then she was gone in a burst of silver, leaving three-quarters of Team BSYP to stare after her in disbelief.
As soon as it seemed Ruby was out of earshot, Yang dropped her face into her hands and let out a loud, agonized groan.
“Oh, for the love of the broken fucking moon,” she muttered. “I can’t believe these two. Just—how? They’re both afraid of being the reason the other one gets hurt! How are they real? I feel like I’m listening to a fairytale!”
After a moment, Yang had to wonder if either of her teammates had heard her. Weiss had gone silent, staring off into the distance, and Yang’s words apparently had done nothing to rouse her. And Blake was staring straight down at the ground, her ears pointed back. She had undergone an emotional journey during Ruby’s explanation—first sinking down, her ears drooping, but then, somewhere around the moment Ruby said once the Vytal Tournament’s over, she’d given a small nod to herself and set her jaw in a grim determination.
“…She didn’t change her mind. She’s going back to Atlas,” Blake said. There was an unmistakable air of finality to her tone. “My plan didn’t work. We have to go to Plan B now.”
Somehow, that was what pulled Weiss out of her stupor. She whipped around to Blake, squinting suspiciously. “Is it kidnapping?”
“It’s not.”
“Thank the gods.”
“That’s Plan C.”
“What—”
“Plan B is going to Ozpin when we get back,” Blake said, cutting Weiss off. “And I’m telling him everything I know about Ruby Karyatis and Project godsdamned Moonrise. Everything. She doesn’t deserve to spend her life as just a tool.”
“I thought you wanted to take this to the government?” Yang said, dredging up a half-remembered conversation in an empty classroom from earlier in the semester. “Not that I think Ozpin’s a bad choice, just, what changed?”
Blake shrugged. “Ozpin is the Vale government. Have you noticed how many things run through him?”
Weiss didn’t argue with any of that. Maybe because she was less nervous about that course of action, or maybe because she could see there was absolutely no way Blake’s mind would be changed about this.
“Ruby’s not going to like it,” Yang said—more a statement of fact than any kind of objection.
“I’ve made my peace with it,” Blake said. “Once she’s out of Atlas for good and surrounded by people in positions of authority who actually care about her as a person and value her independence, she’ll begin to realize just how wrong it’s been to raise her the way Atlas did. And if she stays mad at me…” She shrugged again. “There’s already plenty of people in this world who hate me for doing a good thing. I can live with one more.”
Penny sat on a protruding piece of debris with her hands folded in her lap as Winter walked in a slow circle around her. No, walking did not seem like the right word to describe Winter’s current gait. Stalking or even prowling felt far more accurate. Winter’s hands were clasped behind her back, and her eyes never left Penny as she moved.
It all made Penny thoroughly confused, and somewhat uncomfortable. Currently, she was completely unable to parse Winter’s facial expression. This woman had a rare talent for neutrality and lack of even subtle variance in her expression, both of which were qualities which confounded her emotional recognition. However, the longer Winter went without actually saying anything, the more likely it seemed that she would be saying something of immense importance. Whether that was a good importance or a bad importance, Penny had no idea.
“Penny Pallas.”
Winter chose the moment when she was exactly behind Penny to begin speaking, forcing her to twist around to face her.
“That is my name, yes,” she said cautiously.
“Born and raised in Vale, according to your student profile. A first-year Huntress at Beacon Academy as a member of Team Battleship. Affiliations: Unknown. Semblance: Unknown. Weapons: A rifled zweihander and a jetpack. Sparring record: Nineteen wins and two losses. Home address: Unavailable. Listed emergency contact: Headmaster Ozpin.”
She was listing facts from Penny’s student profile in the Beacon database. Had she done research on Penny?
“A powerful student, one who could go toe-to-toe in a spar with Project Moonrise,” Winter went on. “And one who Cadet Karyatis trusted enough to tell about the existence of said project, despite knowing full well that it’s a closely protected state secret.”
Penny disregarded all the recommendations from her prediction algorithms which told her to stay silent for now, and said, “Ruby deserves to tell other people about herself!”
Winter, completing another circuit around Penny, arched an eyebrow. But when she continued, it was without responding to her statement.
“You are particularly puzzling, Penny Pallas.”
The word puzzling set off all sorts of alarm bells in Penny. It was the kind of word which sounded like Winter knew things about Penny. Secret things. What did she know?! And how had she found out—
Winter stopped, directly in front of Penny, and wheeled to face her, crossing her arms. “What are your intentions with Cadet Karyatis?”
Penny’s prediction algorithms crashed. Suddenly without any idea of where the conversation might go from here, all she could do was say, “What?”
“As Ruby’s minder, it is precisely my responsibility to ensure that there is no danger to her while she is undercover in Vale. And the romantic attraction for you which she has been blatantly expressing may very well be a danger.” Winter leaned in closer, her eyes even more intense than even what Weiss could manage. “So, I ask you again, what are your intentions with her?”
Penny decided that Winter Schnee was a very intimidating individual. Perhaps that was a genetic trait in Schnees.
“Er.” How should she answer here?! Dishonesty would doubtlessly be received poorly, but the honest answer did not seem like something that would go over well, either!
It would be very convenient if a Grimm decided to attack right now, actually. Penny checked her radar readings in fruitless hopes that there would be one nearby.
Sadly, Team BSYP had done their job far too well that day. There were no creatures that would be coming to save Penny from the piercing gaze and razor-sharp questions of Winter.
When in doubt… Honesty.
“I would like to date Ruby,” she said, and immediately put all systems on high alert in case Winter decided that answer warranted an attack. “But I am also happy to be friends with her, if that is what she prefers! And—if she stopped wanting to be friends with me, I would be sad, but I would understand and I would not try to fight it! But I also find myself wanting to become closer and closer to Ruby, in a way that likely goes beyond friendship! But I would not be improper in any advances that I may or not make! I promise I would be very respectful—I always try to be respectful of Ruby—I would never want to hurt her!”
She stopped herself there, before it turned into an all-out ramble. Then, because it seemed like something Winter would appreciate, she saluted and added, “Ma’am.”
Winter stared at her for 7.6 seconds, before muttering something under her breath so quietly that Penny knew she wasn’t supposed to hear it. However, she had no qualms about eavesdropping on Winter.
“I see why you two are so attracted to one another.”
Penny would take that as a compliment.
“Well, you’ve stood up to the first pass of scrutiny,” Winter said, giving her a single nod. “However, the feasibility of such a relationship for Project Moonrise must be considered before anything else. And as with any major decision involving Ruby, I’m going to have to clear this with the General. Which I will do as soon as we are back on campus.”
Notes:
Well... BryonNightshade's War Machines is complete! And now I'm flying solo. I've got to say, it feels strange to be the only War Machines updating. I'm going to miss the feeling of seeing a similar story unfold right alongside mine. I'll always be grateful to Nightshade for what he did with an idea of mine, and for the inspiration to create something beautiful that he took from my own writing. He has been an absolute delight to bounce ideas off and talk about writing with!
And at the same time, there's something almost... intimidating yet exhilarating about plunging alone into the great unknown of post-V3. I'm not sure I've ever stated this before, but since Nightshade concluded his War Machines after Volume 3, I think it's worth mentioning that my story is going all the way. My intent here is a 'full show resolution' of the kind that canon itself is working towards. Although the exact chapter count is still very unknown, I have all the plot beats planned out and aligned. It's just a matter of writing them.
So, with that, here I go. Onward. Sitting at my laptop, cracking my knuckles, and banging away at the keyboard for however long it takes to bring this story to its conclusion. I'm so very excited.
Thanks for reading, and see you all next week for Chapter 44: The Tale Of The Girl Who Turned To Stone.
Chapter 44: The Tale Of The Girl Who Turned To Stone
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
Yang took Winter’s place at the end of that shift. And then at the next transition point, Penny stood up, ready to go rouse Blake. But Yang put a hand on her elbow, stopping her.
“Wait right here,” she said. “I’m gonna go try something.”
Penny attempted to object on the grounds that Yang needed sleep more than she did, but Yang waved it off with a grin and then disappeared down the stairs.
Hm. She was planning something.
Resigned to waiting to see what would happen, Penny remained standing. She was still thinking some rather unkind things about Winter Schnee and James Ironwood, and perhaps she would be thinking those things for a significant period of time. Ruby’s personal decisions should not have to be approved by a military hierarchy! Had Ruby needed approval for her decision to be friends with Team BSYP?
…Well, considering how Ruby had been confined on the airship for almost a month, it seemed that not only had she needed approval for befriending them, but she had failed to get that approval. At least, until forcing the issue.
Suddenly, there was a familiar swoosh, and then Ruby was standing on the other end of the roof, her body silhouetted by the still-rising moon behind her. “Uh. Shouldn’t you be asleep, Penny?”
Penny blinked at her. “Shouldn’t you be asleep?”
Ruby’s look of confusion only deepened. “Yang said it was time for my second shift?”
“But we have not rotated through the rest of the party? Blake, Weiss, and Doctor Oobleck have not taken a shift yet.”
Ruby’s eyes widened. “Wait, what time is it?”
Penny told her.
“Yang said it was four-thirty in the morning.”
“Given a choice between trusting Yang’s sense of the passage of time or my internal atomically-calibrated chronometer, I think I would take my chronometer as the authority.”
“Which means…” Ruby looked around once more, and then shuffled over to Penny, plopping herself down beside her. “She did this on purpose.”
A gust of wind rushed around them, making Ruby’s braid whip around and Penny’s hoodie bounce around her. She caught its sides and then zipped it up, stilling it. She was not cold, but the flapping of the fabric was an unwanted distraction right now.
Then she made a decision and sat down next to Ruby, her knees pulled up partway up to her chest and her arms behind her, holding her upper body upright. Ruby was in a similar position, except her legs were flat against the ground, not bent.
“I believe I know why Yang did it,” Penny said.
Ruby let out a short, odd-sounding laugh. “Funny, I was gonna say that.”
Penny’s internal temperature rose. She kept her photoreceptors trained on the view in front of them, the cadaver of a city sprawled out before them, lit in a ghostly pallor by the moon far above. The more she watched it, the more she thought there was a haunting beauty to this place at night, something which made Penny want to paint it.
She wanted to paint this city as it appeared, but then she wanted to add scenes of everyday life to the painting. Children playing amongst the ruins as they would do in any street or square in Vale. A shopkeeper sweeping out a burnt, collapsing doorway as if nothing was wrong. A bus navigating blithely around the sinkholes and craters that pockmarked the destroyed road.
She wanted to paint reminders that even in a place as desolate as this, there had been life. There had been countless memories made here. There had been happiness which was felt here, and joy, and sadness, and sorrow, and excitement, and anger, and jealousy, and love, and curiosity, and hope, and despair, and a thousand other emotions.
Maybe someday, because of the efforts of Penny and her friends, more memories could be brought back to this place.
…Suddenly, Mountain Glenn did not seem like such a sad place to Penny. It just felt… asleep. Waiting. Waiting for a new dawn.
“There’s really only one reason why Yang would trick us into being alone up here together, right?” Ruby said, her words soft and quiet. Penny wanted to hear her voice again and again and again…
Maybe, then, it would actually be a nice thing for Mountain Glenn, for Penny to make another happy memory here after this entire city had gone so long without having a single happy memory.
And so she entered a territory of thought and action which was entirely unknown, the exploration of which she hoped would be exhilarating.
Why wait to tell Ruby when she could simply do it at this exact moment, before anything else happened? Why wait for circumstances to be perfect? There was no such thing as perfect, after all. Maybe waiting for a perfect moment would only result in Penny waiting forever.
“Yang’s reason is something which concerns both of us, and only us, correct?” Penny said.
“Yeah. Something between us,” Ruby said. She reached up to her braid and brought it around to her side like she might begin undoing it, but she stopped there, just holding it in her hands.
“It involves feelings,” Penny said. “Feelings between us, specifically.”
Ruby nodded. She was still holding her braid, now looking down at it as if there was something particularly important about it. “Personal feelings. Lots and lots of personal feelings.”
A silence fell between them. Penny had the sensation that she could look into every corner of the universe for the thing which she was feeling right now, and not find it anywhere except with the girl next to her.
Ruby took a shaky breath and raised her head to meet Penny’s eyes. Her heart rate was also rising in Penny’s sensors. “I think we’re talking about the same thing.”
“I think so, too.” Even so, Penny had to acknowledge one very important thing before they went any further. “But, Ruby, the last time that we thought we were talking about the same thing, we were actually talking about very different things.”
And suddenly, they were both giggling, the sound a combination of nervousness and joy. Penny was reminded that everything would be okay. It was Ruby. She would not run off screaming when Penny confessed attraction, even if it was not what Ruby was expecting. She hadn’t run off screaming after Penny confessed she was a synthetic person, after all.
“Well, when we actually told ourselves about each other, it turned out it wasn’t so different after all!” Ruby said once she’d caught her breath. “Two special girls, special in our own ways. Synthetic-mechanical and synthetic-organic. So I think we’ll be fine. No matter what.”
“Yes. No matter what.” Penny brushed back a strand of hair that’d fallen over her face, and looked into Ruby’s eyes once more. “Ruby, may I say the thing which I am referring to?”
“What, we’re not saying it at the same time again?” Ruby said, cracking a smile which made Penny smile right back. “Go for it, Penny.”
Penny took a deep, cooling breath. She wasn’t nervous, though—all the extraneous processing activity came from processing good emotions. “Ruby, I…”
It was at this point that Penny realized she had no idea how to actually tell Ruby this. Her language processors turned and turned, and even with a serverload of spare processing cycles, nothing that she considered as a reply felt right! Why couldn’t she just… project a holographic image of a stylized heart into the air? That felt like the most efficient way to do it!
…Note to self. A holographic projector would be a very useful upgrade.
If she just said “!”, would Ruby understand that? Was there a way to vocalize an exclamation mark? Also, time was still passing, even if her processors meant she could do a lot of thinking within the space of a few seconds. She had to say something.
She had to make sure she said it in exactly the right way! If it was too direct, it might startle Ruby, and if it was too indirect, it might confuse her, and if it was too enthusiastic Ruby might be unsettled, and if it was too relaxed she might not believe her, and if it was too happy it might sound fake, and if it was too sad it might sound like Penny didn’t want these feelings, and if it was too official or too saccharine or too long or too short or too animated or too stiff or too monotonous or too—
Logic suggested saying something before the heat death of the universe. And honestly, her emotional side of things was inclined to agree. Somehow, coming to terms with her feelings for Ruby had made it easier for her logic and her emotions to agree.
So Penny took a cooling breath and plunged into a veiled but vast expanse of possibility.
“Ruby, I feel like… like I want to be more than friends with you, and more than even best friends. If it is something you desire… I would like very much to be girlfriends with you.”
She had done it. The words were out of her mouth, and she knew Ruby understood her meaning crystalline-clear as evidenced by her mouth falling open slightly. It felt like the second-most important thing Penny had ever told anyone.
(Second-most-important because, no matter how deep her feelings for Ruby, no matter how Ruby replied to this, the most important thing Penny had told anyone would always and forever be telling her team the truth about herself. That was the moment when her world had blossomed.)
(But this moment could be a blossoming of its own.)
The moon hung in the sky and a wolf howled in the distance and the building creaked under them and Luminous Electra sat comfortingly on Penny’s back and Penny waited for Ruby’s response.
“Yeah,” Ruby said, an enormous, goofy smile settling over her face. “Yeah. This time, we were talking about the same thing.”
Penny’s inner self produced the most emphatic ! that she had ever logged.
But then Ruby’s face fell, and Penny’s soul, moments ago feeling as if it had been set aflame with hope and possibility, now crashed down through her body until it rested limply somewhere in her lower half, quieted by the look of pure misery that Ruby was now giving her.
“I’m—I’m sorry, Penny, but I can’t.”
“Oh.” Instincts warred within Penny, one processing cycle wanting desperately to ask Ruby why, and another processing cycle terrified of what Ruby’s answer might be. But before that internal conflict was anywhere close to being resolved, Ruby kept talking.
“It’s not—absolutely not because of you, I promise! Double triple quadruple quintuple sixtuple seventuple promise! I just can’t… I’m not going to be a student after this semester. I’m going to be deployed. Permanently. Not as a trainee, as the actual world-saver that I’m meant to be. And I don’t know how long that’s going to take, and I… You don’t deserve to be stuck with all that.”
The torrent of words would have been dizzying to anyone else, but Penny’s processors managed to register every word and make sense of it, and the thing which Penny was being told…
“You are not going to be a student anymore?” she said, as her soul continued its plummet, now firmly in her heels, and perhaps cracking apart.
“I never was, really—this was basically just a trial run, and once the Vytal Tournament’s over—I’m going to win—there’s no reason to keep me off the field any longer! I can help so many people. It would be selfish of me to hold myself back from it any longer! And once I’m out there, once the world knows about me—there’s going to be people who want to hurt me. And if you’re my girlfriend, they’ll want to hurt you. And you’re just a student! A really, really good student, but still a student! I won’t let you get hurt because of me.”
Penny was struck by the oddest urge to laugh hysterically as she realized that Ruby was afraid of the exact same thing which she was afraid of: being the reason that her love got hurt.
Now a theoretical image rose up hauntingly in Penny’s thoughtstream—Ruby, alone in the military again, with no friends, just people ordered to be with her and people giving her orders, her life consisting of nothing but killing Grimm and maybe even other people—
“How… how long do you think you will be… deployed?” She managed to say it in a neutral tone despite her rapidly mounting horror.
Ruby shrugged. “The rest of my life? Or until the world’s saved. Whatever comes first.”
No. No. Penny would not let Ruby be lonely. But if Ruby was still determined to leave, then was there anything which could change her mind?
…There probably was not. However, there was still one thing Penny could do.
“I will go with you,” she said.
Ruby gasped. “Penny, no—”
“You deserve to have a friend with you. And—because I was not designed to be a normal Huntress, I will not be missing out on very much in Beacon—”
Hic.
Penny ignored the hiccup without a trace of shame. “—and I can assist you in the field. I was likely built for combat, after all. Just like you.”
Ruby’s eyes had gone very wide, and her heart rate was spiking once again, but she was silent.
“Please, Ruby. I don’t want you to be alone for the rest of your life,” Penny said.
“But I won’t be alone! We can still talk on our scrolls, and do video calls, and when I’m in Vale I can visit you!” Ruby paused. “Hopefully.”
That hopefully only made Penny feel even sadder. “But I want to be around you,” she said.
“So do I! But what I want isn’t important, so…” Ruby leaned towards Penny, putting both of her hands on top of Penny’s, and fixed a pleading look on her. “Penny, I won’t let you leave Beacon just for me. You deserve to stay with your team. You deserve to take your time. You deserve to have fun. You deserve to keep doing ordinary teenage girl things.”
Penny squeezed Ruby’s hands as tightly as was safe, and then tried to construct her voice to be a perfectly calculated combination of gentle and worried and sure, as if that would somehow be enough to change Ruby’s mind if she hit the right auditory formula.
“But you deserve to do ordinary teenage girl things too, Ruby.”
Ruby looked down at Penny’s hands, and then slowly pulled her own hands out, fiddling with her gloves as she shrank back a little, looking at everything except Penny.
“Maybe I do deserve it, but I’m not allowed,” she whispered. “I’m too valuable. If I’m not trying to help people as soon as I can, then I’m a bad person. And if I’m trying to make myself happy, that means I’m not trying to help people as soon as I can. Which means I’m a bad person. I don’t want to be a bad person. I want to help people. It was okay this semester, because I was gonna be at Beacon no matter what to finish getting ready, but if I stay here that makes me a bad person. I don’t want to be bad. I want to be good. I want to be a good soldier. I have to be good. I have to be, I have to be!”
And then she burst into tears and darted forward, burying her face in Penny’s chest, her entire body heaving with loud, drawn-out sobs that sent her braid whipping around.
“I’m sorry,” she mumbled into Penny’s hoodie. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. If I was anyone else on the planet besides what I am, I’d give you my heart, I’d give you whatever you want, I’d spend the rest of my life with you! But I—I—”
Whatever she was going to say, she couldn’t hold back her sobs for long enough to get it out, and instead, she returned to a stream of I’m sorry repeated over and over, growing progressively more quiet. And all through it, Penny held her tightly, feeling horrifically powerless as Ruby’s heartbeat pounded against her like a cornered animal striking out at anything and everything.
The moon shone down on them, saying nothing.
It could be a scene from one of their fairytales. Two girls clinging to one another during a long night which was far from over, both of them afraid, but for very different reasons.
Penny was afraid for Ruby, afraid of what would happen to her soul when she gave herself over to a life of being a weapon. She saw Ruby’s soul as luminous, full of radiant joy, and Penny wanted to believe it could shine on even in the most unrelenting of circumstances. But the tightly controlled future which had been laid out for Ruby seemed like something which would make even the most brilliant of souls flicker and die.
Ruby was afraid of herself. She was afraid of what she’d learned about herself in the last few months, what she’d learned about the things she wanted and the things that made her happy—because everything she’d learned about herself seemed to detract from her ability to be Moonrise. How could she trust herself to save the world if she was breaking down over the idea of leaving behind her best friend?! How could she be strong enough to fulfill her destiny if she could barely make the choices needed to keep herself on the right path?!
Ruby didn’t know. All she could do for now was keep herself clamped to Penny as long as possible, as if she could somehow save up all this treasured contact to ration out to herself over the coming years in the field where there would be none.
Penny was running her fingers slowly through Ruby’s hair, dancing her fingers up and down her braid at the end of each stroke, but Ruby couldn’t feel feel any of it. The closest thing she had to a feeling was the knowledge that Penny was stroking her hair, but just being aware of Penny’s fingers didn’t feel like enough. She wanted to feel more. She wanted to feel so much more. She knew it was supposed to feel good when someone’s hair was played with, and she… just didn’t feel anything even close to special. It was the same amount of sensation she got from being punched in the face.
Still, though, knowing it was Penny touching her hair and interlacing her fingers into a part of Ruby that other people barely ever touched… just knowing Penny was doing this, and enjoying it, was enough to put an instinctive smile on Ruby’s face. It was Penny. That was enough.
Penny never took her eyes off Ruby as she continued threading her fingers through her thick, luxurious hair. She knew that Ruby may not be able to appreciate it as much due to her sensory systems, but she hoped that the care in the gesture would still be apparent. And there was a part of Penny that… that liked doing this, liked it for herself. Ruby’s hair was just so beautiful. Ever since that first time when Ruby had undone her braid in the secret garden, it had taken up a prioritized presence in Penny’s memory. It was just so…
Penny wondered if Ruby’s future missions would push her into cutting her hair. Maybe she would come to only see the hair as a potential danger in battle, and then maybe she would slice it off, another part of herself sliced off in the process. Maybe she would be ordered to do it after a close call in battle, under the pretensions of being for her own safety.
Penny thought back to the intervention they’d done for Weiss (it had only been a day and a half ago, and yet it felt like an entirely different era), and what Neon Katt had said:
“Eventually, you’re just trying to carve off… yourself.”
Ruby had been there for that conversation. She must’ve heard Neon’s words. Was she thinking about them right now? How close was Ruby to doing such things, either metaphorically or literally? Was she already doing it right now as she cried into Penny’s arms over the choice she was making?
Penny could not stay silent. She had to try again. And maybe again, and again, and again—
“Is there anything I can say which would convince you to stay?” Penny said. “Or convince you to let me come with you?”
The question made Ruby open her eyes, her pupils dilating to tiny dots, and then suddenly she was squeezing them shut even harder, shaking with the effort of holding back another round of tears.
“Don’t say that,” she muttered. “Don’t say things which make it even harder for me to keep my eyes on my destiny…”
Too late, Ruby wondered if she’d said too much just then. Because if Penny knew just how dangerously close Ruby was to… to… to disobeying…
“I have to be good,” she added, and she had no clue whether she was saying that to herself or Penny. “Just… Please don’t. Some things are just meant to be. Like me being Moonrise. And some things aren’t. Like…” She couldn’t bring herself to finish that thought. Because how could she actually tell Penny that the universe’s plan probably involved keeping them separate?!
Penny, in fact, had gleaned exactly that from what Ruby had already said. And Penny’s first instinct was to wonder what kind of arbiter of existence would decide that two people couldn’t be together. It would be a very unkind arbiter, she decided. And if the arbiter in charge of the universe—if there was one—was unkind, then why should Penny listen or acquiesce to whatever they wanted?
Penny considered saying that aloud to Ruby. She really did. But she didn’t know if Ruby would want to disobey matters of destiny. Ruby liked her destiny, after all.
So Penny stayed silent.
Ruby couldn’t make herself look at Penny right now. She couldn’t look at what would undoubtedly be disappointment. Maybe even anger, or frustration. Maybe their paths would cross when Penny graduated in four years. Or maybe Ruby would be dead by then, or maybe Penny would be dead by then, and this week would be the last time they’d ever see each other. Which would mean that Ruby’s destiny somehow didn’t involve Penny. Gods, Ruby wanted to know how this universe, which was so cruel and unrelenting and violent and insistent on keeping Ruby and Penny apart, could also be the universe which had created Penny Pallas in the first place?
Ruby wanted to turn off her thoughts. She didn’t want to think anymore. She just wanted to be an automatic thing, with no feelings or wants or desires. And then her future would be so much easier.
And then Penny spoke.
“Okay,” she said softly. “I may not like it, but I understand. I will not try to stand in your way any longer, Ruby.” Her voice wavered between tones, like a musical instrument trying to find the right note. In her mind, she feared that if she kept pushing the issue, Ruby would begin to see her as an obstacle. Which would only make everything worse.
Penny’s logic core pinged, reminding her that there were still options, choices, ways that Ruby might still be rescued from her situation. Blake had promised drastic actions of her own to keep Ruby from returning to Atlas. And even if Blake’s plans failed… there was still one more thing Penny could try. A sort of reversal of what Ruby had done earlier in the semester to escape her airship confinement.
Ruby may have been unwilling to let Penny join her on her journey to save the world, but Penny was quite confident that the Atlesian Military would not pass up the chance for a sentient combat-oriented robot with immense strength and durability to be accompanying Ruby. If Penny went directly to General Ironwood, and explained exactly what she was and how much help she would be to Ruby… then perhaps, the General would see her potential and assign her to work with Ruby. And then Ruby could not object to Penny being with her, because it would be on the orders of the military! And then Ruby would have a friend with her wherever she went.
It would not be a perfect solution. Penny would still have to leave behind her team, and she would be throwing herself into an entirely unfamiliar and likely unsettling world of military protocols and missions and orders. And it would still be only one friend for Ruby. But one would be better than none, and… they would be together!
Penny nodded to herself. She had a plan. First, wait to see what Blake’s plan(s) yielded. If those failed, then she would enact Operation SMOOCHES: Secretly Maneuver Onto Operations Concerning Her Exuberant Sweetheart. The acronym was an extremely important part of the plan.
But, for now, still in Mountain Glenn, still on a mission which was very much unfinished, still on the night watch with Ruby… there was exactly nothing that Penny could do towards those plans. What she could do, however, was continue being the best friend to Ruby that she could possibly be.
“Then we should make the most of the time we still have together,” she said aloud. “We should try to do as many Ordinary Teenage Girl Things while you still can. If that is something you would like?”
Ruby’s heart went ba-dump. Something which Penny could notice, but not Ruby.
“Yeah. I’d like that,” she said shakily, pulling herself upright and scrubbing at her tears with a sleeve. “Might as well, while I still can, right?”
But then she remembered her surroundings, and looked around guiltily. “...We should actually keep watch, though…”
“Not to worry! I have been keeping my radar and auditory monitoring sensors on high alert as a background process this entire time!” Penny said. Every scan of their vicinity so far had turned up no intrusions.
“Oh! Okay, awesome, I should’ve guessed you could do that…” Ruby stood up and twisted around, cracking a joint in her lower back and letting out a sigh. She’d been curled up for too long, and now she’d have to be careful about moving too quickly, in case a muscle somewhere had gotten tight. Which she wouldn’t know because of the no pain thing. Best to keep her Aura up to take care of any accidental muscle strains. “I still wanna take a look around with my own eyes. I trust you! Just… force of habit, y’know?” It made her feel better, knowing that she was keeping watch, doing her duty, protecting others.
She pulled Lunar Enforcer off its hilt, and twirled it from one hand to the other as she strolled to the edge of the building, scanning the streets directly below. Nothing. There was a pebble at her feet; she kicked it over the side and watched it tumble down, disappearing into the gloom. It was the only thing moving.
Penny hung back for a moment, watching Ruby watch the city. She wasn’t entirely sure why she was taking the time to contemplate her from a distance—she felt as if she was searching for the answer to a question, without even knowing the question.
After twenty-two seconds of her processors whirring aimlessly, she shook herself out of the stupor and joined Ruby.
“All quiet,” Ruby said.
“I hope it continues to be quiet,” Penny said.
It was at this point that it started to really sink in for both girls that, somewhere amidst the tangle of pitched emotions and soul-searching that’d happened tonight, they had confessed how they felt about each other. And no matter what happened next, that was undeniable. It wasn’t something that could be taken back easily. Nor did either of them want to take it back. Now there was a knowledge rising sharper and sharper in their minds—knowledge of just how much they meant to the other person. They’d had some idea before, of course, but now it was definitive.
And both of them could not stop wondering: now what?
Ruby yawned, letting out an involuntary groan, and then immediately blushed. “Sorry.”
Penny giggled. “Don’t apologize! I find yawning to be one of the most curious, yet endearing things about organic bodies.” It was right up there with stomachs grumbling in terms of adorableness. “Did you know there is still no scientific consensus on the exact mechanism and benefit for yawning? And that the contagious aspect of it may be an entirely social behavior?”
And then Penny yawned. Without missing a beat, she added, “A social behavior which was added to my code to help me blend in.”
“Y’know, I think I should’ve wondered, because that’s not the first time you’ve yawned. But that was just… I just went with it. A robot girl who yawns, why not? Just like how you’re a robot girl who hiccups, and a robot girl who whirs and buzzes when she’s feeling lots of emotions, and a robot girl whose eyes glow brighter when she fights. It’s just you!”
With that, Ruby took a seat, dangling her legs over the side of the building before patting the spot next to her. Penny didn’t need an invitation to sit with her, but it felt right to do it anyways, just so Penny knew everything was still fine between them after the really heavy conversation they’d had five minutes ago!
“I’m never gonna get tired of learning things about you,” she said as Penny sat down. “I hope I never run out of new things to learn.”
“And I will make sure to always be creating new facts about myself for you to learn! That way, you will never run out, no matter how much you learn.”
Ruby smiled. A faraway look came into her eyes, and then she turned towards Penny. “Something I especially wanna learn. Can I ask?”
“Of course.” Penny gestured out at the stilled city before them. “It is not as if it would distract us from our watch.”
“Heh. Yeah. So.” Ruby scanned the vicinity once more, and then pulled Lunar Enforcer off her back and into her lap. “You remember when I told you about my favorite fairytale? The Blacksmith And The Robot?”
“Of course.” Penny nodded emphatically. How could she designate such a lovely moment as anything less than the highest priority of memories? Just last week, she had replayed the scene in her mind before going to sleep. It was a Most Treasured Memory.
“So. It’s something I didn’t even realize until when we were flying to the dance. I mentioned the Girl In The Tower, and then…” Ruby detached Lunar Enforcer’s loaded Dust clip and then checked that both firing chambers were cleared before producing a cleaning cloth from her utility belt. She’d already cleaned Lunar during her watch with Winter, but this was far from the first time she’d cleaned her weapon unnecessarily. It was soothing to her. “I realized, I spent a whole bunch of time telling you about my favorite fairytale and how cool it was, but I never actually asked you what your favorite fairytale was! I’m really sorry.”
“Don’t worry about it!” Penny said.
“Sorry,” Ruby said again. “I was gonna ask you after the dance, but. Uh. Things happened.”
They both shifted uncomfortably at the memory of the evening, a silence falling. Ruby tried to concentrate all her thinking on polishing out a stubborn scratch on Lunar Enforcer. Penny folded her hands in her lap, studying the tips of her shoelaces as they dangled over the precipitous drop. She tapped the heels of her light-up sneakers together, and they immediately lit up, their green lightning bolts flashing merrily for a few seconds before blinking out again.
“So. This is me asking now,” Ruby said. “Penny, what’s your favorite fairytale?”
Penny gave Ruby a smile brighter than the moon in the sky or the lights on her sneakers. “I am so glad you asked! Do you know the tale of The Girl Who Turned To Stone?”
When Ruby shook her head, Penny launched into the story without pause, letting the familiar words flow from her mouth.
“A long time ago, in a land far, far away…”
A long time ago in a land far, far away, there were two lovers who traveled together, endlessly in search of heroism and adventure. They found both in droves wherever they went, and together they fought for the innocent and the vulnerable, vanquished cruel lords, slew giant bloodthirsty beasts, solved ancient mysteries, discovered forgotten treasures—feats far more numerous than what could be described in a single story. But through it all, nothing was ever as important to them as their love. They loved each other more than anything else in the world, and they promised time and time again that only death could separate them.
And separate them it did.
After years upon years together, one lover fell gravely ill, and despite all attempts at healing and nursing by the other, death came for the lovers’ bond far sooner than either of them had expected. The surviving lover, a witch, was consumed by her grief, retreating into herself and refusing to speak as the pain of her lost love tore at her heart. She felt as if she would never be happy again. She melted down her own armor and snapped her spellcasting staff over her knee, unable to bear the reminders of the years spent adventuring together, reminders of a joy that she believed she would never feel again. At her beloved’s grave, she left everything which had belonged to her beloved—everything which might remind her of that lost joy.
But even removing these reminders did not ease the witch’s pain. She found that every day, anything could be a reminder of her loss—something mundane, something ordinary, even something which seemed to have nothing to do with the lovers. The laughter of a passerby might remind her of that treasured laugh which she would never hear again. The song of a bird in the morning might bring back memories of waking up in bed together with their faces just inches apart, sharing drowsy smiles and words of adoration. The gleam of a particular metal under the noonday sun could recall the smile which had been as constant as the passage of time. And every reminder would bring all her pain rushing back anew, just as overwhelming as that first moment when she had felt the last beat of her beloved’s heart.
The witch wondered, again and again, why? Why would the world be so cruel to her? Why had she not been taken, too? Why was she left alone, without the love which had meant the entire world to her? Why would she be allowed by fate to experience such happiness only to have it torn away?
She began to believe that she would never be happy again. She wondered why she went on, why she allowed her heart to continue its pitiful beat.
The witch thought of ending herself. She thought of casting off the crushing pain. She thought of seeing her beloved again. She thought of these things, and it called to her like a siren’s song. But on the one occasion when she did stand at the precipice of a jagged cliff and whisper to her beloved that they would soon be reunited, a single thought pulled her back: her beloved would not want her to give up. Even if ending her life would mean being reunited, her beloved would never want such a thing. Her beloved would want her to persevere.
The witch hated herself for knowing exactly what her beloved would want. She hated her beloved for being virtuous enough to believe such a thing. She hated herself for being strong enough to follow her beloved’s desire and live.
It was then, after so long spent lost in grief without change, that the witch decided if she could not deliver herself to her beloved again, then she would bring her beloved back to her.
Such a thing had never been done, not to anyone’s knowledge, and it was widely believed to be impossible. But the witch did not care. If this was a world which could take, then she believed it was also a world which could give.
The witch scoured the deepest, most dangerous dungeons in hopes of finding some ancient forgotten tome of magic which might hold the spell to bring back her beloved from the dead. She traveled the land in search of another witch who might know how to revive a lost soul. She found increasingly strange and forgotten ways of magic, practices that had been lost to time until she rediscovered them amidst her single-minded quest. She found entirely new types of magic, spells that no one believed could exist, and became the master of a thousand things once considered unimaginable.
The witch became the most powerful person in the land. Kingdoms feared her presence. No one except the foolhardy dared to cross her path. The air shimmered erratically in the wake of her footsteps, as if she was constantly on the verge of tearing apart the world without even meaning to. And all of this power was useless to the witch, because none of it could bring her beloved back. She would trade it all for her beloved—she would trade the world if she could. But even the world was not enough. It seemed that nothing could bring her beloved back.
In her desperation, the witch turned to something which could not be called an idea, or a plan. Sometimes she thought of it as a wild hope, and sometimes she thought of it as a baseless fantasy.
Hope or fantasy, delusion or drowning sorrows, all the same: the witch began to build a new body for her beloved. She carved it from the finest, most lustrous marble, a process that she labored upon for years and years. She gave it two sparkling, flawless diamonds for eyes, and for hair, she arrayed shimmering gold leaf atop the body’s head with the utmost care and skill. She used polished, gleaming ivory for the teeth, and sheets of luminous mother-of-pearl for the fingernails. She sculpted wrinkles and folds of skin which gave the appearance that the body could spring to life at any moment.
She believed that if only she made this body perfect enough, she could bring back her beloved. She believed if it was perfect enough, she could create a new home to which her beloved’s lost soul could return and come back to life in. But she believed it had to be perfect; it had to be something far, far better than the original body which had failed both of them. She worked ceaselessly with as little sleep and food as she could manage, and entire days could pass by without her noticing. The only thing which she measured time by was the progress she made on the body. She began to forget herself entirely, thinking only of finishing her work and being reunited.
She wove her magic into the body. She cast spells upon it which made it pliable and flexible, yet somehow still as hard as the stone it was carved from, and she cast spells to ward off every kind of danger that she could think of, anything which might carry the smallest risk of killing her beloved again. She cast many, many other spells which she had learned during her travels, spells which would enhance the senses and bring warmth and comfort and too many others to count, spells which she hoped would bring the body that much closer to perfection. The stone body began to feel as if it was alive under her touch, thrumming with something that she could almost call life. Even as the body remained stubbornly still and unresponsive, such signs encouraged her and gave her the strength she needed to continue.
But all of this toil took a terrible toll on the witch. She withdrew entirely from the world to immerse herself in her work, and with no one to speak to, her voice fell into utter disuse. With so little attention paid to her own body, it withered, her skin pulling tight over bones, the light in her eyes dulling, the color in her cheeks draining away. It was as if everything which she put into the stone body was taken from her flesh.
One day, long after she had stopped counting the passage of days, the witch awoke, and found that she could not move. Her arms and her legs seemed to be made of lead, and her heart pounded with glacial slowness in her ears, the only sound that she could hear. Every breath she took felt as if it was being drawn from mud, and even with the blankets which covered her, a chill had wound its way around her, piercing to the marrow of her bones.
She knew she was dying. She could feel the beat of her heart growing slower and slower.
She managed to turn her head, her gaze falling upon the stone body which laid silently on a workbench by the opposite wall. In recent months, she had become so protective of the body that she could not even bring herself to be in a different room from it.
Some inexorable urge drew her towards the body; in her last moments she desired to be next to it. She used her magic to give herself the strength needed to move, heaving herself upright and tottering forward, her shrunken legs protesting painfully under a burden they could no longer carry. But the magic kept her upright for just long enough for her to sink to her knees beside the body, cradling the ever-silent head in her arms.
She gazed down into the diamond eyes, and saw the reflection of herself. She saw her inhumanly sunken eyes, her skin paler than a ghost, her lips thinner than gossamer thread, and too late, regrets of every kind filled her.
If only I had taken better care of myself, I would’ve been able to live longer, she thought. If only I had paid more attention to myself, I would’ve been able to finish this work for my beloved, she thought. If only I had remembered the body I live in, she thought. If only I had not forgotten myself.
And then, as the dizziness of the looming end overtook her, so did a strange clarity. All of this work had been for nothing, she realized. Her quest to bring back her beloved would never have succeeded, no matter how many more years she might’ve put into it. No matter how perfectly constructed the body, no matter how finely detailed, a soul simply could not be brought back from the dead. It was the will of the gods, and so it was a rule of existence which could not be broken. It had to be respected and obeyed. Those who did not respect it—those who attempted to disobey it—would find themselves resigned to similarly miserable fates as her, wasting away in pursuit of an impossible folly while losing sight of all which was still good in the living world.
Too late, she realized all this. There was no strength left in her body to correct any of her mistakes. It was only through inertia, and the stiffening of her muscles, that she was still upright, embracing the stone body.
Perhaps this sudden insight was one final gift of mercy from the gods, she mused. It was already an immense mercy that they had not punished her for spurning the rules of the world which they’d so graciously created. Perhaps they knew that this too-late realization would be punishment enough.
While trying to find something she’d lost, she had lost herself.
But then, with the world around her fading away, she remembered that she did have one more chance to go on living, one last chance to honor what her beloved wanted. That chance was the body which she had spent so many years building, the body which she was pressed up against now. It could not bring a soul back from the dead, but perhaps… it could become a home for a soul which was still alive.
Barely even aware of what she was doing, she unleashed her magic, raw energy without any particular intent pulsing within her soul and flaring all around her. She stared into the diamond eyes of the stone body, and she hoped, and she yearned, and she wondered, and she tried, and she wanted.
The witch’s body crumpled to the floor as its heart gave its final beat, muscles slackening and eyes turning dull.
For a moment, all was silent in the house, its only occupants being two unmoving bodies.
And then the stone body moved.
At first, it was just a twitch of an arm, something that might’ve been mistaken for a death throe if it had come from the other body. But then the other arm twitched, and then the legs shifted to one side, and then the stone body sat bolt upright, reflexively gasping even without lungs or a throat.
No longer was this something which could be referred to as the stone body. Now, rising from the table with diamond eyes which sparkled like no other gem, with arms and legs which moved as if they were made of flesh and bone and not stone, and surrounded by a faint glow of magic, she was the girl made of stone.
The witch looked down at her new body, and it was then that she felt something which she’d thought was gone forever: Joy.
All her work had been for something after all. This body, so meticulously crafted, was hers now. She had another chance to do what her beloved would want her to do before anything else: live.
And live she would. This was a body that would not age, would not decay. Perhaps it could even be called indestructible. She had all the time in the world, and far less of the risk. Anything was possible. There would always be people who needed help, problems that had to be solved, and adventures to chart.
She had learned the vast difference between dwelling on what had once been, and focusing on what still could be. In dwelling on what once was, she would only ever lose herself, because she could not exist in something which no longer existed. But in focusing on what still could be, she could always find herself in the things which might still happen. She would never again forget herself.
And so, the girl who turned to stone left her self-imposed confines, walking out into the morning sunshine and into a world that once again felt welcoming.
“The end,” Penny said, her words hanging in the night. “That is far from the end of the girl’s story, but it is the end of the written story known as The Girl Who Turned to Stone.”
“Wow…” Ruby breathed, staring at Penny with a slightly open mouth. “That was so cool…”
“You have not heard it before?”
“Nope!” Ruby shrugged. “I don’t really know many fairytales. Just the ones that Fria used to tell me to help me fall asleep. Mostly I just wanted to hear my favorites again and again…” She cocked her head at Penny. “So what do you like about it? I mean, I could probably guess, but… it’s nicer hearing you talk.”
Something inside Penny went bzzzt. She tried her best to ignore it. “I liked the story because, well…” She trailed off, suddenly feeling embarrassed of what she was about to say. “I hope you don’t think it is too silly, but I liked it because it was about a girl who became like me, in a way! She turned herself into someone made of inorganic materials! I am not exactly made of stone, but metal is also a hard material that comes from the ground! It felt as if I was reading a story about someone like me…?”
“No, don’t worry, it’s not silly, it’s totally cool! But…” Ruby poked her in the side. “So, all that, and you still didn’t know about The Blacksmith and the Robot until I told you, how?!”
“I am not omnipresent or all-knowing! I can be unaware of things just like any other human can!”
“Hey, had me fooled,” Ruby said. She leaned herself against Penny once more and looked up at her with big wide eyes. “I’m glad you told me this one, though. I like it. I don’t know why, but I like it… it kind of sounds a little like The Blacksmith and The Robot, doesn’t it?”
“Yes!” Penny nodded enthusiastically. “I thought the same thing after you told me the story! I researched it online, and did you know that scholars believe whoever wrote The Girl Who Turned to Stone was genuinely inspired by that fairytale? They have pointed out how the similarities are too significant to ignore!”
“Huh.”
“It is a shame that no one has ever established who created that story.”
“Yeah, and I’d have some questions for the writer,” Ruby said. “Like, why don’t we know anything about the dead lover? We don’t know if it’s a woman or a man or a nonbinary person or even… I don’t know, an alien!”
That was another thing which scholars seemed to endlessly debate—the gender of the witch’s lover. But at this exact moment, Penny was silently hoping to herself that the lover had been a girl. A hope which most definitely had nothing to do with how she herself was perhaps in love with the girl right next to her.
“And like. Doesn’t that bit at the end about the will of the gods feel kind of weird?” Ruby said. “It’s kind of like.. I don’t know, it feels like it’s from another story.”
Penny had considered a similar thing, and this was yet another thing contested amongst literary scholars. Some said it was proof that this fairytale had no single author, but was rather an amalgamation of many different versions. Some said it could be due to a mix-up with some other lost fable. Some said it was from a later author overwriting an earlier version with their own views. And everyone was quite sure that their theory was the correct one.
Literary analysis was a very confusing field. She wanted to learn more about it.
“Do you think they’ll write fairytales about us?” Ruby said. She was looking out to the horizon again, her eyes fixed on the moon.
“If they do, I hope the endings are happy.”
“We’ll make them happy.” Ruby wasn’t just saying that. She believed it from the moment she thought it. “It’ll be the favorite bedtime story for so many kids. I’m thinking… The Tale of The Magnificent Moonrise and the Brilliant Battle Angel.”
“Battle Angel?” Penny said. That was new. But uniquely worded in a way that made her think it was referring to something.
Ruby shrugged. “I heard it somewhere once.” And that was as specific an answer as she could give.
Penny accepted it. And went to another name that she had given Ruby earlier today.
“I’m so happy that I know you, Moonbeam,” she said, letting her head drop onto Ruby’s shoulder.
Ruby gasped quietly, and then whispered, “Me too, Firefly,” putting a hand atop Penny’s hand.
“You know, there is one other reason why I picked Moonbeam,” Penny said several minutes later, constructing a sly smile on her face, and internally marveling at how easily it came. Releasing herself from such a fearful secret felt like an extra burst of power being added to her wings.
“Oh?” Ruby said.
“It sounds very phonetically similar to Moonby.”
Ruby groaned quietly, but there was no hiding her smile. “Firefly,” she said, poking Penny’s cheek.
“Moonbeam,” Penny said, poking her right back.
They returned to leaning against one another, hand in hand. Maybe it was illogical of them to let this breathtaking physical closeness happen when they were both trying to hold themselves back from falling any deeper in love with the other, but… For this moment alone in a ruined city with an unknown future ahead, this was all they wanted. Just each other, and nothing else in the world to worry about.
At least, nothing to worry about until Penny’s sensors picked up a faint but unmistakable tremor in the ground.
She stiffened, checking through her full suite of sensors as another tremor struck, and then another.
“What is it?” Ruby said. She knew what somebody noticing something looked like—she was already holding Lunar Enforcer at the ready, scanning the streets with her scope.
Penny calculated that the tremors would become powerful enough for Ruby to notice in three, two, one—
Ruby’s eyes widened. “Is that—”
She put her palm flat against the surface of the building underneath them, and stayed silent through four more tremors, before she inhaled sharply and jumped to her feet.
“Wake everyone up, Penny. Now. That’s footsteps. There’s only one thing on this part of Remnant heavy enough to make the ground shake like that when it walks—”
It was then, as Penny deployed her wings and pulled Luminous Electra off its holster, that she picked up a visual. A visual which was very hard to miss, because it was a building collapsing into a cloud of dust. And a moment later, appearing in the sudden gap in the dead city’s skyline was a pair of enormous glowing red eyes, almost as tall as the building they’d just leveled, and a pair of enormous gleaming tusks—
Ruby’s shout pierced the air, all thoughts of stealth thrown aside.
“MEGOLIATH!”
Notes:
One of the things which surprised me while writing this story was just how much longer than originally planned the Mountain Glenn arc ended up being. In the outline, this section was only supposed to be three chapters!
I love writing custom fairytales for RWBY.
See you all next week for Chapter 45: Runaway
Chapter 45: Runaway
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
Penny had no need to alert her teammates because Ruby’s warning shout did that for her, a confused hubbub erupting from the campsite even as Ruby’s voice was still echoing around the city. Seconds later, Winter and Oobleck leapt over the edge of the building, appearing at their side.
Winter sucked in a sharp breath when she spotted the unmistakable shape of the Megoliath looming in the darkness.
“Doctor Oobleck,” Winter said slowly as Blake, Yang, and Weiss sprinted up the last flight of stairs to join them, still readying their weapons and blinking sleep out of their eyes. “I strongly recommend that we take the reins of decision-making back from the children.”
Oobleck turned to a still-unsteady Blake. “That is up to you, Miss Belladonna. A Megoliath is entirely beyond what any first-year team would be expected to defeat on their first field mission. There would be absolutely no malfeasance in yielding your authority to me at this moment. I guarantee it would not reflect poorly on any of you.”
“I…” Blake looked at the Megoliath wading through Mountain Glenn towards them, and then Oobleck, and then back to the Megoliath.
There was something uniquely unsettling about facing down an enemy which was powerful enough to be able to move slowly, Penny thought. They had enough time to ask questions such as the one Oobleck had just now voiced; they had time for Blake to think through her answer, and yet the enormous beast was approaching ceaselessly, inexorably, leveling everything in its path with its sheer bulk and tusks as large as Luminous Electra.
“How many, Penny?” Blake said as the cacophony of a broken civilization’s remains being crushed underfoot grew ever-closer.
“Just one,” Penny said, triple-checking her readings. “It seems to have broken away from the pack which we spotted passing by the city. No sign of the rest.” And that was strange. Megoliaths were some of the oldest and smartest Grimm in existence. Any of them would know better than to attempt a random attack like this. What was drawing this one in?
“Okay.” Blake took a deep breath, rubbing her face roughly. “We’ve been through a lot today, but I think we’ve still got a Megoliath takedown in us. And I think I know how, too.”
If Oobleck was surprised by her decision, he didn’t show it anywhere in his expression. “Very well.”
Winter, for her part, was far more dubious, never taking her eyes off the Megoliath as she kept a white-knuckled grip on her sword. “Belladonna. Do you know what you’re doing?”
“Do you know my team better than me?” Blake said.
Winter turned away from the Megoliath, tilting her head at Blake, and then she crossed her arms, but said nothing. After a moment, Penny realized she was waiting. Waiting for orders.
Blake nodded once, and without further preamble, launched into a rapid-fire delivery of the plan. “There’s a sinkhole in the north of the city—hard to notice, but there’s an entire section of pavement ready to collapse, wide enough to swallow up a Megoliath. We can trap it there.” Her gaze flicked to Penny. “Your sword’s going to be helpful against those tusks—can you stay the closest to its front?”
Penny extended Luminous Electra to its largest form. “I absolutely can!”
“Winter, your summoning glyphs are perfect for running interference on the target. Can you keep it distracted?”
“Most certainly.”
“The rest of us, we’re in charge of making sure it keeps heading in the right direction. Follow my lead, watch out for the tusks, and watch your Aura—none of us are at full strength. I’d say watch your Dust usage, too, but it’s a Megoliath—we take it down and then worry about supplies!”
Before anyone could respond, the Megoliath crashed through the last row of buildings separating them.
It paused momentarily to shake off a cascade of concrete chunks and debris before training its eyes on them once more and unleashing a bone-rattling bellow, making the building underneath them shake ominously.
“Go!” Blake shouted as the Megoliath lowered its head to charge once more, its tusks glinting viciously. She was the first to leap off the back of the building, everyone just moments behind her as the beast rammed into their lookout spot.
The billowing cloud of dust and smoke kicked up by the resulting collapse was so thick, Penny had to switch to infrared vision, her photoreceptors utterly powerless to parse anything. Infrared told her everyone else was similarly blinded, frozen in place while they waited for the dust to clear.
Abruptly, her radar alerted her to the Megoliath shoving aside the wreckage behind them with a mighty sweep of its tusks, stamping a foot against the ground before charging towards—
Winter, who likely couldn’t see more than a half-meter in front of her and might not hear the Goliath over the noise of neighboring buildings collapsing—
Penny fired her rockets at maximum power and blasted through the air before abruptly shutting them off just before she would’ve collided with Winter, which allowed her to flip in midair to land directly—but not too directly— in front of her, raising Luminous Electra and bracing herself just in time to catch the Megoliath tusks which appeared out of the dust.
The thunderous crack of the tusks running into Penny’s sword was like a high-caliber rifle going off, and the impact vibrated up and down her body, producing a peculiar ringing which could not be immediately eliminated from her audioreceptors. But she held, her heels digging a divot into the ground.
The Megoliath made a sound which might be called a confused grunt at the fact that this puny person wasn’t being trampled underfoot, and at the same moment, Penny became aware of the point of a sword resting lightly between her shoulder blades.
“How?” Winter said a moment later, lowering her sword as her senses caught up to her reflexes—something which Penny’s prediction algorithms had suggested might happen, hence the being careful not to land too close to Winter.
“How did—” she started to say again, but by the time she was on her third word, she was talking to empty air, because the Megoliath had retreated back into the dust and Penny had flown off in pursuit of it.
“Get out of the dust cloud!” Penny shouted as she landed in front of the Megoliath again and blocked its advance before it could run down a still-disoriented Yang. It could smell everyone, and no one knew it was coming.
Thankfully, her warning seemed to have reached at least the people closest to her and the Megoliath, because Winter, Yang, and Weiss (the three closest) began moving away on her radar.
And at the same time, the Grimm realized that its biggest current concern was probably the girl waving a giant sword and standing up to its hits. It let out another bellow, something which was barely even a distinguishable sound so close, much closer to just a tremendous blast of noise.
And then it swung its tusks at her again, this time coming from the side. Unfortunately, while Penny was exemplary at stopping frontal attacks, side attacks were… trickier. She blocked it, of course, but unable to properly brace herself at this angle, she was thrown sideways.
She activated her rockets midair, turning the uncontrolled flight into a tightly banking turn, and circled around the Megoliath, landing on its opposite side. The dust was starting to settle, mercifully, and she detected the rest of the group retreating further down the street, except for Ruby who she couldn’t—
Ruby zipped into existence beside her, her goggles lowered and her braid swinging wildly.
“Ever fought a Megoliath?” she said, grinning her trademark feral grin as the monster swung to face them again.
“No.” There was an obvious implication in that question. “Have you?”
“Oh yeah,” Ruby said. “But I used my eyes. Can’t do that here, so this is gonna get interesting!”
A shout came from farther down the street—Blake, calling to Penny to let the Megoliath push them back towards the rest of her team’s position.
As she rose into the air again and Ruby semblanced away, she found herself wondering—how did Ruby’s eyes work? She’d described them as firing laser beams, but… how did that work?
Maybe it was something as inexplicable as Aura or Semblances—maybe it had something to do with Ruby’s Aura? Perhaps she was able to literally flare her Aura out through her eyes as an offensive weapon against Grimm?
…That sounded like something truly beautiful to witness. She hoped she got to see Ruby do it someday.
“Good job,” Blake said as Penny and Ruby caught up, the Megoliath not far behind. “Penny, what’s the fastest way to get to that sinkhole?”
“Straight, straight, straight, right, straight, straight, left, straight, right, left, straight, straight!”
Penny wasn’t sure if she was supposed to hear Ruby whispering “you are the greatest person to ever exist,” but she did hear it, and it once again made something inside her go bzzzt bzzzt. But what she was definitely supposed to hear was Blake saying, in a defeated sort of tone, “Let’s just go with the route I remember, then.”
And then the Megoliath caught up to them again, and everything fell into a storm of blades and tusks and glowing white Beowolves (Winter’s summons were fascinating), and it only made the Grimm more and more enraged, its swings of its tusks growing wilder. It was stomping at the ground, generating minor groundquakes powerful enough to knock even Yang off-balance.
Just as they were reaching the halfway point to Blake’s sinkhole, Penny’s radar began to ping with alerts from… ahead of them? And she recognized those, they weren’t Grimm radar signatures—
A squad of White Fang soldiers, heavily armored and copiously armed, sprinted around the nearest street corner and then came to a dead stop as they sighted the chaos. They seemed just as surprised to see Team BSYP and the Megoliath as Penny was to see them.
“Hostiles ahead!” she called.
Blake’s head whipped around, and as soon as she saw the White Fang, she froze—right in the Megoliath’s path. And before anyone could shout a warning, another furious swing of the tusks sent her flying into the side of a building.
“Blake!” Yang shouted, sprinting towards her, just barely dodging under a tusk and unloading both gauntlets directly into the Megoliath’s face. Which, like everything else they’d tried so far, only made it more incensed.
Penny ran to join Yang, who was playing a dangerous game with the Megoliath, using a flurry of Aura-boosted punches to keep the deadly tusks away from a still-recovering Blake.
“Are you okay?” she said over her shoulder to Blake as she blocked another swing. The Megoliath had stopped its forward advance entirely, nearly pinning the three of them against the wall.
Still with her hands on her knees, Blake managed to get out, “Where the fuck did they come from?”
Penny blinked, confused, until she realized Blake was referring to the White Fang. Who were watching the scene with their guns raised, but not shooting, as if they were unsure what the bigger threat was right now.
“They just appeared,” Penny said, pushing away another blow. She’d also just noticed Ruby looking back and forth between the Megoliath and the White Fang, and she was definitely trying to figure out which threat to prioritize. Penny thought it was emphatically clear that the giant Grimm was the most urgent threat for anyone in the vicinity, but then again, she didn’t have the same decision-making processes as Ruby and the White Fang.
“Doctor! Winter!” Blake shouted, finally fully upright again. “Go after them!” She indicated the Fang with a tilt of her head.
Ruby, standing next to Winter, asked her something which Penny couldn’t quite make out due to the roar which erupted from the Megoliath’s mouth at the same moment. But given the way Winter emphatically shook her head and pointed at the Megoliath with her sword before running off, followed by Ruby pouting, Penny could make a very likely inference about what’d been asked.
The White Fang had broken into a retreat the moment they’d heard Blake’s order, and so Winter and Oobleck’s pursuit took them out of sight seconds later. The Megoliath momentarily backed off, slowly turning its head from side to side as if confused by the sudden appearance and then departure of all those other people.
“We need to get it pointing in the right direction again,” Blake said, glancing at Ruby and Weiss, who were still on the other side of the street, separated by the Grimm. “Penny, Yang, Heatsink!”
Oh, yes. It’d been Penny’s idea during training to give cute names to their team attack moves, and now they were doing it in the real world for the first time!
Heatsink was very simple. Yang gave Penny a thumbs-up as she tossed a new clip into each of her gauntlets, and then Penny stepped forward, grabbed Yang around the waist, and flung her into the air.
“Booyah!” Yang shouted, twisting in midair to unload Ember Celica on the Megoliath as she sailed over it in a high arc. That, of course, redirected the Megoliath’s attention upward as it reared up and tossed its head, trying to knock her out of the sky like an irritating insect. But Penny had calculated the arc of her throw to keep Yang beyond the Grimm’s reach, and at the same moment she’d thrown Yang, she’d broken into a sprint. So the Megoliath, looking up, never saw Penny running up and swinging Luminous Electra into its neck with every joule of energy in her body.
The blow jolted the Megoliath sideways, biting into the massive armor plates around its neck, and digging in so deeply that when the Megoliath roared in pain and tried to shake off the stuck blade, Penny was yanked off her feet. For 1.4 seconds, she swung perilously in the air, and then finally Luminous was jarred loose. Unfortunately, all the momentum in the swing of the Megoliath’s neck was transferred into sending Penny flying, too fast for even her rockets to course-correct.
WHAM.
Whether Penny wanted it or not, she would be out of the fight for at least the next fifteen seconds as she recovered from a very sudden introduction to the side of a building. For now, she would be stuck staring at the sky and listening to the sounds of battle while her movement sensors recalibrated themselves. She heard Blake yelling for Freezerburn—which consisted of Yang closing to melee while Weiss peppered their target with projectile-launching glyphs from farther away. And mercifully, the heavy thud of Ember Celica’s shots landing against Grimm armor was moving away from Penny. She was very vulnerable to the underside of a Megoliath’s foot right now.
Six seconds later, Weiss and Ruby appeared in her field of vision, their eyes flicking frantically over her body.
“Is she okay?!” Ruby gasped. “She’s not moving—”
“She isn’t hurt. This happens occasionally,” Weiss said, glancing up as an especially big explosion shook the ground. “After a big hit, her body might need to recalibrate, and when that happens, all we can do is wait for her to regain her movement.”
At that moment, Penny’s recalibration finally finished, and movement was restored to her body.
“Precisely!” she said, jumping to her feet in one movement. Weiss, who was used to this, didn’t blink. Ruby, who had never seen Penny do that before, reflexively burst into her Semblance and reappeared several meters away before realizing what’d happened.
“Got it,” she said, blushing violently. “Now what?”
Thanks to the efforts of Heatsink and Freezerburn, the Megoliath was facing in the right direction again, but now the team was split—Yang was the only one ahead of the beast while Blake, Weiss, Penny, and Ruby were behind. Although Yang was doing a sensational job of keeping it distracted, it would be all too easy for the Megoliath to notice the larger group and turn around to challenge them, erasing all that work—
“Blackout,” Blake said to Penny, rapidly unraveling Gambol Shroud’s ribbon.
Oooh. Yes. Perfect. Penny nodded and crouched down into a ready position, priming her rockets and holding out a hand, ready to receive Blake’s half of this combo attack.
Ruby blinked. “What?”
Blake plucked an unusually small canister of Dust off her belt, pouring its contents onto her now-unraveled ribbon, which she’d detached from the weapon and bunched up into a ball in her hand. She spent a half-second mashing the Dust into the ribbon, giving the elastic a particular claylike appearance. “You’ll see.”
With that, she tossed the ribbon’s end to Penny.
Penny took off, clutching the ribbon in one hand, and went straight for the Megoliath. She approached so quickly it didn’t have time to turn around to face her before she was buzzing by its face, the ribbon unfurling behind her. Unfurling at eye-level with the Grimm, to be exact.
A moment later, a shot rang out from Gambol Shroud, one which wasn’t aimed at the Megoliath but at the ribbon trailing behind Penny. A shot which would activate the Dust that the ribbon was currently laced with.
This Dust, created by Weiss in an experiment at Beacon, was a custom mixture of Water Dust and Earth Dust and several other additives, all of which combined to produce a burst of immensely sticky mud when activated. When that burst happened right in front of a Grimm’s eyes? That sticky mud became… Well, a blackout.
A loud, wet thwump, a powerful tug on the ribbon, and a spray of mud splattering over Penny told her that the Dust had activated successfully. She turned in midair, reeling in the ribbon, and was greeted with the sight of the Megoliath’s face entirely caked in mud, which clung stubbornly no matter how hard it tried to shake it off. It was completely blinded, and so finally Blake and Weiss could slip past it unnoticed, rejoining Yang as Penny touched down and Ruby semblanced over.
“Okay.” Blake took a deep breath. “Keep moving. We’re not out of the woods yet.”
That was an idiom, Penny knew that by now, but even so, she thought it was quite funny to be using this particular idiom when they were very distinctly not in the woods.
“That was so cool!” Ruby gushed as they retreated once again, the blinded Megoliath now relying entirely on its sense of smell to chase them. “I never did any combo attacks with my own team because y’know, why practice combos with people you aren’t gonna be working with in a few months? And most of my missions are gonna be solo anyway, so we just never saw the point in trying any, but oh my gods now I wanna try making some of my own combos! You were just like fwoosh pow swoosh ka-bam boom YEAH!” All of this, she said while keeping up a steady barrage of fire, and dodging seamlessly around obstacles. “Penny, can we do a combo attack? And can we give it a cool name like you all did?”
Penny started to nod energetically, but Blake interrupted her.
“Ruby, as much as it warms my heart to see you learning how to actually lead a team—” She broke off to vault over a particularly large pile of steel beams which had apparently been erected as a barricade at some point years ago. Moments after the team had cleared it, the Megoliath rumbled through like it wasn’t even there. “—Can we save the experimental stuff for when we’re not in danger of being crushed into a bloody pulp?”
“Oops! Sorry!” Ruby nodded once and fell silent.
Silently, Penny decided there would be no harm in devoting a few spare processing cycles to coming up with combo attacks for her and Ruby, and reallotted several cycles for exactly that task.
“Left turn!” Blake called abruptly as they neared an intersection. “Last one! The sinkhole’s ahead!”
They emerged onto a wide, straight road which seemed to cross most of the city, a clear shot to their goal—and only then did Penny realize a flaw in their plan.
A Megoliath, at full speed, could run down a person. However, reaching that full speed required significant space, distance, and flat ground. All of which had been in short supply in a crowded urban landscape where the chase was following turn after turn between buildings and narrow roads—even if the Megoliath could just kick over any obstacle in its way, it was still being constantly slowed. But now, on this main street with no turns and no obstacles, the Megoliath could now run them down.
The worst part was, Penny knew exactly why she hadn’t realized this sooner. All of her prediction algorithms had been predicated on the idea that their route through the city would be something similar to the route she’d originally found, one which was constantly twisting and turning. But they weren’t following Penny’s route. They were following Blake’s route. And Blake, having an organic brain, would have chosen a route which was easiest to remember—and therefore had the fewest turns. Which Penny had failed to account for in her prediction algorithms. Meaning, they were about to be run down by an enraged Megoliath and she had no idea what to do next.
“Blake!” she called, trying to get her attention. And to her relief, Blake seemed to realize the problem at the same moment, her eyes widening as she threw a look over her shoulder and spotted the Megoliath genuinely gaining ground on them for the first time that night.
“Penny, Weiss, Frostbyte!” she yelled, barely dodging a flying chunk of concrete.
Good plan! Penny pivoted immediately, putting up Luminous Electra, bracing the blade with two hands, and the Megoliath ran straight into the flat of her blade—with enough momentum to actually knock her back this time, no matter how well she was set up. Fortunately, that was where Weiss came in, casting a glyph which pulled Penny away at the same moment that she cast a massive stopping glyph in front of the Megoliath, slowing it even further. It broke through with a vicious headbutt, but it was delayed just long enough for Penny to regroup and drop back into its path, once again forcing it to knock her back, which in turn gave Weiss the time she needed to fall back and cast another glyph to pull Penny away along with another glyph to slow the Megoliath, and then it became something like a rhythm. The Megoliath was too powerful to be stopped, but not powerful enough to disregard Penny and Weiss’s tandem efforts to slow it, pushing them back over and over again a while unaware of the trap it was being led into.
Penny’s radar alerted her that Blake, Yang, and Ruby had stopped moving; a quick glance over her shoulder confirmed they were ready. Just ahead was a shallow but unmistakable depression in the pavement, with several ominous cracks showing at its center. Perfectly camouflaged and dangerously frail—if Penny was reading those stress vectors right, it looked like the asphalt might not even hold up the weight of a human, let alone an enormous Grimm. Blake was standing at the sinkhole’s far edge, signaling emphatically.
Penny nodded and flared her rockets, disengaging from the Megoliath and picking up Weiss with one arm as she flew past. Weiss, who had slowly and reluctantly grown used to being abruptly picked up by her partner mid-fight, only let out a deep sigh as they rejoined their teammates. Which was an improvement over the angry yelling and flailing that had happened the first several times they’d tried this maneuver.
“Good job,” Blake said as Penny and Weiss touched down. “Now—”
She was interrupted by a cacophony which could only be generated by a full-grown Megoliath suddenly reversing course mid-stride. It skidded forwards in a spray of rubble, its forelegs digging ruts into the ground and hind legs scrambling around madly in a way Penny might’ve found adorable if not for how this meant their trap had been noticed.
The Megoliath came to a stop just meters from the edge of the sinkhole, close enough to give Penny hope that the Grimm’s weight might just cause the sides to cave in anyways, but the Megoliath seemed very aware of that possibility as it backed away.
“You have got to be kidding me,” Yang muttered.
Now out of the danger zone, the Megoliath poked with clear caution at the ground with a front paw, and then let out a loud snort and backed away again, as if to say, did you really think you could fool me with that?
“It cannot be gloating,” Weiss said in a tone of pure disbelief.
Still, the sinkhole was wide enough that the Megoliath couldn’t circumvent it, and so, however briefly, they were at an impasse. A bizarre quiet fell. The Megoliath stared at them. They stared at the Megoliath.
“I have an idea,” Ruby whispered. “A combo idea. Penny. If you fly and I use my semblance, we can fly circles around the Grimm, fast enough to keep hitting both tusks without getting hit back. We hit those tusks enough times, we can chop them off. And Megoliath tusks are heavy enough that if it loses both tusks, it’ll get thrown off-balance. Forwards.”
Recognition passed over Blake’s face. She tightened her grip on Gambol Shroud. “And we can do the rest.”
“Exactly!” Ruby looked to Penny, who immediately nodded in assent. “Yeah! By The Light Of The Silvery Moon, go!”
Ruby’s combo name was very fun, Penny thought as she took off, although perhaps it could be truncated slightly to make it easier to shout.
As she flew towards the Megoliath, Ruby was right there beside her, a silver streak whirling around and around Penny’s wings like an affectionate comet. Just before they would’ve collided with the Grimm, they split ways, Penny banking right and Ruby darting left. And then she flared her rockets as hard as they could go in a circle this small, leaning into a turn that just barely missed the most protruding spikes of bony white armor.
Halfway through her first lap, a cloud of silver flashed by her. Or rather, through her. The sensation of flying through a cloud of Ruby particles was… extremely unique. She’d expected it to feel like being sandblasted, but instead it just felt like a gentle wave washing over her, despite how rapidly Ruby’s Semblance was moving on a visual level.
A moment later, she was coming around to the Megoliath’s front once more, and this time, she swung Luminous Electra down at the tusks as she passed above, and at the same instant, Ruby dropped out of her Semblance from the other direction, Lunar Enforcer’s twin blades scraping against the solid bone before she vanished into a cloud of silver again.
The Megoliath twisted and turned and unleashed deafening roars, trying to swat Ruby and Penny out of the air with its trunk, but their agility was simply too much as they circled again and again, hacking away at the tusks with every pass. They were a constant streak of green and silver light, intertwining endlessly as they swooped past one another like binary stars orbiting some central point of gravity, always dancing out of the Megoliath’s reach as if it were nothing but a prop on a stage.
And then, on the thirty-ninth circle, Luminous Electra bit all the way through one tusk at the same moment that Lunar Enforcer slashed through the last splinter of bone holding together the other tusk, and then the two tusks were crashing to the ground and the Megoliath was pitching forward, off-balance—
A flurry of glyphs appeared behind the Grimm, shoving it even farther into a precarious position, and Blake’s ribbon wrapped around its head, yanking it forward. The Megoliath stumbled, tried to regain its balance, failed, and stumbled again—
And put a foot directly into the sinkhole.
The sagging pavement offered less resistance than wet paper, the Megoliath foot punching through like it wasn’t even there, and as soon as that foreleg plunged in, there was no stopping its descent as the rest of the pavement heaved up and then gave way, the enormous beast toppling down into a suddenly yawning chasm. It flailed desperately in every direction, but found nothing except empty air, and landed with a thunderous CRASH somewhere below, wherever ‘below’ was.
Team BSYP and Ruby carefully picked their way to the edge of the newly-revealed sinkhole and stared down. The Megoliath was on its back, kicking its legs weakly, either still dazed by the impact or actually wounded by the fall. Either way—wait.
Penny blinked, zooming in on the sinkhole’s sides. Were those floors—?
“Let’s finish it off,” Blake said. “Keysmash.”
Oh, yes. This one was Penny’s favorite. And also Yang’s. It was something which might’ve appeared quite complex to an outside observer, but to Team BSYP the strategy was extremely simple: Throw Penny and Yang at a thing.
Penny put aside her visual investigation of the sinkhole and fired her rockets once more, rising into the air. She felt one of Weiss’s glyphs latching onto her a few seconds later—if she were to shut off her rockets, the glyph would still hold her aloft. And then she felt a second glyph appear—a push glyph. The pull glyph continued holding her in place, but she could feel the push glyph straining against it, building up an immense amount of force like a slingshot being pulled back to its maximum.
Penny narrowed her focus to the supine Megoliath below and pushed her rockets to full power—full full power, because there would be no turns or complexities to worry about in this flight. Just a straight shot with Luminous Electra as soon as Weiss’s glyphs catapulted her forward.
Yang was holding one end of Blake’s ribbon. At Blake’s signal, she fired Ember Celica, which threw her into the sky, and the ribbon immediately went taut, pulling her into a tight arc as she kept firing her gauntlets as fast as she could, accelerating into the arc. And right as the ribbon’s arc started to bring her back down again, that was when Weiss released the holding glyph on Penny.
And suddenly, Penny and Yang were flying downwards together into the sinkhole at incredibly high rates of speed, their weapons aimed at the same target: the exposed underbelly of the Megoliath.
The tip of Luminous Electra and the face of Ember Celica met the Grimm’s vulnerable form within a tenth of a second of one another. One final thunderous roar shook the world around them as she buried Luminous up to its hilt in the massive creature and Grimm matter exploded out everywhere from the landing point of Yang’s fist.
Grimm matter rained down on Penny and Yang, dissolving before it reached the ground. Yang blinked at their surroundings, as if just noticing the massive hole they were in, and let out a long, slow breath.
“We just took out a Megoliath. A Megoliath,” she said, shrinking down her gauntlets to their travel size. “We have to get extra credit for that, right?”
“So what didja think of my combo move?” Ruby called down from above, peering into the sinkhole.
Blake, retying the ribbon on Gambol Shroud, came to a stop beside her. “Too long, too complicated.”
Ruby pouted. “I thought it worked really well!”
“Oh, agreed. I just meant the name you picked.”
“Oh.” Ruby nodded as she reupholstered Lunar Enforcer. “That makes more sense.”
Blake scanned the area, and then scanned it again much more quickly. “...Has anyone seen Oobleck and Winter?”
Now that Blake mentioned it, it was odd Penny couldn’t hear the sounds of a fight from elsewhere. If Winter and Oobleck weren’t actively fighting the White Fang somewhere, then why hadn’t they rejoined the group…?
Suddenly, she registered a sudden flurry of sounds from… underneath them. A groaning and creaking—the sound of ground shifting.
“BRACE!” she screamed to her teammates, just before the sinkhole, and most of the surrounding street including the ground her teammates were standing on, collapsed again.
Penny had previously assumed that they’d uncovered the full extent of the sinkhole, but as she fell down into open air amidst a cascade of dirt and rocks and asphalt chunks, she realized, no, this was the rest of the sinkhole.
She activated her rockets, arresting her descent in midair, and caught Blake just as she plummeted past. Then she winced as a rock clanged off one wing, denting it noticeably. As a warning pinged, her radar informed her of an important distinction: this wasn’t even a sinkhole, it was an entire underground cavern—
A cavern? With… buildings? And White Fang? And mountains of heavy weaponry? And Doctor Oobleck?
“Well,” Blake said, rather anticlimactically, as Penny brought them down to the floor of the cavern. “We’ve found the White Fang.”
Indeed they had. They’d landed in the middle of a firefight, actually, with Oobleck pinned down by a barrage of fire from a well-camouflaged cohort of White Fang soldiers, all of whom did not seem like they’d be running out of ammunition anytime soon, if the massive amounts of Dust littered throughout the area were any indication.
Oobleck, who had flattened himself against an overturned truck and was hurling fireballs at the Fang, looked over his shoulder to register the presence of Penny and Blake (and Yang, joining them as gunshots pinged off her Aura), nodded rapidly. “I have several questions about how you arrived here, all of which can wait! Students, I need—”
“Where’s Winter?” Weiss shouted as she joined them, a shielding glyph barely protecting her from a hail of gunfire that’d greeted her upon her emergence from the rubble of the collapse.
“She was caught under the collapse of a building aboveground! I am fairly confident she is alive—”
“FAIRLY CONFIDENT?” Weiss shrieked.
“—She had a great deal of Aura left when the building collapsed on her! She is likely unconscious, but I had to continue my pursuit! I am quite sure once she regains consciousness she will free herself, a faith which we will have to accept for the time being because, students, we need to stop that train!”
He pointed across the cavern to where a set of parallel train tracks disappeared into a dimly lit tunnel—and after a moment, Penny realized that the dim lighting was not from any tunnel lights, but from the receding lights of a cargo train. But standing between them and the train was a perilous gamut of White Fang firing down on them—
“Get to the train! I’ll cover you!”
The voice was Ruby’s—she’d appeared behind them, reloading Lunar Enforcer. “I can keep them occupied!”
Blake glanced at Ruby, and for all of the things about Ruby which concerned her, she also knew with perfect clarity that Ruby could take on a full squad of White Fang members, and for that reason she nodded once and took off in a dead sprint, barely flinching under the immediate storm of gunfire which descended upon her and the rest of Team BSYP as they followed close behind.
Ruby burst into silver and reformed ahead of them, firing Lunar Enforcer at several of the nearest White Fang positions before disappearing into her Semblance again. Penny didn’t have a visual read on exactly where she’d gone, but the startled yell which echoed through the caverns moments later told her all she needed to know. The gunfire began to abate immediately, as the Fang’s attention swung towards the streak of silver tearing through their ranks. Gunshots still thudded against Penny’s Aura, but at a far more sustainable rate as they closed in on the train tunnel. She made sure to keep herself at the rear of the group, letting herself absorb the most fire since, unlike the others, she could keep taking hits after running out of Aura.
By the time they reached the train tunnel, the sound of gunfire from behind them had abated almost completely, but they couldn’t celebrate that minor victory—their greater concern was the train disappearing from view.
Penny ran a quick calculation—she could overtake the train if she ran her rockets at full power, but her teammates had no way of keeping up with her or the train, unless—
“Airlift,” Blake called out, arriving at the same conclusion as Penny and tossing her ribbon over.
Penny caught it, tied it around her arm in 1.06 seconds, gave it an experimental tug to make sure it would hold, and nodded to Blake. At the same moment, Weiss cast a lifting glyph under Blake before latching onto her arm while Yang latched onto Blake’s other arm, and finally Blake nodded.
Airlift’s original intent was to be a rapid team evacuation, but this worked, too.
Penny fired her wing rockets at full power, taking off like a shot down the tunnel, the ribbon tied around her arm flexing as she pulled her teammates along. Normally, pulling three people behind her would’ve slowed her significantly, but Weiss’s glyphs produced so little friction that Penny barely felt the strain of pulling them—the only notable difference being slower acceleration, but given how long this train tunnel seemed to be, they had margin for error—
Wait, had one of the train cars decoupled? Answer: YES—
Penny barely managed to dodge around the boxcar which had suddenly become an obstacle, and only some creative glyph usage from Weiss kept the rest of the team from being hurled into the tunnel wall. She risked a glance back, just in time to see the car explode, bringing down the tunnel roof on it. That was… strange. Boxcars were not inherently explosive.
But Penny didn’t have the time or processing power to ponder that, because there was another boxcar ahead of them, this one careening off the rails as it closed the distance between them, forcing her into an even sharper roll to avoid being run over, and she sent a silent apology to her teammates for how much they were getting thrown around as she pulled up again and an explosion echoed in the distance, and finally they were at the train—
Except, just before Penny would’ve landed, a third boxcar broke away from the train, and although she didn’t really have to dodge this one, she had to do an awkward stutter-step to not fall flat on her face, and one final flare of her wings later, she was on the solid roof of a boxcar which had not yet decoupled as her teammates landed beside her.
Far behind them, the third boxcar exploded, bringing down the tunnel ceiling atop it just as the other two cars had. And then, afforded the opportunity to take a longer look, Penny noticed something which filled her with dread.
Grimm. A torrent of them, flooding through the newly created hole in the tunnel with no sign of abatement, doubtlessly attracted to all the emotions occurring on this train. And if Penny focused her vision farther and farther down the tunnel, she could see more Grimm rushing through the other breaches, following the path of destruction the train was leaving.
“Where does this train go?” she said. She’d kept her positioning systems offline ever since the incident in the CCT, afraid of what even the smallest wireless connection might do. She had no idea where they were in relation to Mountain Glenn, or how far they’d traveled, or—
A burst of motion on her peripheral vision made her spin, drawing Luminous Electra, only to relax as she realized it was Doctor Oobleck, catching up to the train with his speed Semblance and grabbing hold of the car’s edge. Moments later, a wave of silver crested up over Team BSYP before reforming into Ruby on one knee, Lunar Enforcer in its single-staff mode as she surveyed their surroundings.
“This is an abandoned subway line, Miss Pallas.” Oobleck spoke rapidly as he climbed aboard. “It terminates underneath the heart of Vale, where the tunnel was sealed off during the fall of Mountain Glenn, for fear that the tide of Grimm already swallowing up one city would be able to use the tunnel to overrun Vale itself.”
There was a horrified silence as everyone processed exactly what that meant.
“They’re going to breach the tunnel,” Blake said. “And all these Grimm they’re drawing in, right into—we’ve got to stop this train!”
“Precisely!” Oobleck said. “Miss Belladonna, you’ve gone well above and beyond of anything which could’ve been asked of you on this mission, but now I will be taking the lead—”
Penny’s radar pinged, and she turned, raising Luminous Electra in a guard stance just in time to block a shower of bullets. “Incoming hostiles!”
A phalanx of White Fang soldiers had appeared atop the train several cars down, although they seemed in no hurry to advance, instead content to stay back and pepper them with fire, and indeed, time was on the Fang’s side, because their plan had already been set in motion—all they had to do was hold them off. Penny had no idea how long this tunnel was, but at the train’s current rate of speed, and using an estimate of distance between Vale and Mountain Glenn—
“On it,” Ruby growled.
She vanished into silver dust again, turning into a flare of silvery light which leapt off the train and then raced up along the train’s side like a little silver shooting star, slipping past the Fang soldiers, who were entirely powerless to stop her.
But Penny couldn’t keep her attention on Ruby for long, because from one of the flatbed cars ahead rose a stolen Paladin, its operating lights blinking on as it rotated to face them, its machine guns whirring ominously. Machine guns which did have enough firepower to knock them off the train.
Gunfire lit up the air around them, the bullets biting into Penny’s Aura and shredding the metal roof of the boxcar underfoot as if it was cardboard, before a bevy of Weiss’s glyphs lit up the air in front of them, temporarily staying the hail of bullets—but from the way Weiss was straining visibly as she kept Myrtenaster planted on the ground to cast, she wouldn’t be able to keep this up much longer. They needed to take out the Paladin, but at this range, they couldn’t pierce its armor—
Ghost, her logic core alerted her. A perfect opportunity to use it—
“Cover me!” Penny said. “I’m going to use my Semblance!”
She closed her eyes and pulled herself away immediately, trusting that her teammates would guard her, and found herself elsewhere.
INPUT DETECTED: WHITE FANG PALADIN-290
Hm, interesting—this one was classified differently from the other Paladin she’d possessed! Was it because it’d been in the possession of the White Fang? Was it—wait, no, she had a job to do, she could explore the intricacies of her Semblance later!
With experience and a Paladin which was fully functioning, it was far easier for Penny to get her bearings, checking several cameras to confirm her position. Her first thought was to turn the Paladin around and open fire on the White Fang, but a moment later, she discarded that as too costly for her Aura. She needed to conserve it as much as possible, so the most direct way to dispatch this threat…
She took a moment to calculate the precise vectors, and then jumped off the train.
Well, the Paladin jumped off the train with Penny spectating. There was an abrupt surge of resistance as the pilot inside tried futilely to twist the mech upright, but it was too late, and Penny’s soul had the element of surprise. She stayed in the mech just long enough to confirm a flood of alarms informing her of system failures, and then jumped back to her own body.
“Success!” she said, turning to see the crumpled chassis of the mech bouncing helplessly down the tunnel as her teammates breathed sighs of relief.
Turning back to the fight as they began exchanging gunfire with the White Fang, she switched to Aura-detecting vision just to confirm all their opponents had Aura. Which they did. Good, that meant knocking them off the train would not be an immediate death sentence—
Wait, no. There was one person who seemed to be entirely out of Aura, reduced to just the faint localized glow of passive Aura. A moment later, recognizing the ponytail and freckled face, Penny realized it was Blake’s friend in the Fang. Ilia. And then, while Penny’s attention was on her, she registered something peculiar happening.
One of the other White Fang members, a beefy man wielding a chainsaw, was edging closer to Ilia, and his attention seemed to be focused more on her than anything in the fight. Ilia was taking no notice of him, her eyes trained on Blake as she kept up a steady stream of gunfire. As the chainsaw-wielder drew into physical range with Ilia, Penny spotted muscles tensing in his arms and legs, and then on the next frame he began to pull back his saw, as if—
Penny’s prediction algorithms all dovetailed into one conclusion, one which alerted her to something very wrong happening.
She fired her rockets without hesitation, accelerating forwards through a wave of gunfire towards the train car carrying Ilia and her allies, just as the chainsaw wielder smashed the broad side of his saw into Ilia’s back and knocked her off the train.
The chainsaw was inactive, so that in itself wouldn’t have inflicted too great of an injury, but knocking her off a speeding train with no Aura? That was a death sentence. Ilia never saw it coming, too. There wasn’t even enough time for her to scream as she toppled over the edge, only a brief widening of her eyes as she fell—
—Right into Penny’s arms as she swooped in, yanking Ilia away approximately 0.2 seconds before her head would’ve impacted the solid rock floor of the tunnel.
“What?!” Ilia yelped, twisting violently in Penny’s grip. Penny was entirely unsure whether that query was aimed at her, or at the chainsaw wielder.
She adjusted her grip, securing Ilia who thankfully seemed to have realized flailing was not a good option right now, and throttled back her flight mode—just enough to let the train pull ahead, bringing her level with the car carrying her teammates again.
“He just—” Ilia’s head whipped back and forth between Penny’s teammates and the White Fang. “He—tried to kill me?”
The evidence seemed irrefutable. Penny had seen nothing accidental in the chainsaw wielder’s movements. Only deadly purpose. And given the complete lack of surprise displayed by the other White Fang members, it seemed that this was a coordinated plan.
“Those fuckers,” Ilia snarled a moment later, all the surprise and hurt draining away from her. “Put me down, chicken wings.” She jerked her head towards Blake. “Next to her. I’m not stupid, I’m not fighting my only chance of getting outta here alive.”
Penny nodded once and touched down on the train car, letting go. Blake, who had watched the entire event unfold with a look of rapidly increasing horror, leapt over. “Ilia, are you—”
Whatever she was about to say, it was lost to the annals of time, because suddenly the train jerked violently under their feet, heaving everyone forwards as an explosion from somewhere ahead echoed through the tunnel.
Penny pulled herself to safety with a burst of rocket power, barely avoiding a facefirst collision with the tunnel roof, and caught a somersaulting Yang. Blake grabbed Ilia with one arm and drove Gambol Shroud into the train’s roof with the other, arresting her tumble just before they both would’ve plummeted into the chasm between the cars. Weiss, who’d been reloading her rapier, was caught almost completely unawares—but Oobleck grabbed her just before she would’ve been flung off, and Penny let out a sigh of cooling relief. They were safe. But what—
The train was stopping.
The lead engine was on fire, smoke billowing out of its engine bay as sparks flew from all its suddenly stilled wheels, the fearful screech of metal on metal resounding endlessly through the tunnel and almost overloading Penny’s auditory sensors.
Blake, fighting to pull herself upright against the full force of the braking train, let out a sharp gasp. “Ruby. She… Oh.”
The White Fang, also regaining their footing, were turning around, realizing what’d happened, and even if Penny couldn’t see their faces behind their masks, the horror was apparent in their body language.
A strange stillness fell over both groups as the burning train shuddered to a halt, the gunfire ceasing entirely. Penny lowered Luminous Electra, staring at the White Fang as her prediction algorithms reset themselves. Suddenly, there was no reason to keep fighting. At least, not against each other.
The only noise for now—or rather, the only noise the organics could hear—was the crackling and hissing of the fire engulfing the engine, spreading into an inferno. Then silver dust erupted from the train’s cabin, and Ruby reformed behind the White Fang, Lunar Enforcer in its sniper form and leveled at the Faunus.
However, before she could make another move, Blake’s voice rang out over everything, sharp and authoritative and urgent.
“Ruby. Don’t.”
For a half-second, Ruby froze. Then she refocused on Blake, still keeping Lunar Enforcer trained on the Fang. “Huh?”
Blake shook her head as she stepped forward, crossing the gap between Team BSYP and the Fang. “We’re not fighting them anymore.”
Ruby frowned. “But they were gonna attack the entire city?”
“No,” Blake said. “Doesn’t matter now. No one in this tunnel is fighting each other anymore.” Blake stepped forward into the space between the Huntresses-in-training and the White Fang, her eyes fixed on the chainsaw-wielder. “Verdant,” she said, addressing him as she held out a hand. “A truce, and a deal. If we help each other survive, we won’t try to stop you from getting away.”
Chainsaw-wielder, apparently named Verdant, crossed his arms, a gesture which did not inspire confidence in Penny. Something changed in Ruby’s face as she looked around at the White Fang, who still seemed entirely uninterested in fighting her. She looked at Yang and Weiss and Oobleck, all of whom were already turning their attention towards the far more important thing. She looked at Penny, who had holstered her sword. She pulled up her goggles, revealing brown eyes blinking slowly at Blake. And finally, the twin barrels of Lunar Enforcer dipped down to the ground.
“...What’s happening?” Ruby said.
“We’re stranded.” Blake turned to stare into the inky blackness of the tunnel, her heart pounding heavily in Penny’s sensors. “And we’re about to be overrun by an entire forest’s worth of angry Grimm that’ve been packed into here.”
“You should listen to her, hound dog,” Verdant said, his voice rough and grating, like it’d had to pass through sandpaper to be spoken. “Unless you want to guarantee we all die.”
Ruby’s eyes widened, and a very quiet “Oh” slipped out of her mouth.
Penny’s prediction algorithms adjusted rapidly, taking into account just how many Grimm she’d seen flooding into the breached tunnel, more than she’d ever seen in one place before in her life. Finally, her algorithms gave the most optimistic prediction they could offer:
They would need a miracle.
Far down the inky blackness of the tunnel, fast growing closer, the growls of innumerable monsters echoed off the unyielding stone walls.
Notes:
Ohhhhhhh I can't wait to drop next week's chapter I can't wait I can't fucking wait I'm vibrating
See you all next Friday for Chapter 46: Silent Spring
Chapter 46: Silent Spring
Chapter Text
Even as the enormous weight of what they faced settled over everyone, there was a complete lack of movement which confounded Penny. Most of the White Fang were looking at Verdant, who was looking at Blake, his arms still crossed. And those not looking at Verdant were staring at Ilia, who was watching Verdant with a positively murderous look. And Ruby, who hadn’t moved from her spot, was staring off into space, as visibly lost as Penny had ever seen her.
It was a great deal of looking and not a single bit of acting upon the massive Grimm horde about to annihilate them, and Penny, even with all the understanding of social interactions that she’d acquired over the school year, did not understand why this was taking priority.
“Sure, we’ll fight with you,” Verdant said. “Do we have a choice? But I’m not trusting the word of a traitor about whether or not we’re getting thrown in shackles the minute death isn’t staring us all in the face.”
Well, if no one else would… Penny decided she was not needed in this conversation, and turned to the two rearmost train cars.
As she slashed Luminous Electra through the train couplings, she heard a sigh from Blake. “Maybe I am a traitor, but I can make my peace with being a traitor to this.”
Penny crouched down, carefully positioning herself at the corner of one train car, checked all necessary systems and calculations, rechecked them, and lifted the boxcar up, her servos straining against the effort.
The sounds of the Grimm were growing louder.
“You—” Verdant broke off, and then said in a considerably less combative tone, “What is that girl doing?”
What Penny was doing, as she pulled the boxcar off the rails and rotated it to one side, was making a barricade, thank you very much.
“That’s Penny,” Blake said as if that explained everything. “And I think you should be more concerned about what you’re doing. What the Fang is doing. What is this, Verdant? You’re not—this isn’t—what could you possibly hope to accomplish with this?!”
“That’s rich, coming from the girl who decided to shack up with the people keeping us down because she couldn’t handle the thought of spilling the blood of some oh-so-precious innocents! Well, Belladonna, nothing’s innocent in this sick joke of a world, least of all you!”
Penny heaved the next car off the rails and shoved it into place beside the first car with a violent grinding of metal on stone. The width of the tunnel was now blocked off.
Blake let out a sharp, hysterical laugh. “Shacking up? How about you and Adam and the rest of the Vale Fang jumping in bed with an unknown entity that you have absolutely no insight or control over?!”
The ground was starting to vibrate under Penny’s feet, pebbles rattling against the stone floor with a terrible continuous clacking.
“You don’t know our allies’ power. The things they’ve given us, the things we can do because of them.”
“I wasn’t sure of it before, but I’m sure now. You’re pawns in someone else’s game. You’re not in a partnership, you’re being used.”
“You don’t get to preach to us.”
“Oh, I’m going to, because we all might be about to fucking die, and it’s because you’re trusting a shadow faction to have your back without ever considering they might just be using you as a meat shield!”
There was no response from Verdant as Penny stepped back and surveyed her handiwork. A rush of wind blasted her face, air being moved through the tunnel simply by the sheer amount of mass charging towards them. They were too close for this argument to go on any longer—
She smacked the flat of Luminous Electra against the train, producing a sharp, ringing clatter like a gong breaking apart, and pulling every pair of eyes in the vicinity towards her.
“The Grimm! Please!” she said, gesturing down the tunnel.
The abrupt reminder, along with the now-unavoidable roar of noise and the shaking tunnel and the wind only whipping past faster and faster, finally snapped everyone into action.
There was a brief, wordless scramble as everyone pulled themselves up onto the barricade. Several gasps passed through the makeshift array of people as everyone got their first visual of what they were facing.
There was only one comparison which could be called fitting. Solid objects did not flow like liquids, with one key exception: if a given solid was broken up into many discrete pieces, the body of those particles could flow just like a liquid, spilling and heaving and cascading—a handful of sand slipping between one’s fingers, cereal being poured into a bowl, an avalanche of rocks falling down the side of a mountain.
Or a massive horde of Grimm packed into a tunnel.
It really did have the appearance of a tidal wave rushing towards them, the Grimm nearly indistinguishable from one another as they scrabbled over and under and around each other, clawing at the walls and the ground and even other Grimm, not caring what they hit or what was in their way as the horde thundered forward, the sound of their approach now a dull, all-encompassing roar.
“Don’t hold anything back,” Blake said through gritted teeth, and for all intents and purposes, that was the signal to open fire. A cacophony of their own, answering the overwhelming clamor of the Grimm.
The tunnel lit up in strobing flashes almost brighter than daylight as a rain of Dust bullets of every type ripped into the murderous tide, igniting and flaring. There was no point in trying to ascertain whether they’d hit their mark—there were so many Grimm that anything fired down the tunnel would inevitably hit something.
The feral noises which reached them were unlike anything that anyone—even Oobleck—had ever heard before, as if pure suffering had been condensed down into a potent physical form and sprayed into their ear canals and audioreceptors. A black fog began to accumulate in the tunnel, like toxic smoke billowing out of a fire, from the sheer volume of dissolving Grimm particulate. Grimm were falling even faster than their remains could dissipate. It turned their already-bleak surroundings into something bearing a truly apocalyptic air, the flood of Grimm now entirely indistinguishable from one another as the cloud of black dust swallowed them up, seething and roiling and turning the tunnel ahead into a jet-black void from which it seemed there would be no escape. Even the flare of Dust rounds and the blood-red flashes of Grimm eyes were quickly being muted by the gritty black powder spreading everywhere.
And inexorably the darkness advanced, slowed by the temporary allies’ barrage but far from halted. And the number of Grimm seemed infinite, whereas the Dust reserves and Aura levels of the assembled group were clearly, painfully, limited.
Blake glanced over her shoulder, and in the razor’s edge they were walking right now, even such a small movement was a gamble. “Penny!” she shouted, jerking a shoulder at the space behind them as she returned to firing ceaselessly. “We need another barrier!”
Pulling just one shooter off the line was an unthinkable risk, one they very nearly couldn’t afford to take, but they needed a position to fall back to. It wasn’t a question of if they would fall back, only when.
Penny flew off without hesitation, taking far less care than she did with the first barrier, shoving boxcars into place and ignoring the warnings from her system that she was running some servos dangerously close to their load limits.
A small Nevermore separated itself from the indistinct horde and somehow managed to dodge enough of their bullets to dive towards them, shrieking indistinctly. Yang cut it down immediately with a double-fisted blast from her gauntlets, but all the same the winged beast falling just meters from their barricade was an unmistakable warning: the maelstrom was closing in on them.
“Weiss, fire line!” Blake called.
Weiss spun the cylinder on Myrtenaster and slashed it downward. A massive wall of flames burst to life between them and the Grimm, forcing a blast of hot air into everyone’s faces. The Grimm at the forefront of the pack couldn’t stop in time, their momentum carrying them into the flames; they ignited on contact with the curtain of fire and tumbled through to the other side in a frenzy of agonized shrieks, dissolving in moments.
Sharp crackles and hisses filled the air as the fire caught the small, irregular amounts of other Dust that’d already fallen on the ground from their sustained barrage, setting off miniature multicolored explosions amongst the inferno. It could’ve been called a beautiful sight, if not for the legions of Grimm prowling just beyond the barrier, growling and snapping as they waited for the moment when the fire would die down enough for them to charge through without being fully incinerated.
The makeshift team paused, panting for breath, reloading Dust and checking Aura levels, their eyes flicking back to the Grimm every few seconds. They didn’t have long.
Weiss inspected the Dust chambers on her rapier and let out a quiet groan. “Well, that’s the last of my Fire Dust. Speaking of which—hold your fire. Our bullets won’t make it through the flames. It’d only waste ammunition.”
“Never thought I’d die taking orders from the Schnee princess herself,” a voice from beside her said.
During the scramble to get on top of the barricade, Weiss and one of the White Fang soldiers had ended up standing side-by-side—something which they’d both failed to notice, until now. And with a momentary reprieve and nothing better to occupy the time with, they were both becoming acutely aware of their proximity. The White Fang member, a masked fox Faunus with a bushy red tail dotted with scorch marks, seemed far more wary than Weiss.
“You know, maybe once I might’ve been surprised to be fighting side-by-side with the White Fang, but not anymore.” Weiss nodded towards Blake, who was arguing animatedly with Verdant. “I believe you’re familiar with my team leader.”
The fox Faunus snorted loudly. But then her posture shifted, becoming something more reserved. “Hey, Schnee, real talk?” She slung her rifle over her shoulder and let the barrel rest against the nape of her neck. “If you make it out alive, when you’re all safe and sound in your big mansion again, you better remember the people who saved your ass in the tunnels. The people who don’t get to go back to being safe or secure or normal, because of your company.”
Weiss found the words safe and sound to be deeply ironic. She once again thought of her father’s words which dripped with disdain, the silent threat of disownment that he constantly held over her, the way he made her feel like his plaything and figurehead and instrument all at once instead of a person. And then she gave voice to exactly none of that. Instead, she said, “I will. This is a promise; when I inherit the company someday, I am going to undo every ounce of damage that the Schnee name has inflicted upon the world.”
“That’s not enough,” the fox Faunus said.
Weiss blinked. “What?”
“How long’s it gonna take for Old Man Schnee to croak, with all the good doctors he can pay for? Three decades? Four? And you know he’s clinging onto that power until death herself pries it out of his frail, decaying hands. Maybe twenty years from now, Daddy Schnee disowns you because you weren’t enthusiastic enough about assassinating union leaders, and then you’ve got nothing to show for the decades of blood on your hands. And even if you do everything right and get the company? That’s forty years of you sitting on your hands doing jack shit because The Right Way while we keep fighting and dying for our basic rights against your family throne. That’s not morals, that’s complicity.”
The flames ahead were starting to die down, not quite licking the tunnel ceiling like they had just seconds ago. And the Grimm were noticing, creeping closer and pawing at the ground and biting at the flames as if they could tear them apart.
“If you really want to make a difference, stop playing by the rules made by the people keeping us down,” the fox Faunus said. With that, she faced front again and shouldered her rifle, signaling the end of any discussion.
Weiss didn’t need any further discussion, either. The meaning was perfectly clear to her. She turned to face the Grimm again just as the first Ursa burst through the dimming fire, and there was some small part of her which hoped she would die in this tunnel, because she was becoming more and more terrified of the choice facing her.
Meanwhile, as soon as Weiss had announced she was out of Fire Dust, Blake directed a question towards Verdant without taking her eyes off the still-corralled Grimm. “Any more Dust in the train?”
“Nope. Everything was in the cars we blew up.”
“Leaving you as sitting targets if the train got stopped,” Blake said. “How did any part of this plan pass muster?”
Verdant let out a hoarse chuckle which rapidly dissolved into a cough. “You’ve got no business scolding us. We weren’t planning to be on the train—just set it automatically and send it off remotely, but of course we had to get on the train ourselves to protect it, because you couldn’t stay in your lane!”
“Oh, it’s my fault?!” Blake spun fully away from the Grimm for the first time, her eyes practically igniting with disbelief. “If I didn’t show up, someone else would’ve! And the Fang knows better than anyone else that no plan survives the enemy’s counter-moves, Verdant! So how could you possibly think this was a good plan when the contingency might kill every Faunus involved?!”
“It wasn’t our plan. Came from our allies. Who we trust.”
“So your allies, who seem so capable and so powerful and so smart, either couldn’t be bothered to come up with a backup plan that didn’t put you all at risk, or they set this up to kill you all intentionally.”
At first, it didn’t seem like Verdant would reply. Penny, having had just enough train cars to assemble the second line of defense, rejoined the group as the Grimm began to test the flames again. But then, right when the first Ursa leapt through the dying wall of fire and Blake fired a bullet into its skull, he said something else in a considerably quieter voice.
“Adam trusts them.”
“Would you trust someone who trusts a plan like this?”
That was all Blake could say before the torrent of Grimm demanded all her attention again. She had to hope it would be enough.
It was as if the pressure of the Grimm had been building behind the fire the entire time, like a Dust canister being overpressurized. To Penny’s sensors they were charging even faster now, closing the gap far faster than they could be cut down.
“Fall back if you’re low on Aura!” Blake said, recognizing the danger a moment later. “We’ll cover you!”
Two of the White Fang jumped down, heading to the rear. But Ilia, still out of Aura, did not budge. Blake noticed, and caught her by the elbow. “Ilia, you should—”
“No.” Ilia shook her off with a growl, shooting down a Beowolf just before it could spring over the barricade. “I’m as safe up front as back there, since the people I thought were my brothers want me dead.”
“I don’t want you dead,” Blake said, throwing a withering look at Verdant and his right-hand woman and signaling to Penny. Before Ilia could react, Penny swooped in, picked up Ilia, and flew off to the second barricade, being very careful to avoid touching her electro-whip.
Left behind on the front barricade in a position rapidly becoming untenable, Blake used Gambol Shroud to lasso a Boarbatusk and hurl it back at the Grimm.
“Let me guess, Adam told you to kill Ilia and make it look like an accident?” she said to Verdant as they backed toward the edge of the boxcar.
“She was undermining us,” Verdant said. He broke off as a Beowolf—a young and stupid one, by the looks of it—leapt over the edge of the boxcar, its claws flying towards his face, only to be stopped by Verdant’s chainsaw roaring to life and tearing off its arms and head in one swipe. “The Menagerie Fang trying to rein us in,” he finished.
The first barricade really was lost now, and for a moment all their attention was taken up by jumping down and retreating, firing as they went and making sure nothing caught them off-guard.
“Maybe it’s Adam trying to gather more power around himself,” Blake said when she had a second to talk again. “Instead of fucking Ilia dragging down the Fang! If it was me, the traitor, telling you to kill her and ordering you into this mission, what would you think?!”
Verdant cast a look back at Ilia, standing tall at the second barricade and blasting bolts of electricity at the Grimm now trying to climb over the abandoned barrier. If Blake could see through his mask, she would’ve seen the unease which flashed across his expression for the first time that day.
Most of them who hadn’t already retreated had their backs against the second barrier now while the Grimm threw themselves against and over the first row of train cars, once again climbing over each other in their frenzied attack. They just kept coming, and coming, and coming. As everyone’s reserves, Aura and ammo, ran lower and lower, no one could escape the thought of just how devastating this would’ve been if it’d happened in the heart of Vale.
Their now-abandoned barrier was still providing an obstacle for the Grimm, forcing them to slow down and pushing them into a narrower path. It was anyone’s guess as to how long it would last, though, as evidenced by the ceaseless banging and scraping against the boxcars from Grimm trapped against the other side. Still, the flood being stemmed just a little meant—
“Melee!” Blake called out. “Conserve your Dust!”
Though, for some of them, going to melee engagement wasn’t a choice. A few of the White Fang had emptied their ammunition clips, and Yang was currently wishing she hadn’t set off quite so many explosions during the previous day, and Weiss was regretting not bringing more Dust on the mission. Penny wasn’t out yet, and had given up on trying to conserve her supply of Dust for her battery life, reasoning that the Grimm were far more likely to kill her in the next short-term than running out of battery. Even with all the intense fighting and flying, she was still fine! For now.
Now at close range, the sound of the fight itself took on a different tenor, the roar of Verdant’s chainsaw and the thud of Yang’s fists against Grimm skin and the screech of metal blades biting into Grimm armor plating all combining together into something that sounded like some ancient being’s endless scream of despair, something which might be heard at the end of the universe.
Their margin for error was much smaller now with the Grimm close enough to hurt them. Even the slightest of hits to their Aura were something which might be the difference between life and death. With their view obstructed, there was no telling how many Grimm were left, and no way to know how much Aura they might still need. Or even if it was possible to have enough Aura to outlast the attack.
Ruby was a machine of destruction, carving a path through the Grimm in a hurricane of blades, shifting Lunar Enforcer back and forth between its forms so quickly that it almost seemed fluid. She was at the very front of the line, shredding Grimm as soon as they climbed over the barrier, jetting from monster to monster with her Semblance and dismembering them in a way that was unsettlingly clinical to anyone in the tunnel whose attention lingered on her for more than a second. The air took on a silver tinge, too, the dust left behind by her Semblance lingering far longer than it usually did and hanging in the air like a luminous mist.
However, the usual predatory smile Ruby wore whenever facing down the Grimm was completely absent now. In fact, as she fought, her expression slowly grew more and more worried. More than once, she reached for her goggles, only to abruptly pull her hand away like she’d been burnt.
There was the slightest of pauses in the onslaught of Grimm climbing over the barricade, not even long enough for anyone to wonder what it meant, and then a pair of King Taijitus slithered up and over the edge. By silent agreement, the Huntresses went for one Taijitu, and the White Fang went for the other.
So close and in a place which trapped all sound, the rattle of the snake’s tails managed to drown out everything else; it sounded as if the tunnel itself was about to shake apart. It was an impossibly thin line to walk now—focus too much on the Taijitu, and leave oneself open to an attack from the other, smaller Grimm swarming in after it. But pay too much attention to the surrounding Grimm, and risk being caught by a Taijitu’s fangs. Penny found herself wishing she had more swords as she dodged between fangs dripping with venom. Swords to cover both her front and back—she certainly had the processing power for it! Something to think about when she was out of danger.
Seconds later, though, her current sword reasserted its capability in emphatic fashion as Penny took full advantage of Luminous’s reach and drove her blade into the Taijitu’s right eye.
But then, with Penny fighting to keep her balance and the snake Grimm thrashing too violently for her to pull Luminous out, a scream pierced the air.
The other Taijitu had caught one of the White Fang squarely in their chest with a strike of its tail, knocking them to the ground in a flash of Aura giving away. And then its tail reared back for a second strike with the Fang member sprawled under it, insensate and out of Aura—
Just as the tail came whipping down, Blake appeared out of nowhere, her shadow-clones deflecting the would-be killing blow as she snatched up the still-unmoving White Fang member. She just barely managed to avoid another strike, sprinting clear and depositing the Fang member atop the second barricade.
She was back off to her team’s fight immediately, so she didn’t have the chance to notice the newly contemplative looks that several of the White Fang were giving her.
Penny rammed Luminous Electra through the Ursa flying towards her. She’d timed the stab so that as the tip of her sword exited the Ursa’s backside, it impaled the other Ursa immediately behind the first one. But killing two Grimm with every stab still wouldn’t be enough. There were just… too many Grimm. The Fang member Blake had barely saved from the Taijitu was a symptom of a bigger problem: everyone was running out of everything.
Two of the White Fang lost their Aura at nearly the same exact time, and then one of them received a bloodying slash to her back as she scrambled up the final barricade to higher ground. There was no sign of the Grimm slowing.
Penny hadn’t said anything about this yet, but her prediction algorithms’ estimated death tolls had steadily increased over the course of the fight. Current prediction, with over ninety-nine percent confidence: the death of everyone. With the possible exception of Penny.
Verdant’s Aura was the next to fall, but instead of backing away, he revved his chainsaw harder and yelled, “If I die, it’s with a roar, not a whimper!”
Then, moments later, Blake’s aura evaporated from a stray Beowolf paw catching her in the back of her head. It would’ve killed her with a second hit, too, if Ilia hadn’t jumped down from the barricade and impaled it with her lightning whip.
Penny instinctively edged closer to Blake, bringing up her sword to guard her while a fresh, unfathomable terror coursed through her. Every life in this tunnel would be a terrible loss, of course, but Blake was her teammate, her leader, the girl who had told Penny it was okay to hide things sometimes and who had done her absolute best to make Penny feel welcome from the first day and—and—even if it was doomed to happen, Penny could not bear the thought of losing her—
Every White Fang member was out of Aura, she realized belatedly. Now there were only five people standing between the out-of-Aura and the Grimm—but only four in fighting shape, actually. Weiss was bleeding heavily from a cut on her side but wielding Myrtenaster defiantly, showing no sign of giving up.
No one was giving up, actually. Penny’s radar picked up movement behind her—everyone else, gathering on the ground again and preparing themselves for a final stand. There was no time for reflection, no time to consider that these might be their last moments, because still the Grimm were coming. Nothing except a grim silence—well, it couldn’t be called a silence, only a lack of words, because the noise of the Grimm never once stopped. Penny struggled for metaphor whenever she tried to find a comparison for such a compressed, concentrated blast of noise. It was like someone had created some enormous weapon which ran on thunder and could swallow up the entire planet, and everyone in this tunnel were the first people in that weapon’s path.
Regardless, there was nothing said as everyone waded into the Grimm once more, everyone knowing fully that the next slip-up, the next missed swing, the next failed dodge, would kill someone. Everyone.
It was at this juncture that Penny’s prediction algorithms suggested, with nothing left to lose, that maybe this was when she should bring out that mysterious component. The one Ruby had discovered inside Penny while installing the taste sensor system weeks ago. The one where she’d heard the voice of her father warning her as soon as she tried to investigate it.
Indeed, as soon as the thought of it was in her consciousness matrix, she heard his voice again, saying the same thing:
Not yet, Penny. That is only for the gravest of emergencies.
Well, this qualified as the gravest of emergencies, didn’t it?
Immediately, three new words in her father’s voice, words she’d never heard before:
Are you sure?
Penny hesitated. She didn’t know what this would do, whatever it was. If it was an area-of-effect weapon, someone might be caught in the crossfire. She needed to get in front of everyone. Put the abandoned barricade between her and them—
Ruby, still in front of everyone and maybe the only reason why someone else hadn’t died yet, was the only one with Aura left—not even Penny or Oobleck had any. Ruby’s level was dangerously low, but if she’d noticed, it wasn’t making her any more cautious. At Penny’s approach, she threw a look over her shoulder as she stabbed her war scythe—now in single-staff, double-blade mode—through a Creep’s neck, nodded infinitesimally, and slashed another Creep in the jaw.
“Ruby!” Penny said, drawing level with her and blocking a swipe. “Pull back! I am going to try something!”
Ruby gave her another wordless look, one which suggested she thought Penny was mildly insane. But before Penny could explain herself further, they both realized something vitally important. The flood of Grimm had stopped clambering over the barrier. Not slowed, completely stopped.
“Um,” Ruby said, staring upward. “Did… did we win?”
But they hadn’t. The noise levels in the tunnel were as loud as they’d ever been, the growls of the Grimm on the other side of the barrier still grating against ears and audioreceptors. It was as if the Grimm were… waiting?
And then Penny realized—the last time Grimm activity had slowed down, it’d been because of the Taijitus, a Grimm too big for any others to get past, and for it to stop entirely—
The ground had been vibrating endlessly from Grimm activity all throughout the fight, enough that she’d stopped allocating resources to tracking the reverberations. But now checking again, the vibrations were intensifying in a particular rhythm that was all too familiar.
She grabbed Ruby by the waist and fired her rockets, pulling them both back just as a trumpeting bellow shook the tunnel, flattening every other noise that dared to occupy the same airspace. The first barrier shuddered before giving away, both boxcars being shoved into the wall like a gate being flung open, faster than Penny ever could’ve done it. And into the newly created gap lumbered a Grimm that Penny had already seen too much of tonight.
“Fuck,” Ruby said through gritted teeth as another Megoliath loomed before them.
Even if they could somehow defeat a Grimm which had already withstood nearly everything they could throw at it, behind the Megoliath, the tunnel still teemed with Grimm. Penny tensed. No more hesitation. It was time for her ‘gravest emergency’ function, whatever it—
But before she could initiate activation, Ruby put an arm across her. Then, with her other arm, she pulled up her goggles, leaving her face bare.
Penny understood immediately. “Ruby?” she said, looking back at the others. “Are you sure?”
“No choice.” Ruby’s hand went to her eyes, fiddling with something for a moment—pulling out her contact lenses, Penny realized.
The Megoliath had come to a halt upon seeing them, its piercing red-eyed gaze sweeping across the group in an unnervingly analytical manner. But at any moment, it would make up its mind and charge again.
“No point in putting off what I was born to do, anyway,” Ruby said. She lifted her head to meet Penny’s eyes. Suddenly, her luminous silver irises were the brightest things in the tunnel; they made the harsh emergency lighting overhead feel like nothing more than faint stars in a distant sky. And those otherworldly eyes were gazing right into Penny, pupils dilating noticeably. Somehow, it felt vastly different from all the other times Penny had seen Ruby’s eyes. Like souls touching.
The Megoliath reared up on its hind legs and unleashed another roar.
That shook Ruby out of her trancelike state, and she took a deep breath before swinging around to face it.
At the exact moment she turned around, the Megoliath froze, falling back heavily onto all four legs and its roar cutting off like a switch had been pulled.
Ruby took a step forward. Behind Penny, the collected Huntresses and White Fang stared, no one—not even Penny, for that matter—sure how to react to seeing the girl silencing a Megoliath just by looking at it.
A young Beowolf threaded between the Megoliath’s legs and sprang forward. By virtue of being at the front, Ruby was the target of its outstretched paws. Or, at least, she would’ve been the target until—
“No,” Ruby growled.
The Beowolf yelped and scrabbled wildly at the ground, managing to bring itself to a full stop less than a meter away from Ruby. As soon as it’d stopped its forward momentum, it backed away rapidly, its ears flat against its head. It kept backing up until it hit one of the Megoliath’s legs, and then it turned and fled down the tunnel.
The sound of the Grimm was changing. Before, it had been a dull, almost monotonous roar, but now it was becoming more chaotic. More frantic. Were they… scared?
The Megoliath hadn’t moved. Ruby took a step forward, staring it down, and the ancient Grimm, big enough to go rampaging through an entire city, powerful enough to knock over entire buildings with one sweep of its tusks, cowered.
The Grimm had stopped attacking entirely. It had nothing to do with the Megoliath blocking their way, and everything to do with the girl wielding a war scythe and putting a terror into them that Penny had never seen in Grimm before.
Finally, the Megoliath moved. Slowly, clumsily, retreating. Lifting a foreleg and almost tripping over itself as it tried to turn around in a tunnel it was nearly too big for. Its red eyes dimmed noticeably, all aggression gone—
“That’s enough!” Ruby shouted.
A dazzling silver light, as bright as the noonday sun, burst out from Ruby. But Penny could not possibly do this miracle justice by simply calling it light. The brilliance which exploded from Ruby did not move like ordinary light. It moved like an enormous whip made of molten rock, weighty and fluid at the same time. It lashed out from her eyes in a dual torrent which flooded their surroundings in a fraction of a second. The first thing to be drowned by the radiant silver was the Megoliath, and it disappeared entirely from every single one of Penny’s sensors as soon as it was completely enveloped. The silver light swallowed them all up a moment later, only accelerating. An explosion in every direction.
Penny’s photoreceptors could see nothing except incandescent silver everywhere. If she ignored her radar, it was as if the entire world had been turned into pure light. No detail, no shape, no shadow. Just… silver, erasing the entire world somehow.
And silence.
Silence.
Even before the silver began to fade, Penny knew something of immense magnitude had transpired. The noise of the Grimm had stopped entirely. Not slowed, not faded, not trailed away. Stopped. Ceased. Terminated. It was as if the world had come to a standstill.
Slowly, the world returned to everyone’s sight. The silver faded like smoke clearing away from an extinguished fire.
The Megoliath was gone. The only trace that it’d ever been there was where the rails underfoot had been twisted and warped by its weight, a trail of damage that came to an abrupt end in a tiny dissolving pile of Grimm detritus, barely bigger than a human fist.
The tunnel was silent. Entirely silent. Not a single growl, or groan, or howl, or screech, or shriek, or hiss, or roar. The absence of sound was so sudden, so complete, that it nearly overwhelmed Penny. Her audioreceptors kept automatically resetting, trying to fix a nonexistent problem, because her diagnostics could not believe so much noise could just disappear instantaneously.
Ruby stood in the same place as before, staring straight ahead. Nothing in the tunnel moved. Penny felt rooted to the spot, at a loss for what to do next. She felt as if she could only recalibrate her vision in the aftermath of a light her sensors had never seen before, and wait for something to happen.
The tunnel ahead fell back into focus for her, and with focus came a recognition: the ghostly outlines of Grimm, frozen and blending in unnervingly well with the gray stone of the walls.
Several seconds later, Penny realized why the unmoving Grimm blended in so well: they were no longer Grimm. They had been turned to the same stone as the tunnel itself. It was only the emergency lighting throwing stark, washed-out shadows which allowed them to be seen. Not a single dot of glowing red Grimm eyes remained in what had once been a sea of them.
There were several such petrified Grimm just on the other side of the wrecked first barrier, rendered in their positions at the moment when Ruby unleashed her eyes. Limbs, perfectly captured rippling with power mid-leap, clawing at walls and floor, mouths caught in snarls which would now be eternal. The detail of the petrifications was frighteningly deep, like every atom that made up a Grimm had been exactly replaced. It left them so lifelike that Penny could not discard the sensation that they might re-animate and attack again at any moment. The only thing which seemed to be missing from their forms was their sound.
But even if the Grimm somehow did return to life… The petrified Grimm, as visually arresting as they were, were only a tremendously small fraction of what had been in the tunnel just a moment ago. There were so few left that Penny calculated she could probably deal with them herself. The way ahead—the way out—was largely cleared. Nothing actually blocked their way. Every statue in their path could be simply walked around.
No sound came from further down the tunnel, no sign that there would be another wave of monsters. It truly was over.
Penny turned in place, finding the others. No one seemed to have been affected by the light, which she was glad for. Ruby had never given any indication that her eyes could hurt people, but it was one of those things Penny had never been one hundred percent confident about. Until now.
In what still felt like an impossibility, everyone was upright and conscious. All attention was on Ruby.
Several of the White Fang kept a tight grip on their weapons as they watched her, as if they weren’t sure whether she might be a threat or not. Verdant was also holding his chainsaw up, but not in the posture of someone ready for another fight—rather, the posture of someone who still couldn’t believe this fight was over. He kept scanning their surroundings, but his gaze never strayed from Ruby for more than a few seconds.
Next to him, Blake was bleeding from a multitude of cuts all over her body, with some on her shoulder worryingly deep. But she was paying no attention to her wounds, instead staring at Ruby with eyes as wide as Penny had ever seen them. Her mouth was open in a little silent circle, as if she’d been caught in the middle of saying oh.
Behind Blake, Oobleck stood. His glasses had been knocked askew during the fight, but he made no move to adjust their ludicrously-tilted position on his nose as he too stared at Ruby. There was something different about his expression compared to everyone else, though. Something which Penny could barely parse. He seemed… worried? A guess which came with only thirty percent confidence.
Penny turned her gaze to her last two teammates. Weiss was the only person whose attention was somewhere else besides Ruby. She was looking down at Myrtenaster, clutching it with both hands and staring at the blade like there was something wrong with it. As for Yang…
Yang was maybe in the worst shape of all of them. She was swaying on her feet as blood dripped down her face, although it was hard to say whose blood it was at that moment. She was leaning on Blake’s shoulder for stability, but her eyes were as wide as Penny had ever seen them.
The silver light. Yang had seen it before.
The memory of the light washed over her inexorably, like the tide coming in while she was stuck in the sand too close to the water. She remembered years and years ago as a little kid, back when she still had two parents, waking up to strange indistinct flashes flickering through her closed blinds. She remembered thinking it might be lightning, but she also remembered the thunder never coming, and she remembered no rain drumming on the roof. She remembered creeping to the window as stealthily as possible and pushing up one slat in the blinds, making a gap just wide enough to peer through. She remembered seeing a bright silver light flashing distantly in the woods which surrounded her house, too far away to see anything except indecipherable shapes and shadows amongst the trees, but so bright, too painful to look for too long.
Yang remembered being scared of the light in the woods. She remembered seeing something moving in the light, or maybe multiple somethings. She remembered running back to her bed, nearly tripping over her own feet, and burying herself under the blanket, pulling at the covers and surrounding herself and clutching the edges of the blanket close to her chest so whatever was making the light couldn’t come in and yank the blankets off her and shine that blazing light into her eyes.
There were other nights after that when she’d wake up and see the light flickering at the edges of her blinds. But after the first time, she never tried to sneak to her window to look at it again. She never asked about the light, and never found out anything else about it ever again.
But now, Yang wished she’d asked. She wished she’d gone out during one of those nights when the light was in the woods, and ran directly to the source, never looking away, and found out exactly what was making that light, because… because…
Movement yanked her out of her memories, and she realized Penny was taking a cautious step towards Ruby—the first step anyone had taken since Ruby said that’s enough.
It was so quiet. Suffocatingly, overwhelmingly quiet. Yang had never heard anything this quiet in her life. Maybe sound couldn’t exist anymore.
“Ruby?” Penny said, her worried voice shattering the unnatural silence. “Are you okay?”
At some point in Yang’s childhood, the silver light in the woods had stopped appearing, and she’d never seen it again. Until today.
Ruby had still not turned around.
Yang couldn’t remember exactly when she’d stopped seeing the light in the woods, but… she couldn’t ever remember seeing it after… after Summer had died…
Ruby spoke.
“I guess I can’t hide this forever,” she said. “But, please, please, please, even if you think I’m the enemy or anything, please, could you keep this a secret? I… I need to stay safe. Stay hidden. For as long as possible. Please.”
And finally, she turned to face the others.
“It’s the only way I can save the world,” Ruby said.
Silver.
Yang wiped away the blood which kept dripping down from her forehead, but there was no way her eyes would ever be mistaken by this sight. Ruby’s eyes weren’t brown. They were silver. Shining silver, in a way that Yang had only seen once before in her life.
At long last, as she looked at silver eyes and black-tipped-with-red hair and an expression full of hope and the shape of a face she’d seen before, she finally understood why Ruby looked so familiar.
Yang felt like the entire world was sliding away. She felt an irresistible urge to open her mouth, something clawing at her chest from deep inside, and she was going to have to let it out. She didn’t know if she would laugh, or cry, or scream, or vomit, or some combination of the four.
But when she did take in a shaky, shallow breath and release whatever sound was bottled up inside her too-dry throat, it was none of those things. Instead, it was the only word which reached her conscious thoughts as she stared at Ruby.
Yang whispered, “Mom?”
Chapter 47: No Rest For The Weary
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
No one replied to Ruby asking for secrecy. Which, honestly, she’d kind of figured that. She was still real scared about how much everyone knew, of course, but also, she’d just saved them all from a horrible gruesome death by unleashing her impossible superpower, so the stunned silence was at least understandable!
She’d heard Yang mumble something that sounded like a response but she had no idea what Yang had actually said. And Yang looked pretty out of it, so anything she promised right now might not be entirely reliable. So whatever she’d actually said, Ruby wasn’t assuming it was a real promise.
Still, even with all the anxiety about her secret being out, there was some part of Ruby which was just happy to finally have everything out there with her friends. With Penny. They knew all of her now. They knew what she could truly do. Maybe they’d finally understand why it was good for her life to be like this. Because this was why. No matter how good freedom felt, no matter how good being an ordinary teenage girl felt, no matter how good everything she’d been doing this semester felt, she had to sacrifice it all when she could do this and save so many people. Right?
Right?
It would feel bad to leave all this good stuff behind, all the times being the happiest she’d ever been in her life, but she would leave it behind if it meant saving more people.
Right?
She needed to get out of here. This tunnel felt way too small all of a sudden, like it was kind of pushing her thoughts back in on her.
“We can leave,” Ruby said, jerking a thumb over her shoulder and feeling incredibly uncool all of a sudden. “It’s, um, safe now. The petrified ones can’t hurt you.” To prove her point, she turned around and shot a nearby petrified Ursa with one of the last shots in Lunar Enforcer. It crumbled into nothingness instantly, the way the petrifications always did.
Ruby hadn’t been planning it like that, but the gunshot jolted everyone out of the pause. A flurry of movement occurred as everyone looked around at one another, getting over the shock of a tunnel full of Grimm getting vaporized just in time to fall into an entirely different kind of shock: the shock of being alive.
The White Fang lieutenant let out a long, low laugh. Verdant, that was his name, right? Ruby had the vague sensation of hearing the name before today, maybe on a military watchlist somewhere.
“We fucking survived,” he said. “I didn’t think we’d actually do it.”
“Neither did I.” That was Blake, putting a hand to her wounded shoulder and apparently just noticing the blood still flowing from where she’d been gouged by a Beowolf. “Penny, do you still have our medical kit?”
What followed was a slow jumble of triage as the worst wounds were treated with their limited resources. A makeshift crutch was fashioned from the train wreckage for one White Fang member with a broken ankle. Metal from the train engine, still red-hot from catching fire, was used to cauterize several wounds that were bleeding too heavily to be bandaged otherwise.
Ruby, entirely unharmed, stared down the tunnel, keeping watch just in case a stray Grimm decided to try its luck. But nothing came. The longer nothing happened, the clearer it became that she’d gotten the whole tunnel in one blast. And maybe anything else near the tunnel.
Even Ruby was surprised by that. She’d never gotten so much out of her eyes in one blast. For that many Grimm, she would’ve expected to use her eyes four, five, maybe six or seven times depending on her lines of sight. But here, something had been different.
The way Ruby usually triggered her silver eyes was by thinking about how much she wanted to save everyone, how much she wanted to protect the entire world, and that usually got the job done. Which made sense! Her eyes were designed to protect people, so of course they were activated by thinking about protecting people. Although sometimes they would inexplicably get a little balky even when she tried her hardest to think about protecting. The issues never lasted long, thankfully, but it was a mystery that neither her nor any scientist had ever figured out.
But this time, Ruby hadn’t just thought about protecting everyone. She’d thought about protecting specific people. The people she was with. Team Battleship. Her friends. Her allies. Penny.
Penny.
It had been Penny who Ruby was thinking about, before anyone else, when she turned on her eyes. Penny, the girl who had changed her life in so many ways and kept on changing it. At the moment she’d gone full laser-beam, Ruby’s head had been flooded with thoughts about Penny. Being spun around in the air by Penny at the dance. Being hugged by Penny so tightly that she could actually feel it a little, unlike all other hugs. Lying in the secret rooftop garden with Penny and pointing out shapes in the clouds to one another. Sparring with Penny. Penny leaning against Ruby and making her cute wonderful whirring sounds. Penny helping Ruby paint Lunar Enforcer. The two of them painting together. All of that… blended together into one giant blast of incredible feeling and wanting to protect Penny.
Ruby had done this with her eyes because of Penny, she was sure of it.
Ruby looks like Mom.
The walk back down the tunnel was a long and slow one, littered with stumbles and quiet grunts of pain and labored breathing. Yang didn’t feel sturdy enough to stay upright on her own, but she couldn’t possibly say if it was her injuries causing this, or…
Ruby looks like Mom.
Either way, Yang was leaning on Penny for support as the bone-weary group filed past silent stone statues. Statues which just minutes ago had been trying to rip them apart. In any other circumstance, Yang would’ve been transfixed by the maws frozen mid-snarl, destruction and death rendered more perfectly than any sculptor could ever hope to do. But as it was, she barely paid any attention to them, because…
Ruby looks like Mom so much that it aches just to look at her but I can’t look away I can’t ever look away from her again I can’t I can’t I can’t
As the only one with any defensive Aura left, Ruby led them through the tunnel, constantly scanning from side to side with her weapons held at the ready. She hadn’t put her goggles back down—her eyes were at the ready, too.
Yang had thought she’d forgotten what Summer Rose looked like. Until she saw those silver eyes, and then the memory punched her in the face, the hardest uppercut she’d ever received. No one else in the world had eyes like Mom had, and once she’d seen those same eyes again, she knew. Even if nothing about it made any sense.
“Did you know she could do that?” Verdant said from just ahead. He didn’t indicate he was talking about Ruby, but there was really just one person that question could be referring to.
“Not like that,” Blake said. Verdant was to one side of her, while Ilia walked on her other side. However much tension there’d been between the Huntresses and the White Fang at the start of this fight, it was entirely forgotten. Even if there were still some acutely unresolved differences amongst this group, everyone was too exhausted to have a fight about it.
Yang had known—her whole team had known—there was some sort of superpower Ruby claimed to have, something that let her fight Grimm, something to do with her eyes, but that…
Mom could do this too, couldn’t she?
The light in the woods on Patch. Summer Rose, one of the best Huntresses in the world. Yang couldn’t understand that any other way.
Maybe that’s why Mom’s gone. Because someone else wanted that power, or because someone else didn’t want anyone to have it.
Ruby’s braid swung rhythmically as she walked. She had her weapon in its dual-wielding mode, both shortened war scythes held tightly in reverse grips. She walked like a born soldier—genuinely, because that was what she was.
Are you… are you a clone of Mom?
What other explanation could there be for someone who looked like Mom, had the same supernatural power as Mom, and was a laboratory experiment with unknowable origins?
How could Yang just keep putting one foot in front of the other while knowing this? Knowing that she was walking behind someone who might be an exact biological copy of her mom? How impossible was cloning right now? Had Atlas secretly figured it out without telling anyone? Or… or, was there another explanation somehow?
Ruby, are you… are you somehow, some way, actually Mom? Did Atlas kidnap Mom and do something to her to turn back her age and make her a kid again and erase all her memories? Did they turn Mom into you? So they could remold the superpowered Summer Rose into the exact kind of soldier they wanted her to be?
And now Yang actually did throw up, tottering away from Penny and doubling over, scraping her flesh hand against the rough tunnel wall in an effort to keep herself upright as she heaved violently. Once her insides stopped trying to eject themselves, she pulled herself upright and found everyone staring at her. Including Ruby.
She wiped her mouth off with the back of her arm. “I’m fine.”
She wasn’t fine. She was face-to-face with someone who was maybe an unimaginable remnant of her mom.
It was right then that she was slapped in the face with the realization that there was someone else in this group who would remember the face of Summer Rose. Probably with far more clarity than Yang.
She glanced back to Oobleck, an old family friend, who was bringing up the rear. She had to know if he saw the resemblance, too, or if she was just going insane.
She slowed her steps until she was beside him. He watched her fall in step with her with an immensely tired, entirely unsurprised gaze which suggested that he’d been expecting this. In a strange sort of way, it made Yang feel better.
“Doctor,” she said quietly, trying to keep her voice down enough for no one else to hear. “Ruby. Do you see—see—her? Her? Am I… am I seeing things, or does she really look like…?”
“You are not imagining the resemblance, Miss Xiao Long.”
Yang wondered if she’d actually died already and this was just some hallucinatory episode wrought up by the last neurons firing wildly inside her dying brain.
“I noticed it from the moment I first saw Miss Karyatis in my classroom.”
“Why didn’t you SAY anything?!” Yang hissed, slipping into a voice too loud for this. Blake shot a look back at her, but Yang shook her head wildly. I can’t explain this right now to anyone who doesn’t already understand.
Whatever Blake saw in Yang’s face, it was enough to make her nod and turn her attention elsewhere.
“How could I have?” Oobleck pulled off his glasses and wiped them between the folds of his coat as he continued. “What exactly could I possibly satisfy by dredging up the memory of a woman that your family has long since grieved and let go of? My own perverse curiosity? I chose not to say anything, because all I could imagine was causing needless pain over something which I logically knew had to be nothing but pure coincidence.”
“Fuck,” Yang muttered. “Fuck you. Fuck me.” Even if she hated that choice, she understood it perfectly. Because Oobleck didn’t just know Summer—he knew Taiyang, and Oobleck knew what unprocessed grief could do to Taiyang Xiao Long. He wouldn’t make Taiyang go through that again unless he believed there really was no choice.
“I’m doing something about it now,” Yang said. Her Aura still hadn’t come back, but if she had access to her Semblance right now, she was positive her eyes would be turning red as she watched Oobleck for a reaction, silently daring him to object.
But to her relief, Oobleck only sighed in acquiescence. “All I ask is that you remember Ruby is a girl who has absolutely no idea what her face means to you or anyone else who knew Summer Rose.”
Right. Yang swallowed. She’d already seen what happened to Ruby when she was overloaded with too much uncertainty, too much unfamiliarity, too much shaking up her world. She panicked. She ran. Ran away from whatever was making her feel scared.
The thought of Ruby being scared of Yang… it made her want to collapse. She was so tired. So godsdamn tired. But she had to be strong for Ruby, whatever the truth about her was.
“And, please remember, at the end of the day, she is still her own person.” Oobleck’s words startled her, and she was even more startled by how much emotion he was clearly struggling to hold back. “It was immensely difficult for me to adhere to that in the early days of interacting with Miss Karyatis.”
Right. Also important. She couldn’t treat Ruby like a thing. That was how everything got so wrong with Ruby’s life in the first place. Yang returned her eyes which she could barely keep open to Ruby’s form.
I don’t know why you look like Mom. I don’t know if Mom was the blueprint for you, or if Mom was actually turned into you somehow. I don’t know who exactly is responsible for you, or how long you’ve been on this planet, or even where exactly you came from. Maybe everything I know about you is a lie. But what I do know is that you’re Ruby Karyatis. You like painting bright things and you like flying and you like the rock climbing wall in the gym and you like poking around inside machines and you like Penny.
You were already my friend, but now you’re my family. I might not be sure exactly how yet, but you’re family. And I’m going to do my best to help you, and protect you, and give you the chance to live the life that you never got. I’m going to help you, Ruby. However I can, whenever I can, whatever it takes, I’ll do it.
I promise.
Blake didn’t know how to make sense of the world after what she’d just seen.
The thing which made her head hurt the most was… it wasn’t just that Atlas believed they had a superweapon in the form of a child. It was that Atlas actually had a reason to believe they had a superweapon, as twisted and warped and horrific as that reasoning might be. She understood with horrible clarity why a kingdom would unabashedly treat a girl as a slave, if she could do that. She vehemently disagreed, but she understood. In the same way that she understood the motivations of the Schnee Dust Company or the Atlesian Military, or… Or so many other things about the workings of the world. She wished it didn’t make sense.
Gods. A girl who could make Grimm flee just by looking at them. A girl who could stop an apocalypse in its tracks, with one flash from her eyes. A girl who just seemed to be… magic. That wasn’t a Semblance. That wasn’t Aura. It was something Blake had never seen before.
Ruby’s power was causing the exact same sort of tectonic shift in Blake’s understanding of the world as had been caused by Penny revealing her true nature. It left her wondering what else was possible in this world. It left her wondering if anything was impossible in this world. It left her wondering what kind of extent the kingdoms went to in secret. What if Ruby and Penny were just the vanguards of a whole host of other secrets? What else could Atlas and General Ironwood be hiding beyond a girl who turned Grimm to stone? Just what had they done to Ruby in service of keeping her secret? And… had Ruby always been like this, or had Atlas done something to her, to give her this power?
It was almost overwhelming to think about. Which made it all the easier for Blake to concentrate on something else, which should’ve overwhelmed her on any other day of her existence—but next to silver eyes, the fact that Blake was walking between Verdant and Ilia, and none of the three of them were at each other’s throats, was incredible yet somehow unremarkable, because it wasn’t supernatural. It was real, and it was happening right now, and it was making her heart beat too fast with hope.
Blake was torn between two choices. She wanted to let this fragile peace exist undisturbed for however long it could, treasure two presences she never thought she’d be able to enjoy again. She’d never once dared to hope that a truce could ever be called between her and these two ghosts of her past. But it was happening, and she also knew she’d never get a better chance to talk to Verdant and the others about Adam. Maybe it would be her last chance forever.
But… what if Blake ruined everything by injecting her words into the situation? Her words had never been able to fix Adam, and her words might not be enough to fix Ruby, and they had barely been enough to avoid disaster here, so maybe she was just destined to ruin everything she touched? Maybe she shouldn’t—
And then Verdant spoke, startling her.
“I can’t kill you now.” He was speaking not to Blake, but to Ilia. “Not after how you fought by our side back there.”
“Thanks.” Ilia’s voice was saturated with sarcasm. “Want to extend that courtesy to my friend who was right here fighting for us, too?”
Blake silently thanked Ilia for being… Ilia.
Verdant’s eyes shifted to Blake, but he said nothing.
“I thought she’d turned cop, too, you know. Not anymore,” Ilia said.
“Give her a chance, Verdant,” came a voice from beside them.
The three Faunus turned. It was the one who’d broken her ankle and needed a makeshift crutch that spoke. She’d spent the entire walk holding onto Weiss’s shoulder for balance, which Blake privately thought was an odd choice of support when there were other Fang members free to help. And upon hearing the voice and belatedly recognizing that fox Faunus was Nimbus, another one of Blake’s old friends from Menagerie, the choice became even stranger to Blake. Nimbus was… no friend of the Schnee Dust Company, as the scars on her legs would testify to. But there she was with Weiss, making an interesting pair.
“What?” Verdant said.
Nimbus patted Weiss on the shoulder. “I’ve been asking the infamous heiress all about her team leader, and she’s told me quite a lot.”
Ah. Suddenly, Blake understood why Nimbus had been willing to stay with Weiss: information. Honestly, it was a little amusing to realize Weiss (currently blushing as she came to the same realization) had gotten caught in the crosshairs of one of the Fang’s best intel diggers. But—
“And let me tell you, I think Blake’s still got the same revolutionary spirit she’s always had.”
Oh.
That got the attention of Verdant and the other Fang, while Ilia looked entirely unsurprised and said, “Could’ve asked me that.”
Verdant pulled off his mask and shoved it into a pocket. It’d been a long time since Blake had seen him with the mask off, too—she’d almost forgotten what he looked like underneath it, with the trail of snake scales down the center of his face. They started at his forehead, fanned out from his nose, and ended in a point on his chin. He was dragging a hand over those scales now, rubbing them slowly.
“What do you want, Blake?” he said finally.
“Equality. Justice. A future for the Faunus. Freedom. And freedom to be ourselves,” Blake said immediately.
“The same things you’ve always wanted,” Verdant said.
Blake didn’t want to fall into the trap of optimism, but she could almost convince herself he sounded like he believed her.
“So why leave? What changed?”
She’d already alluded to this, but to say it outright still felt like a leap of faith. She took a deep breath. “Adam.”
There was a stutter in Verdant’s gait.
“Fuck,” he said.
He didn’t say anything else, leaving Blake to struggle for a grasp of what that one word, said with mystifying flatness, could mean.
They came upon something which looked like a peculiar pyramid from a distance; only when getting closer did they realize it was a coiled King Taijitu, now turned entirely to stone. It was wide enough that they had to clamber over the outermost, bottom layer of the coil to get around it, and as they did that, one of the less injured White Fang spoke up.
“This shouldn’t have happened.” Once again, another person Blake only recognized upon hearing their voice—Maizie, for whom Blake’s most prominent memory had been the time they’d accidentally dumped a full bucket of paint on Blake during a covert vandalism mission. It had made for a very interesting evac. “We shouldn’t be doing any part of this.”
“So what should we have done instead?” Another Faunus speaking, another memory called to Blake’s mind—this one, Nightshade, had taught Blake how to effectively shuffle a deck of cards during a stakeout of a power station. “Just sit on our asses and let the world keep on rotting?”
“But this isn’t—! We’re doing someone else’s burning! Maybe we’re getting burned, too! There has to be something we can do besides this!”
Another Fang cut in—Ollie, an okapi Faunus who had a photographic memory rivaled only by Penny. “We’re not gonna change Adam’s mind about this. So we’re either with him or against him. No in-between.”
“I’d rather not be against him. For the good of the Fang.”
Blake didn’t try to stop her ears from going flat against her head. Some of these things being said sounded frighteningly familiar.
“I don’t like that kind of thinking,” Maizie said. “Where’s the margin for error? Who’s stopping Adam from making a mistake if no one wants to step out of line?”
“You think Adam’s making a mistake?”
“It’d be a lot easier to say he isn’t if we just knew what all this is building towards!”
“Why don’t we know?” Ilia said, replying with the intent of a pouncing Beowolf. “Why’s Adam keeping so much of this from us?”
By a silent consensus borne out of old White Fang dynamics bubbling back to the surface, every Faunus, Blake included, looked at Nimbus. Who was usually the best at answering why questions.
Nimbus shrugged as much as she could with one arm on a makeshift crutch and the other hanging onto Weiss. “Adam’s never once asked me to try and turn up anything on our mystery friends,” she said. “I’ve done some looking on my own, but I’ve got nothing. Most I know is they’re new players taking advantage of old connections. No names, no faces, no nothing.”
Blake felt a little safer responding to Nimbus than to anyone else. Nimbus’s specialty required her to be adept at avoiding knee-jerk reactions, after all. So Blake said, “It’s like Adam doesn’t mind what they do as long as they keep giving him an avenue for more power and influence.”
Nimbus made a thoughtful expression, but Verdant surprised Blake once again by being the first to answer.
“You make it sound like everything my friend and my brother in arms does is more for himself than for the movement,” he said. It wasn’t distrust, but…
“I knew him,” Blake said. “Maybe better than any of you did. I got to see a side of him that no one else did.”
A silence fell over everyone. Blake knew everyone, including her team and Ruby and Doctor Oobleck, was listening. For a moment, shame pulsed through her at the thought of how everyone was going to know exactly how she’d been his victim. But then she remembered how saturated with shame Penny had been when she’d told her team exactly what happened in the CCT. Blake remembered how much she wanted to relate her own experiences to Penny’s trauma but without any idea of how. And so she fought down the shame, forcing it into submission on the promise of being strong for Penny.
“You never saw him hit me,” she said, and maybe it was just her sudden hyper-awareness of her surroundings, but it felt like that declaration echoed through the tunnel for far longer than anything said previously. “You never saw him touch me in ways I didn’t want to be touched. You never saw him telling me that if I wasn’t good enough for him, I wasn’t good enough for the Fang. He was very good at showing only the parts of himself he wanted everyone else to see.”
She tried not to think about what this would do to everyone’s opinion of her. Blake Belladonna, the poor victimized girl who’d run away from her boyfriend who got too rough, because she was too afraid to stand up to him. Of course, they might not even believe her at all. It was entirely possible they’d just call her a liar trying to make herself look morally superior, or a harlot trying to find an excuse for leaving that didn’t make her look like a traitor. Traitor or coward. Which one was worse to be called?
But Blake had said too much to stop now.
“When what Adam wants for himself lines up with what the Fang wants, he’s a champion of our movement. But when he wants things that don’t line up with the Fang… He figured out that he could disguise what he wanted for himself as being what the Fang as a whole wanted, and position anyone who didn’t want what he wanted as an enemy of the Faunus. And he is so, so good at it.” She nodded to their surroundings. “You’re standing in the proof of his sway.”
“Why didn’t you do something about it?” Verdant said.
Ilia let out a disbelieving snarl, but Blake bumped her lightly with her elbow. Let me answer.
“I was afraid of him,” she said, and it was the truth.
Verdant blinked.
“When I couldn’t change him, I didn’t want to challenge his power because I knew he’d win. I knew he commanded more loyalty than I did. I knew he was a better fighter than me. I knew I couldn’t stop him from taking the Fang in whatever direction he wanted. I knew that if I challenged him, he would want nothing more than to destroy me, and he would push the entire Fang towards that singular purpose if he wanted to.”
The entire procession had come to a halt, every ounce of attention directed at Blake. She crossed her arms, trying not to feel like a cornered animal, and said, “I guess it was stupid of me to hope he wouldn’t do the same thing if I just left.”
She wondered what Yang thought of her in this moment. She wondered if Yang would mind being partners with a coward. She wondered if Yang could feel love for someone who kept running away. Yang had lost so much in her life already. Did she deserve the company of someone like Blake Belladonna, who might take off again at the slightest—
She blinked. Was the tunnel getting… lighter?
“Are we getting near the end?” Ilia said a moment later, apparently having noticed the same thing.
“That can’t be correct,” Penny said, puzzled. “My radar says we still have a great deal of the tunnel left to traverse…”
“Your what?” Nimbus said.
“My jetpack comes with a built-in radar system which transmits real-time environmental mappings at any given time!” Penny said without missing a single beat, smiling cheerily at Nimbus.
Close one, Blake thought.
A few minutes and not much more brightness later, coming around a long bend in the tunnel, they found the light source: one of the holes blown out to draw Grimm into the tunnel. A massive Deathstalker petrified by Ruby’s blast was balanced with impossible delicateness in the hole, its massive pincers digging into the floor while its tail still rose up and out of the hole, out of sight. Although nothing was said aloud, they all came to a stop more or less at the same time, taking in the sight of a Grimm that was supposed to be one of the deadliest creatures in Sanus, reduced to nothing more harmful than a garden decoration. Blake had left her scroll back at base camp, leaving her with no idea of the actual time, so she was genuinely shocked to see the night sky above them. How… how was it not daytime? It felt like at least half a day had passed in here. But the only trace of light was the first wisps of sunrise from one direction.
“Okay, that’s my escape route.” Ilia walked past Blake and hopped up onto one of the stone forelegs, testing its stability before hopping onto the main body. It did create a sort-of bridge leading out of the tunnel, but…
“Ilia?” Blake reached out despite being too far away to stop her. “There’s nothing but forest out there.”
“I can’t leave with the rest of you,” Ilia said. Her eyes landed on Verdant. “Adam needs to think you actually killed me, otherwise you’ll be his next target.” When Verdant answered with a nod, she added, “I can navigate back to the city, and then—”
“But the forest,” Blake said, her alarm growing. “You’re out of Aura, you’d be alone, with no ammo, and—”
“I’d bet money that there’s not many Grimm around now,” Ilia said, gesturing to the Deathstalker she was standing atop.
Ah. Blake considered how many Grimm they’d just destroyed, and… that was an entirely fair assumption, actually. And Ilia really did need to avoid being seen with the others, if she wanted to trick Adam into thinking she was dead.
“What’s your next move?” she said.
“I have an idea,” Ilia said. “Not really sure how I can make it work yet, but… Verdant. Can I trust you?”
Verdant let out a long, low sigh. He looked around at the other Fang members, and whatever he saw, it seemed to further darken his expression. “We might be in too deep.”
Ilia raised an eyebrow, as did Blake.
“If we try to pull out of this now, I’m pretty sure Adam’s friends would just eliminate us. I saw what they did to one of our camps before we joined them, just to prove a point. Who knows what they could do to the rest of the Fang?”
“Is that what happened at the camp where you and Adam were the only survivors?” Ilia said.
Verdant’s silence told them everything.
“Some friends, huh?” Blake said.
“Verdant, if we’re doing something, we’ve got to commit to it.” That was Nightshade, his arms crossed. “Either we throw ourselves all-in with the powerful shadow conspiracy to make sure we’re in their good graces, or we pull out everything we’ve got to stop whatever trainwreck we think we’re hurtling towards. But we can’t stand around wringing our hands about how we’re too late to change anything while everything else catches fire. Because that’s a great way to ensure our mystery allies have no qualms about dropping us into the fire like old garbage the second they don’t need us anymore.”
That assertion was met with a round of nods from the other White Fang.
Verdant looked sideways at Blake, and then up to Ilia.
“You can trust me,” he said. “I don’t know how much it’s worth now, but you’ve got it.”
Ilia nodded once, and pulled her mask back on. “Talk to you later, then. Blake, I’ll see you again.” With that, she clambered up the Deathstalker’s legs like she was climbing a ladder, shimmied up the outstretched tail, and vanished over the rim.
Blake was left with something bubbling inside her which she was afraid to call hope.
Somewhere on their way out of the tunnel, it hit Ruby how weird it was to be walking with a whole bunch of seasoned White Fang like there was nothing wrong. In fact, she was protecting them, because she was the one leading them and scanning for any sign of trouble. And being at the front meant she had her back to them. Which meant… she was trusting them. And the weirdest thing of all? Ruby believed she could trust them.
Which was why she let herself sidle up to Verdant’s side and ask him a question that’d been bugging her ever since he took off his mask. “You’re Adam Taurus’s lieutenant, right? Second-in-command of the Vale branch of the Fang?”
Verdant looked at her with a look that she really didn’t know how to read. “If this is an interrogation, you’re not doing a very good job of it.”
“I’m just curious, you’re…” Ruby tilted at her head, wondering if maybe she was just really missing something here. “You’re young.” He looked like he was in his twenties, and for a second-in-command, that didn’t feel right. Someone in this kind of position in Atlas would be at least twice that age.
Verdant snorted. “You expected some grizzled, leathery old nut with more years alive than scars?”
Well, maybe not exactly that, but close enough. She nodded.
“Well, I’m not special. The whole White Fang trends younger,” Verdant said.
“Why?”
“All the old guard is either too tired or too injured to keep fighting,” said a new voice—the fox Faunus with a broken ankle. “Or dead.”
“Dead?” Ruby squeaked.
“The first White Fang—the one humans love to fawn over as the good White Fang because we didn’t have any teeth—lost too many people. The old generation believed in nonviolence, but the rest of the world sure as fuck did not.” Every word she spoke was punctuated by the clack of her makeshift crutch against the ground. “Picket lines getting met with armored troop transports.”
Picket lines getting met with armored troop transports. “That’s… That’s why the Fang changed?” Ruby said. “It… wasn’t… just for no reason?”
She’d never heard anything about the why of the White Fang changing. All she’d known was that they were once a peaceful organization, and then they’d turned violent, becoming an enemy of order and safety. And up until this year, that’d felt like enough knowledge to Ruby! Because she hadn’t thought there was any point in knowing stuff about the past when the present was the only thing that mattered! If someone was an enemy pointing a gun at you, the past choices shouldn’t have mattered, right?
Wrong, Ruby was realizing now. Really wrong. The White Fang were right in front of her, not pointing a gun at her as they told her whys, and it felt really, really important. Important like it changed how she thought about everything.
“Absolutely,” Verdant said. “You think I want to fight a war, hound dog? If my other option was a better life, I sure wouldn’t be living out of a shitty makeshift camp half my life, always wondering if tomorrow brings the bullet that’s gonna kill me.”
Ruby didn’t know how to reply. She didn’t know if she could say anything. Suddenly, she was thinking about that time she’d captured an entire camp of White Fang in a secret mission in Anima two years ago, yanked them right out of their tents and into handcuffs, and at the time all she’d thought was easiest mission ever, but now she was wondering how many of them just wanted to go home and do ordinary things. One of them at that camp had been a teenager; how much did she want to be doing ordinary teenage girl things instead of sleeping in a dirty cot in the middle of a rainstorm using a bag stuffed with empty food wrappers for a pillow?
“You’re way more of a kid than I am,” Verdant said. He was looking at her with a look that she really didn’t understand. It felt kind of like he was sizing her up, but not in a combative way somehow? “And you want to be doing all this fighting?”
Ruby shifted uncomfortably under his penetrating gaze. “I want to help people.”
If anything, Verdant’s look started piercing even deeper.
“Oh… You’re a rare one,” the fox Faunus with a broken ankle said, and she sounded really amazed. “You actually don’t know any better.”
“Better?”
“How you could be doing a far better job of helping people if you got free of the shackles Atlas has on you.”
Ruby’s first instinct was to bristle at being called shackled, but… maybe it wasn’t a good idea to get mad about that while talking to a bunch of freedom fighters who probably had been in actual shackles at some point in their lives. So she just said, “Like what? How can I help more?” And she really wanted to know the answer.
“Atlas and the Schnee Dust Company don’t need your help expanding their reach. They’ve got an entire army and more weapons than they know what to do with. The places that need someone like you are the places that can’t afford to defend themselves. The places that are supposed to be under the protection of a government that doesn’t actually care about them. The settlements that are made up of people who wanted to get away from the suffocation of a world stacked against them, a world so stacked that the never-ending threat of the Grimm felt more appealing than that world’s so-called civilization.”
“Oh.” When… when she heard it like that, it felt so simple. She was strong; she had a duty to help the weak. So why hadn’t she ever thought of it before now…?
Blake’s voice interrupted her thoughts.
“Because Atlas doesn’t want you to help the weak. They want you to help Atlas.”
Ruby blinked, and then realized she’d just been given an answer to the exact question she’d been thinking— “Did… Did I ask that out loud?”
When she received three answering nods (and a quietly amused smile from Blake and the fox Faunus), she was pretty sure she was blushing wildly, even if she couldn’t feel it. “Oops.”
“Consider me surprised, hound dog—turns out, you’ve got a big heart,” Verdant said, giving her a nod. “You shouldn’t let it go to waste in Atlas.”
That seemed to be the end of the conversation, as Ruby nodded numbly and Verdant turned away to converse with Blake and the fox Faunus in much quieter tones that didn’t seem to have anything to do with her. Leaving her adrift in her own thoughts.
She was face-to-face with the White Fang, a whole bunch of them, and… she liked them? They’d fought right alongside her, just as hard as her, for a victory that they both needed.
Ruby… wasn’t going to tell the General about the White Fang part of this mission. She could just leave that out of the debriefing. They got stuck in the tunnel after stopping the train, tried to fight their way out, and then she had to use her eyes or die. No need to mention the White Fang at all. All the General would care about was the fact that she’d revealed her silver eyes, anyways. That was the least she could do for the people who’d fought right alongside her, right? And then maybe there was more she could do…? Somehow.
Ruby didn’t say anything for the rest of the walk. No one did, in fact. Talking was too much of an effort by now, especially with how far they still had to go. The only sign of their progress was the petrified Grimm getting rarer and rarer, until finally it seemed they’d run out entirely. It was still deathly quiet, the sounds of their footfalls echoing through the air like discordant drumbeats.
Every once in a while—especially when they passed by a petrified Grimm—someone would turn and stare at Ruby without any effort to be subtle. She could almost hear the questions churning around in someone’s mind when they looked at her.
She wondered if her secret would stay here in this little circle of people, or if it would be broken to the wider world. She’d known the secret would have to be out at some point, because a girl who could laser-beam Grimm with her eyes would be just too much to hide once she started hunting Grimm full-time in populated areas, but this was still way too soon! She was supposed to try and keep it a secret for as long as possible, and… she’d failed.
She’d failed.
At least she hadn’t failed at saving people, though. That was still the most important thing.
…This wasn’t gonna be fun to explain to Winter, though.
When they rounded one final bend and spotted the outline of the tunnel entrance, lit by the floodlights the Fang had set up in the cavern, a collective sigh floated up from the group. Calling it a sigh of relief didn’t feel good enough. It was a sigh of we actually made it out and a sigh of finally seeing something besides a deserted tunnel and a sigh of seeing light that wasn’t dim washed-out emergency lighting for the first time in way too long, and a sigh of knowing there was open space ahead. It was a sigh of it being over.
There was no one else in sight, not even any of the White Fang who’d been left behind by the train. Ruby had been the one to keep them busy to let the others catch the train, but she hadn’t bothered with actually tying them up or anything. So they’d probably made themselves scarce as soon as the train was gone.
Verdant led them towards one of the train cars still left in the cavern, and slid its cargo door open to reveal crates of rations and essentials inside, and maybe it was bare-bones stuff, but it felt like they’d all just been given admission to the most expensive luxury hotel on the planet.
Funnily enough, the thing everyone went for first wasn’t the food. It was the medical supplies, because they finally had access to far more than what one first-aid kit carried by Penny could provide, and a desperately needed second round of cleaning wounds and reapplying bandages and treating burns ensued. As they slowly patched themselves up the best they could, one of the White Fang got a fire going, boiled some water, and started passing out ration packs. Ruby couldn’t help but notice these ration packs had been intended for the Atlas Military at some point—the kingdom’s symbol had been embossed into the wrappers. She decided not to ask how they’d been acquired.
Aside from simple questions along the lines of “Does this hurt?” or “Want some more?” or “Can you pass me that?” or variations thereof, still no one talked. Partly from exhaustion, but also partly because everyone was too hungry and thirsty and sore to do much else besides taking care of those three needs. Well, everyone except Ruby, who didn’t feel hunger and thirst thanks to her broken sensory systems.
Fortunately, that’d never been a problem for her, since being in the military meant she had a regular eating schedule anyways! One which was especially closely monitored on account of her being, well, literally the most powerful weapon in Atlas. As for staying hydrated, she had a tracker for her water intake on her scroll. And if for some reason she lost her scroll or didn’t have it, the backup strategy was: if she couldn’t remember the last time she’d drank water, it was time to go drink some water.
And it was pretty close to the time when she’d be eating breakfast anyway, so she dug into a ration pack without worrying about throwing off her schedule. Growing up, she’d learned that Atlesian soldiers had very strong opinions about the quality of various types of ration packs, and also very different opinions from soldier to soldier. Not her, though. All the packs tasted the same to her.
Ruby wondered if a fix for her senses would ever be found. Plenty of military scientists had tried already—that was one of the few times Ruby had met Doctor Polendina, Yang’s arm doctor—without any luck. But new advancements were being made all the time, so maybe… maybe someday.
She wanted to feel more of Penny’s hugs. She wanted to know what warm felt like. She wanted to know what chocolate tasted like, because a taste like that which could bring that kind of joy to Penny’s face had to be the most heavenly sensation in the world.
Yeah, it would make her worse at combat, but… the tradeoff would be worth it, or maybe the world would be saved by the time the fix was found, and Ruby could just concentrate on having fun then.
…How long would she have to wait to have fun again, after this semester?
A sharp animal bark from somewhere off to the right nearly made her spill her food. Grimm—
“Zwei!” Weiss cried, jumping to her feet and running to meet the gray corgi bounding towards them. “Oh, my little fluffy baby, you found us! You’re so smart! Did you fight any big scary Grimm?”
Well, at least the whole team really was back together.
Yang could barely pay attention to everything happening around her anymore. The White Fang’s departure flashed by in a blur—Verdant and Blake shaking hands, the White Fang setting off into the woods towards one of their hidden camps, a silence falling over Team BSYP and then Blake whispering something to herself, none of which she could fully process.
Ruby was right next to her. Ruby who looked like Summer was right next to her. Ruby who looked like Summer for completely unknown reasons was right next to her.
Oobleck found the place where Winter had been trapped under a collapsed building. The wreckage had been moved, which meant Winter was somewhere else. They retraced their steps to their campsite, with no sign of Winter. They dug their supplies out of the rubble of the Megoliath’s rampage. Their radio was broken, but Penny fixed it in under ten minutes. Oobleck fired off some signal flares in hopes of getting Winter’s attention. They radioed for an extraction. Zwei kept nuzzling insistently against Ruby.
Yang was on the verge of losing her mind. She had to do something, but she had no idea what the fuck to do, but even if she couldn’t do anything she had to do something or she was gonna pass out—
“Ma’am! Don’t worry, I’m fine! Good morning!”
Ruby’s voice was the one thing that could pull Yang out of her stupor right now, and yank her back to reality it did.
Winter, riding a glowing white Manticore which was acting shockingly tame, descended from above, alighting on the street. She stared at Team BSYP, dumbfounded.
“What exactly happened?” she said, the question directed more at Ruby than anyone else. “I’ve been searching the city and the forest for hours.”
“We were underground,” Weiss said.
“Underground?”
“There was a train loaded up with bombs and it was getting sent down an abandoned subway tunnel to Vale so it could cause a Grimm breach! But we stopped the train, except we stopped it in the middle of a tunnel full of bloodthirsty Grimm and the only way out was through the Grimm, so we fought for our lives and we were gonna die so I had to use my eyes! Team Battleship and Doctor Oobleck saw it, but, um, I think I can trust them, to keep the secret? Probably?” Ruby said, somehow managing to get all that out in one breath.
Every time Ruby stopped talking, Yang wanted to beg her to keep going, because she couldn’t stop wondering, was this what Mom’s voice had sounded like? Even if Yang was remembering Summer Rose’s face with perfect clarity, the sound of her voice remained frustratingly out of reach in her memory. And for some reason, even knowing who Ruby looked like, she couldn’t quite convince herself that Ruby’s voice was Summer’s voice. She didn’t know what that meant. She didn’t know if that was a good thing or a bad thing.
Winter turned slowly from Ruby to Team BSYP and then Oobleck, and then back to Ruby, before closing her eyes and rubbing slow circles on the sides of her temple.
“Please please don’t arrest them for knowing state secrets,” Ruby said, her voice getting higher and higher over the course of the sentence until the word secrets was basically a squeak.
“I’m not going to arrest anyone, Cadet Karyatis,” Winter said. “I’m just trying to work through how I failed so miserably in my mission, which is to protect you regardless of how challenging you might make that task.”
“Oh, good!” Ruby said. She stopped, cocking her head, and then fretted with her hands a little. “Um, or bad, I guess? Sorry, ma’am.”
“There’s nothing you have to apologize for. You did exactly what you’ve been trained to do.” She let out a deep sigh. “Although, there’s going to be a great deal of debriefing to be done once we’ve returned you to the airship.”
Yang’s hackles went up. Airship. She couldn’t let them put Ruby back on one of the Atlas airships. Then maybe they’d hide her away forever and then maybe Yang might never see her face again, no no no no—
The sound of an actual airship from above momentarily sent her heart plummeting, but a moment later she realized it wasn’t an Atlesian airship here to take Ruby away. It was the Beacon ship that Oobleck had radioed for, touching down across the street and Professor Goodwitch leaping out of the passenger bay before the ship had settled.
They were going home.
The flight back was silent, and for the first time since waking up to a Megoliath running them down, Yang’s mind began to slow. It was a desperately needed relief, to just stare out the window at the sun rising over the deep green trees and not have something eating away at the inside of her brain.
Oobleck and Winter were still standing, but all the teenagers had collapsed into a heap on the floor as soon as they’d climbed aboard—too tired to even bother with the bench seats right next to them. Yang had put herself next to Ruby, and if she looked a little strange while nudging a mildly confused Weiss aside to get that spot, she would deal with that later. She couldn’t leave Ruby. She had a promise to keep.
Oobleck had said something to Goodwitch at the start of the flight. Although Yang couldn’t know exactly what’d been said, she had a pretty damn good guess, based on how Goodwitch’s face had tightened and she turned to look not-so-subtly at Ruby immediately after.
Goodwitch would’ve recognized Ruby from the minute she stepped on campus, Yang knew. And she would’ve stopped herself from saying anything just the same way Oobleck had, Yang knew. She understood all too well, of course, but gods, if Yang had just been able to figure it out sooner, if she’d just been a little less dense so she could’ve remembered her own fucking mom’s face sooner—
Her scroll vibrated. And then vibrated again. And again, and again, and by now Yang was pulling her scroll out and wondering what—
Oh. They had scroll service again, and that was the last day’s worth of notifications all coming in at once. Yang dismissed the alerts and tapped through to her contacts. She knew exactly what she needed to do, right now.
Dialing: Dad Xiao Long
She pulled herself up into a more upright position, leaning back against the grooved wall of the bullhead as the line began to ring.
She looked down at Ruby, still beside her. She’d fallen asleep as soon as the bullhead took off, and she was not a gentle sleeper. Her goggles were knocked askew on her head from shoving her head into the outside of Yang’s thigh, and she’d somehow managed to twist her braid around an arm twice. The arm not entangled in her braid was thrown over Penny—actually, clutching Penny like she was a giant teddy bear might’ve been a better way to describe it. Penny, also asleep (low-power mode? She’d mentioned something about her battery) didn’t seem like she had any issue with that arrangement.
The scroll was still ringing.
Ruby was also drooling. On Yang. Dad might be asleep, too. But he was a light sleeper—the sound of the scroll would wake him up. And he was on a mission right now, so maybe he was awake. Missions gave people weird hours.
The scroll was still ringing.
“Please, Dad, please please pick up,” Yang muttered into her scroll. “Please, with a godsdamn cherry on top.”
Blake shot her a concerned look. Yang tried to pretend she hadn’t noticed.
Finally, after too many rings to count and with the sun rising higher, the line picked up.
“Yang? It’s early—wait, that’s how early for you… Are you okay?”
He sounded a little dazed, a little out of it—probably’d been asleep, then. Yang could almost see him bleary-eyed and clad in a bathrobe, his uncombed hair sticking out wildly in every direction.
“No,” she said.
She heard a sharp inhale from Dad, and then there was a clatter, followed by the sound of something else slamming shut. “Are you safe? Physically? Your mission—were you hurt?”
“Mission’s over. Little beat up, but I’ve had worse.”
“Oh.” Dad was only silent for a fraction of a second. “What happened?”
“I…” Yang trailed off, looked down at Ruby again, and suddenly was smacked by the realization that she couldn’t just tell Dad what was wrong, not while Ruby was right here and could wake up and hear the problem before Yang was ready to tell her, but she had to say something, she had to—
“It’s… really hard to explain,” she said. She pushed a stray strand of hair away from her eyes. “I can’t… I don’t know how I can tell you without showing you. Can—can you come to Beacon? As soon as you can?”
There was a long silence on the other end, long enough that Yang felt the need to justify herself. “I know you’re on a mission, but I… it’s kind of an emergency.”
As soon as the word emergency was out of her mouth, Dad’s voice was back.
“I’m coming.”
She heard things being moved in the background, something heavy being pushed across the ground. “It might take a little bit to get home, but I’ll be back as soon as I can. I’ll steal an airship if I have to. Hang in there, okay? Stay with your team. Hug them all for me, please.”
“Will do.” Yang listened to the sounds of her father hastily packing for a few more seconds, and then decided she had to say something about what the emergency actually was, even with Ruby right here—
“You know, if I had to sum up the last twenty-four hours in one word…” She looked down at Ruby (still sleeping, thank the gods), decided this part would be safe enough to say in front of her, and said, “Summer.”
Halfway across the world, Taiyang Xiao Long finished picking up the broken shards of the water glass he’d just dropped, and began dialing Qrow Branwen.
“Qrow. I need to ask you about Raven.”
Notes:
In my outline, Mountain Glenn was only supposed to take three chapters. It ended up being eight.
Also, just passed 1,000 kudos on this! That's a big milestone, thank you all so much for helping me get there!
Chapter 48: Into The Unknown
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
Location: Unknown. Time: Unknown.
Hazel Rainart walked down a narrow hallway painted in the sterile colors of the Atlesian military, navigating around electrical panels that’d been thrown open, bundles of cables pulled out of walls, and holes hastily cut into the floor to give access to electronic components that he couldn’t even guess at the function of. He also found himself navigating around splatters of mostly-dried blood. He came to a stop at the largest gap in the floor, where rather than cutting a hole, an entire section of the flooring had been yanked up, easily big enough for someone his size to climb into.
Instead of climbing in, though, Hazel stood at the edge and looked down into the crawlspace that’d been revealed.
“We don’t have infinite time, you know,” he said, noting an even wider variety of tools, circuit boards, and technological odds and ends spread out across the floor than the last time he’d checked.
From somewhere inside the crawlspace, out of sight, came a clatter, followed by a loud curse. “I’m well aware!”
Moments later, Arthur Watts appeared from below. Or rather, his head did, as the rest of him remained hidden inside the guts of the Atlesian airship he was attempting to rewire. “This bucket of bolts has more malfunctions than that pea-brained project of Polendina’s which blew itself up!”
He had a flathead screwdriver in his hand, and suddenly he stabbed it into the floor, not appearing concerned in the slightest that he might break something else. “Honestly, how did those tin soldiers of Ironwood’s ever make this thing fly?! Some of the glitches I’ve been encountering are stupefyingly disabling! I thought I’d fixed the problem a half-hour ago, but when I tried to turn on the engines, the fire suppression system went off!”
Well, Hazel thought idly, that explains why he looks like he’s been dipped in powdered sugar.
Hazel listened to Watts grouse on for several minutes about balky computer systems and uncooperative machinery. When he finally seemed to have expended all his frustration, Hazel said, “Are you at least any closer to solving it?”
“Well, I’ve isolated what seems to be the biggest problem. Make yourself useful and hand me my equipment bag, will you?”
Hazel obliged. He’d thought this mission would be trivial—fly to the rendezvous point, wait for one of Cinder’s associates to deliver the stolen Pandora, introduce the virus to the Atlesian network, hand off an infected ship communicator to Cinder’s associate to take back to Beacon for reintroduction to the rest of the network, wait for Watts to rewire the ship to suit their interests. It was a job that he’d assured Salem would take just hours—and then fly both of them back to Evernight. But instead, he’d been subjected to a half-day’s worth of listening to Arthur Watts rant about the incompetence of Atlas’s leaders and the imbecility of his former colleagues, and regardless of what he said about progress, he didn’t seem any closer from where Hazel stood.
“The biggest headache is that the ship’s computers simply will not shut down. I’ve done a hard reset more times than I can count, I’ve thrown and re-thrown every circuit breaker I can uncover, I’ve cut all power to every part of the ship, I’ve shut down everything which might generate so much as a fizz of static electricity, and I’ve gone over the chassis with a fine-toothed comb and unplugged every single wire leading to every single thing on this ship which might conceivably be called a battery. There isn’t so much as a clock battery plugged into anything! And yet. And yet. The computers just keeps running! And as long as they’re running, I’m locked out of everything I need access to!” He rummaged around in his bag for a moment, found a tester gauge, and disappeared back into the crawlspace.
“At this point, I’m just considering pulling all the smart technology out and turning this ship into the world’s most expensive battering ram,” he said a moment later, his voice now slightly muffled.
“Would that get this done any faster?” Hazel said.
“Quite possibly,” Watts said, entirely missing the sarcasm in Hazel’s voice. “I’ve finally gotten to the systems core, and if I can’t find the source of the mystery here, then it’s time to rig this into a blunt force weapon.”
Unfortunately, Watts had said something to a similar sentiment an hour ago, and Hazel was starting to wonder if he should just force the issue.
And then he heard a clang from below, the floor vibrating slightly, like something heavy had been dropped, followed by Watts saying, “What the—”
A long moment of silence ensued, and Hazel wondered if Watts had electrocuted himself. He leaned over, trying to see into the crawlspace. “Everything alright down there?”
“Hold on,” came the gruff reply, confirming that Watts had at least not severely electrocuted himself. “How is it doing that? That’s not possible. It’s not…” A shuffling sound. “I don’t believe it.”
Watts appeared again, going for his equipment bag, and hastily pulled out a sleek gray laptop and a cable. Which he took with him when he went back into the crawlspace.
Amidst the sound of rapid typing and more odd noises which couldn’t be placed, Hazel began to grow curious despite his exasperation.
“Well, this job just became far more interesting,” Watts said finally, his voice filled with an undisguised amazement that Hazel wasn’t used to hearing from him.
“Have you finally found the problem?” Hazel said.
“Yes, and more.” Watts pulled himself all the way out of the crawlspace with uncharacteristic speed and pulled a soldering iron, screwdriver, and wrench out of his bag. Then, just before he ducked back into the ship’s guts, he sent Hazel a leering smile. “In fact, I’ve just found the thing which I’ve been searching for all my life.”
Vale
“An entire battle cruiser. Filled with the latest in our automated weaponry, and good soldiers. All lost. Because of your decision, Oz.”
Ironwood slid a paper across the desk. It came to a stop at the very edge, nearly falling into Ozpin’s lap. Ozpin, his hands folded in front of him and resting against his forehead, did not look down at it. He already knew what he’d see there.
“The Pandora wasn’t just any cruiser, either. She was my ship. The best ship in Atlas. The pride of the fleet.”
On some days, Ozpin could not shake the sensation that he was losing James. It was something he desperately hoped to avoid, but how could it be, when every choice he was faced with seemed designed to further drive a wedge between the two of them? He wondered what Salem would think, if she could see this conversation playing out. This all seemed to be playing right into her hands, after all.
“And lost for what? It’s one thing to lose forces in battle. It’s another thing entirely to lose them because of a hasty, politically motivated withdrawal which I was not in favor of, in any way, shape, or form. It was your decision to send away the machines, Oz. And now, look what your bowing to image and optics has won us. The loss of an entire arsenal.”
Sometimes Ozpin wondered if he’d erred by placing his faith in a military leader of Atlas, instead of a civilian one. To a military mind, the only logical course of action in this war was to escalate the conflict until it could be fought to its conclusion, rather than draw it out endlessly by insisting on maintaining secrecy. It was only natural that Ozpin’s strategy was difficult for James to agree to. It wouldn’t make sense to any soldier. But the plan that James thought was logical… was a plan that would only be logical if they were facing an enemy who could be killed.
“I have held my tongue until now, but I can stay silent no longer. What are we actually doing, Oz? What are you actually doing? You say there’s a delicate balance to maintain, but all I see is Salem tipping one end of the scale endlessly in her favor because you refuse to do more than place so much as a toe on your end of the scale!”
But what other choice could Ozpin have made, at the time that he’d recruited James? There was no better option. He’d captured the hearts and minds of Atlas with his rarefied heroics in battle, and Ozpin had seen nothing but a genuine, honorable man who was driven to do the right thing. He had also seen a man who was more than prepared to make the kind of hard choices which were necessitated by being part of a secret war. And with Atlas’s military growing ever more powerful, it had seemed a prudent choice to have the confidence of the man who held the reins of the kingdom’s might.
“At a certain point, an abundance of caution becomes an infestation of inaction, and you have long since crossed that line! The Maidens, the CCT, the rising crime rates in Vale, the loss of the Pandora, what will it take for you to actually do something of actual note? You made me the head of security for the Festival, which might be called the one smart thing you’ve done this semester, except that you immediately handicapped me by forcing me to give up my best ship and all of my machines. What’s next—will you insist on removing all the ammunition from my soldiers’ weapons?!”
At the time of recruiting James, Ozpin had his reservations about recruiting someone who might advocate strongly for a plan that would lead to Salem’s truth being exposed and therefore lead to the loss of all hope in humanity. Ozpin had assuaged his own concerns by promising himself that he would be able to bring James closer to his own viewpoint in time. However, years and years on, James had not come any closer to seeing things Ozpin’s way.
“I know that you have a hundred times the experience that anyone else has. I know that you have a thousand times the knowledge that anyone else has. I know that you can see the situation in a way that none of us can understand, Oz. But as of late, I am finding it impossible to convince myself of these facts about you! You have never once explained your methods and motivations in a way that would satisfy even the most inexperienced of military strategists. If the hordes of Grimm were charging into the heart of Vale, led by Salem herself atop a massive flying Grimm, would you still be up here in your office insisting that maintaining calm was more important than anything else?! If it was anyone else besides you making all of these decisions and letting so many defeats occur under your oversight, Ozpin, I would have labeled it malicious neglect!”
In fact, to the contrary, over time James had come to believe that Ozpin needed to see things his way. It was a belief that came from the best of intentions, but it was wrong in a way which threatened to undo all of Ozpin’s work. But what solution was there to this dilemma? He could not tell James he was wrong, given that with the information he had, his conclusion was indeed correct. And more information was impossible.
“Since you seem entirely uninterested in being the arbiter of the world’s security, perhaps I should be the one to fulfill that role. Whether you like it or not. Perhaps I should be making unilateral decisions about the world’s security, and if you tell me no, perhaps I should ignore you. Because unlike you, I do not care about burning a little goodwill in the name of saving us all.”
“James.” Ozpin unfolded his hands, laying his palms flat against his desk. This rant had gone on for far too long. “I have kept this particular nugget of knowledge from you in the hopes that I would never have to share it—I have rarely done so through generations—but I see it has come to this.” If delivered right, this was one of the rare instances where the bare truth could be Ozpin’s ally.
Ironwood raised a skeptical eyebrow, indicating for him to go on.
“None of us have the strength to take the fight to Salem at this time,” Ozpin said slowly, making sure that each word rang out to its full effect in Ironwood’s ears before moving onto the next. “Not even the full might of the Kingdom of Atlas. If you entered an open war with Salem today, you would lose.”
Ironwood stared at Ozpin in silence, his eyebrows venturing northward as his posture stiffened.
“You’re serious,” he said, his voice much quieter than at any other point in the conversation.
“As serious as annihilation, James.”
Ironwood closed his eyes, but said nothing else. However, Ozpin recognized that expression, and it brought him a small measure of relief. For the first time that semester, James Ironwood was showing acceptance, instead of demanding more. That was exactly what Ozpin had been hoping for.
However, from acceptance there were two paths which Ironwood could choose between. One path would be to temper his insistence on bringing the fight to Salem and his expectations of fighting a true war, but… it felt like pure wishful thinking to hope that would be the path which Ironwood followed. The other path seemed far more likely for someone of his mindset and values. Upon being told that his kingdom could not stand up to Salem in a direct fight, that might simply harden Ironwood’s resolve to forge Atlas into a weapon which would be strong enough to defeat Salem. Without the knowledge that a weapon which could defeat Salem did not exist.
However, even if ultimately Ironwood’s resolve was only strengthened by this, telling this one truth had bought Ozpin time. It would take significant time for Ironwood to arrive at new goals, significant time for him to begin making changes, significant time which Ozpin could use to engineer circumstances less amiable to an unchecked Atlesian military expansion.
Ozpin was wading into dangerous waters now, and somehow they still felt safer than what he’d just averted.
With breathing room bought and Ironwood finally silenced, Ozpin let himself look down at the paper which James had given to him: The last recorded communications of the ship known as the Pandora.
At first, he was just intending to flick his eyes over the transcript before turning his attention to other matters. However, a few moments later, he was picking up the page and blinking rapidly at the words printed there.
“...Even with all that I’ve seen, this is novel,” he said finally.
Ironwood, now paying more attention to his scroll, took several moments before he replied, clearing his throat. “Yes. Normally, only the captain can send outbound communications from the ship. But as you can see, some of those transmissions are not from Captain Faraday.”
Ozpin nodded. “Do you have any idea what actually transpired?”
“Not in the slightest.”
CONFIDENTIAL: Transmissions log excerpt. Quoted parties denoted as follows:
- Cpt. Cascadia Faraday, commanding officer of the AKN Pandora.
- Atlesian Kingdom Navy Communications Relay Station L-3
- Unknown party.
Begin excerpt.
2300 hours
A: Systems normal. Proceeding as expected. Expecting to make landfall at 0102 hours. Current position is [REDACTED]
B: Transmission received and acknowledged.
2320 hours
A: Systems normal. Proceeding as expected. Expecting to make landfall at 0101 hours. Current position is [REDACTED]
B: Transmission received and acknowledged.
2325 hours
C: wrong
2326 hours
B: Clarify previous transmission?
2327 hours
A: No transmissions have been sent since last report of current position.
C: wrong
B: Tower has received 3 messages from your transmitter in the past 2 minutes. How many have you sent?
A: Only aware of 1 message sent. Unsure of origin of unauthorized transmissions. Placing all personnel on high alert. Ordering full sweep of ship.
C: something is wrong
B: Command requests you deactivate your transmitter for two minutes.
A: Understood. Shutting transmitter down now.
[Signal interruption at 2327 hours and 55 seconds]
2328 hours
[Signal resumes prematurely at 2328 hours and 15 seconds]
C: something is wrong
B: AKN Pandora, an unknown party has access to your transmissions and seems to be capable of overriding signal. Please update on status of security sweep.
2332 hours
C: no storm
C: heading [REDACTED] bearing [REDACTED] course [REDACTED] azimuth [REDACTED]
A: Security sweep is proceeding smoothly. No sign of sabotage or infiltration.
B: Transmission received and acknowledged. Unauthorized messages are transmitting false positioning data. Motive unknown at this time.
2335 hours
A: Sweep complete. All crew and cargo accounted for. Ship is secure.
C: no
A: Crew remains on high alert. Resetting computer systems.
C: no
B: Transmission received and acknowledged.
C: stop
C: stop
C: THE CAPTAIN IS WRONG
C: THE CAPTAIN IS WRONG
C: HELP
C: HELP
2339 hours
[Signal interruption at 2339 hours and 6 seconds]
2340 hours
[The AKN Pandora misses its mandatory 20-minute check-in message]
2341 hours
[All further attempts to contact or locate the AKN Pandora are unsuccessful.]
End excerpt.
Ozpin placed the transcript down and stared off into a corner of the office. Beyond the obvious inconsistencies, something about these words bothered him, but he felt nowhere close to grasping exactly what.
“Strange indeed,” was all he could say. “Thoroughly strange.”
Ironwood rose from his chair, adjusting his gloves, and sighed unsubtly, fixing a look of irritation on Ozpin. “I’ll be on my way. There is quite an administrative mess to clean up now. I hope you won’t have let the kingdom collapse by the time I’m done.”
“Best of luck, James.”
“Good day.”
Ozpin was left wondering if this could even be called an improvement over the previous state of affairs between the two of them. The deeper issue was still there, and all he’d done was make it easier to ignore for the time being.
How long would it be before James was once again declaring that he would take the fate of the world into his own hands regardless of what Ozpin thought? How long would it be before not even the existential threat of Salem could quell him from firing the first shot of an open war which he would lose?
Only time would tell.
Ozpin’s eyes flicked to the clock. It was still startlingly early. James had roused him to inform him of the loss of the Pandora. Well, at least he’d be able to get a head start on the day’s work.
And that was when the elevator opened again and Glynda marched in before the doors were even fully apart, her expression all urgency and her body tensed in preparation for action.
“Team Battleship, sir,” she said. “Something’s happened.”
“What?” Ozpin stood up, immediately all alertness again, because the tenor of Glynda’s voice promised nothing but bad news.
“They’re requesting an evacuation from Mountain Glenn. Not an extraction—an evacuation.”
Later
Details were slow to reach Ozpin as he waited for the return of the airship, and sparse when they did arrive. Slowly, he gathered that everyone was, at the very least, alive. And that something of great significance had occurred. And that the ship would be returning with two more people than had been sent on the mission: Winter Schnee and Ruby Karyatis. Everything else remained unknown.
After so many lives, there were very few things which could feel like a painfully long time to him. But this moment was one of them. It felt as if an eternity had passed before the door to his office swung open.
Glynda strode in, with Bartholomew and Blake Belladonna following her, and no one else.
Glynda noticed Ozpin’s questioning look immediately. “Miss Schnee is being examined in the infirmary. Miss Xiao Long is also in the infirmary, but unconscious; the culprit seems to be dehydration. Miss Karyatis is in the infirmary and under close guard from Lieutenant Schnee. Miss Pallas is recharging in her workshop; her battery was dangerously low.”
Internally, Ozpin’s list of questions about the mission grew ever-longer.
“And Miss Belladonna should be in the infirmary as well,” Glynda said, turning a severely arched eyebrow on her. “But she insisted strenuously on speaking to you first.”
Ozpin gave his full attention to Blake for the first time since she’d entered. Her shoulder had been bandaged heavily, with a perhaps unsettling amount of red staining the bandages. She was caked with dirt and grime, and instead of being holstered, her weapon was still held in one hand, as if she expected an ambush at any moment. Urgency burned in her eyes.
Silently, he wondered if he’d asked too much of Team BSYP, so soon after a host of turbulent events. Then, before he could offer Blake a seat, she spoke.
“The mission was… a success, technically. But that’s not why I’m here. I need to talk to you about one of the Atlesian students. Ruby Karyatis. Do you know her?”
The question felt ludicrous. So much of this semester had been spent knowing of Ruby Karyatis, while also knowing nothing about Ruby Karyatis.
“Go on, please,” he said, dreading what might come next.
Blake took a step forward. “She’s being used by Atlas. In a way that’s violating almost every single one of her basic sentient rights.”
Ozpin closed his eyes for just a moment, and wondered if the weight of all his mistakes in all his lives was a feeling which would or could ever diminish.
“And in what way is she being used?” he said, despite knowing full well what the answer would be.
“She can vaporize Grimm with her eyes,” Blake said. “And turn them to stone. An entire tunnel full of Grimm, gone in a flash of light. If you think I’m making it up, ask Doctor Oobleck.”
Oobleck nodded once, wordlessly. Glynda, now positioned next to Ozpin’s desk, had gone perfectly still, and only Ozpin could see the tightening of her hands on the scroll which she held.
If there had still been any doubt in anyone’s mind by now, it was now conclusively gone. Blake had no way of knowing this, but she was currently the person in the room who knew the least about the power which Ruby wielded, and she was drawing dangerously close to secrets from which there would be a point of no return. Ozpin knew he would have to tread carefully for the rest of this conversation, to ensure Blake’s protection.
“I don’t know how she does it, but honestly? I don’t really care,” Blake said. “There’s more important things for me to worry about with her. They’re using her powers. They call her Project Moonrise. She’s being kept like a secret, and she thinks it’s for her own good that she’s been treated like a weapon to be pointed at whatever target Atlas wants. In fact, she’s been conditioned to want that, to not want to think for herself. It’s wrong in so many ways, and it can’t be allowed to happen.”
Ozpin stared at Blake, each word sinking into him like a bullet fired at point-blank range.
James, what have you done?
“And then—well, this next part, I’m less sure about, because I’m relying on what she knows about herself, and…” Blake gestured wildly, only to immediately regret it as she put a hand on her injured shoulder, wincing. “…Who knows how much they’ve lied to her to make her more compliant? And some of it has to be lies. As in, she says she was grown in a laboratory. Which… well, on the one hand, it’s Atlas, they might actually be capable of doing that, but on the other hand, it sounds like the kind of thing they’d tell her to make her think she belongs to the military! And if it’s a lie, it’s worked! She thinks she was born for the purpose of saving the world, and anything less than that is failure to her!”
Ozpin was quite sure that Glynda was creating a list in her head of ways to strangle James Ironwood. The worst part of this might’ve been realizing that the part of the story which Blake believed to be lies… probably was the unvarnished truth.
“And Ruby also says she wasn’t actually created by Atlas the governmental entity,” Blake said. “She says it was some rogue scientist who created her all on his own in his private lab, and it was only when that scientist committed crimes and died that the Atlesian Military found her abandoned in his lab, and of course at that point they were practically forced to take the baby superweapon in and raise her. Which has to be a lie. I’ve never heard a flimsier excuse. I’m really supposed to believe that this mysterious, unknown scientist who’s conveniently dead left this child experiment for the Atlesian military to find, practically wrapped up in a bow on their doorstep?!”
She shook her head and let out a disgusted snort. “It makes me wonder which poor family in Mantle had their child kidnapped by Atlas.”
A headache had descended on Ozpin like the claws of Salem herself were digging into his skull. Blake was unwittingly providing the last pieces of the puzzle: Ruby Karyatis was a clone of Summer Rose. A clone grown in a laboratory in Atlas. A clone trained to be a silver-eyed warrior for her entire life. A clone who didn’t even know who she was a clone of.
“Thank you for sharing this information, Miss Belladonna,” he said. “I know it can be difficult to breach someone else’s trust, even when you have the best of intentions.”
Blake crossed her arms as best as she could with the injured shoulder, stared Ozpin directly in the eyes, and said, “I’m telling you this because I believe you have the power to do something about it, and the conscience to actually do it.”
Glynda beat Ozpin to the reply. “Trust me when I say this, Miss Belladonna: Heads will roll.”
Ozpin nodded his assent.
And then, for several seconds, his gaze remained on Blake, studying her as his mind focused on matters which went far beyond today. More pressingly than ever before, he was noting the things about her which had only shined brighter and brighter throughout the year which he’d known her. How could he not take careful note of her care and courage, her resolute desire for justice, her willingness to go above and beyond what anyone could ask of her?
He knew the future would come someday. With what, and with who, would he face it?
“Good,” Blake said. With that, she turned and walked out, and it was only as she departed that Ozpin realized she was limping.
“There’s nothing I can add to what Miss Belladonna already said,” Oobleck said, pushing up his glasses and turning to follow her. “I’ll see her to the infirmary. I’m fairly concerned about her ability to make it there on her own.”
And then it was just Ozpin and Glynda, alone in a silent office and contemplating their new reality.
In the stillness, every sound in the room felt magnified. The gentle whir of a ventilation fan somewhere above their heads. The quiet buzz of a malfunctioning light somewhere in the ceiling which needed to be fixed. The clack of Glynda tapping a pen against her scroll. All of it combined into a veritable fusillade in Ozpin’s ears.
“A silver-eyed warrior,” Glynda said. “Or rather, a silver-eyed soldier. How much of what Miss Belladonna told us is truth, do you think?”
“More than what she thinks.” Ozpin folded his hands together, and considered the thing which Blake most strongly believed to be a lie—the question of who was responsible for Ruby’s creation. He dearly hoped that was the actual truth. He did not want to think about what it might mean for James’s confidence in Ozpin’s plans, if he had given this project his approval from the very beginning. And yet, it sounded blatantly unlikely that this would fall into his lap after the exposure of some rogue individual’s secret machinations. Unfortunately, there was only one way to put these questions to rest.
He looked down at his desk once more, his headache only growing stronger. “Call Taiyang and Qrow,” he said. “We need them here as soon as possible.”
“Should I contact James as well?” Glynda said.
“No.”
Glynda raised an eyebrow. “Pardon?”
“I’ve had enough of navigating this matter without Taiyang and Qrow’s knowledge. For all future conversations that are had about Ruby, they will be involved. They deserve to know everything from here on out, with nothing said behind their backs. And I think their presence may actually make the conversation with James easier, by reminding him that this is not a matter of power, but rather a matter of family.”
“Fair enough, but… What exactly are we going to do in the meantime? I can’t shake the feeling that we’re trying to thread a needle that’s only shrinking.”
“And the solution is never to throw away the needle entirely. Because then we are left with nothing to hold together the fabric of civilization.” Ozpin rose from his desk, picking up his cane. The mug of coffee stayed behind, forgone for the rest of today. He still had a Fall Maiden to find. “Moving rashly is exactly what she wants. Chaos is always her ally, even when it seems as if it would benefit us. So we weigh our other options. We maintain balance. Order. We cannot allow the situation to devolve any further. And we have faith that the institutions we have built, the guardians we’ve put in place, are enough to see us through the storm.”
Glynda was silent until Ozpin reached the elevator. “This strange dance can’t go on forever,” she said. “Something has to give.”
Ozpin pressed a button, summoning the elevator. “And something will.”
Later
“So that’s how it is, then.”
James Ironwood turned away from Winter Schnee, resting a hand against the frame of his office window as he stared at the sprawl of Beacon Academy beneath the cruiser which now served as his flagship. Winter, standing at attention for every moment of this briefing, had just delivered the news of Ruby being forced to break secrecy on her silver-eyed power.
“It’s not exactly a catastrophe,” Ironwood said to Winter without looking at her. “Project Moonrise was going to become known to the world at some point in time. The only difference, really, is on whose terms the reveal is made.”
He locked his gaze onto Ozpin’s office. “However, these particular terms that we’ve been dealt are… Unfortunate.”
Winter furrowed her brow. “How so, sir?”
One of Ironwood’s fingers went rap-rap-rap against the glass. “I have reason to believe that Ozpin will object vigorously to Moonrise. So vigorously that he may try to interfere. And with Doctor Oobleck having witnessed her powers, it is only a very short matter of time before Ozpin knows.”
Privately, Winter had always found herself just a little concerned by how much sway Beacon’s headmaster seemed to have with the General. And that concern was now being incited by how the General was speaking of Ozpin as an authority whose reach transcended international borders. It reminded her far too much of the kind of presence that Jacques Schnee held within her own mind. An entity whose tentacles reached into so many corners that there was nowhere to hide from him. If Ozpin was the same way…
Winter left that thought unfinished and instead chose to ask, “…Cadet Karyatis lies within our legal jurisdiction. No other academy can make a justifiable claim on her. Is there anything the Headmaster can even do, sir?”
“Nothing. For now,” Ironwood said. “As long as Ruby wants the destiny that we’ve given her, there is no avenue for Ozpin to undermine Moonrise.” He let out a deep sigh and nodded to himself. “I will wait for him to make a move. That man is so stubbornly complacent that if he can actually bring himself to do something with a trace of backbone before we’ve returned Ruby safely to Atlas where she’ll be out of his reach, I’ll be thrilled. Because it’ll be the most proactive thing he’s done all year. Maybe that’ll spur him to action in other areas.”
Ironwood would not admit this aloud, but by now he was desperate to see any sign of proactive behavior from Ozpin. In fact, another unexpected benefit of this involuntary reveal was now occurring to him. Ozpin believed that Salem could not be destroyed at this moment in time. He wondered, maybe the evident strength and skill of Project Moonrise could actually change the ancient wizard’s mind and bring him out of his paralyzed state?
Perhaps, for better or for worse, Ruby would be the catalyst for a much-needed restructuring.
“Will there be any adjustments to Cadet Karyatis’s routines, sir?” Winter said. “Any new security protocols?”
Ironwood shook his head. “Business as usual. As long as Ruby is happy, she will remain within our control. For all my concerns I’ve had about her safety… every time that I’ve tried to reassert the need for her own safety, it has only resulted in her retreating further away from me. From us.”
He closed his eyes, thinking of the decision to withhold her from classes for her own safety, one which had ended in a genuine escape. That was something which Ruby would’ve never considered before this year. And then there was his decision that the dance was too dangerous for Ruby—which had resulted in an even more daring escape, and then actual face-to-face resistance from Ruby—yet another thing that would’ve been unthinkable to her before coming to Beacon.
It was as if Ironwood was watching Project Moonrise disappear before his eyes. And without Ruby, what could he do against Salem? Ozpin had made it so very clear, after all—nothing about his way had produced something capable of defeating Salem. It was only Ironwood’s way which had produced a silver-eyed warrior capable of defeating her.
An anger towards Ozpin rushed through him, a feeling that was becoming familiar. That old wizard, so complacent and insistent on comfort before anything else, was neutralizing the world’s best weapon without even understanding what he was doing. It wasn’t even his direct work. Project Moonrise was being neutralized not by Ozpin but by Penny.
And his frustrations always came back to the PENNY Project, didn’t they? Penny had once been a superweapon of her own, meant to protect the world in equal measure to Ruby… until Ozpin had aided and abetted her escape, and turned what could’ve been vitally productive years of Penny’s development into years in which she had just been… languishing at Beacon in secret, doing nothing to protect the world and doing nothing to turn the tide against Salem. He didn’t understand how that could be enjoyable for Penny. Did she not want to protect people? And Ozpin firmly believed what he’d done to Penny to be a good thing. Why was he so insistent on kneecapping his own faction?
And now, Ironwood was watching in real time as Penny drew Ruby further and further away. One irreversibly lost weapon rapidly weakening his best remaining weapon. And if he tried to intervene for the good of the world, Ozpin would side with Penny—side with taking away another one of their own weapons which they all desperately needed.
They were fighting a war, and Ozpin was trying to prioritize feelings. Would Ozpin still be trying to care about feelings and comfort when the world had been reduced to a smoking, lifeless rock? Perhaps he would find himself afraid to leave unsightly footprints in the pristine blanket of ash which would someday coat every continent.
Ironwood knew that the moves which he made concerning Ruby in the next few weeks could very well determine the fate of civilization. If he tried to reassert the importance of Ruby in Atlas’s plans too bluntly, as he had done in the past, he would only push her further out of reach, and possibly even snap her allegiance entirely. But if he chose too hands-off of an approach, she would slip out of his grasp all the same.
“If we press further, she may very well break away from us entirely, and then there will be nothing we can do to bring her back,” he said finally. “We must be exceedingly deliberate in how we handle her. Fria’s health has been in decline ever since Ruby left—perhaps if we emphasize that to her, then we can draw her back to Atlas, where she will be free of any destabilizing influences.”
Winter nodded slowly, but she knew there was one more thing she had to tell the General. So she cleared her throat and went on. “About Cadet Karyatis breaking away, sir. There has been a development in that regard—something which might give her all the motivation she needs to spurn the safety of the military without a second thought. Something which might be able to overshadow even her care for her guardian.”
Winter was flabbergasted. She couldn’t understand how anyone would want to leave the Atlesian military. She especially couldn’t understand how Ruby would want that, not when she’d done her best to impress upon Ruby the dangers of the world at large. For Winter, safely ensconced within the structures of the Atlesian military was the only place where she felt safe. Safe from the soulless husk known as Jacques Schnee who was doing his best to close an iron fist around the entire world. He would suck the blood from every living thing on Remnant if it would contribute an extra bit of gilding to the throne he was building for himself. How did Ruby not realize this? How did she not realize the terrible danger she would be putting herself in if she left the military’s protection? Did Ruby not realize that the moment she left, the Schnee Dust Company would do its best to snatch her up in its tentacles and lock her away in some laboratory to be experimented on and used and turned into nothing but a puppet for an evil, evil man’s whims? How did she NOT know?! How, how, how—
Winter recognized the beginnings of panic welling up in her. She clamped down on them as hard as she possibly could, and was gratified when she felt the distant terror receding far before it would’ve ever showed itself outwardly. She was with the General. She was in the flagship. Her swords were at her side. She was safe.
All they needed to do was help Ruby understand that this was the only place where she would be safe. Where any of them would be safe.
Ironwood hadn’t noticed any of Winter’s brief internal turmoil. When he turned to face her, all he saw was his faithful lieutenant offering more intel.
“Oh?” he said, genuinely unsure of where Winter was going with this.
“There is a… mutual romantic interest between her and another student,” Winter said.
Ironwood stiffened.
As soon as he heard the words another student, he knew with dread and certainty exactly which student Winter was referring to. He had absolutely no doubt which name his lieutenant was about to utter.
“Penny Pallas,” Winter said. “I believe you are somewhat familiar with her already, sir.”
She said it with the utmost seriousness, completely unaware of what depths she’d just pierced within Ironwood’s psyche.
Ironwood turned back to the window, and activated Mettle before he succumbed to the impulse to repeatedly bash his head against the reinforced glass. This window may have been rated for combat, but was likely not rated for his skull.
Even with his Semblance maintaining his focus, he could not stifle the urge to ask, in the most pained of tones, “Why is it always her?”
“…Sir?”
Ironwood decided it would be wise of him to not answer Winter in that moment. Instead, he leaned his forehead against the cool window glass, and even with the assistance of his Semblance, he was having difficulty marshaling his thoughts.
Of course, he thought. Naturally. It could’ve been spotted from a thousand yards out. If Ozpin hadn’t assured him that Penny had no memory of her past, Ironwood would’ve believed fully that Penny—especially a Penny led by an ex-White Fang team leader—was intentionally working to erode Ruby’s trust in Atlas. Trying to turn her into a deserter.
And maybe Penny was doing it without even realizing it, without a hint of malice. Maybe the concept of freedom had been drilled into her so deeply by Ozpin that she could not resist the urge to try and free anyone who she believed to be in the same situation as her.
Ironic, he thought. She had become an extension of Ozpin’s will without even realizing it, and unfortunately… Ozpin’s will was one that cared for things which were pointless and meaningless in the face of war.
He wondered if Ozpin had ever been a soldier. He wondered if Ozpin had ever truly been able to look at this conflict with a martial mind, a mind that was able to make hard but necessary sacrifices in the name of victory. Perhaps Ozpin simply did not understand how war worked. Penny would not understand how war worked, either.
…But Ruby understood war. She had lived it, breathed it, been raised on it. She understood where Ozpin and Penny did not. She understood what Ironwood did.
Finally, Ironwood understood exactly how he would free Ruby from the corrupting complacency of Ozpin and others. And in a strange way, hearing of romantic passion was what’d helped bring him to this conclusion.
Passion. That was the key. Or rather, fervor. That was it. He had to reignite Ruby’s fervor for their fight. It had undoubtedly been extinguished by promises of false safety and softness peppered over her during her time living in a kingdom buoyed by false peace. He had to shatter the illusions of the world around her which Ozpin so painstakingly kept in place.
Ironwood knew that Ruby’s fervor for victory and protection was old and deep. In comparison to that, the impulses and outside pressures she was succumbing to this semester would seem as fleeting as dried leaves on a tree about to be carried away by the autumn wind.
All he had to do was remind her. And he knew exactly how to.
But to do so, he had to make it clear that he was the one in the right. He would not make the mistakes he’d already made twice this semester. He would have to wait for Ruby to break away herself, and then he would act. Only by reacting, instead of immediately seeking to control before anything had happened, would she understand that Ironwood truly did not see her as Salem saw her Grimm—as mindless creatures sitting on their haunches and waiting for an order to destroy. Even if that was certainly what Ozpin thought James’s mindset to be.
Unlike Ozpin, it was rare that Ironwood chose waiting as a course of action, but in this particular case, it was the only option he had left. So he would take this course of action, and if it failed…
Brothers help them all.
“Sir?” Winter said again, her concern only growing.
Finally, Ironwood had composed himself sufficiently to reply.
“I am familiar with Pallas, yes,” he said—the kind of stupefying understatement that would’ve made Ozpin proud. “And I have no concerns with her or a possible relationship. They may proceed without our interference.”
Winter nodded in acknowledgment.
Ironwood let Mettle drop and turned away from his view of Beacon to sit behind his desk, where he slowly massaged his brow before adding, “I cannot see their relationship having a significant impact on the course of the future.”
It had taken one more night for everyone on Team BSYP to either be released from the infirmary or finish charging. Now with a reassuringly full battery on a bright fall morning, Penny found herself answering a summons to Professor Carmel’s office.
She knocked on the door, and immediately heard a “Come in,” from inside. She stepped inside, closing the door behind her and carefully navigating around several stacks of books to take a seat in the spinny chair in front of Carmel’s desk.
“Good morning, Miss Pallas,” Carmel said without looking up from the paper she was grading. “I’m sorry for the mess, which I really only have myself to blame for. I spend one semester in this office, which I’m only borrowing, and yet somehow I make it look like I’ve dumped my entire personal study in here.” She shook her head, and then made one final mark on the paper in bright red ink before pushing it aside and turning all of her attention to Penny. “So! I called you in to update you on my search for a piece of media with robots that you’d enjoy. I do apologize for taking so long, but I wanted to be thorough.”
Penny nodded, leaning forward a little in her seat and composing her expression into one designed to be as attentive as possible. She had not given much conscious thought to Carmel’s quest over the past several months, but she was achingly curious to know what the professor might’ve found for her. She had always been afraid to search for media involving robots herself, due to a fear of only finding things which would make her immensely sad. From what she already knew of the genre as a whole, Silent Spring was only one example of a significant number of movies where things or people like her were portrayed as evil. So she did not look, for fear that she might find nothing.
Carmel settled back in her seat and lifted her gaze until it was focused on something somewhere behind Penny, and rubbed her chin slowly. “The results have been… mixed.”
Mixed was a word which Penny always struggled with. To her, mixed sounded like it should imply an equal presence of good and bad things, something theoretically neutral. However, she’d found that when everyone else used mixed, it was usually with a wholly negative connotation. Either when there were more bad things than good things in the results, or when someone had been expecting positive results and instead had found neutral (but comparatively negative) results. On multiple occasions, the gap between Penny’s understanding of the word and other people’s understanding of the word had created some… interesting accidents.
However, by now, she believed she had a fairly good grasp of what the word meant. And so she braced herself for disappointment.
“Well, you see, I did find some movies and shows and books and comics and video games with nice robots—heroic ones, valiant ones, sweet ones, ones that I think you would delight in seeing or reading about or playing as.” Carmel let out a heavy sigh. “The problem, Miss Pallas, is that a great many of these characters meet tragic fates.”
Penny nodded. Thankfully, she was not too disappointed, due to having expected something along those lines.
“Which quite often makes for wonderful stories, masterpieces of storytelling and emotions, but I cannot in good conscience give you a list of recommendations in which you’d have to see people who are supposed to be like you die. Or go through immense pain without recompense, or have their memories wiped, or any other number of unfortunate things.”
She leaned to one side to open a drawer, pulled a stapled packet of papers out, and started to slowly flip through. “Usually, when serious storytellers create a robotic character, they’re taking advantage of an opportunity to contrast a robot’s perceived invulnerability with that robot actually receiving far more hurt and pain than their fleshy counterparts. It’s a powerful juxtaposition, one that can speak volumes to certain social issues when deployed, and create lasting emotional impact in the audience, but… no matter how good they are, no matter how lovely or important, no matter how universally lauded, I don’t feel comfortable recommending those kinds of stories to you.”
Penny had never heard a more serious tone from the professor than at this moment.
“Because you’re not a character, Miss Pallas; you don’t exist for an audience and you don’t want to be used as an object for someone else’s feelings. You’re the first of your kind.” Carmel trailed off, fixing her gaze on Penny again. “Please, tell me if any of what I’m saying is inaccurate or making you feel uncomfortable.”
Penny shook her head, and started to play with the strings of her hoodie, twisting them back and forth into different and novel permutations of entanglement. “Not at all, ma’am. I am glad you are telling me the truth.”
Carmel nodded. “So am I. Another reason for this trend of unfortunate fates—sometimes, robot characters are used as a handy way to show violence and death to younger audiences without traumatizing them, since there’s no blood involved. And then sometimes they’re simply comic relief, which… That’s doubtlessly lighter fare than tragedy or violence, but… How can I recommend something to you where the character who’s supposed to be like you is a joke?”
Carmel let the packet of paper fall into her lap and sighed again. “So, I admit failure in my search. I have nothing to unreservedly recommend to you. I fully believe that the media landscape we build around ourselves can affect our mindsets, influence our outlooks on life, change the way we think about the world and other people and—maybe most significantly of all—ourselves. Sometimes, Miss Pallas, when we read stories, we’re searching for reflections of ourselves. From the conversations I’ve had with you, from the things you’ve written for my class, I think you’re looking for reflections of yourself. And I will not introduce you to a media landscape which might very well lead to you internalizing the belief that your reflection should be pain, or despair, or insignificance, or a joke, or all of those things.”
This was precisely why Penny had been afraid of seeking out movies or shows or books or anything else with characters like her. She did not want to find nothing but reminders of how unfriendly a world this could be for her.
“So, I’m going to change that!”
Penny blinked. “Pardon?”
A wide smile spread across Carmel’s face. “I have friends in the film industry, and I’ve spent the last few weeks badgering them to put a feel-good robot girl movie into production. I’m quite confident that I’ve put the idea in enough people’s heads that it’ll eventually get to someone. I’ve even guaranteed a good review of their movie, and let me tell you, in the world of film, my opinion carries a very long way.”
Penny tilted her head curiously. Of course, she was immensely honored that Carmel would go to such lengths for her, but also… “Is that not… unprofessional?”
Carmel let out a short bark of laughter. “Of course it is! But my time left on this earth isn’t very long, Miss Pallas, and I’m of the mind that reputation is only worth something when you’ve got a lot of years left. So if I get some egg on my face at ninety years old due to using my reviews as currency, I won’t lose much sleep over it.” She paused, and then chuckled. “Of course, now that I’ve said that, I’ll probably live another twenty years. Might happen, as long as I don’t have to pick up Supply and Demand again.”
Penny ran through her auditory memory several times, failing to parse the end of Carmel’s sentence each time. “I believe I may have misunderstood something in your previous sentence,” she said finally.
“Oh, apologies.” Carmel extended a gnarled index finger, pointing to the wall behind Penny. She turned, and saw a glass display case holding a pair of oversize pistols, their shining metal plating ornately carved with floral patterns.
“Supply and Demand. My twin pistols from my glory days of being a Huntress. So named because I discovered my Semblance, Cupboard, while I was building them. And my Semblance has always made sure I never run out of ammunition. Always knowing how many shots you’ll need to fire in the next twenty-four hours is extremely helpful.”
She gazed at the pistols for a moment longer, and then added, “And ever since the day I retired from being a Huntress, my Semblance has never once informed me that I’ll need my pistols. I always check every morning when I wake up—how many of my weapons will I need for the coming day? Zero, one, or two? And not once in my thirty-odd years of retirement, has my Semblance ever told me that I’ll need even just one pistol for the day.”
“I hope it stays that way,” Penny said.
Exiting the meeting with Professor Carmel, Penny found Ruby waiting where she’d left her, on a bench in the hallway. She was lying flat on her back, one leg lying on the bench and one kicked over the side. She was playing a game on her scroll, but she put it away as soon as she saw Penny and jumped onto her feet, her braid swinging wildly behind her.
“Woo! Ready for, um… whatever?” she said, holding out a fist for Penny to fistbump.
Team BSYP’s mission finishing so abnormally early had an unexpected benefit: it meant they had a large block of unstructured time between now and the start of the Vytal Festival. Time in which there were no classes to attend, no assignments to be done, and no preparations to be made for the tournament. Penny faced this block of free time with a single objective: spend time with Ruby.
Because this would be possibly the last time they could be together for a long time. Yes, Blake had already gone to Ozpin with her concerns about Ruby, and Penny was fully prepared to offer herself to the Atlesian Military as a willing and able protector for Ruby, but… She was still going to make the most of this guaranteed time with Ruby! Because what if Penny did not spend the maximum amount of time with Ruby and then all their plans failed and Ruby went back to Atlas alone and Penny was left to think about time they could’ve spent together which they hadn’t?! She did not want that! If circumstances would somehow force Ruby to be alone again, then she should have as many happy memories to take on all her solo missions as possible.
“Dining hall?” Ruby said, falling in step beside her. “I haven’t eaten breakfast yet.”
Penny nodded in agreement. “I hope that General Ironwood took the news of the incident well? I was… I was quite worried that you would have been confined to the airship again.” Somehow, quite worried was an understatement. Penny had been unable to shake the belief that if she’d let Ruby out of her sight anytime since returning to Beacon, it would’ve been the last time they saw each other.
“Nope!” Ruby said, popping the ‘p.’ It was a vocal quirk that she must’ve picked up from Penny or Yang—it hadn’t been part of her mannerisms at the start of the semester. “He just sounded really tired, but he told me I was free to do whatever I wanted, and that I wasn’t in any trouble, so…”
The were walking down a hall with tall, arched windows all along one side, through which they could see one of the Atlesian cruisers moored, its shape standing out starkly against the gentle morning sky.
Ruby gave the cruiser a long look before shrugging. “I guess it’s not really a big problem, since I was gonna stop being a secret soon anyways? I’m not gonna think about the why and how too much though, because what really matters is, I can do whatever I want for the next few days!”
She spun back to Penny, only to freeze, her eyes fixed on her and her mouth falling open slightly.
“Is everything alright?” Penny ran a quick check of Ruby’s vitals, finding nothing out of the ordinary, but—
“I’m fine!” Ruby ducked her head, blushing madly, and then met Penny’s gaze again. “I just. Um. Sometimes you’re so pretty I forget about everything else.”
Bzzzt. Bzzzt. Bzzzt. Bzzzt. That was the sound of Penny trying to avoid every internal program crashing at the same time.
“With the sunlight on your face and that little tuft of hair sticking out and just your eyes and, and…” Ruby gestured wildly. “I can’t not notice! Maybe if it was someone else I could ignore it, but… but it’s you.”
Penny somehow resisted a sudden, mightily pressing urge to lean herself against Ruby. She had not forgotten about their conversation in Mountain Glenn about their mutual feelings. And, given her rapidly expanding blush and her hammering heartbeat, Ruby hadn’t forgotten either.
With everything that’d followed afterward, the conversation about their feelings felt as if it was from a different century, but it had undeniably happened, and it was etched into both of their memories.
“I wish I never had to look away from you, ever again,” Ruby whispered.
A pain deep inside Penny throbbed like an internal bolt had just sheared.
I want to kiss you, Ruby Karyatis. I want to know what your lips feel like when pressed against mine. I want to know how it feels to give you a touch that I have given no one else in the world, and I want to know what it feels like to receive that same enchantingly rare touch from you. If I can feel things this powerfully, this deeply, just by looking at you, then I cannot even begin to enumerate what I might feel if we were to kiss.
There is so much that I want, Ruby Karyatis.
But Penny did not say any of those things aloud. Instead, she said, “What if you stayed?”
Ruby stopped. Penny stopped, too. They were the only sentient beings in this hallway, their only company the thousands of dust motes swirling in the air around them, illuminated by the morning sun which filtered through the windows. Penny noted, as she had many times before, how the sunlight brought out the red in Ruby’s hair, and made it seem as if she was smoldering, just like how every memory of her within Penny’s databanks felt as if it could catch fire.
“What if I want you to stay more than anything?” Penny said.
Ruby made a quiet, pained noise, and then she leaned closer to Penny, clasping her hands around Penny’s like she needed the support to stay upright, and then—and then their foreheads were touching, and Penny wasn’t entirely sure how that’d happened, but now that she was feeling it, she never wanted this contact to end.
Ruby’s eyes darted from side to side, and then she closed them and whispered, “Penny, I’m scared.”
Penny worked one hand free from Ruby’s, and raised it to rest on the nape of Ruby’s neck, feeling the tension working in the muscles underneath the skin. “Scared of what?”
A shiver passed over Ruby’s body. “I… I don’t know anymore if what I’ve been told all my life to want, is what I should want. I don’t think my wants are actually mine. I… I think they’re what the Atlas Military wants.”
Penny wished Blake was here. She would have a far better idea of what to do, what to say. But there was another corner of her consciousness which wanted no one and nobody to intrude upon this moment. It was an odd conflict within her.
Romantic feelings were peculiar, her logic core observed. Peculiar but wonderful.
“What do you think you want?” Penny said. “The things that Ruby Karyatis wants, not what the Atlas Military wants?”
Ruby shivered again, and the hand not holding Penny’s hand went to squeeze and twist her own braid. “It’s… it’s really hard to figure that out… I… I don’t know… How do I stop wanting the things I was told all my life to want? Even if I’m learning maybe they aren’t the best things… I still feel them, I still feel the instinct and the urge and the reflex and the… and the… it’s like it’s part of my DNA, like it was built into me—” Ruby stopped, and then her voice became even smaller, her words tumbling out in a frenzy. “What if… what if it was built into me? What if that scientist who made me put loyalty to Atlas in my DNA and—and—I don’t know, a million other bad things he could’ve put inside my genes, what if I can never change the way I am?”
She fell silent, her chest heaving as she shook all over like a cornered animal.
But Penny, for once, knew exactly what to say, with a thousand percent confidence. “Ruby,” she whispered. “Whoever built me—whoever that I escaped from… it is highly likely that I had some sort of loyalty to them programmed into my code. Their values, their goals, their aims. And… I overcame it. I learned to live for myself, not for the people who intended for me to follow their desires. If I, a robot, can free myself from what I was built to be, then I believe with all my being that you can, too.”
A sob escaped Ruby’s throat. She opened her eyes, and they were shining with tears. But there was also a quivery smile fighting to show itself on her face. The hand which had been fiddling with her braid moved to Penny’s shoulder, squeezing her tightly.
“You know what, Penny? When you say it like that, I can’t not believe it. I’m gonna try. I’m gonna try so hard. I’m still scared. But I’m gonna try.”
“Doing something while scared is the first step to doing it while not scared,” Penny said, echoing Blake’s words from a conversation around a campfire thirty-six hours ago.
Ruby nodded slowly, taking a deep and uneven breath. “Doing it scared…” She laughed weakly. “Not used to being scared. But I’m gonna be an Ordinary Teenage Girl this week. Doing Ordinary Teenage Girl Things. And maybe I’ll figure out the things I actually want! And then… and then, when the tournament’s over… I’ll…” She swallowed, chewed on her lip for a moment, looked from side to side, and then looked back into Penny’s eyes, her silver gaze drilling into Penny. “I’ll figure it out. I’ll figure out what I wanna do. Once we’re there. I don’t know yet, but I hope I know what I wanna do by then. Because I’ll have to choose once the tournament’s over.”
Penny nodded. Ruby’s heart was still beating like she was running a marathon, but she was giving Penny a little smile which felt like the rarest, most coveted treasure on the planet. It made her feel so warm inside, seeing Ruby smile like that.
“Let’s do Ordinary Teenage Girl Things together, then!” she said. “It will be sensational!”
“Yeah!” Ruby pumped a fist and looked expectantly at Penny. Penny looked expectantly right back. Twenty-two seconds of silence ensued.
Finally, Ruby deflated a little. “…We still don’t know what Ordinary Teenage Girl Things are, do we?”
Notes:
Just a quick reminder of something that's already changed here in comparison to canon: In canon, the Vale Council installed Ironwood as the head of festival security after the Breach. But in War Machines, Ozpin already asked the Vytal Council to make Ironwood the head of festival security before the breach, as a means of extending an olive branch to him after the CCT was broken into. That scene happened in Chapter 35, before the Mountain Glenn mission, which is why I bring it up here again--it's been three months of real-world time since that happened in the story lol.
Chapter 49: Ordinary Teenage Girl Things
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
Cinder’s scroll vibrated.
She wasn’t entirely sure what would be in a message arriving in the dead of night when she wasn’t expecting anything, so she was immediately on high alert as she opened her scroll—
All of her wariness abruptly morphed into a deep satisfaction as she saw the notification. It wasn’t a message. It was an update from the virus’s network catalog, informing her that a new point of access had been found.
And then, before she could even click on that one to see exactly what it was, another access appeared on the map. And another. And another.
Among them, she saw Amity Arena listed. But not even that was as exciting as the Atlesian military names which were now flooding her screen—weapons and ship controls and personal scrolls, all things believed by the world to be impenetrably secure.
A smile spread slowly across her face. She had all the access she needed again, and more. All was proceeding as foreseen.
Suddenly, footsteps from across the warehouse interrupted her thoughts. She stood up immediately, pocketing her scroll and preparing herself for a confrontation. As far as she knew, she was the only one in the warehouse—but this person was making no effort to disguise the sound of their approach, which either meant it was an uninvited ally, or a brazen enemy.
As it turned out, it was neither. It was something rather more unknown.
Cinder hilted her swords and studied Ilia Amitola as she came to a stop next to a stack of crates, crossing her arms.
“I was under the impression that you were dead,” she said, noting definitive signs of a battle on her.
“Adam thinks so.” Ilia’s eyes roved all over, checking every corner of her surroundings. “I’d like to keep it that way. At least, until I get what I want, which you can help me with.”
Cinder raised an eyebrow.
Later
Weiss laid on her bunk, staring through the window at clouds in the sky. She didn’t have the slightest idea how long she’d been watching them drift by. Time had lost meaning to her somewhere in the return from Mountain Glenn.
She was curled around one of Penny’s plushies—the ridiculously proportioned Ursa—and hoping that her partner wouldn’t mind the temporary theft. She desperately needed comfort of any kind.
The date and time of the press conference Father had called remained unchanged: the morning of the tournament’s third day, before the singles round began. Weiss could count out exactly how many hours of freedom she had left.
Some part of her wondered what would happen if she simply did not show up for the press conference Father had called. She could claim illness. She could claim an assassination attempt. She could claim insanity. She could simply keep finding excuses and reasons to never have that press conference. It would be a page ripped from Father’s playbook—when faced with something which he refused to do, he would dissemble, delay, disrupt, drag it out into such a long and protracted affair that whoever was opposing him would inevitably surrender to Jacque Schnee’s dizzying ability to wield sheer inertia.
Weiss wished she had a tenth of that skill. Sometimes she felt like a leaf in the wind, being tossed around endlessly by whatever currents picked her up. She was glad she was not her father, but that meant she had none of his strengths. She was not Winter, either, with her spine of steel, and she was not Penny, with her… her literal spine of steel.
Did Penny have a spine analogue, actually? Weiss vaguely recalled being shown imaging of Penny’s exoskeleton at one point, and now she dug into her (frustratingly organic) memory, trying to recall if there had been an actual component akin to a spine—
Dear gods, it seemed to be a laughably basic requirement for a Huntress to know whether or not her partner’s body contained a spine. And now here was Weiss Schnee, a so-called Huntress-in-training, not even capable of answering that with confidence. That felt like just one failure atop a stack of them, though.
Seeing Penny and Ruby fighting together at Mountain Glenn had confirmed it in Weiss’s mind. Ruby would be a far better partner to Penny than Weiss had ever been. She knew it without a shadow of doubt.
The door opened behind her, but she didn’t bother rolling over to see who it was. The cheerful back-and-forth conversation which reached her ears told her who it was.
Knowing Penny, there was no chance that she would fail to notice Weiss, so she was left hoping that Penny and Ruby would be so enamored with each other’s presence that they would simply ignore Weiss.
Sadly, as footsteps neared Weiss, she realized that would not be the case. Preemptively admitting defeat, she rolled over to face the rest of the room—just in time for an honest-to-goodness periscope to appear over the edge of her bunk, with a very distorted silver iris staring at Weiss from inside the scope.
“And here we see the, um, the rare and reclusive white-haired songbird!” came Ruby’s voice from somewhere below. A moment later, the periscope disappeared and her head popped up, grinning at Weiss. “Hi.”
Weiss blinked at Ruby. And then she took notice of Penny’s appearance, featuring a stunningly tacky safari hat which she had never seen before, a jacket made of forest camouflage fabric, and a pair of binoculars around her neck.
“We went birdwatching!” Penny said.
Ruby dug a notepad out of her pocket and began rattling off a list of names without so much as a single breath. “We saw sixteen lutejays, fourteen piratinals, eleven green-tailed redbirds—that’s not a confusing name at all—nine pining sapsuckers, five blue-horned ornithopters, two maximal glosswings, a Brent’s rooker—”
“Unusually late in the season for one of those to still be flying!” Penny added.
“Yeah!” Ruby nodded eagerly, and then went back to her list. “A keening barnfinch, notably not sighted in a barn, an Eran’s Sparrow, a lesser kingfisher heron, a capbeaked dove—”
“Not to be confused with the cupbeaked dove which is endemic to the wilds of Anima!”
“Right!” Ruby consulted her birdwatching list again, tapping it with a pen, and then hummed thoughtfully. “Oh, right, also two very lost seagulls, I forgot to write them down because we were too busy pointing them back to the sea.”
“I discovered that my Semblance is capable of rudimentary communication with animals if I enter their head! I did not try to control them, but I did manage to communicate through feelings which direction the ocean was! And they understood me!” Penny was genuinely bouncing up and down on her feet, practically radiating excitement. “If I can use my Semblance to talk to animals, then perhaps someday I can also understand what they are saying to me?”
“Oh!” Ruby smacked her forehead. “Right! How could I forget?! The most important sighting of all! A green-eyed flying beauty!”
Penny paused her bouncing to blink at Ruby. “That… that is not a bird which is listed in any of the reference guides I downloaded?”
Ruby poked her in the side. “That’s because you’re not a bird, Penny.”
Weiss swore she could see the processors spinning in Penny’s head for several seconds before her eyes widened.
“Ruby,” she gasped, before burying her in a hug while a massive, self-satisfied grin spread across Ruby’s face.
Weiss’s heart squeezed with… was that jealousy? She wasn’t even sure what kind of jealousy it could be. Was it because she was seeing two girls eagerly falling in love with one another, without restraint? Was it because she was seeing what an actual student partner for Penny was supposed to do? Was it because they were happy?
Well, whatever it was, it didn’t matter. Weiss turned back over and buried her face in her pillow, trying to block out the rest of the world.
“It’s nice to know that I won’t be missed at all,” she muttered into the soft, puffy fabric.
Several seconds after that utterance, she realized that Penny and Ruby had gone dead silent.
Ah. Right. Of course. A little muffling would not stop Penny Pallas from hearing and understanding someone’s words, and the fact that Weiss couldn’t remember that either was another sign of how terrible a partner she was.
“Weiss?” Penny said, her tone considerably quieter. “Could you please clarify what you meant by that?”
After an internal mental struggle, Weiss pulled herself upright and stared down at Penny and Ruby. They’d both lost all their exuberant cheer.
“Isn’t it obvious?” Weiss said. When she received two shaking heads in response, she sighed. “Either I will be forced to stop attending Beacon when I choose the future my father demands I follow, or I will be forced to stop attending Beacon for financial reasons when my father disowns me and the checks stop coming.”
Ruby and Penny were just tilting their heads in confusion. Weiss stared. “Seriously? Did you two just think it’s free to attend the most prestigious martial academy in the world?”
And then she remembered who she was talking to. The girl who was literally a ward of Beacon, and the girl who was essentially owned by Atlas. She pinched her brow. “Well, now you know. And now you know why this is a choice that I lose either way.”
“There is financial aid, scholarships, merit—” Penny started, only for Weiss to shake her head violently as familiar fears flooded her.
“I don’t know how any of that works! I don’t know how to open a bank account, I don’t know how to write a check, I don’t know how to make a deposit, I don’t know how to make a payment to the school, I don’t know how to apply for a credit card, I—I don’t know how to do my own finances at all! All of the skills I have acquired over the course of my life are skills that presuppose having a massive amount of money at your disposal!” Weiss looked down at herself, her hands clenching into fists and rumpling the edges of her skirt. “All of my clothes require dry cleaning! I don’t know if I’d be able to afford to take care of my own clothes! I don’t know anything about budgeting and saving and… and…” Weiss’s voice rose to a shriek, hitting octaves that usually only appeared in her concerts. “I don’t know how to function as someone with a net worth of zero!”
Her head was spinning now, and she had to stop to catch her breath. She waited for Penny or Ruby to offer some other well-meaning but hopeless suggestion, but their shocked silence seemed to indicate they’d even run out of those. So she went on with a bitter laugh.
“And who would want to help a Schnee that doesn’t have any money to make her appealing?! Without paying people, I’m just a girl with a face and a name that the world hates, and also deviant tendencies that I can’t even bring myself to embrace! And some half-baked fighting skills—I couldn’t even do mercenary work! Myrtenaster requires certain high-quality grades of Dust, the cost of which is a drop in the bucket for my father’s accounts but would be a king’s ransom for myself alone!”
She sank back down, crossing her arms and staring up at the ceiling like she was preparing herself to be buried. “So there you have it. Either I let my father puppet me around for the next few decades and I fail to make the world a better place, becoming just as culpable as he is for all the SDC’s crimes… Or I adhere to my morals and do the right thing, at the expense of hurling myself into oblivion.” Weiss let out a bitter laugh. “I can let my father collar me and turn me into a soulless, blood-stained butcher that deserves to be assassinated by the White Fang. Or I can die of hunger alone under a pile of cardboard in a damp, stinking alley somewhere. Truly an incredible choice.”
In the stunned silence that followed, Weiss turned her head just enough to look at Myrtenaster, which hung from its usual spot on the wall. She imagined her weapon hanging overhead, following her around with every step, always poised directly over her with its gleaming, sharpened tip the first thing she would see if she looked up. She imagined her weapon dropping one day soon, falling straight down and impaling her through the heart.
Penny and Ruby were whispering things to each other, but Weiss really did not have the energy to listen. At least, not until she felt the mattress shifting as two large weights settled on either side of her.
Weiss sat up and looked from Penny to Ruby. “What are you two doing?”
“I am more than ready to tell you about the three hundred and eighty-seven immediately accessible ways in which you would have help and support if your father disowned you!” Penny said. “Coco is an expert on affordable Huntress fashion, there is a student message board where free items are given away, I can think of at least sixty-two people who would offer you shelter and sustenance, Beacon Academy has financial counselors and a financial literacy class, I checked before we left for our field trip to confirm that you automatically qualify for emergency financial forgiveness since you are a student in excellent standing, and Ruby and and I are weapons experts who would gladly help you modify your weapon to take standard Dust types!”
Weiss blinked rapidly, and gave up on trying to process that barrage. Penny had managed to make her feel dizzy while sitting still.
Then Penny nodded to Ruby. “However, all that being said, I believe that you may be even more interested in what Ruby has already been thinking about.”
Weiss swiveled slowly, painfully, to look at Ruby. This was possibly the last person she had ever contemplated taking advice from. “...Yes?”
“I…” Ruby took a deep breath, fiddling with her hands. “I’m a girl who’s thinking about maybe kinda sort possibly leaving behind everything I’ve ever known in Atlas to carve my own path even though it’s the hardest thing I’ll have ever done and it’s really scary and I still don’t even know if I should do it, buuuuuut…” She flapped her hands at Weiss. “Um, sound familiar?”
“The choice is clear in your case,” Weiss said immediately. “The choice is not clear in my case.”
“Weird. It’s actually the exact opposite,” Ruby said, mirroring her immediacy.
“Ruby, your choice is between a miserable life of indentured servitude as an objectified Atlesian figurehead or getting to pursue the path of a Huntress while living as yourself amongst friends that genuinely care about you.” No, she was not jealous or anything about how easy Ruby’s choice was. She was also not frustrated by how Ruby did not see it that way.
“No, that’s what you’re picking! Mine’s different!”
“Ruby. Weiss.” Penny reached across Weiss to pick up Ruby’s hand, rubbing her thumb back and forth over Ruby’s knuckles. She laid her other hand on Weiss’s shoulder. “If the two of you continue in this manner, I will turn off emotional processing so that my logic core can spend the next three hours explaining in excruciating detail all of the fallacies you two are swimming amongst.” She tilted her head, apparently listening to the inner workings of her body. “Logic may not deal in emotions, but as a part of my consciousness, it still has limits!”
Weiss did not for one second doubt the seriousness or the specificity of Penny’s threat. So she swallowed down a hundred rebuttals to Ruby, straightened her posture, and gave Penny a look of surrender. “Do you have an alternate suggestion, then?”
“Do you two trust me?” Penny said.
“Yeah.”
“Yes.”
“Do you both trust that I understand you well?”
Two more affirmatives.
Penny nodded. “Then, please believe me when I say this: The two of you are facing nearly the exact same situation.”
Weiss stiffened, and she felt Ruby do the same, her grip on Penny’s hand going rigid and tight.
“And I firmly believe that when you tell each other what choice is better, that should also be the choice that you pick for yourselves.”
Silently, Weiss considered that perhaps this was something she’d known to be true all along, but had been terrified of accepting it until now. “I don’t…” She struggled with the next words to leave her mouth, and again her eyes returned to Myrtenaster on the wall. Except, this time, she was thinking about the possibility that someday it might be the last remaining link between her and a past in Atlas.
She remembered Blake’s advice from the campfire well—she had been listening, as Yang would doubtlessly be pleased to know. Doing it scared. But that felt impossible. She would have an easier time believing that save the world was a simple order that could be followed. Well. Hm. That sounded like—
She glanced at Ruby, who was staring down at her feet which hung in the open air beyond the edge of Weiss’s bunk.
“How do you… leave behind everything that is familiar?” she asked, and the question was about her as much as it was about Ruby.
“Sounds like something I’ve wondered,” Ruby murmured.
Penny’s processors whirred just a few ticks louder—a sound that Weiss had slowly grown attuned to over several months. “Sometimes, you do not have a choice,” she said, looking away from Weiss and into the distance.
Weiss thought of Penny’s workshop in the tower, and the wistful, almost reverent way that she spoke of her forgotten father, and the answer she had given Yang’s father when he’d asked where’s home for you girls?
“Even if I am quite sure what decision is right for both of you, I am still glad that you have a choice.”
“Leaving Atlas,” Ruby said, and there was a stutter in the middle of her syllables, a twitch of her shoulders as she said it. She was wincing as soon as the words were out of her mouth, but Weiss noticed the set of Ruby’s jaw before she added, “I don’t want to be a bad person.”
“Neither do I,” Weiss said.
“I’ve always believed that I’m a bad person if I’m not trying my absolute hardest every second of every day to save the world.”
“I’ve always believed that I’d be a failure if I wasn’t constantly perfecting myself in pursuit of inheriting the company,” Weiss said. “However, two days ago, somebody told me that was a waste. That I needed to rework my understanding of the world, because the success I’d always cared about was actually meaningless to everyone else.”
She trailed off, staring into the pattern of Penny’s bedspread on the bunk below for so long that the power symbols began to burn themselves into her retinas.
“Sounds like trying to make the paintjob perfect on an airship falling out of the sky,” Ruby said.
Weiss nodded emphatically. “And I grew up being taught that an immaculate coat of paint would hide any flaw.” She hoped that Ruby would realize how familiar that sounded.
Ruby blinked. Swallowed. Her grip on the edge of the bunk turned white-knuckled.
“I’ve grown up learning…” She trailed off. “Atlas… the military… the me… Everything!” She gestured at nothing and everything, her arms flailing so wildly that Weiss had to lean away or risk being smacked in the face. “Oh gods, I… I’m… I don’t know anything. The military is the only way I’ve ever known,” she whispered. “Like you, except your way was the Schnee Dust Company.”
“How does it feel to think about letting them down?” Weiss said. Once again, it was asked for her as much as it was for Ruby. Because when she thought about letting them down—
Ruby shrank in on herself, her breathing hitching and then accelerating like a jet engine. Silver dust tumbled off her arms as she started to shiver wildly, until suddenly Ruby was all silver, disappearing into her Semblance and reappearing in Penny’s lap, her arms already wrapped around Penny’s neck when she reformed.
“Bad,” Ruby said, pressing herself to Penny’s chest as Penny hugged her tightly and Weiss resisted the incredibly indecorous urge to sneeze out all the silver dust that’d gone up her nose. “Bad, bad, bad, ugh, augh, good soldiers follow—bad, bad, ugh, I…” Each word was increasingly muffled as she turned her face into Penny’s hoodie.
“I can relate,” Weiss said. Even if she was better at tamping down any sign of panic, she understood the feeling of can’t breathe stop no I want to be perfect I’ll try harder please don’t—
It was only Penny’s hand landing on her back and rubbing slow circles which stopped Weiss from pulling herself into a panic attack entirely of her own making. She fought down a wave of shame—Penny seemed to have a nose for shame, and would tirelessly remind Weiss that their room was a no-shame zone.
A strange calm fell over Weiss as she surveyed the room, the only sensations she registered being Penny’s soothing hand and the sunlight which cast a warm square on her lap. A series of breathing exercises taught to her in long-ago vocal training rose to mind, and she began going through the familiar motions, taking air in and out of herself in a rhythm that was remembered in her lungs as much as in her mind. Whether consciously or unconsciously, Ruby and Penny began to match her breathing as well, and the room became the strangest symphony Weiss had ever played in.
She had repeatedly thought of what the Nimbus girl had said in Mountain Glenn. There was no functional difference between twenty years (optimistically) of Weiss waiting in the wings to inherit the company from Father and twenty years of Whitley waiting to inherit.
Eventually, though, her answer to the world settled in her mind, taking shape and weight. It felt… frightening. But… The company hadn’t always been Weiss’s birthright—it’d once been Winter’s, after all, and it was only because she’d left the family that it became Weiss’s.
Doing it scared.
And now Weiss understood Blake’s advice.
She folded her hands in her lap and took a breath to speak. On the wall, directly in her line of sight, Myrtenaster gleamed like a diamond of the first water.
“Being the perfect heiress… is not the best version of myself that I can be,” Weiss said.
She appreciated the effort her teammates made to be respectfully silent even as their eyes widened.
“Therefore, I have decided that I will find myself elsewhere.”
The declaration hung in the air, and admittedly, Weiss found the aftermath to be… a letdown. There were no police officers breaking down the door to evict her. Her father was not sending a fleet of Atlesian bombers to turn the school into a Great War battlefield. Her scroll did not automatically self-destruct after detecting subversive language. Myrtenaster did not fling itself at her in a bloodthirsty rage for betraying the family. The world appeared exactly the same as thirty seconds ago.
“Sensational!” Penny let out a little cheer. “Weiss, I am so excited for you!”
Ruby gave Weiss a worryingly queasy smile. One that Weiss felt needed more attention.
“And… perhaps being the perfect soldier isn’t the best version of yourself, Ruby?” she added, giving her a careful look.
But Ruby twitched, and clung to Penny harder, shaking her head violently. “Sorry. Sorry. Too much. Overloaded. Bad thoughts. Really bad thoughts. Nope. Nope nope nope! Sorry… Makes me wanna turn my brain off…”
Ruby trailed off into a series of whimpers as Penny ran her fingers gently through Ruby’s hair over and over again, still holding her tightly. Weiss watched, feeling rather useless.
“I… I wanna get more of a feel for what I am,” Ruby said finally, raising her head. “I’m… I need to… can we just focus on Ordinary Teenage Girl Things for a little bit?”
“I would be more than happy to!” was Penny’s response, while Weiss found herself thunderstruck by a new thought.
She was not the heiress anymore. She was just… just a teenage girl, and there would no longer be any consequences if she were to partake in Ordinary Teenage Girl Things.
“May I join in?” she said, so giddy over this revelation that she didn’t even feel the need to ask what exactly was Penny and Ruby’s working definition of Ordinary Teenage Girl Things.
She received an eager affirmative from the pair, and a series of truly nonsensical visions floated through Weiss’s mind: a slumber party. Painting each other’s nails. Trying on clothes. Talking about cute girls. All things that Penny had suggested doing as bonding activities at the start of the semester. Weiss, of course, had refused them, out of fear that she would… somehow break something heiresslike in herself.
Well, that thing, whatever accursed organ it was, was broken. She was free to be… herself. Whatever that was.
“Perhaps we could figure out how to be ourselves together?” Pyrrha had said months ago. Those words still rang in Weiss’s head like the most finely crafted gong echoing forever. Was it… was it not too late to still answer that question? Or had Pyrrha moved on? Had Weiss hurt her too deeply? Were the things she’d already said and done to satisfy her father unforgivable in Pyrrha’s eyes? Was… had she already lost her chance?
Weiss’s heart clenched. She… she would accept whatever Pyrrha wished. Even if that wish was to never talk to Weiss again.
Oh gods above and below, how much had she hurt Pyrrha? How could she ever face her? How—
The thunk of Penny sliding off the bunk shook Weiss back to the present moment.
“—Although, first we should return these supplies to the supply warehouse,” Penny was saying. She waved the binoculars that were still hanging from her neck. “We should do that as soon as possible, given that this was an illicit requisitioning. The warehouse is not actually… open right now.”
“She used her Semblance to get us in without setting off the alarms!” Ruby chirped as she grabbed her periscope off the bed, answering a question Weiss had absolutely not been asking.
Petty theft. If Weiss’s teammates received a demerit for petty theft, she no longer had to fret about how much her father’s ire would be raised. She could simply ignore his phone calls. She could… she could block his number!
Weiss felt sublime. She was approaching Penny levels of exuberance. At least, internally.
She watched Penny and Ruby depart. Her shoulders felt lighter than they had in… days? Weeks? Months? Years? It was impossible to say; she felt as if she’d just discovered she had wings and was taking flight on them for the first time.
Then, belatedly, Weiss realized something else. She squinted at the now-closed door, trying to recall in her memory who had been carrying which birdwatching accessories.
“Penny,” Weiss said to an empty room. “You have camera lenses for eyes. Why did you have the binoculars?!”
Laundry.
They’d all come a hair’s breadth from dying a gruesome death, in which the only thing that had saved them was an incomprehensible supernatural force, and now Blake was doing laundry.
That just didn’t feel right.
She’d had a similar experience the day after leaving Adam and the White Fang, when she’d spent fifteen minutes trying to find a teakettle in Tukson’s kitchen. That had ended with her having a breakdown under the kitchen table.
But this time around, it was Yang who looked far closer to a breakdown than Blake. At first, she’d put Yang’s behavior down to just aftereffects of the dehydration, but the longer today stretched out, the less sure she was of that.
The first thing Yang had done after waking up was frantically scan their room like she was afraid something had gone missing, and although that look had disappeared from her eyes soon after, there was a tension in her shoulders that never left as even as she followed Blake to the dining hall and then to the laundry room and then to the library and then back to the laundry room. If anything, her shoulders were more tense by now.
That was why Blake stopped halfway back to their room, pulled Yang into an alcove, dropped her sack of clean laundry on the floor, and said, “Yang. What’s wrong?”
Yang jerked all over, as if she genuinely hadn’t expected Blake to notice, and made sounds with her mouth that Blake hoped she didn’t think were supposed to be words, or they would have a real problem.
“What?” she said. “Why did you—I feel fine! Do I look like something’s wrong?”
“Yes.”
Yang went on an interesting facial journey before her face settled on a cheeriness that… Well, it looked incredibly genuine, like any other sunny Yang smile from the past year, but Blake was having trouble believing this one.
“Really, Blake. I’m fine.” There was a pair of vending machines in the alcove; Yang turned towards the one dispensing snacks and dug into her pockets for her wallet. “I just need to finish recharging, y’know?” She pulled out a handful of quarters, poked at the keypad, and pulled a candy bar from the tray. “That’s still a work in progress. Want a bite?”
Blake crossed her arms, considering her partner. The Yang from a minute ago looked more scared than tired.
But before she could press further, her scroll vibrated. And a quick glance at the screen told her it was a text from Ilia. And she had to pay attention to that.
By the time she was done reading the message and replying, Yang was already walking down the hall towards their room. Her laundry basket was balanced jauntily on one hip as she whistled a cheerful tune, but the signal that the discussion was over could not have been clearer.
“Booyah!” Ruby yelled, pumping her fist as her pixelated fighter onscreen unleashed a spinning kick that turned into a tornado. Penny was powerless to do anything except watch as the tornado swept up her own pixelated fighter and slammed it into the ground.
After debate and workshopping and input from Weiss, they had arrived at a collective definition of Ordinary Teenage Girl Things: activities which had nothing to do with being a weapon or a synthetic person or a Huntress or a soldier or an heiress. Which afforded many, many opportunities for things to do!
Although, Weiss had grown tired of losing to Penny and Ruby (despite the fact that they were all beginners at this game), and she’d taken up residence on her bunk to spectate and eat all their popcorn.
“What does booyah mean?” Penny said, voicing an idle thought. It was a favorite saying of Ruby’s, and she’d heard it in other places—from Yang, amongst other students. “Is it just an arbitrary combination of sounds that feel pleasing when put together, or does it have a deeper meaning?” She could’ve looked it up on the CCTnet, but her scroll was across the room, and her internal connection would never be turned on ever again, and anyways it was always more fun to ask Ruby.
Ruby tilted her head as the game flashed back to the character selection screen. “I dunno. Maybe it’s supposed to be an extra scary battle cry? Like, you’re yelling, but you’re also saying boo, so your opponent’s gonna be extra scared.” She looked sideways at Penny, a smile flitting across her face. “So did I scare you?”
“I do not think so,” Penny said, replying with a smile of her own. It was something which felt so right whenever she was around Ruby. It was like her default state when spending time together was… happiness.
“Really?” Ruby nudged her. “Not even with my super elite video game skills?”
“What is scary about you having exactly as many victories as me?”
“Hey! When I’m playing someone with reflexes faster than any human, being tied in victories basically means I’m winning!”
Penny giggled, but didn’t say anything else, because Ruby had unintentionally touched on the subject of something far less cheerful. There was a reason why she was not handily beating Ruby in this video game, and it didn’t have much to do with fairness. With all her processing power, she could be undefeated right now. It was just that she’d chosen to reallocate a great deal of her processing power to observing and recording Ruby through every applicable sensor and analysis program, which left a limited amount of processing for video-game related things like reaction time and strategic analysis and quick-fire button inputs. Leaving her with a gaming ability comparable to that of organics.
Penny was doing this because she was afraid of something. She was afraid that even with Blake’s plan and her own plan and Ruby’s own wavering commitments, even with all that it would somehow be the last time she and Ruby would see each other for a very long time. And if all their plans to help Ruby did somehow fail, then Penny wanted to have as many memories of Ruby as she could generate. And she wanted them to be as detailed as possible. And she wanted them to be secure and backed up within her memory, and painstakingly indexed and re-indexed, and…
She wanted Ruby to stay with every circuit of her being.
“Penny? You good?”
Penny blinked, shaking off the thoughts and looking back at Ruby. “Yes?”
“You’ve, um, been scrolling through the character selection for the last minute. Nonstop.”
“Oh.” Penny looked down at her hands, and realized she had left her thumb on a continuous joystick input somewhere in the middle of her thoughts. She refocused on the screen, picking the first character she landed on.
“Never played video games like this,” Ruby said, shaking her head in wonderment as bright neon numbers counted down the seconds until the match started. “The stuff I played was training simulators. Or the hardlight virtual reality sims, I don’t know if those count, but either way… now this is Ordinary Teenage Girl Things!”
The match started, punctuated by a deep female voice declaring “VIOLENCE!” so loudly that the speakers on either side of Team BSYP’s television shuddered visibly.
Just as Penny launched into the first of many combo sequences, the door opened. In her peripheral vision, she spotted a pajama-clad Yang with a laundry basket balanced on her hip.
“Hey, Peninsula. Hey, Ruby.”
As Yang said Ruby, there was a hitch in her tone so slight that Penny was sure she was the only person who noticed it. It was an unusual speech mannerism for Yang, so she looked up to see if something was wrong.
Yang appeared casual in her posture. Her voice sounded like a casual tone. But there was something which made Penny’s facial recognition systems ping oddly, although it took her twenty more seconds to realize why.
Yang was starting in on folding her laundry, but as she did so, her eyes would flick to Ruby and then away every few seconds. That was not casual.
A vicious crunching sound from the television pulled Penny’s attention back just in time to see her character get punched into the stratosphere. Which was not an understatement—the game literally had a meter that showed how high a fighter flew upon getting punched through the ceiling. Her momentary lapse in concentration had resulted in Ruby delivering a spacefaring sucker-punch.
“Morning!” Ruby said, waving to her as they both waited for Penny’s character to fall back into the arena. “How’re you feeling?”
“I don’t feel like I’ve been run over by a truck anymore,” Yang said with a shrug. “Now it just feels like it was a bicycle.”
Ruby made a sympathetic noise and went back to the game. Yang, however, did not go back to her laundry. Instead, she came to stand behind Penny and Ruby, watching the screen with her arms crossed. Except for when her gaze furtively went towards Ruby.
“You finally got Nora to let you borrow her copy of Streets of Vacuo Reloaded?” Yang said forty seconds later. “I’m impressed. She was protecting that game like it was an egg she laid.”
“It is not quite accurate to say it is being borrowed,” Penny said, frantically dodging a flurry of attacks from Ruby as she tried to even the already-lopsided score. “I’d describe it as… an act of covert temporary possession. I will return it before Team JNPR returns from their mission.”
“Even if she strangles us, worth it!” Ruby’s voice was full of glee as she leaned to one side, frantically mashing buttons. “This is awesome! Absolutely zero training value in this game! I mean, look! This character can turn into a bird! That’s impossible in real life! And that character can fly! With no wings or Semblance or Dust or anything, she can just fly and it’s never explained! There’s no realism whatsoever, no way to translate any skills to the real world! It’s just… fun! I love it!”
“Guess you didn’t get too much plain fun in Atlas, huh?” Yang said.
Ruby went still and silent, her fingers freezing over the buttons. Her fighter, forgotten onscreen, fell into a pit of acid.
“…No,” she said after a long pause. “Everything fun was always for my training. For making me a better soldier.”
A silence fell—well, if it could be called a silence when there was still an avalanche of cartoonishly exaggerated sound effects pouring out of the television. But regardless, no one talked until Yang said, “Ruby? Can I give you a hug?”
And now Penny knew something was definitely bothering Yang about Ruby, because she caught that same exact nearly-imperceptible hitch in her voice as she said Ruby’s name.
“I’d like that,” Ruby said, and the word that was barely out of her mouth before Yang was burying Ruby in a hug.
Penny had already been detecting an elevated heart rate in Yang, but as she hugged Ruby it rocketed up to a sprint.
“Well, you know what, you’re with people who like fun now,” Yang said. She shifted, shook her head a little, and then added, “I mean. If you want to stay with us.”
Before Ruby could reply, the door opened again, and Yang closed her mouth with an audible click as Blake entered. The first thing in the room she looked at was Yang, but as another random crunching sound from the screen echoed across the room, her eyes snapped to the TV.
“—Is that Streets Of Vacuo?” she said, tossing her laundry sack onto her bunk.
“It is the remaster of the first game in the series!” Penny said. “Please do not ask me where I found it!”
“Oh, that’s the one I—” Blake edged closer, studying the screen. “Could I have a turn?”
“Of course!” Penny gave up her controller, and there was an almost wistful look in Blake’s eyes as she sat down beside Ruby.
“It’s been more than a year since I played this,” Blake muttered, staring down at the controls. “More, actually? I hope I still have the muscle memory….” She fell silent as she and Ruby went through the character and stage selection, and then when the match started, an incredible warrior was unleashed. Not Ruby, but Blake.
Penny watched in quickly growing amazement as Blake unleashed a dizzying flurry of moves, most of which she hadn’t even realized existed in the game.
“Hm. I’m a little rusty,” Blake said sixteen seconds later, when her fighter delivered the finishing decapitation to Ruby’s character and a blood-splattered wall of text slid across the screen to declare her the victor.
Penny had once pointed out that the way organics used ‘rusty’ as an adjective to describe a state of familiarity and ease of use was entirely incongruous with how ‘rusty’ would apply to a synthetic person’s condition. If Penny was rusty, that would be a sign of such severe degradation of her physical form that there would be immensely more worrying consequences to her wellbeing than reduced movement. Regardless of all that, Blake did not seem ‘rusty’ even by organic standards.
Weiss sat up from where she’d been half-reading, half-watching. “How did you do all that?” she said, all of her attention now on Blake.
A small smile played across Blake’s lips. “I’ve been playing this game since I was twelve. The original version of it. Learned it on a balky PlayBox system in a backwoods White Fang camp when I was twelve.” She paused, tilting her head in thought. “…Three camps, actually. That console somehow survived two different Atlas raids and migrated with us. And I got super into it. Read every strategy guide I could find on the CCTnet cover-to-cover ten times over and got so good at it that no Fang wanted to play against me. One time, we pulled a heist in Mistral which actually happened right next to a Streets of Vacuo regional tournament, and my job was to blend in with the tournament and be the lookout.” She shrugged. “I won the tournament. So I scored a two-hundred-lien SDC voucher at the same time my compatriots were making off with a truckload of Dust.”
“No, I mean the stuff you made your character in the game do—as in, what buttons did you press?The most impressive thing I could achieve was making my character impale themselves, and you… you… That.” Weiss gestured helplessly at the screen.
“Oh, simple,” Blake said. “I just did a quarter-circle reverse side-stick input to launch a It Started Out As Just Light, and then a half-circle down-tap to follow with a Please Leave Me Alone, and then I could chain that into an I Can’t… Contain My Strength which let me combo strat Ruby’s fighter into oblivion.”
Weiss, Penny, Ruby, and Yang stared at Blake.
“Ruby, is this how I sound to you when I talk about fashion?” Weiss said faintly.
“I understand more of Blake’s words,” Ruby said.
Blake shrugged. “Hey, anyone can learn this—the guides are right there on the net. Ruby could’ve countered that last move with a Flight Of The Bumblebee, which would’ve put me in a tricky spot, but I could’ve escaped by pulling off a Reverse Triple Carabiner Jumbo Gumble Weewoo XRE6 Right 3. Which definitely would’ve put her to bed.”
“Alright, now you’re just throwing words together.”
“Maybe.” Blake handed the controller back to Penny and tapped her chin thoughtfully. “I wonder what happened to that PlayBox. Demeter was borrowing it for a few months, but her camp got wiped out by… Something. Either Atlas or Grimm. We never figured out which.”
Ruby’s controller fell out of her hands with a clatter. Her eyes had gone very wide.
“Um. What did Demeter look like, exactly?” Her voice was only a squeak.
Blake stared at Ruby. “...Iguana Faunus. Thick green tail. Keeps a dagger up her sleeve, has an undercut—”
“Oh, no,” Ruby mumbled. “Um. I think that was me.” Her gaze dropped down to her lap, swallowing hard. “I had a mission with the Ace Ops to take down a White Fang camp a while back. Their leader had a green tail.”
Penny counted forty different emotions passing through Blake’s face as she processed that information.
“They’re… probably still in jail,” Ruby said. “If the Atlesian government thinks somebody’s going to be an ongoing threat to creating Grimm-attracting negative emotions, the kingdom has a law that they can just… keep them in jail for as long as they want…” She shook her head. “Um. I’ve known that for years, but now it feels awful.”
She continued looking straight down, her head dipping lower and lower as she hunched over. “I remember the PlayBox, too, because the Ace Ops brought it back with them. I think it’s still in Atlas headquarters.”
A silence fell over the room as Penny struggled to craft an appropriate response to this confession. But, as it turned out, she did not have to, because Ruby spoke again.
“Are you all… afraid of me?” Ruby whispered, meeting no one’s eyes.
Yang had retreated to her bunk, her pulse slowly returning to something more normalized as she watched the video games, but when that question left Ruby’s mouth, she stiffened. Penny was the only one to notice the abrupt change in posture.
“What do you mean?” Yang said, just a little more quickly than how she usually spoke.
“I’m…” Ruby raised her head, gesturing to her shining silver eyes. “You’ve seen what I can do now. You’ve seen what Atlas wants me to be. You’ve seen how powerful I really am. But, I don’t want to be scary to my friends, I… I just want to be the Ruby you’ve known all semester long.” She pulled her knees up towards her chest, wrapping her arms around them to keep herself folded up, like she was trying to make herself as small as possible.
The video game chirped and pinged incessantly in the background, entirely forgotten by everyone. Penny muted it.
Fifty-five seconds later, Yang spoke in a quiet tone. “I won’t be scared of you, Ruby. Ever. Whatever you’re capable of, whatever you can do, I’ll… I’ll be there for you. I will. I promise.”
Ruby swallowed, nodding. “Thank you…”
Tracking the sequence of events which happened next was difficult, but Penny found herself content to simply summarize how it ended up: With everyone in the room hugging Ruby as tightly as they could from every direction, as if they could shield her from the rest of the world.
They were a few hours deep in the video game tournament—or rather, the “Can Anyone Beat Blake” tournament—when Yang decided she needed a shower. Partly because she really did need one, and partly because she needed a break from feeling like her organs were going to implode every time she looked at Ruby.
But as she stood in the shower with the water drumming against her too-tight shoulder muscles and not a single drop of shampoo in her hair, she came to the conclusion that this decision had been a terrible choice. Because now she was alone with her thoughts, and they felt sharp enough to cut her to shreds.
What was she doing? Why wasn’t she telling Ruby exactly who she looked like and why she might look like that? Why hadn’t she pulled Ruby close to her and never let go of her ever again? Why hadn’t she caved in James Ironwood’s face for whatever he’d done to Ruby? Why wasn’t she screaming at Ozpin until her voice gave out for how he’d seen a child with the face of Summer Rose and then hadn’t done anything about it?
Yang tried her best to lose herself in the hypnotic swirl of the water as it went down the drain between her feet. But no matter how long she stared down at the tiny whirlpool, her thoughts never became any quieter.
There was one very good reason why she wasn’t doing any of the things that she absolutely should have been doing: She was afraid. She was more afraid than she’d ever been in her life, of how she could fuck everything up. There were so many ways that she could scare Ruby irreparably, push her too far and never see her again. There was a growing part of Yang screaming that she would break this mystery. Just like how everything else in her family was broken. A miracle of unknowable proportions had been dropped into her hands, and she was terrified that she’d either hold on too tightly and shatter it, or she wouldn’t hold tightly enough and she’d drop the miracle entirely.
Actually, that wasn’t the right way to describe it. The miracle was being dropped into Yang’s hands right now. It hadn’t even landed. And who was to say she wouldn’t break it as soon as she touched it, as soon as it hit her palms? And if she couldn’t keep Ruby… that had to mean every other tragedy that’d ever befallen her family was her fault somehow, because it couldn’t be her dad’s fault or her uncle’s fault or anyone else’s, but it had to be someone’s, and that only left her.
These were old thoughts. Familiar thoughts. Ones that stirred up memories of a time years past when a much younger Yang had become convinced that her own touch could be a death sentence. And she knew that didn’t make any sense. She knew what she was feeling made just as little sense as those thoughts that’d made her run away from home. She knew she couldn’t ruin something just by touching it. It was perfectly logical. Yang wished so very badly that she had a logic core like Penny’s right now, one that could make rationality feel comforting. But she didn’t. And no matter what she knew about the irrationality and illogic of these thoughts, they brought an increasingly irrepressible terror that kept steamrolling everything else in her mind.
She turned up the water temperature until steam was rising from her skin and turned to face the showerhead, closing her eyes to let her face be pelted with nearly-too-hot water. One of her favorite things about living in a dormitory was that the shower never ran out of hot water. Maybe if she stood here for long enough, she could wash off the stains of old bad habits which were clinging to her again because she’d seen a pair of unforgettable silver eyes in a dim tunnel. Maybe she could stay here long enough that the constant pounding of the water would erode her from existence like a river carving a vast canyon out of rock, leaving no sign that she’d ever been there.
She still hadn’t put any shampoo in her hair. At some point, her teammates would notice she’d been in here for too long, wouldn’t they? Maybe one of them would want a shower, too (Well, not Penny, since she washed herself off with an isopropyl alcohol spraying station in her workshop), and then they’d notice Yang, and then they’d start trying to help her even though she couldn’t be helped, and then she would be wasting their time and energy which they desperately needed. She couldn’t be a burden on her team. Not when they were all dealing with so much of their own issues. Issues that were far more real and pressing than Yang’s… Yang’s… weird family mommy issues or whatever.
Oh gods, if Penny found out that Ruby somehow looked like Yang’s dead mom, she’d put all of her own happiness on hold to try and help Yang. Yang couldn’t let that happen, not when Penny was in love with Ruby. Not when those two were circling closer and closer to each other like they might soon merge into one being made of pure love and joy and energy. They deserved each other—they didn’t deserve to have their inevitable relationship stomped on by Yang’s… Yang’s stupid recycled problems.
And if Yang took this problem to Weiss… Well, she would have every right to laugh in Yang’s face before throwing a bar of SDC-branded soap at her. Yang had always had a warm, comforting home and a dad who loved her, which was more than Weiss could’ve ever said. The stress she was under made Yang’s look pitiful. Hey, Weiss, I know you’re making the hardest choice of your life and you’re giving up everything you’ve ever known to do the right thing for the first actual friends and family you’ve had in your life, but can you help me tell Ruby she might be a clone of my mom? Yeah, that would go over real fucking well.
And then there was Blake. Blake had so much on her mind already. Maybe the most of anyone on the team. The everything going on with the White Fang, and the ongoing presence in Vale of her dirtbag ex, and also just the obvious duties of being a team leader with the Vytal Tournament. What kind of partner would Yang be, if she burdened Blake with all this extra stuff that didn’t actually matter to Blake at all?
And Blake was already suspicious that something was wrong! Even though Yang was trying her hardest to act normal around everyone! She couldn’t trick Blake into thinking that Yang’s problems were just as big as hers! That would be… that would be manipulative! It would be wrong! It would be unfairly dumping trauma that Blake hadn’t asked about, and… and… She’d just try harder to hide it. She had to, if she was going to be a good partner and a good teammate and a good everything.
She had to be good enough for everyone.
She had to.
Later
Penny pulled a burgundy dress with gold highlights off the rack and held it against herself, considering its appearance. She turned with the dress to Weiss, giving her a questioning look.
Weiss hummed thoughtfully, and then shook her head. “It’s quite well-crafted, but the colors… it just doesn’t suit you, I think.”
“I concur.” Penny returned the garment to the rack and continued browsing. It would surely be enjoyed by someone else who came to visit this thrift store. Her quest for new, sufficiently interesting clothes continued!
With every other team still deployed on their mission, Team BSYP and Ruby were the only students in the school, and it hadn’t taken long for the emptiness to become overwhelming. Thankfully, the city of Vale was very easy to visit.
“Hey!” came Ruby’s voice from behind her. “Check this out!”
Penny turned around, seeing Ruby smiling and holding something in front of her which looked like… a metal sign? Its back was to Penny, so she couldn’t read it. “What is it?”
Ruby’s smile grew even wider, and then she flipped the sign around. It was an old industrial sign, its text written in big black letters on a red background above a pictogram of a dump truck. It read: BE AWARE OF YOUR SURROUNDINGS! HEAVY MACHINERY OPERATES IN THIS AREA
“Oh?” Penny said, vaguely interested but also unsure of what exactly Ruby’s intent was.
Ruby waggled the sign around like she was trying to sell it to Penny. “What if you put this up on the door to your room?”
Penny burst into giggles, joined immediately by Ruby, who must’ve been holding the laughter back until now. Weiss just looked confused.
“Well. I am made of machinery, and I am heavy!” Penny said once her giggling had trailed off. “But it would be an even better fit in my workshop! There is lots of heavy machinery in addition to me!”
“Ooooh, good point.” Ruby tilted the sign back towards herself, studying it. “I’d be really good at obeying this. I’m way more aware of my surroundings when I’m around you, that’s for sure!”
“Thank you,” Penny said with the most genuine of tones. She took the sign from Ruby, and as she did so, she brushed her hand against Ruby’s, and maybe that contact was intentional.
“Well, if you’re buying it, I’ll pay for it,” Weiss said with a sigh. “It’s not as if I’ll ever have access to Father’s bank cards again.”
Ruby nodded energetically and skipped off, disappearing amidst the tall shelves which were precariously packed with secondhand items. Penny had found a wonderful category of words to describe secondhand items and other things one might find in a thrift shop. Those words: Knickknacks and trinkets and bits and bobs and thingamajigs and doohickeys and doodads and baubles and curios and gadgets and gizmos… They were all so fun to say! Gizmos was her favorite word of the bunch. Penny’s own body was full of gizmos!
“Penny, can I ask you something?”
“Yes, what is it, Weiss?”
“That isn’t… offensive to you?” Weiss gestured to the sign Penny now held. “I would feel as if I’d gravely insulted you if I suggested putting this sign on our door.”
“Oh, if a stranger had implied that I needed an industrial warning sign, it would’ve felt quite awful.” Warning signs would imply that she was scary, that she couldn’t control herself, that she had to be treated like something dangerous and not a person. “But Ruby being the one to make this joke makes it wonderfully, delightfully funny.” Penny used one finger to trace a long scratch that ran across the sign. “I trust Ruby. I know how she feels and thinks about me. And when I know that this is Ruby’s idea, when I know that Ruby sees this as a sign bearing good news, it makes me feel more real.” It was the same impulse behind why Ruby was the only person allowed to call Penny a robot.
“Oh,” Weiss said, the sound drawn-out as she looked back in the direction that Ruby had gone. “Ruby really does understand you more than I do, doesn’t she?”
Initially, the words registered as an idle comment, but then Penny noticed several things about Weiss’s physical state. Her body temperature was rising. She was clutching the garment in her hands with a dangerously tight grip. And her words… if Penny ignored the lighthearted tone Weiss used, that statement sounded dangerously self-deprecating.
“Weiss, what is wrong?” she said.
Weiss froze.
And then a tension left her as she pressed her face into her hands and muttered unintelligible words, before letting her arms drop and meeting Penny’s eyes. “Well, now that I’m taking back my agency, I actually have to confront this.”
“Confront what?”
Weiss took a deep breath. “Penny, even though I have no intention of leaving Beacon, I would understand completely and offer no protest if you chose Ruby as your official academic partner for the rest of our time as students.”
Penny performed a blink at one-tenth the speed of her normal blinks. “Have I done something to make you think I want such an arrangement?”
Now it was Weiss’s turn to blink. “Well.” She threw a look at Ruby which Penny didn’t understand. “You… and her… and… You think she’s going to stay, don’t you?”
Penny glanced over her shoulder, where the top of Ruby’s head was periodically appearing between the gaps in a bookshelf as she browsed through a stack of something not visible to either girl. Her prediction algorithms were struggling to produce an optimistic scenario. She was still afraid to take her hopes too high. Opposing the will of a kingdom’s military might produced… unkind odds. “I hope she does.”
“I’m operating under the assumption that she will stay with us,” Weiss said with the tone of someone who would not easily be convinced otherwise. “And if she becomes our teammate, she is a far better choice of partner for you than what I have been.”
Penny stared at Weiss and wondered how she could believe that when there were so many combo attacks which spoke to the contrary. Frostbyte was a wonderful example of how the pair had learned to combine and magnify their strengths to great effect—how many partner pairs could hold a Megoliath at bay besides Penny and Weiss? Then there was Airlift, a combo borne from their weekly think-tank sessions they held to brainstorm how their most unique attributes could fit together to create unprecedented opportunities. How many Huntress pairs could evacuate multiple teams worth of students? Only Penny (flight mode) and Weiss (glyphs) working together!
But before she could list the many combo-moves they’d created, Weiss kept talking.
“I worry I’ve failed to understand you in the way that any respectable student should understand their partner. And it could not be more apparent to that Ruby does have this capability! I know you are a person, of course! I would defend that statement to my dying breath! But no matter how exalted a pedestal my father has put the family on, I am just an ordinary human girl—” Weiss, staring down at her hands, made a noise of disgust. “I fear that I am doing you a disservice by… by… by not being able to relate in the ways that Ruby can on account of her equally-synthetic nature. For that matter, Blake can relate more than me since she’s also not human! Even Yang has more of a connection! She has a body partly made of metal, after all! And I’m just—just—”
Weiss’s lip quivered. She tried to subdue the movement, but Penny saw it clearly. A sign of someone holding back tears.
“I suppose, after the tournament, I’ll just be… Weiss,” she whispered. “And I will make my peace with it, but… you don’t have to, Penny. If there’s nothing but formality tying us together as partners, then I don’t want you to feel trapped with me.”
Penny decided to emulate a tactic which Nora used on her own team sometimes when they were being ridiculously illogical even by human standards. She raised the metal sign which she was still holding, and (VERY) gently used it to bop Weiss on the head.
“Does friendship not count as a connection?” she said. “Aren’t we friends?”
She didn’t actually believe Weiss had forgotten about their friendship, but the sudden embarrassed sputter from her was comforting nonetheless.
“And we do have commonalities! Just not in a way that is as readily apparent as Ruby’s or Blake’s or Yang’s!”
Weiss frowned. “You don’t have to patronize—”
Penny dropped the sign, ignoring the clatter it made on the ground, and shot out her arms to carefully but firmly grip either of Weiss’s shoulders as she stared straight into her partner’s eyes.
“Weiss, you are like me. You were also raised in an environment by people who had a preplanned purpose for you and expected you to fulfill that role to perfection, just as I was expected to be a weapon! And you also found the process of escaping and building your own life to be immensely distressing, just as it was in mine! I have completed a journey very much like the one you are beginning, and I will help you through yours. I promise.”
Weiss’s mouth flopped open and closed like a beached whale, her eyes starting to glimmer with tears, and Penny might’ve had to initiate top-of-the-line hug protocols if not for Ruby re-entering the scene with another sign in her arms.
“Yang would like this one, wouldn’t she?” she said, holding up yet another industrial warning sign, this one declaring DANGER: HOT
Weiss nodded dazedly. “Yes. Yes, she would.”
“I thought so! Come on, there’s a whole pile of old signs in the back like these!” Ruby said, grabbing Penny’s hand. The contact immediately made a thrill of electricity shoot up her arm, all the way to her shoulder. Weiss followed behind, somehow pulling the tears back from her eyes, and she seemed to have her emotions mostly under control by the time they were all collected in front of a secluded alcove piled high with a fascinating variety of old signage.
Almost too fascinating, Penny thought, as she picked up a shiny NO TRESPASSING sign. “I must wonder if these have all been acquired through legal means.”
“Probably not!” Ruby said, holding up a sign that said, Unauthorized removal of signage is a violation of Vale City Law. Violators will be prosecuted.
Penny was immediately drawn to a stack which had a DANGER: HIGH VOLTAGE sitting atop. She considered the irony of that sign, and then considered whether she was interpreting irony correctly, and then considered that maybe she should be referring to an entirely different type of humor, and then decided she would buy it for Nora.
Weiss was craning her neck to see over Penny’s shoulder as she flipped through the stack of signs, and Penny wasn’t sure if their prior conversation was suspended or not due to Ruby’s presence. However, Weiss answered that question moments later.
“Sometimes I thought the only daughter that would make my father truly happy was an automaton.” She scrutinized an especially beat-up HARD HAT AREA sign and shook her head. “Maybe I failed him just by being born.”
For a moment, Penny visualized a childhood spent in the Schnee Manor alongside Weiss, one mechanical girl and one organic girl both trying to meet the demands of a family scion who wanted something impossible. She visualized throwing Weiss’s father into a swimming pool.
“I would have disappointed your father, too,” she said. “Likely in even more spectacular fashion!”
Weiss tried to hide the amused smile which flashed across her face, but Penny spotted it with the gifts of high-speed vision. Yes! She was helping!
Newly assured, she returned to flipping through the stack of signs, until she found one which brought a wide smile to her face. She reached out and tapped Ruby’s shoulder. “I have found one for you!”
“Oooh?” Ruby spun around to see Penny raising a sign to eye-level which read, WARNING: LASER BEAM.
“Perfect!” she said, bouncing up and down. “That’s the last thing the Grimm see before I blow them to smithereens!”
By now, Penny was hoping to assemble a full set of signs, one for each member of their team, so she turned to ask Weiss what kind of sign would befit her, and instead found Weiss apparently on the verge of another mental breakdown. At least, that was what she assumed when she saw hunched over and mumbling to herself as her eyes flicked around to random places.
But then Weiss stood bolt upright. “Penny. There’s an even more spectacular way you can help me disappoint my father—a failure great enough to bring his company crashing down around him!”
There was a breathlessness to Weiss’s voice which prevented Penny from fully dismissing her concerns about her partner’s lucidity. “Yes?” she said carefully.
“Do you still have those SDC intelligence files you helped me illicitly download?”
“Of course! Still saved in local storage!” As in, her own memory.
“Good.” Weiss’s expression turned positively scheming as she actually rubbed her hands together in a way that Penny had only seen in fiction, never real life. “We’re going to hijack his press conference. I’ll take the stand with the whole world watching, just like he wants, but I won’t be there to parrot his desires. I’ll be there to deliver the largest leak of classified files in the history of Remnant. Finally, I’ll have an answer for him.”
Oh, that was a sensational idea. Penny applied her prediction algorithms to the concept, and instantly began compiling possible outcomes. “And my Semblance can ensure that the cameras won’t stop filming!” she said.
“Yes. Yes.” Weiss’s eyes glittered. “And perhaps this would be a criminal offense in Atlas, but neither Vale nor any other kingdom will have any desire to hand me over to them once they’ve read everything in those files.”
Penny nodded. “And if Atlas does try to apprehend you regardless, we will protect you. Your teammates. Your friends. Everyone who cares about you.”
Weiss fell silent, her heart rate spiking again, and for a moment Penny worried she’d said something wrong. But then she leapt forward and buried Penny in a hug.
“You’re the finest partner I could possibly ask for, Penny.”
Penny burbled all over with happiness, and committed this moment to deep memory. The moment during initiation when Weiss had tried to reject Penny as a partner had never felt more distant than it did now. Although… that was just a statement about the passage of time, wasn’t it? Every moment in which time passed was the most distant that an event in the past had ever felt. Two seconds later, it would be even more distant. But… that moment still felt more emotionally distant than even chronology could account for. There. That made sense.
“Um, Weiss? Penny?”
Ruby’s voice, suddenly nervous, abruptly reminded Penny that perhaps they shouldn’t be discussing this in front of their friend who still had at least a nominal allegiance to Atlas.
They turned to Ruby, who was clutching another sign in her hands, not quite meeting either girl’s eyes. “So, this file dump… Am I in it?”
Penny did not even need to check the file index. She remembered reading Ruby’s file long ago when Ruby was still just a girl in an airship, far out of reach and wanting to being a weapon.
“Yes,” she said. She checked her radar to confirm there was no one else within hearing distance besides the three of them, and then she began reading out the file to Ruby.
“On several occasions when the SDC has requested the intervention of the Atlesian military at particularly Grimm-heavy sites in remote locations, Atlas has deployed an otherwise unknown asset that they refer to as Moonrise. Little is known about the asset, but…”
Ruby slowly grew less and less animated until, as Penny reached the final words, she was sitting on the ground, clutching the sign she’d been holding to her chest and appearing very, very small.
“Yeah. That’s me,” she whispered when Penny stopped. “Project Moonrise…” She shook her head like a dog shaking out water, and then in an even quieter tone, nearly just an exhalation of breath, she added: “I think I remember, once upon a time, I didn’t want to be a project…”
“We’ll leave that file out of the leak,” Weiss said, startling both of them. “Disregarding one child soldier won’t make a difference in the sea of crimes being uncovered.”
Ruby stared. “You’re… you’re sure?”
Weiss huffed. “Of course. You can hardly do Ordinary Teenage Girl Things when the world’s eyes are on you. Trust me on that one.”
Ruby nodded slowly.
Penny nodded her assent, and set about deleting Ruby’s file from her memory, removing any chance of an accidental transfer. And then it occurred to her… A ‘Project Battle Angel’ had also been mentioned in that same file (“Recommend exploration of any connections to rumored [POSSIBLY SPURIOUS] Project Battle Angel…”), and this wasn’t Penny’s first time hearing the phrase. Where had she—?
Her memory pinged seconds later as it found a match. Ruby had brought up that term in Mountain Glenn as something she’d heard before. Maybe it was an alternative name for Ruby in the military?
Better safe than sorry, Penny decided, and searched for the phrase (and several variations) in the rest of the stolen files. But there were no other hits. The only mention of a Battle Angel came from Ruby’s file in that passing mention. Oh, well. Maybe the SDC’s intelligence division had decided it was spurious.
“Thanks.” A little of the energy returned to Ruby’s presence as she stood up. “Anyway, you gotta see this sign, Penny, because it’s us!”
She flipped it around just as she’d flipped around the first one, and Penny pulled away from Weiss to inspect it.
It read, in black text on a bright yellow background: GOGGLES POSITIVELY MUST BE WORN WHEN OPERATING THIS MACHINE.
“Y’know, because I wear goggles, and you’re made of machinery, and… How many pairs of people fit that?” Ruby said, wiggling her eyebrows. “Oh! And we’re both really positive! Just not like how the sign means it, I guess, but close enough, right?”
Penny loved the way Ruby looked at the world. Loved it, just the way that she loved several billion other things about Ruby. She could look at something like this sign, and turn it into a meaningful symbol that Penny would never had put words to herself. Every time Ruby did something like this, it made Penny’s understanding of the world and its possibilities just a little bit more complex. And that complexity was not bad; it was beautiful.
Penny put a hand on the sign, taking note of the metal’s texture, and stared wistfully at Ruby.
“I love this, Ruby.”
Just like how I love you.
A silence fell. Neither Penny nor Ruby moved an inch, the sign held between them, a metal bridge connecting the two girls’ hands with words only they could fully understand.
A sign, announcing in such a unique way to the world that we are a pair.
Penny’s processors sped up as that particular thought floated through her consciousness. She liked that. She really liked that.
“I think we should hang this one directly over our bunk,” she said.
Ruby stared at Penny. “Our bunk?”
Immediately, Penny realized her mistake. “I’m sorry. My bunk. But if you want to stay, it would be yours as well.”
“Even if I… hypothetically possibly maybe joined your team, wouldn’t you want to having your own bed?”
Penny let herself smile slightly. “Unfortunately, it is a fact of geometry. There is no possible space for another bed in our room. We will have to share one, unless you want to sleep on the floor. And I am more than happy to share my bed with you, since we have already fallen asleep together many times this semester!”
“Oooooo-oooooh,” Ruby said, very slowly. And then she nodded, even slower. “I… I think I’d really like it, if it was our bunk.”
Even though she was right next to them, both girls pretended not to notice Weiss’s jaw briefly dropping.
Several seconds of mutual staring later, Ruby’s face erupted into a blush. “Okay, I’ll get us a bag from the register!” she yelped. With that, she disappeared in a burst of silver, and Penny was left with a warmth which suffused her body all over and sent a lovely grin playing around her lips.
Weiss was staring at her, shaking her head slowly. But Penny recognized the faint-yet-fond smile which her partner usually deployed to signify happiness when she was afraid to do so.
“Penny,” she said. “I know we’re not as close as you and Ruby, but… Whatever happens with her, between Ruby and you… Please know that I will be there for you, ready to give you anything I can offer.”
Penny nodded, watching Ruby from afar as she chatted with the cashier about their burgeoning signage collection. She knew what Weiss meant. This was a rare occasion when she knew a meaning not actually spoken aloud. “Thank you.”
“You already made a promise to me.” That tone was different; and pulled Penny’s full attention to Weiss. There was a shine to her eyes that Penny had never seen in her entire time knowing Weiss before now, and it couldn’t be called tears. “Now it’s my turn to make one for you. From this day forth, I will also be the finest partner you could possibly ask for. I promise.”
Notes:
Very important note: I collect old used industrial signs that I find at flea markets, and as such, I literally own several of the signs described in this chapter! The ones I have in real life are "DANGER: HOT" and "DANGER: HIGH VOLTAGE" and "HARD HAT AREA" and also the "GOGGLES POSITIVELY MUST BE WORN WHEN OPERATING THIS MACHINE" sign, which is one of my favorites of my collection.
Also, my wonderful girlfriend is a fighting games nerd, and I can confirm that talking about fighting games with her or playing a fighting game against her has similar vibes to how Blake does it in this chapter (and I love my gf all the more for that).
Chapter 50: Rising Like The Moon
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
This was not Penny’s first slumber party of her life, or even of this semester. However, it was Ruby’s first real slumber party ever! Somehow, in all the busy events of the past semester, they’d failed to schedule one. They’d tried, of course, but other, more pressing commitments kept interrupting. Until now. The school was nearly empty. Nothing could interrupt them this time!
All their mattresses and pillows and blankets had been moved to the floor, which had required putting their desks in the hallway and left very little space to actually walk around, but it created maximum sleepover potential! Which was something Penny had calculated.
“This is a night for Ordinary Teenage Girl Things!” she said to Weiss, Blake, Yang, and Zwei, who were gathered on the floor-turned-mattress. “We will paint our nails, and try on clothes, and braid each other’s hair, and eat junk food, and watch movies of potentially questionable cinematic quality, and play silly games of dubious strategic construction, and talk about cute girls!”
On the words cute girls, the bathroom door swung open (the action was notably not coordinated), and Ruby bounced out, pajamas-clad. Not in Atlas Academy pajamas, though—pajamas acquired in the thrift shop (their thrifting spree wasn’t all dubiously acquired industrial signage, after all) which were very different from anything Ruby had ever worn before.
“Hello hello!” Ruby said, spinning in a circle. “First time I’ve worn something that isn’t a combat outfit or Academy gear since I came to Vale! I love it!”
Her outfit was carefully assembled from painstaking decision-making in the thrift store. It started with the most important thing of all: a pair of fluffy bunny slippers. Then bright pink sweatpants patterned with little cartoon drawings of robots—Ruby had been so excited to find those. And then a red t-shirt emblazoned with the words, When I said I wanted to slay, I meant being fabulous, not fighting Grimm! above a silhouette of an Alpha Beowolf chasing a fleeing stick figure—Penny and Ruby had agreed that both things could be true at once. Over that, Ruby wore what seemed like a plain black sleepwear hoodie, but it had a little surprise.
“Check this out,” Ruby said, pulling up her hood—not just pulling it up, but also down over her face, revealing the hoodie’s quirk: the hood was designed to look like a Beowolf head when pulled down over the wearer’s face.
“Rawr!” she growled, making claws with her hands and lightly swatting Penny. “You’re being attacked by a big scary Grimm, what are you gonna do about it?”
“The big scary Grimm is shorter than me,” Penny said. An enormous smile broke across her face all the same. Sometimes Ruby was just so adorable and cute and squeezable that she was sure it would make her overheat to a genuinely dangerous degree, one of these days.
“The big scary Grimm is still very scary! Regardless of height!” Ruby said. And then, without warning, she jumped at Penny.
In the time between registering Ruby’s pounce and the predicted collision, Penny worked through four possible courses of action and settled on the one least likely to break a window.
Penny reached out and caught Ruby with both arms just before she would’ve crashed into her, and then held close as she flailed. And perhaps Penny was taking advantage of her inorganically powerful strength to prevent Ruby from wriggling out of her arms.
“Very scary,” Penny said. Zwei barked in agreement.
Ruby stopped and pushed her hood back up, grinning at Penny. “I made a critical error. No Grimm can be scary to the coolest girl in the whole entire world.”
Then she went still, her heartbeat ramping up and up in Penny’s sensors.
Ruby was very warm in Penny’s arms, and her pajamas were very soft, and her braid was brushing against Penny’s wrist. At that moment, all Penny could think was, It would be quite easy to kiss Ruby right now. Just one little movement of this servo and that servo and a little repositioning of my arms, fans at maximum speed because I can’t breathe during a kiss but I’d still need to keep myself cool and I need to stop thinking about this before I do something impulsive and unexpected without Ruby’s permission.
At that moment, Ruby squeaked and disappeared into her Semblance, reappearing on the other side of the room and brushing silver out of her hair.
“Okay! Are we ready to slumber and party?”
Ruby couldn’t stop thinking about being held in midair by Penny like that. They had been so close to kissing.
She didn’t know how kissing felt. And she probably still wouldn’t know even if they did kiss because sensory system broken, but that didn’t ever stop her heart from trying to jump out of her chest every time she thought about doing that with Penny. And ever since Penny had said, I would like very much to be girlfriends with you, Ruby had thought a lot about kissing Penny. She’d just be looking at Penny, and then kissing would jump into her head. Or she’d be just thinking about Penny, and her thoughts would jump to kissing.
“Ruby?”
“Huh?” Ruby jerked upright, almost dropping her cards, and then realized she’d gotten lost in thought. Again.
“It’s your turn.”
“Right. Sorry!” Ruby looked down, considering her hand.
She didn’t understand why poker was called that when no actual poking was not involved. Just cards, and betting, and a lot of staring mysteriously at each other and trying to intimidate everyone else into thinking your own cards were the best. And betting chips. But not poker chips like she’d seen in a movie. Actual chips.
Ruby reached into her bag of ruffled potato chips, somewhat depleted at this point in the night, and drew out a handful, dropping them into the bowl at the center of the circle. “I’ll raise to seven,” she said. She wasn’t confident her two pairs would win the round, but she wasn’t going to just fold! That wasn’t any fun.
“Raise to fifteen!” Penny said immediately, tossing down another handful of chips, with some pretzels mixed in.
Everyone else in the room had agreed that Penny was a truly confounding opponent, since she always had her decisions calculated before it was even her turn, and always said them immediately. She also tended to offer live mathematical and statistical commentary on other people’s betting choices, but no one was entirely sure if she was giving accurate numbers or trying to throw them off, and no one had any way to check, not without spending a few minutes on their scroll holding up the game. And that wasn’t even getting into how Penny had maybe the best poker face on the planet, on account of being able to mechanically fix her features in place.
“I still think you have an unfair advantage,” Weiss grumbled from Penny’s other side as she matched the bet.
Penny only smiled serenely as she flipped a corn chip into her mouth. “As I have said before, poker is not a game which has been solved by computers. Especially not the five-card draw version we’re playing. I am simply on the level of a skilled organic player.”
“Hmph,” was all Weiss said in reply, but without any real anger behind it.
“Besides, Weiss—” Penny turned to her, and affixed an exaggeratedly sorrowful expression to her face, making her eyes as wide as possible. “In the grand scheme of life, can my poker skills really be called unfair when I must also suffer the acute and unending loneliness of being the only one of my kind? Is that not significantly more unfair? Why are you not considering the full picture, Weiss?”
Weiss spluttered. “I—I mean—well—I suppose—Perhaps I was too hasty in—Blake, what?”
Blake had put down her cards to cover her mouth with both hands in a vain attempt at stifling her laughter. She fell over into Yang’s side, just narrowly missing crushing both of their winnings.
“Weiss, she’s joking,” she finally managed to say.
Penny burst into giggles, clearly having held them in until that moment. “Correct! I was not actually accusing you of being inconsiderate, Weiss.”
“Oh.” Weiss flushed red, reached behind her for the nearest pizza box, and jammed a slice of pepperoni into her mouth.
“Anyways, that’s the round!” Yang said. “Lay ‘em down!”
So they did.
“I won?” Ruby said, staring at everyone else’s cards and then hers, and coming to a realization. “I didn’t think my hand was good enough, dang…”
“Sometimes it’s not about what you’ve got,” Blake—the only person in the room with previous poker experience, thanks to her White Fang days—said as she started gathering up the cards. “Sometimes it’s about what everyone else has.”
“Huh.” Ruby gathered up her winnings of a nice snack mix and flipped an especially big potato chip to Zwei, who had been gazing wistfully at the snacks the entire time. Then she passed the bowl to Penny, since she would get more enjoyment out of it. Then she flopped onto her back and spread out her arms, her eyes falling on the night sky through the window.
It hit her that she had no idea what time it was, only that it was really late. Maybe it was morning already. Who could say for sure? And she didn’t need to know, because there was nothing to be done tomorrow on any sort of schedule. Nothing she had to do. She was just hanging out with her friends, hanging out with Penny who was more than a friend, forgetting about everything else in the world. Forgetting about all the things she was supposed to want, which was… getting easier and easier.
But as it got easier, a corner of Ruby’s brain that she’d never paid much attention to was getting louder. That part was disgust, a disgust that Ruby hated feeling but no matter what she did she couldn’t make the disgust go away and sometimes it only got worse and worse until Ruby had to hide somewhere and frantically mutter her own words which she actually believed so her real voice could drown out the increasingly hateful part of her brain which hissed deserter and coward and traitor and good soldiers follow orders.
Ruby never let Team BSYP see this part of her struggle. If they knew how loud and awful her thoughts really were, then they’d probably think—they’d think—they’d think something terrible about her and they wouldn’t want to talk to her ever again.
Ruby didn’t know what to do about these thoughts, the loyal soldier thoughts that were getting stronger the closer she got to choosing to—
COWARD. TRAITOR. DESERTER. I’M NOTHING WITHOUT ATLAS. NOTHING. A NOTHING CAN’T HELP ANYONE.
Ruby couldn’t breathe. She KNEW what she was without Atlas! Of course she did! Right?
…So why couldn’t she actually think of anything right now? It was Atlas that’d given her all her thoughts and feelings and wants and tendencies and traits and habits and behaviors, and… if Ruby decided she’d never set foot in Atlas again deserter traitor then would she nothing coward have anything of herself left?
Ruby needed to think about anything else. She needed—she needed—
She burst into her Semblance and reappeared already wrapped around Penny, squeezing her hard enough to actually feel her a little.
Penny was safe. Penny was good. Penny was good thoughts. The bad thoughts couldn’t get to Ruby when she was with Penny. It was like a thick blanket of comfort being draped over her to block out a vicious bombardment.
Ruby, of course, didn’t tell Penny about any of this. She didn’t want to upset her or make her afraid. She couldn’t hide it completely since Penny could detect her vital signs going haywire, but Ruby hoped Penny would attribute its cause to their close proximity.
“What’re we doing now?” she said—happy voice, normal voice, just couldn’t sound like there was a battle raging in her head—as she noted the cards had been put away.
“You’ll see!” Penny was rummaging around in their bag of slumber party supplies. Finally, she made a triumphant noise and held up a DVD in each hand.
“Ruby, which movie would you prefer? Wilma And Louisa, or But I’m A Soldier?”
“Hang on,” Yang said. “Hang on now. I love both options, but how exactly did you pick these two?”
Ruby shrugged. “We asked the video rental clerk to recommend us a good slumber party movie. She gave us two.”
“And you both asked the clerk?” Blake said. “Together? Or was it just one of you?”
“It was both of us,” Penny said. “What difference would it make?”
Yang and Blake said nothing, but Yang looked like she was trying very hard not to say anything. Weiss just looked thoroughly confused by everything about this conversation.
“I don’t know anything about these movies,” Ruby said. Penny nodded in agreement. “Are they good?”
“Oh, they’re excellent. Just, there’s definitely interesting things going on in that video store clerk’s mind.” Yang leaned over, plucking a DVD out of Penny’s hands, and went for the television. “And I’ve decided we’re watching But I’m A Soldier first.”
Ruby and Penny looked at each other and, after a moment of shared confusion, shrugged and settled down. Or, at least attempted to settle down, because there was one small problem: she needed something to do with her hands. Sitting still and watching a movie without doing anything else felt like an easy way for the bad thoughts to start creeping in.
“...I could braid someone’s hair?” she said. Not only was it a Normal Sleepover Activity, she was also really good at it and it was relaxing! “Don’t worry! I’m an expert in braids!” She gestured to her own handiwork.
“You can braid mine,” Yang said.
All of a sudden, Blake, Weiss, and Penny were staring at Yang in shock.
“What?” Yang said, and she sounded just as confused by their reaction as Ruby was.
“You never let anyone touch your hair,” Weiss said in a hushed tone. “Not even us.”
Yang shrugged, sitting further up to give Ruby better access. “So?” She turned a little, just enough to see Ruby, and added, “It’s okay, Ruby. I trust you.” She punctuated that with a reassuring smile that felt really nice to look at.
“Okay!” She dropped onto her knees behind Yang. “Let me know if I hurt you!”
“Oh, believe me, you’ll know,” Blake said.
Ruby nodded, not entirely sure what that meant. She gathered Yang’s hair in her hands as Penny used her Semblance to turn off the lights and the title card burst onto screen.
Braiding Yang’s hair was nice. It was thick and fluffy and there was so much of it, and working with it was a lot like when Ruby braided her own hair. After brushing it out, her hands flew back and forth over the golden locks, making quick but impeccable work of it. The end result was a golden trail down her back, about the same length as Ruby’s braid.
“Ta-da!” she said finally, stepping back and mock-dusting her hands off. “What do you think?”
Yang pulled the braid around her head to look at it, and a strangely long silence followed, her eyes flicking back and forth between Ruby and the braid.
“Thank you, Ruby,” she said finally, and her voice was thick with something Ruby couldn’t identify. “It’s fantastic.”
Ruby nodded happily. “Thank you. That was fun! Anyone else want one?”
Weiss and Blake shook their heads. Penny looked at a strand of her hair, considering the length, and then shook her head, too.
Oh. So she needed another thing to keep her mind quiet, something that’d—
And then Penny patted the space on the mattress beside her, fixing a pleading gaze on Ruby.
Perfect. Yes. Perfect. Penny was the best way to drown out all the painful scary things echoing in her head.
Technically, the invitation was to sit beside her, but Ruby took it one step further and jumped into Penny’s arms. And what did it say about them that Penny was ready to catch her, no sign of surprise there?
Ruby snuggled in close to Penny and closed her eyes for a little bit, just reveling in the feeling of terrors fading away under the brilliant light of Penny Penny Penny. Zwei must’ve wanted in on the cuddling, too, because he loped over and curled up around her legs with a happy grumble, settling down in a manner which told the rest of the world it would take a lot of trouble to make him move.
Now cuddling a cute dog and an even cuter girl, Ruby’s mind felt safe again in no time. She opened her eyes, gave Penny a heartfelt smile, and devoted her full attention to the movie. Just why had the clerk picked this one for her and Penny, anyways?
By the end of the movie, Ruby had a very likely guess for the clerk’s motive. As the credits rolled, she tried to wrap her brain around the story she’d just watched. It was… a lot. But, in a good way. Because she had a really happy feeling somewhere inside her stomach, and it didn’t feel like it would go away anytime soon.
How could she not feel connected to a movie about an idealistic young Mantleborn soldier in the Great War who was punished by her superior officers for being a distraction when her distraction was literally just being attracted to girls? How could she not look at that soldier in the movie and feel like she was trying to hide her feelings in the same exact way?
And the happy ending for the soldier in the movie was… embracing her feelings, and refusing to hide them anymore, and letting herself be happy, and deserting the military. Deserting. Ruby had never seen desertion shown in a good way. Until now.
Also, there had been a lot of girls kissing. Which just made her think about doing that with Penny. And she was close enough to Penny to hear Penny whirring throughout the movie. Very loudly.
Ruby had clung to Penny throughout the movie with increasingly more strength, until towards the end she was holding onto Penny hard enough that she could actually feel it a tiny bit. And that only made her want to hold on even harder, because she wanted to feel more and more.
She knew what future she wanted. Not what Atlas wanted—what she, the girl named Ruby, wanted.
But… could the world still be saved if she chose her desire? Would the venomous parts of her mind ever stop trying to convince her she was doing the most shameful thing ever? She didn’t know. She didn’t know. She didn’t know—
“I think everyone else is asleep,” Penny whispered.
Yang and Blake and Weiss had all fallen asleep against each other, and at some point in the night Zwei had fallen out of Ruby and Penny’s beanbag chair without waking up. Also, Yang was clutching her braid in her sleep with both hands, pressing it against her cheek like she was trying to use it as a pillow.
“...I don’t want to sleep,” Ruby said. “Yet.”
“Neither do I.”
Penny turned off the television. They watched their sleeping teammates for another minute, and then slowly, Ruby rose and stretched, flashing her Aura over herself just to make sure she didn’t strain anything after being still for so long. She needed to do something else, or the bad thoughts would catch up and do their best to choke her to death.
“Let’s go for a walk,” she whispered.
“Where?”
“Don’t know.”
They tiptoed out, taking care not to step on Zwei’s outstretched paws, and closed the door as quietly as possible. They didn’t make a noise until they were in a different corridor.
With the absent students, the extremely late (or extremely early) hour, the still-dark night behind every window, and the hallways only lit by reserve lighting at this hour, Beacon Academy felt… beyond empty. Like a haunted ruin.
Actually, Ruby had found a lot of places in the Atlas Military complex that felt like this. It was just such an enormous place, built to be the headquarters of a force even greater than what the kingdom could muster right now, and that meant there were a lot of forgotten hallways, empty and unused rooms, locked doors that maybe no one remembered how to open. Atlas felt like a haunted ruin in her memory, too. And that was how it was normally.
How had Ruby ever been able to live in a place like that?
Maybe because she’d never known anything better.
They walked all over campus without any particular destination in mind. They threw pebbles at a not-yet-repaired pothole in one of the courtyards, trying to land one in it from a long distance. Naturally, Penny succeeded first. They ducked into an open classroom, and figured out how fast Penny could spin Ruby in a spinny chair. Only one chair was harmed in the discovery of that information. They held hands. They watched a fox prowling across one of the quads. They found a broken bike someone had abandoned in a stairwell, and repaired it in fifteen minutes. They snuck glances at each other over and over again. They found a fascinating echo in the campus’s largest lecture hall. The constellations moved slowly across the night sky.
It was the best night of Ruby’s life. She didn’t want it to end.
Eventually, their wanderings brought them to Penny’s tower, and then to the balcony on Penny’s tower.
Ruby was intimately familiar with the space by now, but as she always did, she tried to be respectful of her surroundings. She waited for Penny to exit the elevator before following her out, and she interacted only with the things Penny had explicitly given permission for others to touch. She kept careful track of all her limbs, making sure she didn’t trip over something or knock something over or bang her head on something. If there was something cool she didn’t know if she was allowed to pick up, she appreciated it with her eyes and if she really wanted to touch it, she asked Penny.
Normally, in some other workshop this densely packed with incredible technologies and materials and the best tools money could buy, Ruby would be all over everything in sight. But here, Ruby never let herself forget this was Penny’s workshop, a place Penny needed to live. It was… it was a sacred place, and Ruby was forever honored that Penny trusted her enough to let her inside.
“I’d never get tired of this view if I lived here,” she whispered, entranced by the sprawling campus far below. The lights of Vale glittered in the distance like a treasure waiting to be found.
“You find it impressive?” Penny said with a little smile. “Even though you grew up on a kingdom floating in the sky?”
“Atlas has plenty of awesome views. But this…” Ruby tried and failed to find the right words to explain why this view wasn’t something she could ever get in Atlas. “This is different,” was all she could come up with.
Penny pursed her lips, thinking, and wondered to herself if the word that Ruby was looking for was home. Outwardly, her means of replying was to move close enough to Ruby to rest her head on her shoulder.
Ruby’s gaze shifted to the north, where somewhere far in the distance, Atlas loomed. And there were much closer reminders, too. The moored airships had cast shadows over Beacon all semester long, increasingly unignorable declarations that the Atlesian military could venture anywhere in the world.
There were reminders of Atlas so close as to be inside Ruby’s head, in fact. Her instincts, her reflexes, her training, everything that Atlas had etched into her, was slowly turning to acid in her mind as she crept closer and closer to choosing something which would’ve been unthinkable to a good soldier.
Good soldiers follow orders, the soldier’s instincts whispered, and no matter how much Ruby desperately wished it would be quiet, it wasn’t. It hadn’t been quiet since Mountain Glenn. Her soldier’s instincts, refusing to be squashed out.
The soldier’s instincts hadn’t always been the acidic part of her mind, and they hadn’t always been a part. Once upon a time, Ruby’s entire mind and psyche had been her soldier’s instincts. Things hadn’t been whispered shamefully in her head—they’d been said boldly with her own mouth and it had been what she’d wanted. She couldn’t count how many times in the past she’d repeated good soldiers follow orders to herself out loud, as comfort, as confidence, as inspiration, as motive.
But then Ruby had stopped saying it at some point this semester. She didn’t remember when. And right now, if she thought about repeating that mantra out loud, she’d be filled with a choking fear that would leave her struggling for breath.
But militaristic instincts that’d been trained and drilled into her all her life didn’t just disappear, no matter how much she wanted them to. The instincts sat in the back of her head and hissed and fought and made her feel like the worst human alive, and sometimes they got so loud and angry and frightening that it felt like they were about to seize control of her mouth along with the rest of her body and make her—
Was there anywhere she could look without a reminder of Atlas?! Even her clothes weren’t safe, not with the cadet’s uniform and not with the clasp for her cape which bore the kingdom’s emblem—
Ruby’s thoughts tripped over themselves at the moment she remembered emblems, a thing she’d barely ever given thought to before.
Emblems. Penny’s was pretty (really pretty) and clever and cute and fun, and Weiss’s was ornate and instantly recognizable, and Blake’s was cool and so sleek, and Yang’s was very bright and very, very warm. Jaune’s was simple yet evocative, Nora’s was loud and direct, Pyrrha’s was stylish and stark, and Ren’s was flowery and peaceful.
And Ruby’s emblem didn’t exist. Maybe she wore the emblem of Atlas, but she didn’t have an emblem that was hers.
That felt wrong.
“I need an emblem,” she said, still looking out into the night.
Penny startled and stood upright again. “Oh! Would you like me to help with that?”
“I just don’t have any idea what kind I—” Ruby broke off, processing Penny’s response, and turned to her. “—O-oh, really?” She put a hand on Penny’s elbow, staring at her with shining eyes. “You’d do that? You’d help me make one?”
“Of course,” Penny said, a tide of warmth pulsing through her chest. “There are many, many things I would do for you and with you, Ruby Karyatis.”
Ruby’s heart went thump-thump-thump as she gasped and jumped forward, hugging Penny. As always happened when she hugged someone, her soldier instincts got quieter and less angry, receding into the background. In a hug, she could just be happy without feeling like she was doing something evil.
Not only was Penny glad for the hug, she was also grateful to see Ruby’s vital signs approaching a stable baseline. She’d been detecting vitals fluctuations of an alarmingly large magnitude for the past several hours, but now Ruby’s body seemed to be at peace as the two girls held each other tightly.
“I wish we could keep hugging while we make an emblem,” Ruby said, her words muffled by Penny’s shoulder.
Silently, Penny added another level of priority to her plan for building an interactive holographic projector into her body. That would have been extremely useful right about now.
At least they didn’t have to go far to start their project, since they were already in Penny’s tower where they could use her holographic projection table for computer-aided design. And their shared art supplies were stored in the workshop.
They set up an easel next to the projection table, and two chairs in front of the easel. Then came the tricky part: Making something beautiful. Fortunately, that was also the fun part!
There was a great deal of staring at a blank white canvas, deep in thought. There were scribblings in pencil, in pen, in red paint and silver paint and black paint. There was an attempt by Ruby to try doing art while hugging Penny. The experiment yielded mixed results. They mostly resisted the urge to dab paint on each other.
Penny found an art website which suggested drawing the worst possible idea if one was struggling for inspiration, but that just led to a series of increasingly ridiculous drawings which ended with Ruby almost collapsing from laughter. She would’ve hit the floor, actually, if not for Penny catching her in her arms. Unfortunately, their creative impulses only continued to devolve from there, until some unknowable amount of time later:
“Okay, idea number three hundred twenty—” Ruby started.
“Number three hundred and twenty-one, actually,” Penny said.
“Twenty-one. What if, whenever someone asks me what my emblem is, I just… go into Semblance mode and cover them with silver dust?” Ruby said, waving one arm vaguely at the ceiling. She and Penny were lying flat on their backs, their heads touching. “It’d be memorable! And stylish!”
She felt… good. The hateful little soldier instinct inside her had relaxed into quietness somewhere during their brainstorming marathon. And without having to think about it, she could just be… herself.
“Is there any way in which that could be called an emblem?” Penny said. She was using her scroll to aimlessly manipulate a model of a cube displayed by the holoprojector, turning it from geometric shape to incomprehensible horror and then a different geometric shape with repeated swipes of her fingers.
Ruby experienced a brief scramble for a fitting word. “It’s a, um, multimedia emblem.”
Penny put her scroll down and reached over, placing her hand atop Ruby’s. She turned her head just enough to make eye contact with Ruby and offered a sympathetic smile. “I think you may be suffering the effects of sleep deprivation, Moonbeam.”
“Really?” Ruby said, grinning back at her. “But this night’s the most alive I’ve ever felt. I want it to last forever.”
Penny thought for a moment of how many significant events were still ahead. The Vytal Tournament, Ruby’s decision about her future, Weiss defying her father openly, Blake and the White Fang, the still-unsolved mystery of the conspirators that’d hired the Fang…
“I want it to last forever, too.” She squeezed Ruby’s hand tightly. Ruby squeezed back.
Internally, Ruby was turning over one particular word that’d just slipped from Penny’s mouth.
Moonbeam.
Moonbeam. Moonbeam…
“I have an idea,” she said.
“Oh? Number three hundred and twenty-two?”
Ruby answered by pointing at the shining moon which hung in the night sky far beyond the windows.
After several trials and errors, when Penny stepped back to admire the finished piece that Ruby had created, she gasped.
On the canvas, painted in the same deep ruby red shade as Lunar Enforcer, was a silhouette of Remnant’s shattered moon in its crescent form. Inside the crescent, where there would be shards hanging if someone looked up at the night sky, the debris had been replaced with beams of light which radiated outward beyond the moon’s diameter.
“It is incomparably sensational!” she said.
Ruby scuffed at the floor with her slippers. “Couldn’t have done it without you!”
Penny was having trouble understanding what she’d contributed. The design and color choice were Ruby’s ideas, and she’d done all the painting. Penny’s role had been almost entirely limited to—
Oh. Now she understood. Her role in the design process had been emotional support, and that was extremely important to Ruby.
“I am glad I could help with such a beautiful creation,” she said, nuzzling into Ruby’s shoulder.
They stood in silence for fifty-eight seconds. The emblem had been drawn in such a way that it looked to Penny as if the shards of the moon themselves were transforming into rays of pure light, flying out and away on journeys that would take them to the deepest corners of the universe.
“Okay. Yeah,” Ruby said softly. “It looks exactly how I hoped it would.” She traced one of the rays with a finger, either not caring or not noticing that the paint was still wet. “I need to put this on something.”
Penny ran through her inventory list of tools and materials in the tower, and after scrutinizing her options, she had an idea. “What if I… engraved the emblem on your weapon?”
Ruby gasped, her grip on Penny tightening. “I… you… really?” she whispered, raising herself onto her tippytoes to stare closely at Penny’s face, as if she needed to search for some sort of trick.
“Yes! When I said there were many things I would do for you, Ruby, I meant it!” Then, realizing that this was could definitely be a fraught subject, she immediately added, “I’d also understand if you didn’t want me to handle your weapon in this way. She’s a sensitive instrument, and you know her best, after all!”
“Oh, no, absolutely, you can definitely work on her!” Ruby said, all of her trepidation abruptly pushed away by boundless energy. “I’ll go get her—she’s in Team RSST’s quarters—be right back!”
Ruby exploded into silver, but instead of disappearing into the elevator, a whirlwind of silver curled twice around her, tickling her face and ruffling her hair before leaving. It made Penny giggle, because it was a special kind of hug only Ruby could do.
A window banged open on the balcony above—Ruby making her exit, since her Semblance was faster than taking the elevator. Penny was left alone in the tower with her thoughts and feelings and memories, and suddenly there were so many.
“You’re a hopeful romantic.”
“This time, we were talking about the same thing.”
“What if I want you to stay more than anything?”
Penny felt so close. To what? She could barely tell. It was only a feeling on the fuzziest layers of her consciousness matrix, where Aura and code and and soul and electricity mixed in immeasurable, indescribable ways, but it was a feeling strong enough to resonate all the way to her wingtips.
Ruby, she thought. What if I…?
The sound of a familiar whoosh pulled her focus back to the present moment, just in time for Ruby to leap over the balcony, Lunar Enforcer in hand.
“Here you are!” she said, holding out the war scythe in its single-staff form with both hands as a treasure might be presented to a discerning queen. “I trust you.”
Penny took hold of Lunar Enforcer, feeling its weight in her hands. It was lighter than Luminous Electra, obviously, but even more noticeable was its superb balance in every direction. She was quite sure she could’ve twirled it on a single index finger at its central point without it so much as wobbling. She almost wanted to test that hypothesis, but that seemed disrespectful. So instead she carried Lunar Enforcer to her engraving station, where fastening it in place and connecting herself to the controls was quick work.
“I think on the blade?” Ruby said, peering over her shoulder with a pair of goggles. Not her combat goggles, but just ordinary safety goggles. Aura or no Aura, Penny always enforced complete safety compliance among all visitors to her workshop. “That way, we don’t have to mess up the paint.”
Penny nodded in agreement as she swapped out engraving bits on the machine. There was only one concern: “Will the slight reduction in one blade’s metal content interfere with its weight distribution?”
“Oooh. Uh. Maybe. I guess you can just put the emblem on both—” Ruby stopped herself so suddenly that Penny reflexively checked to see if her audioreceptors had malfunctioned.
“Your emblem,” Ruby said, squeezing Penny’s shoulder. “Your emblem can go on the other blade.”
Penny, just beginning the first series of engraving maneuvers, sent a stop command to the machine and turned to Ruby. She did not even need to ask if Ruby meant it. The determined look in her eyes told her facial recognition systems all she needed to know.
“I would be honored,” she said in an entranced whisper.
They shared a smile like it was a buried treasure, and fell silent as Penny began carving out the shattered moon bursting into a storm of brilliant light.
Ruby rested her chin on Penny’s shoulder to watch, and Penny reveled in the feeling of Ruby’s skin on hers. Ruby was so, so warm.
She ran several calculations as she worked—first, the calculation of how much metal would be removed from the first engraving, and then what size to make her own emblem carving to keep the weight of the two blades equal. It was as smooth a project as any she’d ever done.
They finished as Ruby’s eyelids were fluttering sleepily, just before Penny would’ve started wondering if Ruby was going to fall asleep on her shoulder.
“Ta-da!” she said, her voice making Ruby jolt upright. “Do you like it?”
Ruby turned Lunar Enforcer over in her hands, running her fingers along every freshly-etched line and curve with a careful finger.
“Oh,” she said quietly. Her heart rate was climbing steadily in Penny’s sensors.
Penny was still glowing from the sheer fact that Ruby wanted both of their emblems on her weapon. It was like their emblems were… holding hands, somehow. And now, the power symbol and the shattered moon would be holding hands for a very long time!
Ruby’s new emblem was thrilling for Penny to look at and enter into memory. Such a wonderful job Ruby had done…
“It looks like the light is bursting free,” Penny said.
Ruby’s heartbeat climbed even higher. “That’s what I was going for…”
There was something thicker and shakier in her tone which made Penny look up, and that was when she realized Ruby’s eyes were shining with tears. The worst kind of tears. Sad ones.
“Penny, I…” Ruby gasped like she couldn’t breathe. Suddenly she was shaking all over, and—
Oh. Oh, no. No, no, no, Penny had ruined it all, what had she been thinking—
A tear broke free and ran down Ruby’s cheek as she clutched Lunar Enforcer to her chest. This had to be Penny’s fault, she shouldn’t have offered to touch Ruby’s weapon like that—
However, before she could even try to offer what would doubtlessly be a woefully inadequate apology for defacing Ruby’s weapon, the extension of her soul, Ruby vanished into a cloud of silver. And Lunar Enforcer clattered to the ground, left behind in the empty space where she’d just been standing. A trail of silver dust disappeared over the second-floor railing.
No, no, NO—
By the time Penny reached the top of the balcony stairs, there was nothing to find except the window already thrown open and a few stray particles of silver dust fluttering away, buffeted by the night breeze.
Ruby was gone.
Penny didn’t allow herself any time to sink into misery and self-hatred before she deployed her wings and launched into the night sky. She had to find Ruby first, before—before—she didn’t even know what she was afraid of; she just had to find Ruby.
But, as it turned out, locating her was not an insurmountable task. Because the first place which Penny thought to look was also the first place which Ruby thought to take refuge in.
Before anything else, Penny saw a small heat signature curled up into a ball in their secret garden on the roof. As she floated closer, the sight resolved itself into a human, knees pulled up to her chest as tightly as possible, her head bowed and hidden by her elbows, her hands clutching at herself. And as she came closer still, she flared her rockets slowly and loudly, trying to make her presence known in a way that wouldn’t scare Ruby further.
Now, almost close enough to land in the garden, Penny saw that Ruby was shaking all over like she was about to detonate. Every important vital was spiking dangerously. Her braid had come completely undone, leaving her hair to fan out wildly, its signature almost swallowing her up in Penny’s thermal vision.
Penny touched down in the garden, landing as softly as she could on the thickest section of moss and cutting out her rockets immediately. She didn’t know if it was a good sign or a bad sign that Ruby didn’t react to her arrival.
She felt unsteady, swaying on her feet in a way that no gyroscope could correct. In the end, she fell to her knees beside Ruby, almost afraid to look at her too closely for fear of violating… something. She stared at the orange and gold leaves scattered on the ground in front of her, and monitored Ruby entirely through non-photovisual means.
For two minutes and thirty-two seconds, the only thing which happened was that Ruby continued to shake soundlessly. In a rare occasion, both her logic core and her emotional processing were both at a complete loss for what to say next. An apology, a question, comfort, nothing felt quite right…
In the end, Penny chose to clasp her hands together in front of her midsection and ask, “Are you okay?”
“I—I’m scared,” Ruby said.
Penny shrank back. In the yawning chasm between those two words and whatever other words Ruby was gathering in her throat, Penny could only wonder frantically what it signified. It was all too easy to imagine all the worst meanings.
However, Ruby noticed the reaction and immediately added, “Not you! Not scared of you. Never you.”
She darted forward and buried Penny in a crushing hug. Maybe the strongest hug that Penny had ever registered from Ruby. So hard that if it had been anyone else hugging Penny, she would’ve worried about them hurting themselves.
“Scared of being bad. Scared of being wrong,” Ruby mumbled, doing her best to burrow into Penny’s shoulder. “Scared of being something I’m supposed to think is bad and wrong. Something I thought was bad and wrong all my life!”
She broke into sobs, loud and heaving and stuttering, making her body shake even harder. Her hair brushed against Penny’s skin everywhere, dozens of feather-light touches registering in her sensors and sending shivers through random servos all across her body. And through it all, Penny had never felt so lost.
She followed the path of the thorny vines curling around the garden’s parapets, her gaze lingering on the places where late-season roses still clung to crumbling rock and rusting iron.
When Ruby’s sobbing subsided into sniffles, Penny said, “I want to help you, please.”
Ruby took a gasping breath and pulled back, meeting Penny’s eyes. She’d never put her contact lenses back in after Mountain Glenn, and so pure silver stared into bright green.
“Penny.” She shifted, dry leaves crunching underneath them. “I… I don’t… I don’t want…” Her voice was only a hoarse whisper, her throat worn out by her sobs, but even so Penny could clearly parse the terror and self-recrimination.
“I don’t want to go back to Atlas.”
As soon as Ruby said those words, she could barely breathe, her voice catching on nothing as she tried to get more words out. But all she succeeded in doing with her voice was making a gasping, hiccuping sob which fell out like it’d been ejected.
This was somehow the worst Ruby had ever felt, and also the greatest sense of relief she’d ever experienced in her entire life. She clung to the fact that she’d said it, and whatever else happened, at least she’d confessed her terrible secret instead of holding it within where she was sure it would’ve corroded her from the inside out.
The thoughts which thundered through Ruby’s head came from the worst part of her: The part that still thought the most important thing in the world was being a good soldier. The part she didn’t want to listen to anymore. The part she was afraid of now.
“Oh, Ruby,” Penny whispered, leaning in and brushing away the strands of hair plastered by sweat against Ruby’s forehead. She hoped desperately that what she could say would provide any small amount of comfort. “You can stay here. Of course you can,” she said softly. “No one in this academy or this kingdom will let Atlas take you if you don’t want to be taken.”
Ruby looked right back at her with the most awed of gazes, wishing she could lose herself completely in Penny’s eyes and freckles and bright hair and love and happiness. Every caring brush of Penny’s fingers across her face was like a firework in the night.
“I don’t want to be a soldier,” she said, her words spoken so shakily amidst desperate gulps for air that Penny could barely understand them. “I don’t want to be in the military at all, I don’t want to be a project, I don’t want to be Project Moonrise, I don’t want this destiny, I don’t want to leave Beacon, I don’t want to leave my friends, I don’t want to fight alone for the rest of my life, I don’t want to stop doing Ordinary Teenage Girl Things, I don’t want to leave YOU!”
“Ruby, it’s okay.” Penny did not feel okay. She felt as if her Aura generator was breaking apart, shaking itself into metal shards flung in every direction to tear jagged holes in the rest of her body. It wasn’t because of what Ruby was saying. It was because of the raw terror in Ruby’s face, the distilled fear of going against everything in her life, the way she seemed to be trying to cower away from her own voice. That broke Penny’s everything. “Wanting to stay is more than okay.”
Ruby shook her head again with more violence, looking away with a face of immense guilt, but Penny’s next words froze her.
“It is what you deserve!”
“But…” Ruby shook loose the brief shock and pulled back, entirely separating herself from contact with Penny. She rubbed furiously at her face, smearing away tears and snot with the sleeve of her hoodie. “How do I deserve anything? Doesn’t this make me a bad person?” she whispered.
Penny’s emotions overclocked themselves, assisted by a vociferous boost from her logic core which disagreed just as strongly, and as a result, her rebuttal wasn’t modulated in the slightest. It came out of her mouth in a form vanishingly rare amongst her mannerisms.
“No!” Penny snarled.
She had never snarled before. And yet, it was the only way to reply which made any sense to processors helplessly spinning in search of a solution which felt unattainable.
But the sudden force in her voice made Ruby flinch. Ruby’s instincts could only see it as confirmation of irrational fears that hadn’t even reached her conscious mind before now: fears that Penny would hate her, that she’d have no friends and no allies, that this would be the embarrassing and shameful end of her life as a failure to everything and everyone, but most importantly of all, Penny.
Ruby wondered if maybe she could live with being a failure to everyone but Penny.
“This can never be bad, Ruby,” Penny said once she was sure she wouldn’t scare Ruby further. “None of this should have happened to you in the first place. All you would be doing by staying at Beacon is correcting a very old wrong. If this feels wrong to you, it is simply because it is the only thing you have ever known.”
Now she took utmost care to make sure that she did not sound angry. Even though she was angry. But she was not angry at Ruby. She could never be angry at Ruby for anything being said right now. She was angry at the circumstances that had led to Ruby being in this situation, the kingdom which had built Ruby up into a lone savior and a demigoddess, built her up into something she couldn’t possibly live up to no matter how powerful she was. “You want to be free, Ruby. That is never, ever a bad thing.”
Ruby took a wet, shuddering breath. She still couldn’t bring herself to meet Penny’s eyes. She still felt like she was doing something horrible. She still felt like the General was about to pop out of the shadows and send her to jail for the rest of her life where she’d never be able to help anyone ever again as punishment for her crimes. There was still one question that was being screamed at her from within, over and over again. One question she still didn’t have an answer for.
“Who’s… who’s going to save the world, then?” she said. “If I don’t?”
“So many other people!” Penny said immediately. “Our friends. Our teachers. The many, many Huntresses who are already making a difference in the world every day. None of them may be able to blast Grimm into oblivion with their eyes like you, but together they have something that you don’t!”
Ruby was caught off-guard by just how fast Penny replied, how ready her answer seemed to be. It… it made it feel real to her. Like truth, like something she could actually believe. She edged closer to Penny, making contact again, her hands sliding past Penny’s wrists and up to her forearms, where they rested, not clutching, but ready to leap into whatever Penny told her next. “What? What do they have?”
“They are more than just one person.”
Ruby gasped, and sat up a little straighter. “Strength in numbers…”
“Better that kind of strength than the strength of a single person,” Penny said. “The world is not any worse a place for your decision. And it doesn’t mean you won’t ever save the world! It just means that you’ll be taking more time to do it!”
“I… .” Ruby’s voice wavered, and suddenly she wasn’t sure if she could hold herself up even though she was kneeling. “Why is that so hard to believe? Why do I still feel like, like, like I’m murdering people?!”
But saying the word murder was a horrible awful mistake, because as soon as that word crossed her mind, it refused to leave. Murderer murderer murderer Ruby’s mind screamed, murderer murderer MURDERER EVIL EVIL EVIL NO BETTER THAN A GRIMM
“No, no, no, no, nonononononoNO—” No matter how hard Ruby screamed, no matter how fast her words came out, she couldn’t drown out the thoughts, nothing could drown out the thoughts, they’d never leave—
She scrunched up her face, trying to hold back more tears, but all that did was make them burst out even more explosively, her loudest sobs yet that night. She fell forward all the way into Penny, hanging onto her by her shoulders as drawn-out wails fell out of her like a wounded animal baying for its pack.
The knowledge that she was hugging Penny wasn’t enough to drown out her thoughts now, and maybe nothing would drown them out now. Maybe there’s a reason why I can’t feel touch or smell or taste, she thought bitterly to herself as she struggled to make Penny’s arms register as any real feeling at all. Maybe I can’t feel anything because I’m no better than a Grimm, because I’m something that should be put down like a rabid dog, rabid dogs get put down, rabid dogs get put down, rabid dogs get put down—
Those words. She’d heard those words before. She’d heard that sentence said by someone in a silky smooth and smug voice that made her want to run and hide but she couldn’t remember who had said that, or when, or where, all she could remember was an oily man’s voice saying rabid dogs get put down and the only conclusion she could draw was that was about herself—
“Ruby? Can you breathe for me? Please?”
Moments later, it became clear that Penny’s touch may have lost its power to stop the boiling repulsiveness of Ruby’s thoughts, but Penny’s voice had not.
Penny’s request cut through the self-recrimination and terror that was tearing Ruby apart the same way that the first sunshine sliced through clouds after a storm. On nothing more than instinct, Ruby took a deep breath, her gaze coming back into focus and landing on Penny again. She had gently raised Ruby’s head with both hands, cupping her cheeks with infinite care.
Penny’s processors, driven into a frenzy of worry, slowed in relief as she saw comprehension in Ruby’s eyes, a sign that she was still listening to Penny even amidst the panic. She saw the familiar shine returning to Ruby’s eyes again after it had nearly disappeared in the midst of her meltdown. Penny resolved to do her best to bring that shine back to its full brightness and beauty. The moonlight-bright silver of Ruby’s eyes was a shine that could replace even the sun in Penny’s memory, and it was at its most luminous when Ruby was at her happiest and her most joyful, when Ruby was free. Penny would do everything in her power to make sure that shine never disappeared.
“Thank you, Ruby,” she said. “Can you keep breathing for me, please?” She programmed a regular cycle of breaths for her cooling system, a pattern that a human could easily match. “Can you match the rhythm of my breaths?”
Ruby tried her best. Her breaths were shuddery and wheezy, but as the moment continued to unfold, she managed a rough approximation of Penny’s rhythm, and with slower breaths, the vicious cacophony in her brain diminished to just a background grumble that wasn’t overwhelming her.
With the utmost care she started to wipe away the fresh tears rolling down Ruby’s cheeks. Ruby stared at her with a reverence so intense that it put Penny in danger of overheating again. And then, when Penny detected Ruby’s heart rate falling below a certain threshold, she spoke again.
“You are the furthest thing from a bad person,” Penny said. “I promise with all my heart and soul.”
Ruby sniffled again, loudly. Then, she almost couldn’t believe what she fixated on next. It felt ridiculous, one of the most important things she could possibly say right now. But her brain latched onto it somehow amidst the everything. “I thought you didn’t have a heart organ?” she said in a surprisingly calm, mostly curious voice. “Because, you know, you’re beep-boop?”
And Penny giggled. The sound was the sweetest song to Ruby, a soothing balm for her embattled brain, she almost felt good enough to let out a little giggle of her own alongside Penny. Two minutes ago, she wouldn’t have thought herself capable of doing that ever again.
“Literally, no.” Penny tilted her head, considering herself and her behavior. “For the purposes of metaphor and simile and expressing my feelings in… poetic ways, yes. Although, I suppose that my body does have an equivalent to the heart—my battery cells. They deliver electricity to the rest of my body, just as the heart delivers blood to the rest of an organic’s body!” She turned over a potential sentence in her mind, and frowned. “But I do not think it sounds quite as… poetic if I promise you something with all my battery and soul.”
What Penny did not say aloud was that she’d nearly said romantic instead of poetic. Twice.
Ruby giggled, louder, and the sound sent a joyful thrum through Penny’s cores. She was helping! Ruby was feeling at least slightly better!
“It sounds plenty r—uh. Plenty poemantic. Uh. Plenty poetic! It sounds plenty poetic to me!” Ruby said.
What Ruby did not say aloud was that she’d nearly said romantic instead of poetic. Twice.
And Penny didn’t notice—not because of some miracle, but because was too busy brushing her fingers along Ruby’s face, following the trails of little scars left by her years of too-early too-much too-wrong combat, and thinking about how she wanted to kiss every single one of them.
Ruby nodded to herself. “Yeah. If you promised me something with all your battery and soul, I’d… I’d believe it!”
Penny’s body whirred, loudly. She wanted—she wanted something which had never felt more possible than it did right now. She took a much-needed deep breath to cool herself, and said, “Ruby, you are not a bad person for wanting to be free, and I promise that with all my battery and soul.”
“Goddess, Penny…” Suddenly, Ruby couldn’t stop herself from shivering, and she wasn’t sure if it was because of hope or fear or longing or all of those, because… because… “I—I—I want to believe it so badly…” She really was trying her hardest to make her mind believe it. A thousand times really. But… It wasn’t…
Penny noticed the catch in those words. “But you cannot…?”
“I… I want to…” Ruby felt a familiar spike of agitation from certain instincts, but she pushed on. “I want to leave, I wanna believe that won’t make me evil, but… but I’ve been trained to hate deserters!”
The last word came out in a disgusted hiss, spat so thickly that they both almost felt the spoken word landing on the stones with a smack.
“So I want something but I also hate myself for wanting it, and I don’t know how that’s possible! And I can’t just turn off the part of my brain that’s been trained! I’d probably have to turn off my whole brain!” She broke off, raising her own hands to squint at it, trying to reconcile these hands with the hands of a deserter. “Deserter. Even my mouth feels wrong when I say it like it’s just a normal word.”
“What if you did not use that word?” Penny said.
Ruby blinked at her. She’d just discovered another way her inflamed mind could quieted: deep confusion. “Pretend that I am not a deserter?” she said.
“It would not be fakery. You are not a deserter. You are a refugee.” Penny resisted the urge to start reciting dictionary definitions, feeling that might be counterintuitive. Or overwhelming.
And Ruby did understand the suggestion by itself.
Deserter, her mind hissed.
Refugee, Ruby hissed right back. My friends were telling me all semester how badly I’ve been treated! So don’t I have a right to escape?
Her soldier’s instincts had no reply. Ruby wondered, When did I start believing what happened to me was bad?
A long pause followed in what had already been the longest night of Ruby’s life. They were still hugging, and they were holding onto each other as much as they were hugging. There were only so many ways in which they could get closer than this. Penny felt every contour of Ruby’s body against her, and committed it to her memory with the utmost detail. There wasn’t such a thing as too much metadata when it came to her Ruby-related memory.
Finally, Ruby took a long, deep breath that sounded like a far-off wave beginning to crest.
“…Okay.” She closed her eyes, and leaned close enough that her breath ghosted over Penny’s skin, setting off tactile sensors all throughout her nose and cheeks. She opened her eyes, and Penny’s vision was full of silver. “I’m staying here with my friends, Penny. I’m not going back to Atlas.”
She winced on instinct immediately after, wondering if her brain would rebel, but it stayed stunningly quiet. The only thought which flitted through her mind was one of just how pretty Penny looked with the moonlight shining down on her.
Penny let a joyful smile blossom across her face, and she held Ruby even closer. But she stayed quiet except for an unavoidably noticeable uptick in mechanical noises. She could see Ruby’s lips moving soundlessly, ready to add more, and so she waited.
“I… It’s gonna be really hard to believe I’m not evil, and I’m probably going to cry a lot more, but… I’m gonna do my best to believe it.” Ruby shook herself all over, like she was flinging off all the tears shed over the course of the night, and squeezed Penny. A small smile darted across her face. “For you.”
Penny nodded, and offered an addendum. “For us.”
“Both of us…” Ruby echoed, something like hope shining in her eyes. She fell into a longer silence after that, leaving a thousand feelings to buzz through Penny’s processors. She turned off her chronometers, choosing to let this moment unfold in time undefined, marked only by the passionate beat of Ruby’s heart and the moon’s neverending journey across the sky.
But Ruby’s psychological wounds weren’t the kind that could be healed in a single night, no matter how powerful and transcendent and lovely and ethereal that night was. Eventually, other anxieties began to creep back into Ruby’s mind. She glanced down at herself, still wishing she could have a glimpse of her future self.
“I… I’m scared the trained soldier’s the only part of my brain that exists. I’m afraid that’s all I am, because… because I don’t know what I am without Atlas and Moonrise and being a soldier and everything. I… I feel like without all that I’m nothing.”
“You’re not nothing,” Penny said. “You’re Ruby.”
Ruby’s heart went thump-thump-thump.
But before she could actually answer that with another question burning a hole in her mind, Ruby noticed something over Penny’s shoulder. Something that her eyes didn’t even understand at first, until she squinted, leaning to one side to get a better look.
“Um, Penny? What’s that?” she said, indicating with a jerk of her chin.
“Hm?” Penny detected nothing on her radar besides the two of them, and so she was genuinely confused until she turned, and gasped sharply. “Oh! I did not think any of them would still be alive this late in the season!”
What Ruby had spotted—and what Penny had recognized—was a small cloud of what appeared to be floating pinpricks of light rising from a column of vines. Moments later, it became clear that these dots of light were not just a small cloud, but an entire wave rising from everywhere in the garden, including the moss, close enough to the two girls that Ruby could reach out and corral one of the airborne lights with a single hand.
Ruby stared at what she’d caught in her palm, her mouth falling open a little. “Oh, wait… they’re—”
“Fireflies!” Penny said, her face radiating joy as she twisted from one side to the other, trying to spot as many as possible. “Aren’t they wonderful?”
“Oh my gosh…” Ruby opened her palm, and the firefly she’d caught flitted away, rejoining the swarm of light which rose steadily into the night like a stream of bubbles in the ocean. “I only knew about them because Fria told me stories, about the fields of fireflies in deep summer she’d seen on her travels in Vale. But it’s too cold in Atlas. I’ve never seen them. Until now…”
Ruby’s gaze drifted down to one which was circling around the tip of her braid and bouncing off it repeatedly. With a gentle tap, like how Penny would do it, she sent it in a different direction. “It’s like magic…”
“As magical as us,” Penny murmured. “This swarm must’ve been able to sustain themselves in the garden because of the school’s heat and all the plants here. Plenty of food and warmth and shelter for them!” She reached out a hand, and giggled when a bug, only visible to Ruby as a dot of light, landed on her outstretched finger, fluttering its wings at her. “Hello, little friend! How are you? Have you found lots of nice tasty leaves to eat? I hope you’re not too cold!”
She looked back up at Ruby after a few moments of contemplative silence. “They must think they have found paradise.”
The end of the world couldn’t have torn Ruby’s gaze away from Penny at that moment. “I think I’ve found paradise, too,” she whispered.
Penny whirred.
That sound set off another round of giggling, and then they fell silent, holding each other’s hands and watching the fireflies as much as they watched one another.
“Penny,” Ruby said slowly. “You said I’m not nothing because I’m Ruby. But… I’m still wondering, is Ruby enough?”
Penny didn’t answer immediately as she composed a careful response which needed to be thoughtful and caring and full of love for Ruby. A single firefly flitted between them, almost alighting on Ruby’s face before it continued on its way, rejoining the swarm.
Ruby worried at her lips with her teeth. “I’m not anything I’ve been all my life, so what’s left? What do I want now? All I know is the things I don’t want, and they’re the things I used to want…”
She was scared of being nothing. She was scared of just being an empty shell with nothing left inside. She didn’t know how nothing could help people. She didn’t know how nothing could have friends. She didn’t know how nothing could be with Penny. She didn’t know how nothing could be happy.
But Penny had a look in her eyes like she was on a mission, and for Ruby, it was a familiar sight. It was the same look she’d gotten when she was preparing to stand up to the General at the dance.
“You are already enough for me, Ruby.”
Ruby squeaked.
Penny reached for one of Ruby’s hands and tenderly pressed their palms together, intertwining her fingers between Ruby’s. “Knowing you has given me confidence in myself and my body and my soul that would have felt impossible to me six months ago. I am not Penny despite the metal. I am Penny because of the metal. I think about those words you told me every day.”
“Penny…” Ruby didn’t have any words after that. She just felt an irrepressible need to say Penny’s name like it was the most sacred utterance in the world. She squeezed Penny’s hand—a motion which they both knew was entirely for Penny’s benefit.
“And you’ve already told me so many things you want!” Penny went on. “You want to be free. You want to stay at Beacon. You want to help people. You want to paint things. You want to fly. You want to do Ordinary Teenage Girl Things. You want to be friends with me, and you want to be friends with Yang and Blake and Weiss. I think that is more than enough for a girl just beginning to learn how to be herself.”
Ruby made a choked noise. The fireflies still swirled around them, their unseasonable light show providing a little secret miracle for both girls.
“I had to start over from nothing too, Ruby. I woke up in my tower one day with no memory, and no trace of a past which I’d chosen to leave behind in totality. I was scared, and confused, and distressed, just like you. But I found happiness and freedom and new ways to be myself. Just like you will. I promise that I will always be there to help you along your own journey of self-discovery. I promise that I will help guide your way.”
She fell silent, and the small, sure smile which played over her face was answered by a smile of Ruby’s own, a smile that she really believed in. A smile that felt like it was here to stay.
“Now I know I made the right choice when I picked Firefly for your nickname, Penny,” Ruby said softly.
She unlaced their linked hands, wishing there was a way she could do this without letting go of Penny, and placed both of her own hands over the center of her chest, mirroring a gesture she’d seen Penny make when talking about things she really cared about. And then she said, “Because you light up my life.”
Penny’s mechanical eyes brightened, just like a firefly lighting up. And her language processors froze entirely, but even so, vocal processors continued on without them, reflexively producing a sound. A sound, which if Penny had to classify it, was an expression of the “!” feeling which was so hard to describe. Or at least, her body’s attempt at vocalizing the “!” feeling. It could also be classified as—
“You just beeped,” Ruby gasped, and she looked so absolutely delighted that Penny didn’t even bother wondering if she should be embarrassed.
“Yes,” she said, frantically scraping together the capability for recognizable speech again, because even if it would not be the most eloquent or poetic thing, she had to say something! “Ruby, I… you… You are also a bioluminescent bug to me!”
Penny immediately wondered if maybe she should have waited just a little longer before attempting speech, because that did not feel like the best answer she might’ve composed.
Ruby, however, was thinking that was the most beautiful thing she’d ever heard in her entire life, and that she was going to burn up and turn into a being made entirely out of light as bright as the fireflies. She knew that answer had come from deep within Penny’s battery and soul.
“Beep!” Ruby said right back, which put Penny at ease and also put an enormous smile on her face.
“Moonbeam.”
“Firefly.”
Neither of them needed more words after that. The enchanted expression on Penny’s face was more than enough response for Ruby, and they fell into a comfortable, glowing silence as they knelt on the ground together.
And what a fitting ground underneath them, cobblestones and vines—an amalgamation of deliberately laid machine-cut stones and untamed bright tangles of nature’s forces, interacting in the most beautiful ways. In many ways, it reflected the two lovestruck girls sitting atop it, both of whom were their own kind of amalgamation—one girl was the beautiful interplay of cutting-edge machine and bright soul, and the other girl was a tangle of deliberate planning and untamed magic. This garden had not been made for these girls, but they had found it, and they were making it theirs.
They sat facing each other, their knees touching and their hands clasped and their eyes meeting, never looking away. Green and silver, both extraordinarily luminous. The silence stretched out between them in the most intimate of ways, an invisible connection pulsing back and forth between Penny and Ruby like an electric current. A connection unlike anything else in the world. A mutual understanding of things only they could comprehend, which came as naturally as the beat of a heart or the thrum of an Aura generator. A feeling that they’d found something they hadn’t even known they were searching for. Two halves of the same circuit, sending signals back and forth that needed no voice, no words. Just each other’s presence, and the knowledge that they were staying together.
It was very hard for Penny to concentrate on anything except how close their faces were. If she leaned forward, just a little adjustment in her hip servos and nothing else, their faces would be touching. Silver eyes took up so much space in her photoreceptors, reflecting the green of her own eyes.
Every sensor in Penny’s body was on high alert, seemingly of their own accord. Ruby breathed in and out slowly, rhythmically. A ship’s horn blared somewhere far off, so faint it might’ve been mistaken for a bird call. The vines which climbed around the garden’s edge waved in the wind, in sync with Ruby’s hair. A petal fell off a rose beside them, drifting down to the moss without a sound. The cobblestones somewhere underneath them, no longer held tightly in their masonry due to years of erosion and neglect, creaked ever so slightly as Ruby and Penny shifted their weight, coming closer to one another.
“Hey, Penny?” Ruby said softly, so softly, the words falling over Penny like a butterfly alighting on her finger.
“Yes, Ruby?” Penny said, savoring every part of Ruby’s name in her mouth.
“Can I kiss you?”
Penny’s cooling fans ramped up and up and up. She wasn’t sure at what point tonight this had come to feel like a possibility in her prediction algorithms, but all she knew was that by the time Ruby asked this question, she had an answer prepared, one that would be spoken with every dimension of emotion that she could weave into her vocal processors. Her emotions core and her logic core were in one hundred percent agreement on this. Every other system in her body, all one thousand-plus of them, was also in agreement. One thousand percent agreement, even, because they would all give this united answer over and over and over again, however many times it needed to be given.
“I would love nothing more,” she said.
Ruby leaned in at the same time Penny did, and their lips met.
On the rooftop of Beacon Academy, in the forgotten terrace that they had turned into their secret sanctuary, in a place momentarily transformed into a world of living light, amidst leaves and flower petals and dots of luminosity drifting in the wind, Penny and Ruby kissed.
It was everything that Penny had ever wanted every time she’d looked at Ruby. It was maybe the softest part of Ruby, and to finally be touching that part of her, Penny felt like she was at the gates of another world.
Her body was making every kind of operating noise it could possibly make, whirs and hums and buzzes and whines, and she didn’t even for a second worry about the noise interfering with this singular transcendent moment, because she knew Ruby loved it, knew Ruby wanted to hear those noises as they kissed.
Ruby made a quiet whining noise against Penny’s lips, pressing herself in more and wrapping her arms tightly around Penny’s waist.
Penny, for her part, placed one hand on the back of Ruby’s neck, her fingers threading through Ruby’s hair, and trailed the other hand down Ruby’s side until it came to rest on her hip. Entirely new urges swelled somewhere inside her—she wanted to touch Ruby all over, she wanted to kiss her everywhere, she wanted… she wanted…
She just wanted Ruby.
And Ruby wanted her.
And now they had each other.
Penny had never felt so happy.
Ruby had never felt so happy.
The rest of the world faded away from Penny’s senses, priorities and processing power being pulled away from anything that didn’t involve kissing the brave, beautiful silver-eyed fluffy-haired scythe-wielding girl she was in love with, and redirected towards logging this moment. It would be the largest single memory file ever assembled within her, as big as an entire month’s worth of memory.
Likewise, Ruby’s entire world had narrowed to this little patch of mossy rock at this point in time, and all the other poisonous things that were supposed to scare her suddenly felt like they’d stopped existing or meaning anything. Atlas had never been further away. A soldier’s training had never felt more distant. Moonrise was just a word used for a big rock in the sky and nothing else. The only projects Ruby knew about were the artistic ones she did with Penny.
After tonight, the only colors Ruby would ever want to paint in again would be rich orange and bright neon green and electric yellow, and that would be more than enough for any palette of feelings, because these incredible feelings rushing through her like a river felt like everything.
But, despite so many feelings, Ruby’s conscious mind was silent. Completely, blissfully, wonderfully silent. No soldier’s instincts to be heard anywhere. Nothing but a vibrating joy which needed no words, external or internal. She felt calm, happy, peaceful, right.
Ruby had never felt more right in her life. It felt like a promise and a beginning and a sunrise she’d never seen before, a sunrise she hoped to see for the rest of her life.
Kissing Penny felt to Ruby like completing a circuit that she’d spent all her life only having half of. And now Penny was the other half of Ruby’s circuit, and an otherworldly electricity was flowing between them, and Ruby never wanted it to stop flowing again.
Ruby didn’t think this connection could be called soulmates. She wanted to call it circuitmates.
For both girls, it was like being plugged into the sun. It was like being in a garden of ecstasy. It was like feeling every single emotion in existence. It felt like the entire world crystallizing around them into some beautiful design that belonged in every art museum everywhere. It was a dream come true.
Penny could spend the rest of her life trying to create a painting which would fully do justice to the feelings of this moment, and she would never even come close to replicating with a canvas and all the colors in the world what she was feeling right now. She would have an easier time trying to paint the whole of the universe in all its infinite splendor.
Some amount of time later, which could’ve been anywhere between a minute and eternity, Ruby pulled away with the utmost gentleness, breathing heavily and staring into Penny’s eyes with adoration and joy and a thousand other emotions that Penny reached into her classification systems to add to memory. They stayed close, their bodies still only separated by centimeters.
Ruby brushed a finger against her lips. “Even if I couldn’t feel anything with my skin…” she said slowly, her gaze traveling down to where Penny’s hand still rested against her waist before snapping back to Penny’s eyes. “That’s still the best thing I’ve ever felt in my whole entire life.” And she meant every word of it.
Penny had a faraway look in her eyes, but she heard Ruby’s words perfectly. She took several more seconds to answer, her body radiating so much heat that it was attracting fireflies to flit around them both in hopes of soaking up more of her lovely mechanical heat.
“Far more than enough, indeed,” Penny said with a lovely smile. “Far, far more than enough for me to love you, Ruby.”
Ruby’s entire reality seemed to jolt with sheer love, and she would’ve buckled if not for how she and Penny were still holding one another. She never wanted to let go. And when Penny said those words, Ruby thought of one more thing she wanted which was Ruby Karyatis’s own desire and not anyone else’s.
She wanted Penny Pallas.
“I love you, Penny,” Ruby said.
They leaned in at the same time once more, and Ruby and Penny kissed again and again and again, until Ruby lost count. But she still knew that if she ever wanted to know, she could just ask Penny exactly how many times they’d kissed. And Penny was keeping count, because that number felt more important than anything else enshrined in her code.
For one night, there was no Atlas, no military, no soldier, no projects, no future to worry about. There was just the night and the light and Penny and Ruby and their warmth and their love.
Anything felt possible.
Notes:
I have been so excited about this chapter for so long. It was the greatest labor of love yet out of a great many labors of love which make up this story. This scene is something which I've gone over twenty times, written and rewritten and tweaked and just felt as much as I could, trying to do as much justice as I possibly could to the incredible relationship that is Nuts & Dolts.
And this is just the beginning! I'm so excited to take you all on the rest of the incredible journey that these two extraordinary girls have ahead.
Chapter 51: Battery and Soul, Heart and Circuit
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
After many kisses, Ruby had fallen asleep against Penny, and since that moment Penny had kept movement to the smallest minimum possible. She continuously monitored Ruby’s body for all vital signs, the most relevant one being Ruby’s body heat—it was a somewhat chilly night, and she was only in pajamas. So when Ruby first fell asleep, Penny removed her own hoodie and placed it over Ruby, and for the rest of the night she intentionally ran her processors at higher speeds to generate sufficient radiant heat to keep Ruby warm and comfortable and safe. Yes, that was a higher power expenditure, but Penny’s battery was at a high charge and she was happy to deploy that in service of ensuring Ruby was ensconced in comfort. And true to her mission, Ruby’s body temperature did not once drop to anything that would cause discomfort, let alone anything that would be unsafe.
She was left with plenty of time to watch Ruby in slumber. To map the waveform of her heartbeat, to chart the precise range of movement in the rise and fall of her chest, to gaze at the pretty and peaceful face of the girl she loved and memorize it down to the most high-definition pixels and subpixels. A smile graced Ruby’s lips throughout, sometimes bigger and sometimes smaller but never gone entirely. More than once, she shifted in her sleep and then snuggled closer into Penny, making happy, sleepy sighs which gave Penny a feeling of warmth that no physical force in the universe could account for.
The two of them stayed that way in the rooftop garden until the first hints of dawn showed at the horizon, washing away the starlight and replacing it with a faint but undeniable grayness that promised brighter things to come.
And under a sky growing lighter, Ruby’s eyes fluttered open. The first thing she focused on was Penny, who greeted her with a sweet smile.
“Good morning, Moonbeam!”
“Mmmghhfmmhgghhhiiii, Firefly,” Ruby murmured, rubbing sleep crust out of her eyes with one hand and pushing herself upright with the other. She looked at Penny and tried to say something, only to be interrupted by a titanic yawn. Penny thought that was immensely cute.
Ruby closed her mouth a few seconds later, and sat up straighter, brushing dirt off the front of her pajamas. “Um, was that all a really awesome dream, or did that actually happen…?”
Penny was smiling so widely she briefly wondered if something in her face might break as she said, “Yes!”
Ruby made a noise, and then she was shedding silver dust all over.
Penny giggled. “You’re shedding silver again.”
“How could I not?” Ruby didn’t sound embarrassed by that in the slightest. “You make my soul go supernova, Penny!”
And that made Penny feel as if she was about to turn supernova, even though she had no idea how it would actually work.
“Ruby?” she said.
“Yeah, Penny?”
“I am aware that we just kissed quite a lot, but… May I kiss you again?” Penny said, tugging at the strings of her hoodie. “If you—”
That was as far as she got before Ruby burst into her Semblance and reformed with her lips already against Penny’s. Penny squeaked, her whirring getting even louder as silver dust settled on both their faces. The experience of feeling a kiss from Ruby materialize against her lips was… was… zenithic. And maybe the rest of her life would be a series of zeniths, new heights continuously reached that she had never previously considered possible! Anything felt possible with Ruby!
Ruby pulled back from the kiss with a giant smile. “Answer: Yes, please!”
That made both of them fall into a series of… Could Penny even call it giggles? That didn’t feel right. It was just… a duet of joyful noises, some of which sounded like giggles and some of which sounded like squeaks and some of which sounded like beeps and some of which sounded like static noises, and somewhere in all those sounds the two of them fell onto their sides, still holding each other close with a bed of soft springy moss underneath to cushion them.
Eventually, when the burst of pure wonder subsided, Ruby gave Penny a considerably more serious and discerning look, and asked, “So… does this mean we’re, um, girlfriends?”
Penny reached out and plucked a rose petal which had fallen into Ruby’s hair from the vines which twisted overhead. “If that is something you want, then I would love to be girlfriends with you, Ruby Karyatis!”
Ruby nodded frantically. “Oh, I definitely want it, oh my gosh, yes!”
“Girlfriends!”
“Girlfriends!”
And just like that, the future was unfolding in a way that Penny had never considered could be so beautiful. Girlfriends. Girlfriends. She, a synthetic girl, a girl who was made instead of born, had met a girl who loved her just as deeply as Penny loved her back. So deeply that they were applying a new label to their relationship which was just for them.
The queer club was going to be so excited for her. Maybe she could bring Ruby to future meetings! Oh, and her team was going to be so excited for them both—actually, speaking of Team BSYP!
“We should return to our room,” Penny said, finally pulling away from the embrace with a wistful smile which she hoped would signify to Ruby that she wanted the embrace to last forever. “I do not want our teammates to wake up and worry about our absence.”
“Yeah. Probably a good idea…” Ruby looked down at herself. “I hope moss stains wash out of bunny slippers…”
“I will fly us back!” Penny rose to her feet and offered a hand to Ruby. “Also, Ruby: the team’s room is now your room, too. Just as Weiss, Blake and Yang are our teammates, mine and yours. We are Team Battleship Plus One.”
“I like the sound of that.” Ruby stepped forward into Penny’s arms, holding her around the shoulders, resting her chin on Penny’s chest and staring up into her face with joy and elation and love and hope.
Penny took hold of Ruby in return, pressed a kiss to her forehead, and spread her metal wings. The two extraordinary girls took off into the dawn of a new day.
As it turned out, the rest of Team BSYP was awake already, but to Ruby’s relief, they hadn’t (yet) worked themselves up into a worried frenzy over Penny and Ruby’s disappearance. When Penny opened the door, the first thing Ruby saw was Yang, piloting the team’s griddle—which, like the team waffle iron, had been acquired through unknown means. Although she wasn’t wearing her BE A PARENTAL FIGURE TO THE COOK apron like she usually did. Her hair was still up in the braid Ruby had made last night. Blake and Weiss were sitting on the floor with full plates of food and apparently having a one-on-one rematch of last night’s poker game. Zwei was eyeing Weiss’s bacon.
Yang glanced over her shoulder at the sound of their entrance. And as happened every time Yang looked at Ruby since they’d returned from Mountain Glenn, something flashed across her face that Ruby couldn’t even come close to understanding. But it was gone in an instant, and then she was spinning around and giving them both a sunny smile.
“Morning!” she said, waving with her spatula. “We were wondering where you two went. If you want to eat up, I’m making a post-sleepover breakfast of—”
She stopped. For a few seconds, the only sound in the room was the bacon sizzling on the griddle as Yang stared at the pair.
“Okay, so you two have held hands plenty before, but this time looks… different?” she said finally. And as soon as she said that, Blake and Weiss were paying full attention from the floor, their breakfast in their laps and the playing cards forgotten.
Ruby dipped into her knowledge of romantic behaviors, which was… nothing, actually. Backup plan: she looked at Penny for help. “How do we tell people we’re girlfriends?”
Penny blinked slowly. “You just did?”
Whoops.
Yang gasped sharply and fumbled her spatula, but managed to catch it before it hit the ground. Blake and Weiss’s eyes widened.
“For real?” Yang said. “Like, for real real? I haven’t suddenly developed a temporary amnesia preventing me from correctly remembering the definition of girlfriends? Or are you somehow using the definition of girlfriend that disappointingly heterosexual people sometimes use when they mean a strictly platonic friend?”
Okay, Ruby didn’t know what some of the words in that sentence meant, like heterosexual or platonic, but she understood enough to know Yang still wasn’t quite sure what was going on. So she was more than happy to clear up any remaining confusion!
She turned to Penny, who must’ve had the same idea, because she was also turning to Ruby. It could’ve been called synchronized, except there was no planning—synchrony was just what the two of them did sometimes without even realizing.
When Ruby kissed Penny, all she could think about was how sensational it was, to borrow a word from Penny’s vocabulary. Sure, she couldn’t actually feel the kisses, but knowing that it was Penny doing this, connecting with her in a way that no one else had ever done, was enough to make fireworks go off inside her brain. She was giving this to Penny, and Penny was giving it to her, giving a gift to each other over and over again, a gift just for the two of them. And no one else in the world. It was theirs. Their little wondrous circuit.
A chorus of squeeing noises (and barks, because Zwei too recognized the importance of the occasion) greeted the kiss, and that reminded Ruby they had to keep this kiss short, because their friends would probably have questions. A lot of questions. And it was hard to answer questions while kissing… Although, Penny could technically do that, since she didn’t need to move her mouth or lips to speak. There’d probably be questions for Ruby too, though. So she pulled away and turned back to the rest of the team—the rest of her team, she reminded herself giddily—with a big goofy smile.
“That kind of girlfriends!” Penny said.
“Oh my GODS.” Yang’s voice rose rose to previously unexplored pitches. “You two are adorable together! I’m so happy for you!” And then she jumped forward and wrapped both Penny and Ruby up in a hug, her braid swinging around and thwapping Ruby in the head.
“Congratulations, you two,” Blake said, and Ruby could almost feel how much she meant it.
“Well, we won’t say we failed to see it coming,” Weiss said with a huff which sounded much more amused than annoyed. “Now I have no qualms about telling you this: The two of you managed to confess to Blake, Yang, and I about your romantic feelings for the other person in two separate conversations which happened within an hour of each other.”
“Oh,” Ruby said, realizing Weiss meant Mountain Glenn, because that was the only time she’d talked to Penny’s team about romantic feelings for Penny, which meant… “That’s why you tricked me into having a shift with Penny, wasn’t it?” she said, leveling an accusatory glare at Yang.
Yang’s response was to yelp, “Ack, the pancakes!” and leap back to the griddle to tend closely to some pancakes which didn’t look burnt at all.
Well, that also explained why Yang and Blake had seemed so weirdly excited at the campfire to find out Ruby’s feelings for Penny.
“Technically, her trick did work,” Penny said. “We confessed our feelings to each other in Mountain Glenn!” She beamed at Ruby in a way that made her want to explode and cry and run around the planet all at the same time. “It was a very wonderful night, to learn that you felt the way I did!”
“Wait. Hold on.” Blake’s eyes flicked back and forth between Penny and Ruby. “You actually did tell each other how you felt already? In Mountain Glenn?”
“And then we didn’t do anything,” Ruby said.
Penny nodded in agreement. “Until this morning.”
Blake speared a piece of bacon and shoved it into her mouth with a dazed look. “Weiss, I’m sorry. I will never call you ‘the most useless sapphic in the world’ ever again. These two are holding the title for the rest of eternity.”
Weiss looked like she didn’t know whether to be insulted or relieved. “I wasn’t even aware you were referring to me that way.”
Yang joined them with two plates of breakfast for Penny and Ruby, and after handing them off, she parked herself on Blake’s bunk, throwing the two a curious look. “So, can we ask how it happened? Because last I remember, you were… pretty set on not dating her because you’d be going back to Atlas soon.”
“Well, um…” Ruby knew she had to tell them what choice she’d made last night. If they were going to be her teammates, they deserved to know. But as soon as she thought about saying it out loud, she started to shake. Because saying it out loud would bring back the bad thoughts. The soldier thoughts. The thoughts that whispered—
Ugh. She was starting to think about it again. The words she was trying to say felt like they were getting stuck in her throat, and she was afraid she’d choke on them somehow. Even though she hadn’t taken a bite of breakfast yet.
“I’m leaving the military.” She started cutting her pancakes into quarters, staring down at her plate like she’d die if she looked up. “I’m not going back to Atlas.”
Deserter. Coward. Traitor.
That was what Blake and Weiss and Yang thought of her, wasn’t it? Blake was a veteran of her own fight who understood honor and courage and bravery, and Weiss was Atlesian so she’d hate Ruby for deserting Atlas, and Yang had lost her arm to the Grimm as a kid, and here was Ruby, just… running away from fighting Grimm…
She shoved a piece of pancake in her mouth—maybe if her brain focused on chewing hard enough, it wouldn’t spiral again.
And if Penny’s teammates all thought Ruby was a terrible person, then… then maybe Penny would agree with her teammates and change her mind about Ruby and then they wouldn’t want her on their team and then Ruby would have nowhere to go nowhere to stay nowhere to be safe because she couldn’t go back to Atlas she’d just be nothing nothing nothing nothing—
“Ruby.”
Blake’s voice, close and gentle, cut through the haze of terror and recrimination boiling over in Ruby. She looked up, and realized that Blake was crouching next to her, at eye level, her expression soft in a way that Ruby had never seen Blake direct at her before. Her big amber eyes were full of an emotion that felt way too nice for what Ruby was thinking about herself right now.
“I think this is the bravest thing that you’ve ever done,” Blake said softly.
Ruby swallowed her probably-too-big bite of pancake. “R-really?” she whispered. “You mean it?”
“I know it is,” Blake said. She reached out, placing a hand on Ruby’s knee. “I know exactly how hard it is to leave behind what was your entire life and venture into something completely unknown. I know how it feels because I did it, too. When I left the White Fang, I felt horrible in so many ways. I felt like a traitor, a coward, a weakling, a deserter. Leaving behind something you’ve given your life to is excruciatingly hard.”
“I can confirm,” Weiss said from the background. “Do you know all the horrible things I’ve been thinking about myself in my head, Ruby? And do you know how much the rest of my team will tell me they’re not true? It’s the same for you.”
“Oh.” Ruby stared at Blake. The words she was saying, they might as well have been the words running through her head right now. Like Blake and Weiss had a direct line to her thoughts or something.
“And for the longest time, I kept myself from talking to anyone who might know how I felt, anyone who might know how to help me. I refused to let myself hear someone say that it was okay to make the choice I did. I thought it was fair penance, but… No.” Blake tilted her head, and sighed quietly. “All I did was fuck myself up.”
“I’m sorry,” Ruby said, and those words felt embarrassingly inadequate for what Blake was telling her.
“So, Ruby. I don’t want you to suffer the same doubts alone, the way I did,” Blake said. “You’ve been through enough already. If you ever start doubting your choice again… tell one of us. We’ll reassure you. You could ask any of us a thousand times if you did the right thing, and not only would our answer be the same, we wouldn’t get tired of answering.”
“You could ask me one trillion times if you did the right thing and I would not become tired of answering!” Penny added.
Ruby looked around, seeing serious and honest and encouraging faces. It made her want to cry all over again. But in a good way. She swallowed down a few more mouthfuls of pancakes before talking again. “Okay. I’ll… I’ll try to remember. I probably will have to ask a lot. Maybe not one trillion times, though…”
“Trust me, it gets better,” Blake said. “I think it’ll get better for you faster, even. Because I was isolated for months, but you’ve already found your team.”
Your team.
“Um, speaking of which.” Ruby poked her fingers together, glancing around the room too fast to meet anyone’s eyes. “Penny’s pretty confident you’d say yes, and I think you’d say yes too, but I should ask anyway because that’s nice! So, um… Can I be on your team? As another member? Until we graduate?”
“Yes,” Blake, Yang, and Weiss all said at the same time.
Ruby blinked, wondering if she’d heard right. But there really wasn’t any way to misunderstand yes, especially not when three different people were saying it really loud. “...You don’t even need to think about it? At all?”
“I mean. We’ve had plenty of time to think about it already. Kind of saw it coming,” Yang said.
Blake gestured at their room, which… did have a fair amount of Ruby’s stuff in here already, since she spent so much time here. It’d just kind of happened because she spent so much time with them. “If anything, the possibility of you joining our team was even more obvious than you and Penny’s crushes on each other.”
Beside Ruby, Penny whirred. Loudly. Ruby recognized it as an embarrassed whir but also a happy whir.
Blake had a point. But the doubt still gnawed away at Ruby’s insides, made her wonder if she’d just been tricking them into thinking how much of a burden she’d be. “You all want me, even though I’m… broken?”
Broken.
It seemed to be echoing around the room even before she’d said it. Ruby had been dancing around that word since last night, because she felt like she was splitting apart.
One part of her was the trained soldier, engrained too deeply into her brain and nerves to ever be torn out. The other part of her was the girl named Ruby who had kissed Penny and didn’t want to be a soldier anymore.
All that added up to something broken.
“Ruby.” Yang was looking at her like she was the most delicate object in the world, like she might break if Yang spoke the wrong word. “There’s nothing wrong with being broken. Especially not on this team.” She gestured to herself, although Ruby couldn’t really tell what Yang was gesturing at, just… her entire self. “If we rejected you for being broken, we’d need to disband as a team.”
Blake, for reasons Ruby didn’t understand, shot Yang an indecipherable look.
“None of us fit into what we thought we’d fit into,” Weiss said, crossing her arms. “If that’s not the definition of broken, then I don’t know what is. And trust me, I know how disappointing and stressful it can be to learn that.”
“Ruby, when I look at you…” Yang trailed off, and she seemed to be visibly struggling for words before she went on in a rush. “I don’t see something broken. I see family.”
Ruby’s breath hitched.
Family.
The word had always been a little distant to her. The only family she’d ever had was Fria. Who wasn’t related to Ruby by blood, but had watched over her, and taught her things, and… tried to teach her some other things that Ruby now wished she’d paid more attention to. Maybe family was something that could be assembled from broken pieces. Maybe Weiss and Blake and Yang could be family. Penny had already claimed the label of wonderful girlfriend, did that count as a certain kind family?
Ruby looked at Weiss and thought of how she’d been torn between two worlds. She probably understood what it was like to be broken in exactly the way Ruby had. Yang had… had literally gotten her arm split in half, so she could probably relate. Blake was still trying to bridge the gap in her life between being a Huntress and being a revolutionary. And Penny…
Penny had been a weapon once, like Ruby. She’d fled those who built her, like Ruby was now trying to. The words Penny had said to Ruby in the garden just hours ago echoed in her mind like the peals of a beautiful bell.
“I promise that I will always be there to help you along your own journey of self-discovery. I promise that I will help guide your way.”
How could she argue with the words that Penny had said so honestly to her? Penny would help her reassemble herself, and she’d promised. A promise from Penny was as good as gold.
Ruby was finding it easier and easier to believe the team wanted her, cracks and fractures and missing pieces and all. They wouldn’t regret it. She would reassemble herself into something amazing with her friends’ help.
“Okay.” Ruby slid aside her not-yet-finished breakfast and gave the rest of Team BSYP a shaky smile that didn’t feel entirely faked. “If you’ll have me, then, I’m so, so happy to be the fifth member of your team!”
And then Penny was hugging her, and then Blake, and then Weiss, and then finally Yang, who showed an odd hesitation before jumping into the group hug. And Zwei nosed into the hug too to lick Ruby’s leg enthusiastically. There was almost too much going on to fit it all into one hug, but they made it work somehow, and Ruby was at the center of a ring of love, entirely shielded from the outside world. And somehow, shielded from bad thoughts, too. Her mind felt like it was coated in a nice fuzzy warm blanket that no cruel words could pierce.
…She still had one concern, though. What was their team name gonna be?
“...I mean, if you just stick an R on the end of BSYP, you get Team Battleshipper, which… I don’t know if that’s a word? But it at least makes sense, which is more than you can say about anything else I’ve come up with so far!”
Penny nodded without looking up, keeping her photoreceptors on the task occupying her hands: Painting Ruby’s nails. Nail painting was the one thing they hadn’t had the chance to do during their sleepover, but they still had time! And now they could paint each other’s nails romantically, and that was even better!
She was painting Ruby’s nails with a bright green base, with the color picked from the green of her emblem. And that was only the first step of her design.
“At least the nightmare of Team Biceps is officially dead,” Weiss said without looking up from where she laid on her bed, browsing through the stolen SDC files. The rest of the team had declined to partake in nail painting. “And good riddance, I say.”
Penny expected some sort of rebuttal from Yang, but no sound at all came from her bunk. She’d been carrying a strange listless energy all day, one that left her mostly silent and prone to doing things such as staring at the same page of a book for twenty minutes. It worried Penny.
“I mean, I know with a B from Blake and a K from me, that gives you the word black, so I’ve been trying to figure out something with that, but nothing’s clicking.” Ruby sighed. “I wish my thoughts actually made clicking noises. That’d be fun.”
Penny finished painting Ruby’s final pinkie finger and looked up just in time to see Ruby puff out her cheeks in frustration, which was adorable. Everything about Ruby was adorable, of course, but especially that!
“Anyone feel like changing their name?” Ruby said in a hopeful tone, scanning the room. When there was no reply, she huffed without any actual annoyance and started to cross her arms, before abruptly remembering her wet nail polish, and immediately chose not to do that. “Because, let me tell you, this would be a lot easier if we had some different letters!”
Blake had been in the bathroom, brushing her teeth with the door open to listen, but now she leaned out, wiping toothpaste away from the corners of her mouth. “You know, Ruby, I actually don’t mind if my name’s not first in the order.”
Ruby gaped at her. “Wait, really? But isn’t that against the rules?”
Blake shrugged. “Teams are supposed to be four members, and we’re adding a fifth. What’s one more transgression?”
“Huh. You really don’t mind not being first?”
Penny registered a spike in Blake’s heart rate, and caught something fearful flashing across her face before she clamped down on it. “What kind of leader would I be if I did mind?”
“…Good point.”
An internal timer went off inside Penny; the first layer of nail polish was now dry (the invention of quick-drying nail polish had been described as one of the most significant developments in the history of fashion) and ready for more. Penny uncapped a bottle of carefully-selected red nail polish. “Ruby! Are you ready for stage two?”
Ruby held out her hands. “As ready as I’ll ever be! Oh gods, if any name can go first it’s gonna take forever to figure out something…” She muttered under her breath as Penny proceeded through several nails, and then shook her head. “Okay, I admit defeat. Penny, it’s your turn.”
Even though Penny was the one with the built-in computers and an arsenal of sorting programs at her disposal, Ruby had insisted on having first try at finding a team name. Still, Penny had refrained from pointing this out, since it had been plainly important for Ruby to at least try figuring out a new team name. Perhaps that was because she felt guilty about invalidating the name and wanted to make up for it, which was… concerning. Alternatively, Ruby simply wanted to be included in their rebrand, which was less concerning!
Penny had actually run internal calculations already and arrived at a list of the five best candidates, but she’d only considered possible team names starting with a B. Now Blake’s offer opened up a world of new possibilities. Without interrupting the ongoing nail-painting, she dove back into calculations, which required painstaking cross-referencing with a dictionary and also checking the phonics of every possible combination of sounds.
She finished painting Ruby’s nails before her subroutine was done compiling the results. “Ta-da!” she said, sitting back. “It should be dry soon. What do you think?”
Ruby lifted her hands, studying the nails with a rapt expression. To the neon green base color, Penny had added a little red heart for each fingernail. Red and green, green and red. Ruby and Penny, Penny and Ruby.
“Regal red for a remarkably radiant Ruby,” Penny said. She punctuated her words by leaning forward, taking one of Ruby’s hands, and pressing a little kiss to her fingers.
There were many moments where she was thankful to have an internal thesaurus, and this was one such time.
“Graceful green for a ginormously gorgeous, um, damn it, Penny doesn’t start with a G… Girl!” Ruby nodded frantically. “Graceful green for a ginormously gorgeous geared girl!”
“I love every part of that sentence!” Penny tilted her head in curiosity. “However, I must ask… ‘geared?’”
“Um, I thought maybe since you’re a beep-boop girl, that means you have gears inside you? Because they’re mechanical?”
Penny did in fact have four specific components within her body which she would label as gears. “Ruby?”
“Yeah, Penny?”
“May I kiss you?”
“Ab-so-lute-ly!”
The kiss was punctuated by a deep sigh from Weiss as she sat up. “Gods above and below, this is exactly what the next three years in our room are going to be like, isn’t it?”
“Definitely,” Blake said.
Her kiss with Ruby was short and sweet, but no less wonderful. Actually—she had to wonder, did kisses actually taste sweet? What if she activated her taste sensors while kissing Ruby? She’d kept those sensors inactive during kisses thus far to keep her focus on… well, the kissing, but… Now she was wondering what kissing tasted like. Specifically, what did Ruby taste like? Did she taste the same everywhere, or would her lips taste different from her cheeks or her nose? She would have to do research!
That would be later, though. For now, her subroutine had finished, and it was time to voice her own suggestion for their team name. And Blake offering to let it start with any letter had made all the difference.
“I have an idea,” Penny said. “What if we were R-S-P-B-Y? Team Raspberry!”
Ruby’s eyes went wide. Blake stepped all the way out of the bathroom. Yang sat up. Weiss put aside her scroll. With so much shock, Penny briefly wondered, did they not like it—
“It’s sensational,” Ruby breathed, her face going red like a rose or a ruby or a raspberry. That, plus the emphatic agreements from Weiss, Blake, and Yang, told Penny that they’d just found their new team name.
Team RSPBY. Penny liked how her letter was in the exact middle. It meant she was surrounded by friends (and a girlfriend) on either side! It felt very safe and cozy.
However, the girl in the middle of Team RSPBY at this moment was Ruby, physically located at the center of the second group hug of the day. Their first hug as Team Raspberry. And once again, it was a hug that sought to protect Ruby from the rest of the world.
Only time would tell if such a thing was possible.
Later
The whine of an electric drill briefly filled Team RSPBY’s room as Ruby attached the final mounting bracket to the wall. When she stepped back and raised her goggles to admire her handiwork, it felt as if an enormous weight was lifting off her shoulders.
From now on, Lunar Enforcer would be stored here—on this wall which already held Weiss, Blake, Yang, and Penny’s weapons. There had been just enough space to put Ruby’s weapon alongside the mounting points for Penny’s sword. This felt to Ruby like real, tangible proof that she could fit in with the other four girls. Proof that Team Battleship could truly become Team Raspberry. They were making space for her, welcoming her in beside them.
She picked up Lunar Enforcer from where it rested on Penny’s mattress, turned it over in her hands, and then carefully placed it on the wall alongside Luminous Electra. Ruby’s old room with Team RSST, which she’d always seen as temporary, never had a place for her weapon like this. She’d just leaned it against the bedpost.
Hammering sounds filled the room, and she turned to watch the other half of the remodeling. The addition of a fifth person to the room made more storage space a dire necessity, and so they’d decided to raise the two bunk beds just enough to add custom-built drawers to the space underneath. Custom-built as in, they were building the drawers themselves. And raise the bunk beds as in, Penny was lifting one bunk bed entirely by herself while Weiss, Blake, and Yang assembled the new tier of supports underneath.
Yang looked over her shoulder, but whatever she was trying to say, it was rendered completely unintelligible by the pocket flashlight she was holding between her teeth while she hammered something in. She only realized her mistake after several seconds, upon which she put down the hammer and nail, removed the flashlight from her mouth with a sheepish grin, and tried again. “Hey, the weapon fits right in!”
Blake pushed herself out from under the bed. “If you’re done with the shelf, I can help you start bringing stuff from your old room?” she said. “I think three is too many people to work under one bed, anyways.”
Ruby shrugged. “Sure, why not?”
The funny thing about Ruby getting sent on a special mission to Mountain Glenn without the rest of her team, was that the other three-quarters of her old team had still gone on their own mission. Which meant that Team RSST’s dorm room was empty even with Ruby back at Beacon. And that was the perfect opportunity for Team RSPBY to move Ruby’s things back to their own room.
Blake pulled herself upright. “Weiss, will you be alright taking over where I left off? I was helping Yang get that joint attached—”
“Not an issue,” Weiss said, sliding over.
Ruby grabbed the wheeled storage cart Penny had brought down from her workshop, waved goodbye to Penny (still holding the bunk bed aloft with one hand while waving to Ruby with the other hand), and just before leaving, the last thing Ruby heard was Yang talking to Weiss.
“Okay, Weiss, I know you’re not the most familiar with manual labor, so just so you know what’s going on: This handy-dandy little implement I’m giving you right now is an important type of tool in carpentry known as a hammer—”
“Yang, I know what a hammer is, and I also know how to hit you with it if you keep using that tone of voice—”
Ruby closed the door, and then she was wheeling the cart down the hall with Blake, the only sound the clatter and squeak of the wheels against the ground. She would’ve considered whistling to be casual, except she had no idea how to whistle. So the walk to Team RSST’s dormitory was silent.
Blake’s eyes stayed mostly trained on their surroundings, searching for… something, Ruby had no idea what. That was something Blake did a lot. Like she was always anticipating a threat of any kind. Ruby wondered if it was intentional, or if Blake was doing it without even realizing.
Maybe Blake had used to see Ruby as one of those threats. It made horrible sense, actually. Ruby was the child supersoldier who’d been unleashed on Blake’s friends and comrades. Ruby was the Atlesian standard-bearer who’d slapped cuffs on teenagers that Blake had played video games with, without ever feeling a single twinge of wrongness about it. No wonder when they first met Blake had been so… so…
Ruby used to call Blake’s early interactions with her weird, but that didn’t feel like the right word anymore. Blake had probably been… scared. Scared of the naive girl who viewed every single member of the White Fang as a monstrous enemy of the state and could beat any student in a fight without blinking.
Gods. How many times had Blake had the living daylights scared out of her just because of Ruby excitedly bursting into a room unannounced—because Blake’s first thought in such a moment could’ve been, is this the day the Atlas girl decides I’m her enemy?
Ruby wanted to say sorry, but she’d said sorry for too many things too many times already. Her apology didn’t feel worth anything anymore. She needed to do something better than a sorry. She needed…
“Hey, Blake?” she said as they came to a stop in front of Team RSST’s door, which looked just like any other door in the visiting dorms.
“What’s up?”
“Thank you.”
Blake blinked at her, visibly startled. “Thank me? For what?”
“Thank you for… for being patient with me.” Ruby had to double-check the passcode for Team RSST on her scroll before punching it into the door’s keypad. She had the code for RSPBY’s room memorized by heart. “I know I was, um…”
“Trapped.”
Now it was Ruby’s turn to be startled as Blake finished the sentence for her, and held open the door for Ruby to wheel in the cart. “Believe me, I know how people get when they feel trapped.”
Ruby nodded. For some reason, the word trapped made her twitch. It… it just made her feel scared, and she didn’t even know why. She tried to push it aside and start gathering up her stuff, and at least doing that didn’t really make her feel much of anything. She didn’t have much attachment to the room she’d technically spent most of her semester in. There wasn’t anything she was taking with her which felt like it belonged in this particular room.
...Honestly, it was kind of funny how much of her belongings were already things acquired over the semester while hanging out with Penny and her friends. Or maybe it was just kinda sad. Probably sad.
Out of all her stuff, Lunar Enforcer had the most connection to Atlas, and that was already hanging in her team’s room—
Ruby stuttered mid-step.
Her team.
That was what she’d thought to herself. Those were the words which came to her on instinct. It almost scared Ruby how ready she was to accept being part of an entirely new team. Like she’d never been part of anything before this.
“I owe my parents a full ship’s worth of apologies, for the horrible things I said to them before I left home.”
At Blake’s voice, Ruby turned around and found her studying a poster of Atlas which Ciel had put up.
“When they tried to talk to me about the Fang, they were desperately worried about what Adam was doing to me, about how Adam was using me…” A shiver passed through Blake’s body. “But I screamed at them. I called them toothless cowards, and I called them pets, and I told them I’d rather die on the battlefield than wither away my life in Menagerie doing nothing. And that was the last time I spoke to them.”
Unsure how to reply, Ruby picked up a neat rock she’d found in the Emerald Forest and left on her shelf, and rubbed her thumb over the cracked surface, waiting for Blake to say something else.
Finally, Blake made a sad sound and shook her head. “The thing about trying to help people escape a terrible situation is… If you’ve already convinced yourself it’s best for you, then when someone else tries to help you see how awful it really is, it’s terrifying for you. Because any suggestion that this is bad for you just reminds you that you can’t leave, and then suddenly it feels far easier to block out the truth and pretend you want this and that you don’t want to leave.”
Ruby reached for another thing on the bookshelf—a little glassblown sculpture of a bouquet of flowers that she’d made a few weeks ago in the forge. It was lumpy and misshapen and some parts didn’t really look like flowers, but she’d made it. And made her think of the secret garden she went to with Penny, and that was nice.
“That was where I went wrong. I tried to push you out of Atlas when you still couldn’t imagine yourself as anything beyond Atlas,” Blake said.
“It’s still hard to think of myself as something.” Ruby’s voice had lost all its energy by now. She stopped loading the cart, and sank to the floor in the middle of the lifeless room which meant nothing to her.
“I… I’m out of the military, and I know Penny said I’m enough, and I know it’s okay to be broken, but I’m still just a girl who had a bunch of really bad things happen to her. That doesn’t feel like a lot.” She hugged her knees to her chest, as tightly as she could, and let her head drop down until she was basically talking into herself. “Am I just a victim?”
The word dropped out of her like she’d vomited it up. She hated how it felt to say. It made her feel like a desert. Barren. Empty. Lifeless. Just a scorched emptiness where there should be something better.
She didn’t like calling herself a victim. It made her feel small and helpless. It made her feel bad. It made her feel like it actually wasn’t okay to be broken. And if it wasn’t okay to feel broken, then she was nothing—
Her breathing was starting to speed up. She heard more than saw Blake sitting down on the floor a respectful distance away.
“You’re not just a victim,” Blake said. “You’re a survivor. Like me.”
Ruby met Blake’s eyes, and remembered the words she’d said that first morning after Ruby had kissed Penny. I think this is the bravest thing you’ve ever done.
“One who had to be rescued by other people,” Ruby said. Blake had rescued herself! She’d taken her life into her own hands and run away, and the only running away Ruby had tried doing was away from the people trying to help her.
“That’s how surviving works,” Blake said. “Sometimes you can climb out of the spike-filled pit yourself, and sometimes you need someone to pull you out.”
“But if I can’t even help myself, then how am I supposed to help other people?”
Blake stared at her for a few seconds. And then she said, “Ruby, do you still think of yourself as a weapon?”
“Um.” Ruby had to think about it. Because, well… the words Project Moonrise felt worse every time she thought about them, but also… she’d wanted to be a weapon as long as she could remember, and it was hard to turn all that momentum around… “I’m… trying not to…?”
Blake nodded, no judgment in her face. “I think I see the problem. Weapons aren’t expected to need help. We just think a rifle will shoot when we pull the trigger—we don’t worry about what it’s thinking. But people are expected to need help. Even people who are Huntresses. And you are a person. No matter what Atlas tried to make you think.”
Ruby lifted her head and nodded, something which took far more effort than she would’ve guessed. “I… never thought about that.”
“Sounds familiar,” Blake said as she got back to her feet. When she was fully upright, she held out a hand to Ruby. “It happens more than you think. Just remember, sometimes helping someone is as simple as giving them a hand getting up.”
It took an embarrassingly long moment of staring at Blake’s hand for Ruby to realize she was actually offering to help her up. At which point she accepted the offer and scrambled upright and immediately went back to gathering her stuff, starting with a small stack of books which she dumped on the cart.
“This is almost everything!” she said, scanning the room. “I just need to check the closets, and…”
“Wait. This is my book,” Blake said.
Ruby tried not to look too guilty as she faced Blake, who was leafing through the stack of books Ruby had just put down. “Penny said I could borrow them…”
“And this one. And this one.” Blake threw Ruby an amused look. “I was wondering where these went.”
“I was gonna give them back, I swear!”
“Hey, they’re coming back to my room now, so it’s all good. But they’re going on my bookshelf.”
Ruby let out a sigh of relief, realizing Blake wasn’t actually annoyed. She pulled open the closet door and was about to start rooting through a bunch of Atlas Academy wear when Blake caught her attention again, her tone suddenly a lot more serious.
“You know. Speaking of the whole ‘thinking of yourself as a weapon’ thing, there’s something else I want to talk to you about. About Penny.”
“Yeah?” Did Ruby even need these Atlas Academy uniforms anymore? She wasn’t going to be a cadet anymore, so…
“Can I ask what attracts you to her?”
Yeah, there wasn’t anything in this closet that Ruby actually wanted to keep. The uniforms weren’t fun to wear at all, they were just… gray. Bleh. There were so many other pretty colors she could wear. She slammed the closet door shut without a second thought, and spun back to Blake. “Penny? Attract? Me? Is that even a question? You’re asking me why plants grow towards the sunshine!”
Blake smiled, then tried to cover her smile with a hand unsuccessfully, and finally just gave up and let Ruby see her smile. “Okay, maybe it feels like a silly question, but I really am curious. And it might be important to what I want to say, so if you could please try giving me specifics…?”
Ruby was a little bit mystified, but… Well, thinking about Penny was always awesome, so it wasn’t like this was a hard question! And it was a fun one!
“She’s so… bright. Like, visibly, but also emotionally, because her happiness lights up every room she’s in… Just like how she lights up my life. And, you know, her eyes light up, too, which is really pretty and I love looking into them, and the first time we kissed was the brightest I’ve ever seen her eyes…” Ruby was feeling dizzy again, the kind of dizzy she sometimes got when she thought about Penny a whole lot. She decided it was probably a good idea to drop herself into a nearby chair to head off any unintentional collapses.
“And she’s got more energy than anyone else in the world, and you can hear it in her voice! I could just listen to her talk about anything and everything forever, you know? Yesterday she was telling me about this research she’s been doing on these new titanium-carbon weaves that could be used in shipbuilding and she was so excited and, and… and I just started thinking I have to kiss her or I’ll explode and then I asked to kiss her because that’s something I can do! And she said yes so we kissed and then we went back to talking about her research and I would’ve sat there for ten hours listening to her talk about… anything, actually! She could probably give me a whole lesson on, I don’t know, brick walls? And she’d make it the most interesting thing I heard all month!”
She looked at Blake, wondering if there was a response she should be expecting now or something, but Blake only nodded for her to continue. Was Blake waiting for her to say something specific? But what? There were a million things about Penny which Ruby could gush about forever…
“And she’s so pretty…” Ruby sighed wistfully. It was the kind of wistful that a pining maiden in a fairytale would be feeling when the story was about how she hadn’t seen her wife in years—and Ruby felt that kind of wistful even though Penny was literally right there in the school and they’d seen each other like ten minutes ago and she could pull out her scroll and call her and hear her lovely voice right now if she wanted to. “I’m never gonna get tired of looking at her… Her hair, and every single one of her freckles, and her smile, and her eyes, and her wings…” Ruby’s breath hitched. “Her wings. Her big beautiful wings that she can fly with. She’s like an angel!”
Ruby meant to keep saying more, but suddenly she was caught up in remembering all times Penny had taken her flying, the two of them soaring over the ocean at sunset and Beacon and the Emerald Forest and Vale at night and… What if they kissed in midair? What if they kissed while Penny was holding Ruby in her arms a thousand feet above the ground? What if they stared into each other’s eyes and giggled amidst the clouds while the sunset turned the sky bright orange just like Penny’s hair all around them? What if they flew to places where no one else could go together? The most free Ruby felt was when she was flying with Penny…
“Okay, that’s a good starting point for what I was hoping to talk about,” Blake said, pulling Ruby out of her reverie.
“Yeah?” Ruby said, blinking at her. “You mean her wings…?”
“Not just her wings.” Blake pulled up a chair, seating herself across from Ruby. “Obviously, the way I think about you has changed a lot since we first met. And I’m not nearly as worried about this as I used to be. But there’s one thing I noticed early on that I still feel like I should at least talk to you about. For the sake of Penny, who is my friend and teammate.”
Ruby nodded slowly.
“But at the end of the day, you’re my friend and teammate too, Ruby. And if this thing I’m about to explain somehow is a problem for you still, I’m not going to banish you from the team—I’m going to help you figure out how to make it right. That’s all.”
“Okay.” Ruby still wasn’t sure where this was going.
Blake took a deep breath. “When I first started noticing you had a crush on Penny, back when I still thought you might arrest me at any given moment, I was… concerned.” She shifted her position, leaning forward and resting her elbows on her knees. “Concerned that you were only interested in the aspects of Penny which you could see as a weapon. Her wings are a perfect example. I was afraid that you might only care about Penny’s wings and their technological capabilities, without caring about the very real girl who the wings are inseparable from.”
Ruby’s first instinct was to say, of course that couldn’t be true! Penny was the realest girl she’d ever met, and she knew that! She’d known it from the first moment Penny told her she was a synthetic person!
But then…
Ruby remembered that day when she and Penny had told each other their secrets. She remembered how one of the things Several-Months-Ago Ruby had marveled at in the aftermath of their dual revelation was that she’d met someone who could be even more of a living weapon than her. That… That was probably exactly what Blake had been worried about. Ruby closed her mouth and decided to wait to answer.
“The same thing happens with Faunus. There are people who don’t care about the person that has a Faunus trait—those people just care about whatever special jolt of pleasure they get from bedding something with cat ears.” Blake’s words trailed off into a violent shudder, her gaze drifting downward. When she continued, she hadn’t looked back up. “Those people don’t treat Faunus as people—just as desirable objects to extract pleasure from without offering anything in return.” A small pause, a deep breath that had the slightest hesitation. “So, Ruby, do you understand why I might’ve been initially alarmed when the girl who had an obsession with weapons and dreamt of being a living weapon developed an attraction to the girl who escaped from a life as a living weapon and very much did not ever want to be one again?”
Horror seeped into Ruby all over.
“I… I think I get it. I don’t want to treat her like she’s not a person. Because she is! She’s the best and most person ever! I don’t want to hurt her!” Was… was it bad to think Penny’s wings were pretty? Did she need to stop thinking about them? “But when I say Penny’s pretty, I mean every part of her, inside and outside! It’d feel really mean to pretend all her metal and circuits and wings and synthetic things weren’t there every time I kissed her, because they’re all parts of Penny, and every part of her is beautiful and something Penny tries to be proud of and I want to love the things she’s proud of—!”
Ruby was seconds away from dissolving into scared gibberish, but then she noticed Blake’s smile—still comforting and warm and kind—and that made everything feel okay just enough to take a much-needed deep breath. There was no fear in her expression, no suspicion, just… calm concern like she might get when someone tripped and fell. Which made Ruby feel better about this.
“Ruby. It’s okay. You’re okay. I promise. If I had any doubts, your answer just took care of them all. You get it.”
Ruby blinked at her. “I… do? Huh?”
“It’s okay to be attracted to parts of Penny, to be into things about her, as long as you don’t forget about the rest. That’s… that’s just how attraction works sometimes. You know Coco and Velvet, right? From Team CFVY? Second-years?”
“Yeah?”
“Well, they’re in a deep and loving relationship, and when they’re sitting together Coco likes to lean over and kiss Velvet’s Faunus ears because it makes them both very happy. And the reason Coco likes it isn’t because it’s any random pair of rabbit ears, but because it’s Velvet’s ears. Her girlfriend’s ears. And that’s okay. Coco can find them desirable, because she finds everything about Velvet desirable, not just one isolated aspect. That’s just… attraction.”
“Ohhhh. Okay.” Ruby nodded slowly. “So, it’s okay for me to think Penny’s metal wings are beautiful and majestic because they’re Penny’s wings, just like it’s okay that Yang blushes whenever she accidentally brushes against your Faunus ears because they’re your ears?”
“Wait, Yang blushes whenever she accidentally bumps into my ears?” And now Blake was blushing.
“Um, yeah?” Ruby shrugged. “I think? Maybe she’s trying not to call attention to it because she’s worried she might seem like one of those creepy people you’re talking about?”
“Oh. Oh, no, I think you’re right.” Blake put a hand to her forehead, and then sighed. “Well, if we ever do become something more, we’ll have a conversation like this but from the exact opposite direction.”
Ruby blinked. “Opposite…?”
“Sometimes, when people try not to be objectifying about a certain trait or characteristic, they get so afraid of seeming like a creep or a pervert that they fall into the opposite problem: Well-meaning people who become essentially afraid to be attracted to someone who’s got that trait. I mean, at the queer club, you’ll meet trans people who are sadly familiar with both extremes of the spectrum. Sure, they have to deal with creeps who just want to mess around with an ‘oddity…’ But then they also have to deal with well-meaning people afraid that being physically attracted to a trans person at all is bad and perverted. And that’s an incredibly alienating problem in its own way.”
“Oh…” That… that actually made Ruby feel just as bad as the concept of being gross and weird about Penny’s mechanical aspects. She could see exactly how Penny would be devastated if Ruby had the opposite problem and thought it was bad to like what was under Penny’s skin. She didn’t like Penny despite the metal! “I’m… I’m glad she knows I like all the beep-boop things about her. So she doesn’t have to worry I’d like her more as a human or something. Which I wouldn’t.”
“Yeah. You’re going to be okay, Ruby.” Blake stood up and stretched, balancing herself on her tippytoes for a few moments as she raised her arms as far above her head as they could go. When she relaxed her body, she added, “As long as you don’t think you can replace Penny with a random Atlesian Knight of equal technological prowess—”
“I wouldn’t,” Ruby said, cutting in so suddenly and vociferously that it startled herself as much as Blake. “No. That—Gods, that wouldn’t be anything even in the same universe as Penny! I—she’s—she’s not replaceable, not by anything else in the world! You can’t replace Penny! She’s the only one like herself in the world! No matter what kind of mystery futuristic technology someone could pack into some Knight’s chassis, it… it would just be empty, it wouldn’t ever make me feel how Penny does! I wouldn’t throw Penny away like obsolete technology, I wouldn’t! Never!”
“And that’s exactly why I’m not worried.” Blake gave Ruby another warm look that felt sunshine landing on the treetops, and any agitation still burbling within her from that outburst faded away. “I’m really glad we had this conversation, because it’s good to make sure you know what to do and what not to do, but you’re trying. You care. And if you do make an honest mistake, if you accidentally break a boundary or go too far with something… It happens to everyone. The important thing’s making it right afterward and moving forward, and I believe you can do it.”
“Thank you…” Ruby had the sense that if she started crying right now, there would be a lot of tears.
Blake put a hand on her hip, and fixed a piercing gaze on Ruby. “That being said, it’s my duty as Penny’s friend and team leader to tell you: Ruby Karyatis, if you do ever start looking at Penny like she’s nothing but a slab of meat to be devoured, or a piece of metal to be hammered uncaringly into whatever shape you want…”
And then Blake’s entire expression darkened, and suddenly her eyes were narrowed in a way Ruby had never seen before. It wasn’t just a piercing gaze—now it was stabbing. “Then I’ll recognize that look, because I can never forget how Adam looked at me like that, and then there will be nothing which can stop me from making sure Penny is safe.”
Ruby swallowed hard and nodded rapidly. “Aye-aye. Understood. Affirmative.” She stopped herself before she added every single other word she could think of which meant yes.
Blake nodded once, sharply, and then she was back to her calm smile as she turned towards Ruby’s collective things.
“Alright, I’ll be having a conversation like this with Penny, too, but first, let’s make ourselves scarce from this room before some Atlesians notice we’re here and something goes wrong? If that’s all your stuff, then—Oh. Thank you, Ruby.”
The abrupt change in direction was because, halfway through her sentence, Ruby had bolted forward in a burst of silver and leapt into a hug with Blake, a hug as tight as any Blake had ever received and far more comforting for both girls than either of them had expected.
Ruby’s eyes couldn’t stop bouncing all over the place. She also couldn’t stop bouncing, physically, as she and the rest of Team RSPBY strolled through the festival grounds. The Vytal Festival was an experience unlike any other she’d had in her life. She’d never been in such a crowded, buzzing, alive place before. A steady stream of airships had been ferrying people from Vale to Beacon all morning, and the numbers were only growing, turning the festival grounds into a small city in their own right. The stalls and stands and displays and booths and signs and people and games and sounds and activity, it all just seemed to go on and on and on. There were so many things to look at! How was she supposed to concentrate on any one thing for more than a few seconds?!
Everything was ramping back up real fast. Students had finally begun returning from their missions yesterday, breathing life back into the academy, and today, along with the rest of the students, was also the first day of the Vytal Festival! And tomorrow… was the start of the Vytal Tournament!
Ruby still wanted to win the tournament. That would be the best way to shut up the very loud part of her which was worried that she’d be bad at helping people now, by beating everyone and proving she was still invincible.
“Oh, look!” Penny’s voice broke into Ruby’s thoughts before they could turn anxious—she was tugging at Ruby’s arm. Ruby turned to see Penny pointing at a shooting game that’d been set up in a tent just ahead.
Ruby grinned. She wondered, did Penny know how good she was at helping her escape her own thoughts?
Ruby didn’t know this, but Penny was acting deliberately, and had done this several times before. Ever since their first kiss and Ruby’s decision to stay, Penny had learned to identify the worried faraway look Ruby got in her eyes when she started disappearing into herself, along with other trends within her vital signs. So, as she took Ruby’s hand and steered them towards the shooting tent, she was very happy to have brought Ruby out of a mental spiral.
But before they could get more than a few steps closer, Yang stopped them with a hand on their shoulders. “Oh, trust me, you don’t want to try any of these so-called ‘skill’ games they have at festivals,” she said, shaking her head.
“What?” Ruby pouted. “Why?”
“They’re all rigged to only let you win sometimes, no matter how good you are. Like, the one you’re looking at? The pellet gun the game has you use has wildly unreliable accuracy, so even if your aim and timing’s perfect, half the shots are gonna miss. And there’s plausible deniability because the targets are moving, so you can never be quite sure if it was your fault that you missed. You have to get a direct hit to knock one over, too.”
Ruby huffed. “Well, that’s mean.”
“It’s how they offer such expensive-looking prizes,” Yang said. “Nobody ever wins the best stuff, so the vendors never actually have to give them away.”
“Rude. So is every festival game rigged?”
“Yup.” Yang nodded to a basketball-throwing game they were passing by. “You see the highest basket on that one? The one that gets you the most points if you get the ball in there? Well, you can’t tell from this angle, but that hoop is actually juuuuust enough of an oval shape that you can’t put a basketball—notably not an oval—through it. Even if you stood right next to the hoop and dropped it in.”
“Hm.” Penny cocked her head, analyzed the hoop while adjusting for viewing angle, and realized that Yang was exactly right. “What would happen if the basketball landed on the hoop and got stuck there without falling through? Surely I would get the points.”
Ruby broke into a devious smile immediately, while it took a moment for the rest of the team to realize what Penny was getting at.
“I guess? But it’s imp—” Yang cut herself off, remembering exactly who Penny Pallas was. “—impossible for everyone except you. Penny, you’re evil!”
Penny didn’t think there was anything particularly evil about this, since she was simply removing an unfair advantage. But Yang said evil just like how she’d say a compliment, so she took it as one in this context!
“Do you want any of the prizes, Ruby?” Penny could not help the proud smile that covered her face, even as a rush of trepidation hit her. Was it okay to be proud of having this kind of inhuman skill? Would other people think she was being mean to the fairground workers by out-tricking their tricks?
“Nah, you pick, you’re the best and coolest girlfriend ever,” Ruby whispered in an awed tone.
…It was okay to be proud of this, Penny decided.
She strode up, paid one lien for five basketballs, and took a ready position, zooming in her vision on the basket as she began calculating her shot. She used her first and second shots to gauge all the variables involved, and then on the third shot, she was ready to make an actual attempt. She needed the ball to hit the basket with as little speed as possible, to minimize bounces. Which necessitated a higher angle… but there was netting placed over the arena, ostensibly to prevent any errant basketballs from leaving the vicinity, but also preventing any basketball from being shot at a high enough angle. However… If she bounced the ball off the top of the backboard and up into the netting, then it could fall down into the hoop from directly above. It would require breathtakingly precise movement, but it was plausible within her operating parameters!
Penny double-checked her calculations, nodded to herself, and launched the basketball. The shot floated high, bounced off the top of the backboard, and caught on the netting, killing all of its forward momentum. And then gravity did the rest, and the basketball dropped straight down into the hoop. And stuck there.
The vendor’s jaw dropped, and the cigar she’d been smoking fell out of her mouth, landing in the grass, completely forgotten as she stared at the basketball nestled in the hoop and very much not going anywhere.
“Do I win?” Penny said in the most innocent tone she could assemble, acting as if nothing underhanded had ever happened. Well, could it really be called underhanded when she was just canceling out someone else’s underhandedness? Maybe it was just… handed. That sounded right to Penny.
It took eleven more seconds before the vendor mustered an answer. “I, uh, must’ve overinflated that ball this morning. Guess I wasn’t all the way awake yet, heh,” she said. She stared at Penny for six more seconds before shaking her head. “Tell you what—you win the grand prize. And then please don’t come back.”
Penny decided to borrow a mannerism from Ruby, and saluted jauntily. “Understood!”
Ruby, standing beside Penny, let out a little cheer and shimmied her upper body back and forth. After a few moments, she glanced over at her team. “Is it okay to be this excited about winning something completely unimportant?”
“Yes,” Yang said, beating everyone else to an answer and somehow making it sound like her voice was coming almost completely unraveled in just one syllable.
And then it was time for congratulatory kisses from Ruby. Not just a congratulatory cheek kiss, but also a congratulatory nose kiss and a congratulatory forehead kiss and a congratulatory chin kiss and a congratulatory space-between-her-eyebrows kiss, and of course, a congratulatory lip kiss!
Honestly, that was just what it was like anytime they kissed. How could just one kiss ever be enough for either of them? Or one hug, or one cuddle, or one nuzzle, or one happy noise, or… The list went on and on. And Penny couldn’t have been happier with that state of things.
“You’re incredible,” Ruby said once she’d pulled away.
Then, suddenly:
“Yoo-hoo!”
Nora! Even without vocal identification systems, Penny would recognize that voice any day. She turned around, and indeed that was Nora approaching, with Ren and Jaune and Pyrrha, and none of them looking worse for the wear, thankfully.
“Team Battleship!” Nora said, coming to a stop in front of them and slamming her hands onto her hips. “How dare you not welcome Team JNPR back to Beacon after the completion of our first successful mission ever! This is a historic occasion! It needs to be commemorated!”
Penny noted that Weiss and Pyrrha were studiously avoiding eye contact with one another.
“There’s something else that needs to be commemorated!” Ruby said, bouncing up and down.
“Yeah?”
“Penny and I are girlfriends!” Ruby said, before leaning in and planting a kiss on Penny’s cheek for good measure.
Nora went still in a way which, if it’d happened to Penny, would’ve been attributable to overloaded processors.
“Everyone cover your ears,” Jaune muttered, doing exactly that while also trying his best to look excited for Ruby and Penny.
Ruby didn’t cover her ears because it wouldn’t hurt her, and Penny didn’t cover her ears because she was built to withstand auditory assaults even from Nora. So they were probably the only ones in a fifty-meter-radius who didn’t cover their ears and also didn’t flinch away when Nora unfroze and unleashed an earsplitting squeal.
Nora took no notice of the enormous number of strangers’ eyes now staring at her from every direction as she burst into an excited chatter.
“It actually happened? IT ACTUALLY HAPPENED! You’re not just together, you’re TOGETHER TOGETHER! You two are so cute I want to wrap you up in a blanket and eat you like a cute little double baby burrito with extra adorableness on the side!”
“Is she threatening us?” Ruby whispered to Penny.
Penny shook her head. Coming from anyone else, that would be a threat, but not from Nora.
“This doesn’t just call for commemoration, this calls for CELEBRATION!” Nora looked around, putting her hands on her hips, and nodded decisively. “I say we should all get buckets of popcorn bigger than my thigh, on Pyrrha’s credit card! And I need mine with enough butter to drown an opossum!”
Honestly, that sounded like a wonderful idea to Penny. Especially since the best way to eat popcorn was to have someone else throw it into her mouth—and that was the exact same thing Ruby had in mind at that moment, with Penny being the one catching the popcorn and Ruby being the one throwing it.
However, when Ruby and Penny turned around to head in the direction of the nearest popcorn stand, they found General Ironwood standing ten feet away from them.
Ruby froze, her hand clamping down on Penny’s arm as a squeak tumbled out of her mouth. Blake, Weiss, and Yang all shifted closer to Ruby without the slightest bit of subtlety, a closing of ranks in the face of someone who they all considered to be a threat to Ruby.
But Ironwood seemed just as surprised as Team RSPBY to have run into them. He had a stick of bright pink cotton candy in one hand which looked ludicrously out of place in comparison to his military uniform and pistol strapped to his hip.
Blake was currently wondering how long it would take for everyone’s weapon locker to arrive. Yang was currently thinking that if Jimmy Tin Tits tried a single damned thing with Ruby family she couldn’t lose any more family, then she would do things to him which absolutely stood a chance of starting a Second Great War. Weiss was currently remembering all of the extremely unflattering and potentially incriminating things she’d found on Ironwood in her stolen SDC files. Penny had already made up her mind about what she would do—if General Ironwood attempted anything unpleasant with Ruby, she would deploy her flight mode and fly off with Ruby to somewhere far away where he could not find them. She was barely concerned by the fact that she wasn’t wearing her fake jetpack at this moment. If keeping Ruby safe meant exposing her mechanical self to a crowd of festivalgoers, then… So be it. As Weiss would say.
However, it was Ruby who broke the glacial silence that had emerged between the five girls and the General.
“Um. Hi, uh. Sir.” Ruby stuttered off into silence, wondering if the General had somehow already figured out what she was planning to do even though she hadn’t told anybody except Team RSPBY, and if he was about to clap her in handcuffs and haul her in front of a judge for a court-martial—
“It’s good to see you’re enjoying the festival, Ruby,” Ironwood said in a mild, slightly confused tone which did not match the vocal salvo Ruby had been expecting.
Does he… really not know what’s happening? Ruby wondered. Is he just surprised to see me here instead of like, hiding in a corner somewhere? Should I tell him now? What happens if I tell him now? Is there ever gonna be a better time to tell him? What happens to me when I actually do it? Do I… What do I DO?
Ruby had to do something.
She had to.
Ironwood spoke again. “Are you—”
“I’M STAYING HERE!”
Ruby’s abrupt scream wasn’t as loud as Nora’s squeal, but somehow Ruby felt like it was the loudest sound ever made in the history of the the universe, and even though she was trying as hard as possible to ignore their surroundings, she was sure that every eye and photoreceptor on the festival grounds had just swiveled to stare at her. Actually, no, scratch that, she was sure that every eye and photoreceptor on the planet was staring at her. Maybe even the universe. Maybe there was some far-off alien in another galaxy that’d just heard a strange sound from the stars and was pointing a telescope at the sky to figure out why Ruby Karyatis was staying here at Beacon and leaving the Atlas Military. Ruby hoped the aliens wouldn’t think she was a bad person.
(If Ruby had managed to actually look at her surroundings with a more objective eye at that moment, she would’ve noticed that her own words had actually attracted far less attention than Nora’s glass-shattering squeal. As for the small amount of nearby strangers who had reacted in some way, they’d more or less returned to whatever they were previously doing after a few curious looks.)
Ruby burst into silver and reappeared in close contact with Penny, flattening herself against her girlfriend and burying most of her face in Penny’s neck except for one eye, which still peered out at Ironwood with a mixture of all-consuming fear and fierce determination.
And now Team RSPBY really did close ranks, Blake and Weiss and Yang discarding all pretenses of subtlety to stand in a protective semicircle around their new teammate as Penny wrapped her arms around Ruby and leveled the fiercest stare she could construct at James Ironwood.
Team JNPR, standing further back, might’ve been too confused as to what was unfolding to take any sort of action, if not for something they could see which General Ironwood could not: Behind Blake’s back and out of Ironwood’s line of sight, she had her scroll clenched in one hand and turned on, her thumb poised over the button to call her weapon locker.
And that was all Team JNPR needed to go tense, preparing themselves to defend their friends if they needed to. Even if none of them had the full details of what was going on in this standoff, their instincts told them which side they’d be taking.
Ruby’s announcement had been… rather vague, actually, and for one fleeting moment she had the ridiculous thought that she might need to clarify to the General what she meant.
But in the end… there was no mistake.
There was a brief widening of Ironwood’s eyes, a small raising of his eyebrows, but there was no thunderous eruption, no explosion of military might in service of retaining Atlas’s greatest asset.
And somehow, that made Ruby feel worse. It made her mind snap at her, see? They weren’t really that bad, they weren’t keeping you as a slave, you didn’t need to leave them, you’re overreacting, YOU’RE HURTING YOUR KINGDOM YOU’RE A CRIMINAL YOU’RE THE EVIL ONE RIGHT NOW GO BACK BEFORE YOU RUIN EVERYTHING
“Ah,” Ironwood said.
With slow, careful motions of both hands, he crushed his stick of cotton candy into a miniscule, unrecognizable ball between his fingers. A ball small and dense enough that he could turn and throw it neatly into a nearby trash can as if he was throwing a bullet. He folded his now-empty hands behind his back, returning to the stiff military posture which Ruby was so accustomed to seeing.
Penny held Ruby as tight and close as she could, feeling the terrified pound of her heartbeat against her skin. Her wings were ready. The moment that this man tried to reassert any misguided belief about Ruby Karyatis being his silver weapon to wield and aim, she would fly away to safety with Ruby in her arms.
Ruby was trying her hardest not to shiver as her own mind screamed horrible things at her, told her to get back to her superior officer’s side right now before she became a disgrace to everything she’d ever been trained to believe in, couldn’t she see how polite her commanding officer was being in the face of such an awful and selfish action perpetuated for no other reason than her own personal thoughts, and she was spitting in the face of all the General’s dignity and grace by refusing to cooperate in any way, and traitor coward and failure disgrace and and—
“I understand, Ruby,” Ironwood said.
Ruby choked on nothing. She wanted to say something in response, but she didn’t know what. All she could do was keep watching and hoping she didn’t crumble to bits.
But also somehow amidst the deluge of bad bad bad thoughts, she wasn’t shivering. And it was because of the girl who she was nestled in the arms of. Penny’s embrace reminded her that there were still good things in this world, things she wanted, and that it was not a bad thing to be seeking out those good things! And her friends around her, sheltering her from nightmares…
“I only hope that this is truly what you want,” Ironwood said slowly. “Instead of other actors grafting their own desires onto you because they have convinced themselves it’s what you want.”
Blake was gritting her teeth so hard that it hurt, her jaw muscles flexing like steel as she stared down the head of the kingdom that she’d spent her entire life fighting against. And somehow, this was the closest she felt she’d ever come to open warfare. Not even the distantly witnessed faceoff at the dance compared to the way her battle instincts were now screaming at her to do something before it was too late.
“Is this what you want?” Ironwood’s eyes flicked to Penny and then Blake for just an instant, but every member of Team BSYP saw it. “Or are you simply following someone else’s lead and letting them do all the thinking for you?”
The world felt like it was tilting, falling sideways and sending Ruby tumbling off its edge into an unknowable void. More chiding, scolding reflexive thoughts seared through Ruby’s mind like a fired tracer round splitting the night. listen to him listen to him listen to him listen to him he knows better than you he is a far better soldier than you let him take you away so you never have to doubt your purpose ever again and you’ll never feel this bad ever again and the world will be saved how dare you put more importance in something which isn’t saving the world
“I implore you to be active in the decisions you make, not passive and yielding,” Ironwood said, his voice incomprehensibly calm for the situation at hand. “That is the instinct which any good protector needs, whether that be a Huntress or a soldier.”
With the most confidence she’d summoned to this point, Ruby told her soldier’s urges to shut up.
“Yes,” Ruby said aloud, lifting her head just enough to stare right at Ironwood with both eyes and not just one. “I want this.” She turned to look at Penny, and then Yang and Blake and Weiss and Team JNPR and the spires of Beacon standing tall and sturdy in the distance and the bright blue sky contrasting boldly with blazing autumn leaves and the ever-bustling festival grounds and the friendship and the love all around her, and all of this was far more satisfying to look at than the General with his calmly scrutinizing expression. “I want it with all my battery and soul.”
Ruby didn’t even realize she’d spoken Penny’s version of heart and soul, because it wasn’t a mistake. It wasn’t a scrambling of thoughts in her overtaxed brain. But rather, those words were simply what came to mind first when Ruby thought of how to make a promise from the depths of her being. For her, those words felt right to say. She couldn’t imagine saying such a thing in any other way. Battery and soul, heart and circuit. Penny could make promises in that way, and to Ruby, that kind of promise felt like the strongest promise in the world.
“Very well,” Ironwood said with a single, curt nod. “The Atlas Military will never be the same without you, Ruby.”
And with that, he strode away in the direction of the Atlesian cruisers which hung in the sky at the edge of the festival grounds.
There was no shouting, no rage, no gunshots, not even any weapons drawn. Just a general leaving the field of a verbal battle. Ruby had expected more, and for it to be this much less, she went limp all over with relief. So limp that she would’ve collapsed entirely, if not for Penny being there.
It took a long time for Ruby to stop hyperventilating.
Team RSPBY decided to watch that night’s fireworks show from their room, which Ruby was fine with, because she was exhausted, even if she had a hard time noticing herself—the rest of her team could see it. Especially Penny. And the rest of them would gladly accept a reprieve from the chaos of the festival after the excruciating stress of facing down and defying one of the most powerful men in the world. So the five of them pulled up beanbag chairs to their windows and waited for the show to start, Ruby resting peacefully against Penny and quietly delighting in how okay everything felt.
Well, most everything.
“I’m still wondering something,” Ruby said with a little frown.
“Yes, Moonbeam?” Penny turned her head to Ruby, waiting to hear more. So did Weiss, Blake, and Yang.
Ruby fiddled with her hands, not quite meeting anyone’s eyes. There was one thing the General had said that afternoon which was still sticking in Ruby’s mind. Something which was still unsettling her a little bit. And of course, her bad thoughts were holding onto it very tightly.
“The Atlas Military will never be the same without you, Ruby.”
Ruby couldn’t help but wonder… that was objectively true, wasn’t it? Atlas had a lot. They had so many airships and weapons and mechs and soldiers and Specialists and other projects and a kingdom safe in the sky, but they didn’t have another Ruby. The military didn’t have anyone else who could laser-beam Grimm with their eyes.
“The—the attack on the CCT. The people who plotted that White Fang attack in Mountain Glenn. That’s… that’s not normal danger. That’s something big is happening danger. The General’s told me a lot that there’s a bigger enemy out there than Grimm we need to fight. What if all this stuff that’s been happening is that bigger enemy?” She turned fearful eyes towards Penny, and then every other member of her team in turn. “What if it turns out the world is in terrible danger, and I really am the only one who can save it?”
The answer came quickly, and it came from Blake. “Ruby, one question. Your eyes can’t affect people, right? Only Grimm?”
“Right. They’ve never done anything to a person,” Ruby said.
Blake nodded. “Then, no matter whoever’s behind everything that’s happened this year, there’s nothing special to stop them that only you can do. It’s people who are causing this trouble, not Grimm. And Grimm aren’t people. So… Your eyes can’t save us from the kind of trouble we’re facing. Whatever Atlas thinks is threatening them, they can face it without you.” Her voice was firm, but not unkind. Just… determined.
“Okay,” Ruby said in a quiet voice, amazed at how readily she believed the things Blake said now. People, not Grimm. And Ruby’s eyes couldn’t solve the kinds of problems Vale was facing.
Suddenly, a loud bang in the distance made her jump and reach for a weapon which wasn’t there, but an instant later, a burst of color in the night sky signaled to her that all was well. It was just the fireworks show beginning at last. A little of the team’s peace was lost to the distant fusillade, but the riot of colors and lights and shapes made up for it tenfold, the entire sky turned into an artist’s canvas. All of Ruby’s previous anxiety was forgotten as she settled in more firmly against Penny to watch, enthralled.
“Hey, Penny?” she said softly.
Penny smiled at her, and even if Ruby hadn’t seen the smile, she would’ve heard the smile in Penny’s voice. “Yes, Ruby?”
“I think everything’s gonna be okay.”
Penny’s smile grew, and she leaned in. “I agree.”
Under the colorful sky, Ruby and Penny kissed, two miraculous girls who were content to let the world feel happy and right and ordinary for as long as it could.
Somewhere in Anima, somewhere in time
It was a strange scene to find within the wildest reaches of a vast continent. An unkempt blonde man leaning against a tree and whittling at a splintered branch with a pocketknife, as if he was waiting for a bus in the middle of a kingdom and not alone in a truly untamed forest in a fading twilight.
A rustling sound came from somewhere above, and Taiyang Xiao Long lifted his head, searching the foliage. The flutter of a bird’s wings was a sound that he did not easily forget.
Nothing in the trees moved, but Taiyang stayed alert, waiting. After a few more seconds, he returned to his whittling. But he spoke without looking up. “Well, Qrow was right. One does have to pay a high price if they want to find you.”
From the darkness which not only grew deeper with each minute but also seemed to grow thicker, Raven Branwen stepped out, as smoothly as if she’d melted out of the brush.
“Only one person on the planet would be stupid enough to think he could walk into these woods alone and demand to talk to me,” she said. Her voice was rough, a too-dull blade being dragged against metal.
“And yet, here you are,” Taiyang said, his eyes still trained on his woodcarving. “I hope I didn’t knock around your underlings too badly.”
“They’ll recover. Why are you here?”
Taiyang folded his pocketknife up but didn’t put it away, and made no other move, except to say—
“Summer.”
The Grimm-like mask which covered Raven’s face caught what little light there was left in the dusk, far more than anything else in their surroundings, creating the impression of a ghost floating through the trees.
The aspect of the mask that Raven valued the most, far above any intimidation qualities, was how it rendered invisible any emotion in her face which she couldn’t wipe away. It took away an opponent’s negotiation tactic, forcing any interloper to extract meaning only from her words. And that was another advantage, because for Raven Branwen, words meant nothing.
Unfortunately for her, Taiyang had not forgotten the signs of his former love being stunned into silence, and he knew he had her actual attention now.
“If you’ve somehow gotten it into your bleeding-heart mind that she might still be alive, you’ve reached a level of delusion that even I didn’t think was possible for you to attain,” she said finally.
Taiyang raised to eye level the thing he’d spent the last few minutes carving, inspecting it: the rough shape of Yang’s flame emblem. “I got a call from Yang,” he said. “She said it was an emergency. She said she found something to do with Summer.”
Raven crossed her arms and turned away, and if Taiyang could see under her mask, he would’ve seen a snarl curl across Raven’s face. As it was, he could hear it in her voice. “I know everything I need to know about Summer already.”
Taiyang pocketed the woodcarving. “For someone who’s spent most of her life being unhappy, I’m stunned that you’re satisfied with knowing nothing.”
Raven spun around, and in an instant the point of her sword was at Taiyang’s neck, the razor-sharp blade just barely pressing into his skin. “You shouldn’t waste your time thinking about what I feel.”
Taiyang stared down the length of the gleaming red sword, and didn’t blink. “Maybe. But I can’t help it.”
“Summer failed,” Raven said. “I don’t need to know anything else.”
“What do you know?” Taiyang said.
Raven’s grip shifted almost imperceptibly—the slightest relaxing of the swordtip against Taiyang’s neck. He noticed, and raised an eyebrow. “What exactly is it that makes you so confident her story’s already ended?”
He couldn’t see Raven’s eyes. Which meant he couldn’t see the ever-so-brief look of rage and pain and despair that flashed through red irises, nor could he see Raven slam her eyelids down immediately after—a fear-driven reflex that someone would be able to see weakness in her eyes, even behind the mask.
“What did you see?” Taiyang said.
And now Raven let her sword arm drop, hilting Omen in one smooth motion. “It’s not what I saw.” Her voice was suddenly dull, all trace of her previous scorn gone. “It’s what I haven’t seen.”
And then Raven vanished in a whisper-soft flutter of feathers that melted into the undergrowth before Taiyang could blink away the afterimage of her pale mask.
He stood perfectly still, listening for any hint of her position, but there was nothing. Just the rustle of brush swaying in the wind, and the darkness that was almost too thick to breathe in.
Taiyang sighed heavily.
“Call me a fool for daring to hope you’d tell me something, for once,” he said to the trees, who seemed to be the only audience left. “But I need a portal to Yang. And I know what it’ll cost.”
Silence.
“Your one-save rule.”
Silence.
Taiyang closed his eyes for a moment, and then went on in a louder tone. “This is my one save. For me. I’m calling it in, to get a portal to our daughter.”
There was that same swish of feathers, this time from directly behind him, and when he turned around, Raven was standing there, still masked.
“This is how you want it?” she said. The disbelief could not be hidden from her voice now.
Taiyang nodded. “I’ve already taken too long. And if it takes me any longer to get back to my daughter, it could be too late to help her. And if I’m not there for her when I should’ve been, I’m already beyond saving.”
Raven stared. The trees creaked querulously in the wind. A tiny creature scampered through the grass nearby. Taiyang reached into his pocket and closed his fingers tightly around the woodcarving of Yang’s emblem.
Finally, Raven let out a low growl, unsheathed Omen, and slashed it downward through the empty air beside her. She did not look at the portal which shimmered into existence beside her. But just before Taiyang would’ve entered, she spoke.
“Taiyang.”
He stopped, inches from the portal, and gave her a questioning look.
Raven was staring in almost the exact opposite direction from him. “Are you prepared to live with whatever you find?”
“Probably not,” Taiyang said. “But I can’t hide from it forever.”
Notes:
Shoutout to MaxiemumDamage for predicting Team RSPBY (Raspberry) as a team name many, many chapters ago! It was a team name for RWBY plus Penny (Or in this case, BSYP plus Ruby) I'd had saved in my brain for years, and I'm happy to finally add it to War Machines!
Chapter 52: Panopticon
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
Mantle
“Good afternoon, Remnant, and welcome back to the fortieth Vytal Festival Tournament! I hope you’ve all finished your lunches and gathered your snacks, because the rest of the day will be nonstop fights as we finish out the singles round! And in case you missed this morning’s action, a quick recap! Team FNKI, a first-year team hailing from Atlas Academy, pulled off a stunning upset in a frenzied bout when they defeated—”
“WOOOOOOOO FNKI! GO ATLAS!”
“Fiona, could you please try not to kill my ears?” May Marigold said, cringing away from her colleague while trying not to spill her bowl of nachos. “If it’s fucking Atlesian patriotism of all things that makes me go deaf—”
“You have Aura,” Joanna said from May’s other side. “Aura which probably won’t be needed otherwise. The tournament’s always the lowest Grimm activity gets.”
“Yes, Joanna, I am quite aware of that fact, thank you,” May said. “I’m just operating on the principle of the matter here, because our wonderful girlfriend here is cheering like a propagandist.”
Fiona stuck her tongue out at May. “It’s the one time of the year when I can root for Atlas without feeling like I’m turning into a member of the Ace Ops. Can you blame me?”
“She has a point, you know,” Robyn said, rejoining her team with a fresh bowl of popcorn. “This festival’s the biggest break we get all year. Maybe we should be rooting harder.”
May groaned. “I left Atlas to get away from exactly this kind of insufferable behavior, you know.”
“Cheer up,” Joanna said. “Down here, you only have to deal with it for one week out of the year.”
“The longest week,” May mumbled, before falling silent. The foursome settled more firmly into their seats in what was usually the waiting room of Pietro Polendina’s clinic, but had been hastily rearranged into being a makeshift movie theater for a viewing party hosted by the aged doctor. Who was currently absent.
“Does someone want to go and grab Doctor Polendina before he misses the next match selection?” Robyn said, glancing at the door leading to his apartment, which he’d disappeared into a quarter of an hour ago.
“Don’t worry! I’m here!” came Pietro’s voice from behind the door, followed moments later by the clatter of his mechnochair as it nudged the door open. “This batch of wings took longer than I expected to finish. Have I missed anything?”
“Nope, just in time,” Robyn said, getting up to take the tray of chicken wings from him.
On the giant projection screen set up along one wall, the feed from Amity Colosseum changed to a shot of two wheels spinning wildly, a blur of letters flashing by.
“And the first competitors of the afternoon will be… Beacon’s Team JNPR—”
A murmur swept through the room. Everyone knew exactly which team Pyrrha Nikos was on.
“—Facing Team BSYP, also from Beacon Academy!”
“Yes!” Pietro threw his arms in the air in exultation, and Robyn was quite glad she’d taken the tray of wings from him a moment ago. It would not have been the first overexcitement-related food mishap of the day.
“That’s Yang’s team!” he said, pointing excitedly at the television. “It’s time to see my handiwork in battle! Although, of course, with how much she’s modified it on her own, it’s her work almost as much as mine!”
This, in fact, was the entire reason why Pietro had hosted this party—it was the first time one of his patients was competing in the Vytal Tournament. But not a Mantleborn student, as Robyn had only learned a few hours ago from Pietro—and that still confused her, honestly.
“Ah yes, and this selection means that we’ve arrived at a time-honored Vytal Tournament tradition: the same-academy matchup! I’ll explain for first-time viewers—of course the main attraction of the Vytal Tournament is the contest between the vastly different kingdoms and academies, but every year, the kingdom which hosts the Vytal Tournament is required to have one matchup between two of its own teams in the first round! This practice was conceived as a way of negating the potential home-field advantage that the hosting kingdom may have. While the actual host academy teams which are in this unique matchup are randomized by the algorithm, that algorithm is coded to select one—and only one—same-academy matchup in the first round each year. And now we know the two teams which Beacon, the academy belonging to this year’s host kingdom, will be sending into battle against one another! We know Battleship and Juniper quite well, don’t we, Peter?”
“Indeed, Barty! Now, of course, Team JNPR should need no introduction thanks to the unparalleled accomplishments of Beacon Academy’s brightest star, Pyrrha Nikos, but as a professor who has instructed this team day in and day out for the past year, perhaps I can give some insight—”
As one of the announcers launched into a bombastic and frankly boring description of the various members of Team JNPR, Robyn tuned him out and turned to Pietro.
“Doctor?” she said. “I don’t think you ever explained how a kid from Patch ended up in your clinic. She’s the only one you see from anywhere besides Mantle, isn’t she?”
Pietro sighed deeply and nodded. “Correct. The decision to take her on as a patient was… Mostly due to unusual circumstances. A favor was called in by someone in a position of power, answered by someone else who was in a position of power above me, and I was asked to do this. There was nothing forceful about the request, and I would’ve had every option to decline. But… when it was asked of me, how could I not?”
It was going to take Robyn a while to chew through the implications of that. Sometimes she did wonder about Pietro’s military past. Which he had disavowed entirely, as was clear to anyone with a functioning brain, but… just what had he done for Atlas in his nebulous capacity as a ‘research director,’ and what had changed about it to make him retire so abruptly? Any attempt to ask him about it was always unsuccessful, and the only clue she had was… Well, the entire incident with that kid, and everything that happened afterward, which Pietro fit into somehow, by his own admission.
“But at the end of it all, I am quite glad I had the pleasure of meeting Yang. She is a wonderful pen pal! A sad soul, for sure, but one that does her best to hide it and burns bright nonetheless. In some ways, she reminds me of…”
He trailed off into silence, a distant sorrow coming into his eyes, and then he turned to watch the television without another word.
Robyn stared at him. And then there were the times like this, when he would allude to something in the vaguest of terms—something which Robyn could recognize with painful clarity as a loss of a loved one. This was a sorrow which had begun after his retirement from the military. But whoever he had lost, he never elaborated on it; never even acknowledged directly that he’d lost someone. Whatever ordeal he had endured, he suffered the memory of it in silence.
“—And that is the admirable Team JNPR! Now, Bartholomew, my broadcasting partner, will introduce you all to Team BSYP!”
Robyn crossed her arms and turned back to the broadcast. At least Pietro had a good distraction for the next few days. And thank the gods, the other announcer, who was much more fun, would be introducing Team Battleship.
Battleship. What an Atlesian-style name, she thought to herself.
“Now, the presence of Pyrrha Nikos may lead you to believe this fight is a foregone conclusion, but, good people of Remnant, the team across the arena will be a formidable opponent! Allow me to introduce you to these four extraordinary girls! And there is no better place to start than with their leader, Blake Belladonna!”
Robyn blinked. She exchanged a bewildered look with her teammates-slash-girlfriends. “…That’s not one of those Belladonnas, is it?” she said. “There’s no way—”
The screen flashed to reveal a (obviously posed) action shot of a black-haired girl who was very clearly a cat Faunus.
“Good gods,” someone from behind them whispered.
That was when Robyn remembered there was someone in the room who might know the actual answer to this question. She turned to throw a glance at Stella Draco, sitting in a ripped armchair a meter away. Officially, Stella was just an unimpressive mine worker with shoulders someone could build a railroad on. Unofficially, though, she was the number-three ranking White Fang member in Atlas. And right now, Stella looked both more and less surprised than the rest of them.
She noticed Robyn looking her way, and after a moment, nodded. “That’s exactly who you think it is. We heard she left, of course, but we all just assumed she just wanted a quiet life. Not, you know…” She gestured at the screen.
“So she’s a defector?” another Faunus said from behind the Huntresses.
“Not necessarily,” Stella said. “Depends on why she’s at Beacon. Also…” She hesitated, and then continued. “You didn’t hear this from me, but we’ve been picking up some… things about the Vale branch. Rumors that aren’t pretty, about Taurus and the loyalty he demands and what he’ll do if he doesn’t get it. So it’s entirely possible Belladonna was fleeing, not defecting, and Beacon might even have seemed like a safe haven for her. So I’m gonna give her the benefit of the doubt until proven otherwise, because Faunus don’t get that nearly enough as is.”
Robyn stared at the screen. The incongruence of this girl being a rookie student and a White Fang veteran at the same time…
Pietro took off his cap and slowly rubbed his forehead. “Yang did give me the impression in her letters that she had quite an interesting team.”
That was when Joanna, who had been leafing through one of the tournament programs, stopped short, staring at one of the pages.
“Speaking of which—” she started to say, before being cut off by the broadcast doing a smash cut to an image of Weiss Fucking Schnee in a modified fencing pose.
“And now the S in BSYP needs as little introduction as Pyrrha Nikos, but let me—”
Stella and May burst into laughter.
Robyn thought about a Schnee and a White Fang veteran sharing a team and wondered how in the broken fucking moon those two had not torn out each other’s throats.
“Oh, if she’s anything like her older sister,” May said once she’d caught her breath, “Then I’d pay all the lien in the world to see their first week living in a room together.”
“Maybe Belladonna put a leash on her,” Fiona said. When everyone in the room turned to stare at her, she shrugged. “What? I’m a Faunus, I can say that. Besides, it’s exactly what May did to Wi—”
“Fiona,” May said, with the tone of someone who was considering homicide.
At that point, the broadcast flashed to an image of the third team member, and even if Robyn hadn’t ever seen Pietro’s mystery patient, she recognized the bright yellow-and-black prosthetic arm that the girl named Yang Xiao Long wore on one hand.
“There she is!” Pietro cheered, pulling out a miniature BSYP pennant from a pocket and waving wildly. “Armed and ready, my dear! Armed and ready!” When he noticed the rest of the room staring at him, he hastily added, “Her words, not mine!”
By now, Robyn was wondering if the fourth member of Team Battleship would break the trend and be a person not already known to someone in this room, or if this team was just that weird.
“And the final member of the team, a girl who may very well run the table and win this tournament! Penny Pallas!”
Robyn was greeted with the image of an orange-haired girl smiling cheerily, posing with a peace sign held over one eye and a leg kicked out. On one shoulder, she rested the biggest sword Robyn had ever seen in her life.
“That is the biggest sword I’ve ever seen in my life,” Joanna said.
“It’s no surprise that Miss Nikos has the best sparring record in the school, but our viewers may not know that Miss Pallas is quite close behind her with a sterling sparring record of nineteen wins and two losses! One of those losses was to Miss Nikos, but I am as excited for a rematch as anyone else!”
The broadcast cut to a split-screen view of teams BSYP and JNPR standing at the center of the arena, and the first thing Robyn noticed was the Penny girl waving her zweihander at the crowd like it was a toothpick. And—
“Hang on, are those temporary tattoos?” May said, sitting forward and squinting at the screen.
“Of course, no fight involving Team BSYP would be complete without Miss Pallas’s trademark sense of style! It looks like she’s chosen a knife-wielding bunny and a rainbow with a frowning face as today’s adornments—and that tells me, she means business!”
“Okay, this girl is trans,” May said. “I’m calling it.”
Exactly one second later, the Penny girl turned to one side, revealing a bright and unmistakable trans flag patch embroidered into the sleeve of her hoodie.
“How do you do that?” Stella said. “That’s the second time I’ve seen you predict one of the contestants being trans, too.”
May grinned like a hyena and sat back, throwing an arm around Fiona and Joanna. “She’s got the energy that only we can have. And that energy is called being one of the baddest bitches on Remnant, as my three girlfriends can attest to. Anyways, fuck Atlas, I’m rooting for this girl and her team to win the whole damn thing.”
“I wouldn’t be opposed,” Fiona said after a moment’s thought.
“They have to get through Pyrrha Nikos first,” Robyn said, before turning to Pietro. “It’ll be a real challenge. Doctor, you’ve got the inside info, what do you… think…?”
She trailed off. Something was wrong.
Pietro, stiffly clutching the arms of his mechnochair and staring at the television like his life depended on it, looked as if he’d seen a ghost.
“Pietro?” Robyn said again, more carefully. The rest of her team heard the sudden change in her tone, and swiveled to look at her and Pietro, immediately on high alert.
Pietro didn’t seem to have heard her until a few seconds later when he shook his head, some of the color returning to his face. He turned to Robyn, a sad smile playing over his lips.
“Don’t worry,” he said finally. His eyes flicked to the broadcast and then back to Robyn, a heaviness settling over him. “A face from my past. One which I always knew might appear again, in exactly this way.”
Atlas
Arthur Watts sat up, blinking at the orange-haired girl on his television, and wondered if he was seeing things.
After a long pause to confirm that his eyes were in working condition, he strode over to a corner of his covert apartment in Atlas (a penthouse, of course, a little identity theft and a dead heir was all he had to do take the luxury dwelling entirely for himself), opened a drawer, and began rifling through it. Its contents: documents relating to ventures from a past long since burned to the ground.
“And there’s the first blood of the match, delivered by Pallas as she dodges under an attack from Arc and sends him flying into a nearby tree!”
These papers held no sentimental value to Watts—he kept them only as reminders to sharpen his hatred of those who had mortally insulted him.
“Viewers may be surprised to see someone of smaller stature capable of delivering such blows, but I assure you I am not surprised—I’ve seen Miss Pallas train all year, and she is more than capable of delivering ground-shaking hits until the crows come home!”
And of course, amongst these papers, there were references to Project Battle Angel. Unofficially known as the PENNY Project.
“Some excellent dueling between Nikos and Belladonna occurring on the left side of the split screen—this is clearly one of those fights where there’s more to keep track of than you have eyes!”
PENNY. Watts let out a derisive snort. An idiotic acronym that actually didn’t stand for anything. He had never once stooped low enough to refer to the project by that name. But regardless of what name it had, Project Battle Angel had been a mind-numbingly foolish and woefully simpleminded project. The entire idea was nothing but a glorified Atlesian Knight, its thoroughly underwhelming nature hidden by a plastered-on layer of pointless mystique and useless complexity. He would never understand how Polendina’s nauseatingly sententious obsession with the soul and other esoteric nonsense had managed to enchant the dimwitted jackboots who ran Atlas.
“Oh, and there’s Lie Ren with an excellent deflection of Xiao Long’s punch there, using her momentum to redirect it into Penny Pallas, taking off a good chunk of Pallas’s Aura—but she is unfazed! And still fighting!”
And then, as a token gesture—some simpering and wildly inadequate attempt at assuaging him—the bureaucrats in charge had so ‘graciously’ given Watts a spot on Project Battle Angel! What a honor! To work on the development of a weapon which could not be trusted to fire a bullet when its trigger was pulled! A weapon which insisted on wearing ridiculous things like bows and dresses at all possible times! A weapon which genuinely thought it was a little girl, and brattishly demanded to be treated as such! And that was all intended, all by design! What a monstrously inefficient contraption.
“It seems that Miss Nikos and Miss Valkyrie are actively avoiding Miss Pallas! I’m not entirely sure why, though. Perhaps they’re afraid of her? Do you have any insight, Peter?”
“I’m afraid I’m just as confused as you, Barty, but whatever the reason, it must be noted that Miss Pallas is not taking the opportunity granted either. If those two really are afraid of her, then she could be pressing her advantage, forcing the entire team onto the back foot! But instead, she seems content to let them keep their distance. As if she’s afraid of them, too? Quite odd.”
“Still, a thoroughly exciting match nonetheless!”
Watts had said it a thousand times—what the Atlesian military needed was more certainty, not less. And yet, the incompetent men at the head of the kingdom had gone ahead with the development of a cannon which had a tendency to get distracted by insects and hide in the most inconvenient places. But, well… their loss had been Watts’s gain, because now he had found himself a far stronger ally. One who had opened doors for him which he’d never thought existed. And what did the military have to show for their hilariously misplaced faith in Pietro Polendina? Less than nothing. Wasted money, wasted resources, wasted time. And, of course, the kingdom’s loss of Watts himself. Doubtlessly the greatest loss of them all.
“Oh, and there goes Valkyrie, taken below the Aura threshold by a stupendous offensive maneuver from Miss Xiao Long and Miss Belladonna—even I didn’t know her ribbon could do that! It’s just three people left for JNPR, and while BSYP’s taken their fair share of hits, this fight seems to be tilting decidedly in their direction!”
And the great success bought at such an obscenely high price? A walking malfunction that blew itself up.
“Now Pallas splits off from the rest of her team to face Ren alone, leaving a three-against-two for Pyrrha Nikos and her partner, Jaune Arc! Can the no-longer-invincible girl overcome these incredible odds?”
When, years ago, Watts had heard of the explosive failure of Project Battle Angel, he’d thrown his head back and laughed to the heavens, long and loud and satisfied. It was pure poetry that the project’s centerpiece had blown itself up—exactly what Watts had always expected to happen. It was the ultimate vindication, to see the project fail so miserably that its initiative was entirely abandoned and Polendina was sent to a long-overdue retirement. Now Atlas had no Battle Angel and no Arthur Watts.
“Oh! And Belladonna, the team leader, is out of Aura! And Lie Ren is ably handling Miss Pallas so far—don’t call this a comeback, folks!”
The deluded fool that Polendina was, he’d probably convinced himself that he’d lost an actual child because he’d chopped off a bit of his soul to leave in the vaguely female-shaped chassis. Honestly, Watts was of the opinion that the old coot should’ve been put in a mental ward for senility the moment that he started calling that thing his daughter.
“Oh, Arc’s out of the fight! But for his troubles he took two of Team Battleship with him! And suddenly Pallas is flying solo—but there goes Lie Ren! Way, way out of the arena! I’ll wager he’s going to be feeling that knockout blow for a few hours more!”
Finally, buried at the back of the drawer under a decade of other things, Watts found precisely what he was looking for. He stood back up with a huff, and turned back to his television.
“It’s a team round turned into a singles match, folks! And this faceoff will be a fight worthy of the finals, I assure you! Penny Pallas and Pyrrha Nikos have come to a halt in a tense standoff at the center of the arena now, sizing each other up—it’s only a question of who makes the first move!”
Watts held up the photo in his hand: a picture of the Battle Angel project in progress, taken during his last days of being involved. And placed on a laboratory table was a decidedly unfinished chassis, bare metal and exposed circuitry from the shoulders down, but the face—
“And Nikos makes first move! She—Wait, where is she going?”
Orange hair. Freckles. Green eyes. All of it embarrassingly fake, laughably artificial, plastic imitations, a hideous shadow of real people. This thing was an affront to the human image, and it was what Atlas had decided to pin all their ambitions on.
“Miss Nikos has… surrendered?”
Watts looked back up at the broadcast, where the spear-and-shield-wielding girl had just sprinted to the arena’s edge and jumped out of bounds without putting up any sort of fight. But he didn’t care one whit about the fight. He was focused on the other contestant’s face—
He muted the announcers’ yammering with a flick of his hand, and stared. Orange hair. Freckles. Green eyes. Excessive strength. Inhuman durability.
Fury rose up in Watts. There was no doubting it. Project Battle Angel, the thing which had humiliated him and destroyed his career in Atlas, was not blown to smithereens somewhere in the Atlesian tundra. Project Battle Angel was right there on his television screen, still smiling brightly and pretending to be an innocent little Huntress girl.
But just as quickly, his fury was tempered by a righteous purpose, a triumphant realization of what opportunities he still had. If Project Battle Angel was still alive, that meant it could still be destroyed. To destroy it by his hands would be the only thing sweeter than seeing it destroyed by its own incompetence.
And Arthur Watts already possessed the perfect opportunity to destroy Project Battle Angel once and for all.
He would call the discovery he’d made just days ago a stroke of fate, if not for the fact that this was an invention created purely from his own genius. A product entirely of his own skill which would be the downfall of Polendina, of Polendina's damned chatterbox contraption, of Atlas itself. The downfall of everyone and everything that had wronged him.
Watts’s own creation would destroy the robot once and for all, proving his own mind decisively superior to all others. He would have his revenge.
Vale
Although not as packed as it had been earlier before the first fights, the preparation room within Amity Colosseum which served teams waiting for their fight was still fairly crowded by mid-afternoon. And as such, the shocked buzz which swept through the room when Pyrrha Nikos surrendered was chaotic, loud enough to drown out all other conversation.
Cinder Fall stared up at the television screen from the couch where she’d lounged with her team for the past several hours. All of the amusement she’d felt while watching these pitiful fights abruptly evaporated, leaving her in, just for a moment, complete disbelief.
“What was that?” Mercury yelled at a nearby screen, ignoring the strange looks from nearby students that he drew. “That was a completely winnable fight!”
“Mercury, shut up,” Emerald hissed, before fixing a nervous look on Cinder. And for once, Cinder wasn’t irritated by Emerald’s endless frantic fussing over her, because she actually did want Mercury to shut his trap while she worked through the ramifications of this.
Team JNPR, as pathetic as the rest of the team besides Nikos was, should not have lost that match. Nikos was a brainwashed and oblivious pawn of Ozpin, but she was not a coward. Something else was going on.
“...I’m just as surprised as you, Peter,” one of the professors-turned-announcers was saying now. In the aftermath of the match, their inane banter had descended to a new level of absurdity, one which nearly brought Cinder physical pain to listen to. “You can see the tournament umpires convening in their booth now to determine if there is anything that can be done about Miss Nikos’s actions, but I don’t think they’ll be able to change the outcome of this match! There is nothing in the rules and bylaws of the Vytal Tournament which is intended to handle scenarios such as this. And I would know; I have the entire rulebook memorized from back to front! No one has ever voluntarily surrendered a match—or even attempted to—in the history of the tournament, as the fights are specifically designed to avoid the possibility of bodily harm!”
Neo, sitting next to Cinder with her arms crossed, was pouting at the screens, her hopes for violence and bloodshed momentarily deflated.
“I just don’t know what was going through her mind, Barty! Nikos is an intelligent girl, and I will trust that she knew something that none of us are privy to, or that she saw something no one else could see, but I cannot even begin to fathom what would have to be true, to drive her to such an unprecedented decision!”
Cinder looked around at the prospective Huntresses—cannon fodder, all of them—and saw confusion. Uncertainty. Maybe even indignation. Disruption. Perhaps… this was not an entirely unwelcome development, after all. It was a hole poked in the theater of the tournament. Perhaps even a hint to the rest of the world that there were more things going on behind the curtain than the academies would have everyone believe.
“Ah, the umpires are about to announce their decision. We’ll go to them live—”
Cinder returned her attention to the broadcast just as it switched to a view of the umpiring room. Several of the umpires were stonefaced, and the rest were visibly nervous. The crew chief stepped up to a microphone that’d been hastily placed in front of her, and to a world watching with bated breath, she announced the decision.
“According to the rules of the tournament, a contestant is considered knocked out when any part of their body or apparel crosses the boundary line at the edge of the arena. No consideration is given in the rules to the manner in which the contestant crosses the boundary line. Therefore, someone choosing to walk across the boundary line is functionally indistinguishable from someone being knocked over it. Given this reading of the rules, we declare Pyrrha Nikos to have been knocked out and therefore eliminated from the match. Therefore, all members of Team JNPR have been eliminated. Team BSYP is recognized as the victorious team, and will advance to the doubles round.”
The shocked murmur had ebbed as the umpire delivered the deliberation—none of the students present seemed particularly surprised. But even before the umpire was done speaking, a new sound rose rapidly in place of the murmur—from outside the preparation room. Even through the walls and ceilings and metal structures which separated this room from the rest of Amity Colosseum, Cinder could plainly hear the vociferous boos raining down from the stands. Discontent, anger, annoyance. Negative emotions.
The booing grew louder and louder, making the floor under Cinder vibrate, becoming a sustained wave of sound.
And now she realized—this was not a setback. This was exactly what she wanted. The veil of the tournament was being pulled away—just a little—to reveal the ugly framework of Ozpin’s rule which underlaid everything and demanded performances suitable for keeping the masses docile. And this was what happened when the masses were not sufficiently entertained by the song-and-dance put on by Ozpin and his allies. They began to push back. They began to agitate. They did not like being made aware that they were part of a production that had been produced since time immemorial.
Cinder closed her eyes, savoring the ravenous booing and the announcers’ useless calls for calm. There were still a thousand paths to victory. Nikos was useful to their plans, but not critical, and their plans could be reworked. All that would be needed was a few extra hours to weigh her options and select the next step. And Cinder would gladly give up a few lost hours of sleep in exchange for the fall of the world.
Ozpin’s scroll rang. He knew who it would be.
His eyes passed once more over the broadcast showing discontented, restless crowds in the Colosseum, and then he muted the television and picked up his scroll.
Very few people had his scroll number. But one man who did was a person who had come to him years ago in desperation, seeking a safe haven for his daughter. A safe haven which Ozpin had promised, along with a direct line to him—not for any sort of regular correspondence, but for emergencies.
“Doctor Polendina,” he said, his voice echoing peculiarly in his empty office.
“Headmaster,” Pietro Polendina said. “I saw Penny.” His voice was nervous, but undeniably serious. Not angry, or even overly urgent.
“I knew that she might someday choose to be a Huntress even without the pressures of Atlas,” he went on. “She always wanted to help others, with all her heart and soul. And I can blame myself for instilling that mindset in her so early in life, but the fact of the matter is that being a protector undeniably made Penny happy.”
Ozpin remembered a similar conversation with Pietro, from before Penny had come to Beacon.
“I knew she could not be hidden forever. I knew that Atlas would be guaranteed to discover her, if she chose the path of a Huntress. All of this, I accepted.” Suddenly, Pietro’s tone shifted, and the gentleness was scraped away, revealing something worn down by exhaustion and worry and fear. It was a familiar tone. “But what I don’t know, and what I need to know, is this: Did she have a choice?”
Out of the corner of his eye, Ozpin saw replays of the match scrolling across the broadcast—Pyrrha parrying a strike from Weiss, Penny launching herself off a glyph to attack Ren from the side, Yang’s hair igniting as she dueled Nora.
“Yes,” Ozpin said, with nothing but honesty. “It was entirely of her own volition that she began her training. I did not ask anything of her. I did not even offer anything to her. Her choice was to force the issue by arriving unannounced at initiation fifteen minutes before its start and informing Glynda and I of her plans.”
There was a pause from the other end of the line, and then Pietro laughed warmly. After a few moments, he coughed and cleared his throat, the tension disappearing both from his voice and also from the air in Ozpin’s office.
“That’s my daughter, always a bold one! You’ve just put an old man at ease, Headmaster. I don’t doubt she’s left quite the mark on your academy already.”
Ozpin let his gaze slide over to the forgotten garden on the rooftop. “You have no idea, Doctor. Would you like to know particulars?”
“Oh, there’s no need to ask about what I can see from Atlas, Headmaster.” Pietro’s voice thickened, the words doubtlessly fighting through tears to reach Ozpin. “I can see the joy that she radiates through the screen. I can see the friends she’s made, the communities she’s brought herself into, the places of belonging she’s carved out for herself. I can see that she is living, more than she ever did in Atlas. I have never been more proud,” he said, his voice so saturated with emotion that Ozpin could barely make out the words. “Thank you, Ozpin.”
Click.
Ozpin stared at his scroll, letting the droning dial tone fill his office for a few moments. Age-old guilt pressed down on him.
“Pietro,” he murmured to an unresponsive wooden desk. “I don’t think I should ever be thanked for solving a problem when I am also responsible for its existence.”
“I’m sorry,” Penny said again, even though her logic core knew full well that she had nothing to apologize for. She… just couldn’t help it right now. “It’s my fault.”
“It isn’t,” Pyrrha said again as the two teams filed down the arena’s exit tunnel. Behind them, the boos and jeers of a disappointed crowd echoed off the walls. “You didn’t choose to be made of metal.”
“But you also did not choose your Semblance!” Penny said. Why was the crowd so loud? The sounds of derision continuously washing over them felt like a judgment of the worst kind. She hated it. “I should have surrendered. I’d—I’d rather it be everyone mad at me, than at one of my friends—”
Hic.
Penny fell silent, because at this point in time, she had learned that arguing with the hiccup reflex was not a productive venture. Because the hiccup reflex had proven previously that it would send Penny into an entire hiccuping fit if she tried to insist that she was more deserving of harm than other people.
Was it strange that she was starting to grow fond of the hiccup reflex in this form? The logic side of her already loved it, but her emotional side was beginning to feel a real friendship with it, and that was new. The hiccup reflex was still a part of her, after all! This part was just trying to help! This part wanted to keep her safe and tried to make sure the whole Penny didn’t hurt herself! It really did feel nice, knowing her body was doing its best in its own way.
And Ruby had told her the hiccups were cute. That was also nice, and could not be forgotten when considering the overall impact.
“Really, it’s fine.” Pyrrha gave Penny a tired smile and reached up to her hair, undoing the clasp which held her ponytail in place. “I’m not the Invincible Girl anymore. Every day, it’s easier and easier to not care what the world thinks of me,” she said, shaking her deep red hair out. It always amazed Penny that people could call her a redhead in the same way they called Pyrrha a redhead. “I used to think my destiny was to be the perfect Huntress. But, Penny, standing there in the ring opposite you, and knowing I could kill you with one wrong move, one slipped reflex… I didn’t care about perfection anymore, or how I looked to the crowd… I just cared about helping the person in front of me who was in danger.” She looked down at her shield, her reflection hovering in the polished metal, slightly warped by the curved design. “That’s what being a Huntress is all about, isn’t it?”
On the other side of Penny, Weiss was nodding—either along with Pyrrha, or to herself. And then she added, “Any of us would’ve done the same thing if we were in Pyrrha’s situation, Penny.”
“Thank you…” Penny said. It was much harder to deny that when both her good friend and her partner were offering valid counterpoints.
Pyrrha smiled. One of the biggest smiles Penny had ever seen from her.
“I should be the one getting blamed for us losing,” Jaune muttered, fiddling with the hilt of his sword. “Because I sure didn’t help. I don’t even have a Semblance I could’ve used.”
He looked askance at Penny. “I don’t suppose you have any tips on how to unlock my Semblance, since it also took you until this year to find it?”
Penny tilted her head, thinking. Her advice was not very… advisable. However, Jaune had asked, so—
“Have you tried being physically trapped in a deadly situation where others need your help which you are unable to give, inspiring a feeling of utter hopelessness within you, until you let out a silent cry of futility to the universe which is answered with a spark of something entirely new and ethereal in your soul?”
Jaune blinked with extreme slowness.
“…I sure did feel pretty hopeless in that fight,” he said finally. “Don’t think that’s the kind of hopeless you meant, though.”
But before either of them could continue swapping notes on Semblance discovery, Penny’s auditory sensors picked up voices from down the hall.
“All right, commercial break’s over in three, two, one… Welcome back, Atlas! We’re still coming to you live from the Amity Colosseum, as we will be all day and night! This is Pardon My Interjection, the greatest show on Remnant hailing from the greatest kingdom on Remnant!”
Whoever that newscaster was, their voice was loud, and grating, and pumped full of a cheerfulness that didn’t sound like other kinds of cheerfulness Penny knew. It sounded like someone trying to be a friend who wasn’t really a friend at all.
They hadn’t gotten much farther down the hall before her friends began to hear the newscasters’ voices as well, as it was quite hard to miss.
“—Now we’ve got a few minutes while they reset the arena and clean it up for the next fight, but hoo boy, all the janitors in the world won’t be able to scrub away the absolute stink that disasterclass of a fight left behind! I was having a great time today, until whatever the fuck that was, Jim!”
“You’re telling me, Joe. I feel like Pyrrha Nikos just personally pissed in my bowl of Pumpkin Pete’s!”
The two teams came to a halt, Weiss in particular freezing where she stood, both hands going to her face. “Oh, no,” she mumbled through her hands. “Those might be the last two people on the planet I want to encounter right now.”
“Who are they?” Blake said. Her ears were flat against her head.
“The hosts of the most popular gossip show in Atlas. Or rather, the most popular show in Atlas, period,” Weiss said. “Imagine the nastiest, most mean-spirited person you’ve ever met. Now imagine digging the soul out of their body, and stuffing wads of cash into the hole you’ve just left behind. Now put a suit and a spray tan on them, and that’s a good approximation of these two,” she said. “The only thing they’ve ever cared about in their egotistical, inflammatory lives is how high their ratings can get.”
“Average Atlesian citizen,” Nora mumbled, before straightening up. “Okay! We’ll just ignore them for now but then set their airship on fire later! So we don’t have to deal with—Pyrrha. What are you doing. PYRRHA!”
Nora’s abrupt digression was because Pyrrha was marching alone down the corridor towards the source of the newscasters’ voices, her hair waving behind her with every purposeful step and her muscles rippling in a way that had to be intentional.
“This is how I tell my agent to start looking for a new job!” Pyrrha called over her shoulder.
No one on either team had enough Aura left to physically stop Pyrrha, with the exception of Penny, who would not be attempting any sort of bodily intervention with Pyrrha ‘built her entire fighting style around manipulating the thing which Penny’s body was made of’ Nikos. Which meant, there was no stopping Pyrrha as she stalked towards two newscasters who didn’t have the slightest idea of what was about to hit them.
Mantle
Robyn pinched the brow of her nose, let out a deep sigh, and met Pietro’s eyes again. “So let me make sure I’ve got this straight.” She gestured behind her. “Penny is your daughter.” And somehow, things only got weirder from there. “Your daughter who was built to be a sentient weapon for the Atlesian Military. Your daughter who is a robot—”
“She prefers to be called a synthetic person,” Pietro cut in, his voice a little sharper.
Robyn stared, and ultimately couldn’t hold back a small smile. Somehow, Pietro saying that actually made her feel a little bit better about all this.
“Your daughter who is a synthetic person,” she said, nodding slowly and committing the term to memory. “Who you helped escape the kingdom because you wanted her to be free. Who has no memory of you, or of her life in Atlas, or even any idea of where she came from.”
“...The memory wipe was her idea,” Pietro said, his face—no, his entire body—sinking into utter misery. “I would’ve rather died than take that from her, but she refused to consider anything else. She insisted that the temptation to come back would be too strong if she remembered anything.”
Robyn didn’t need her Semblance to know Pietro was telling the truth. It made painfully perfect sense.
She picked up the dirty plate sitting on the counter next to her and placed it in the dishwasher, more out of rote habit than anything else. Living in a too-small apartment with three other people taught dirty-dish responsibilities very fast.
“Okay,” she said, finally feeling sane for the first time since Pietro had pulled her into his kitchenette to tell her. “I’m not mad at you, Pietro. Not even a little. Whatever mountain of ethics violations is involved in creating a person for the purpose of being a military weapon, I think you’ve already atoned as much as you can. I just…” She rubbed her forehead again. Fuck, this really was a lot to take in. “—What’s the reason to tell me now? After all these years of keeping a secret?”
Pietro tilted his head towards the firmly closed door to his waiting area, where the rest of the gathering sat, oblivious to the conversation happening ten feet away. “She’s not hiding anymore,” he said with a sad smile. “I just know it’s a matter of time now until the world knows about her. It may be a long time, but if it isn’t… I wanted to tell you about her. Tell you the truth, before someone else tries to give the world a twisted, wrong version of her story! I want you to know that she has far more in common with you and your team, than she ever had with General Ironwood or the Ace Ops or the rest of the military she was born into!”
Robyn nodded slowly. If she’d ever doubted that Pietro was that girl’s father… well, the doubts were out the window now. The patented overprotective instinct activation was on full display.
But before she could actually reply, the door flew open with a BANG and May stuck her head in. “I wasn’t eavesdropping, I promise, but you two need to see this. I’m not kidding, get out here right now.”
“What—” Robyn and Pietro followed her back into the viewing room. She turned to the television, only to frown in an annoyed confusion. More annoyed than confused, really. Because—
“Why are we watching Pardon My Interjection of all things?” she started to say, only to belatedly realize that something extremely unusual was happening to the worst show in the kingdom (which somehow also had the highest ratings by a huge margin).
“You missed the first part!” Fiona said, grabbing for the remote. “Here, hang on—” She rewound. “Watch.”
At first, it just looked like the usual Grimm-infested volcano of vitriol and bile, except they were filming from Amity Colosseum instead of their studio in Atlas.
“How about this, Joe? Maybe Ozpin used his secret mind control powers to make Nikos surrender because the other team had a Faunus and a transgender? He probably couldn’t let the DEI students look bad! It sure makes more sense than anything else I’ve thrown out here—”
“No, no, Jim, usually I’m right there with you on stuff like this, but I think I know what actually happened, okay? You know the big news about Nikos and Schnee macking on each other at the Beacon gala?”
“I’m picking up what you’re putting down, Joe. Nikos threw the fight to win the favor of the rich bitch who’s got her talons sunk deeeeeep into the superstar’s heart? I dig it, I dig it.”
“I don’t think it’s her heart that the Schnee’s got a hold of—”
And that was when Pyrrha Nikos appeared from a hallway in the background, vaulted a barricade, and stomped up to the desk which the two hosts sat behind, her expression stormy and unnervingly determined and her hair waving like a curtain of blood. The hosts’ backs were to her, and they were so caught up in their vapid jabbering that they didn’t hear her coming until she was picking up a frightened security guard attempting to stand in her way and moving him aside in the manner of one arranging a couch cushion. That gave the duo just enough time to turn around and register Nikos’s presence before she appeared between them and dropped an Aura-enhanced elbow into their solid oak desk, breaking it in half with an almighty CRUNCH.
“Am I dreaming?” Robyn said, already having the most fun she’d ever had watching this show.
“You invertebrates don’t have the slightest shadow of an idea about what you’re spewing,” Pyrrha growled, and it was terrifying, even if she was currently talking to empty air on account of both hosts toppling backwards out of their chairs. But then she hauled one of them—Robyn didn’t care to remember which one was which—upright, holding him by the front of his suitjacket as easily as a stray cat being picked up by the scruff of his neck.
Robyn barely registered Fiona shouting “Get his ass!” None of this felt real.
“Would you like to know why I forfeited?” Pyrrha said. Amongst the damage she’d done to the studio, she must’ve hit a microphone, because her words were coming through the broadcast slightly distorted now, which only added to the effect, honestly. “It was because of my Semblance! Which you don’t know a single thing about, so you don’t need to waste breath speculating on it! My Semblance is uniquely dangerous to Penny, to the point that we believe the smallest application of it on her could kill her! And my Semblance is such an integral part of my fighting style that sometimes I’ll use it on reflex during a fight, without giving it a single bit of thought!”
“And this is where we paused to get you in here!” Fiona said. “Uncharted ground in television history from here on out!”
The other host started to unsteadily get up, but then Pyrrha spun around without letting go of the host in her hands, knocking over the second host with the first one’s backside, which was either a hilarious accident or a viciously calculated move.
“Let’s do some basic arithmetic, if you two can manage that,” Pyrrha snarled. “A Semblance that I use in a fight without even meaning to, plus a girl fighting against me who might be killed by any level of my Semblance usage. Do you know what that would add up to if I kept fighting?”
The host currently in Pyrrha’s clutches actually managed to stammer out, “Um, b-b-bad?”
“Yes,” Pyrrha said, nodding slowly and with deadly purpose. “Bad. Very bad. And given the choice between disappointing the crowd or killing a friend…” She shook her head and dropped the host to the ground (presumably landing on top of the other one, creating a groaning heap of hair gel and moral bankruptcy). “...If you don’t know what choice I’m picking one hundred percent of the time, you’ve completely lost the plot of what it means to be a Huntress.”
The hosts didn’t reply, and there was a brief pause in which Pyrrha glanced around at the ruins of the set, the briefest shadow of doubt flickering in her eyes when her gaze skidded off the cameras. Which just kept on rolling.
But then she shook her head and launched into a new tirade, still looming over the two hosts, who were no longer trying to get up—probably the smartest decision either of them had ever made.
“Maybe you have lost sight of what it means to be competing in this tournament. You’re under the impression that the only reason we could possibly exist is for your entertainment. Have you forgotten that for some of us, this tournament might be some of the only genuine levity in our lives between our ventures beyond the walls of our kingdoms where we’ll likely die protecting the people booing us right now?! So, you’ll have to forgive us for caring more about wanting to have fun than putting on a good show.”
And then she spun to face the camera, glaring into it with all the power of a blazing sun focused into one single glower. “I am not a show for you. None of us are! You shouldn’t care about how many fights I’ve won. You shouldn’t care about how exciting our sparring matches are. You shouldn’t care about who I was seen at a dance with! You shouldn’t care about any of those things! Every student here, we’re all people! We’re not your paper dolls to play with and tear up and scribble all over! I’m not invincible! I never have been! I’m not a savior! I’m just a girl! I’m just a Huntress! A Huntress who will save lives and help people and kill Grimm and die early like every other Huntress in history!”
She swallowed and then nodded, more to herself than anyone else.
“And there’s nothing else I’d rather do. I’ve made my peace with that, and the rest of the world should, too.”
As Pyrrha Nikos fell into silence, breathing heavily and clearly out of adrenaline, Robyn was honestly half-expecting the feed to shut off there, because how could an ending get more cinematic than that? But instead, someone new stalked into the frame in the background, marching towards the disassembled studio just as purposefully as Pyrrha had minutes ago—
“Oh, something’s about to explode,” May muttered as they all watched the approach of Weiss Schnee.
Vale
Weiss stared at Pyrrha from afar, the blood in her ears pounding harder and harder until she could barely hear her shouting. Pyrrha was doing more or less exactly what Weiss would need to do in two days—make an irreversible break with the past. Burn bridges that needed to be burned.
She watched, and her thoughts whirled.
Not only was this the most-watched show in all of Atlas, it was also fairly popular elsewhere . And for those parts of the world not watching before… Well, word of what Pyrrha was doing would’ve spread far and wide by now and convinced almost everyone else to change the channel and watch. Therefore, it was almost certain that this broadcast unfolding fifty feet from Weiss currently had a vastly wider reach than some song-and-dance press conference only attended by bored gossip columnists and only watched by the most deranged of societal rumormongers, if any of them could even wake themselves up that early, since Weiss’s press conference had been scheduled by her father at a time which Yang (and only Yang) would refer to as ‘ass-o’clock in the morning.’
Then Pyrrha said something to the cameras which made Weiss stiffen.
“We’re not your paper dolls to play with and tear up and scribble all over!”
And with those words ringing in her ears, Weiss made her decision. Penny Pallas had shown her that there were no rules about breaking free. So why should Weiss play her winning hand on Father’s rules? Why not do it entirely on her own terms, blindsiding him in all his arrogance for the second time in her life—the first being when she’d defeated what he thought was an unbeatable foe and earned the right to attend Beacon. Now she would be earning genuine freedom, just like Penny and Ruby had.
Weiss opened her scroll to her rarely-used social media profile and selected the trove of very illicit SDC intelligence she’d prepared, with Ruby’s file already pointedly removed days ago. Then she hit post with the most vicious satisfaction she’d ever felt in her life.
“Penny,” she said, indicating the scene ahead with a nod of her head. “Do not, under any circumstances, let those cameras stop rolling.”
Penny nodded and saluted, her eyes widening but an excited smile covering her face. “I will do my level best!”
“Thank you, Penny.” Weiss hoped Penny would understand she was being thanked for many more things than just this one moment. She gave her incredible partner one more satisfied smile, and broke into a brisk walk, making a beeline for Pyrrha. Penny and Pyrrha. Two girls who had shown Weiss Schnee just how much of herself could exist beyond the confines of the Schnee Dust Company. And if Ruby Karyatis could stare James Ironwood in the face and tell him that she was leaving the military… Then Weiss Schnee, soon-to-be-former heiress to the Schnee Dust Company, could do this.
She glanced down at her scroll to confirm the files had been posted, and then she came to a halt directly beside Pyrrha, staring right into the unblinking red light of an active television camera. A sadly familiar sight for Weiss.
Pyrrha seemed to have run out of steam right as Weiss arrived—all she did was throw Weiss an incredulous but silent look as she panted for breath. Weiss glanced at her for just a moment, and hoped that her eyes could convey the confidence she felt at this exact moment. It hardly mattered that the eyes of the world were now focused on her. She had learned to weather such storms of attention years ago, as a consequence of the concerts her father had pushed her into from the moment he’d realized she had a singing voice worth paying attention to.
“I have a message for my father,” she said, speaking to the camera in a loud, clear tone, holding back none of the fury swelling up inside her chest. A fury which she was recognizing as very, very old. Years of powerlessness put in cryogenic storage. A fury that finally had a chance to rise and roar after years of being clamped down and defanged and dissociated. And now, letting it out of captivity, she didn’t think it could ever be stuffed back in its cage.
“Throughout my life, you have ceaselessly demanded that I prove myself your perfect daughter, your ideal heiress who can please your swollen ego by being a perfect copy of you. Any part or aspect of me which you don’t find suitable, you have commanded me to cut it out or make it invisible somehow. And now, Father, my only regret is that I have waited so long to tell you NO.”
Mantle
Robyn and everyone else could only watch in amazement, their jaws dropping further and further with every word which came after Weiss Schnee’s “NO.”
“No more!” Schnee snarled at the camera. “I will not apologize for being caught up in the arms of Pyrrha Nikos, and I most certainly will not apologize for being attracted to someone as lovely and divine as she is—”
The high-tech Atlesian cameras, which somehow hadn’t been shut off yet, had no trouble picking up the blush which erupted on Pyrrha Nikos’s face at those words.
“—and, Father, I will die before I choose your twisted vision of what you think my future should be over my future as a Huntress!” She punctuated those words by resting a hand on the hilt of her rapier, conveying a sense of ferocious intent without even drawing her weapon.
“I am a Huntress far more than I have ever been your daughter! I am a Huntress far more than I am part of the so-called ‘family’ that you have turned into a travesty! I am a Huntress far more than I have ever been the heiress to the bloodstained, suffocating, murderous enterprise known as the Schnee Dust Company!”
“Oh, fuck, she’s doing it full-barrel,” May breathed. She was sitting up straighter than she had at any point during the tournament broadcast, watching with an intent usually reserved for battle.
Robyn moved closer, putting a comforting hand on May’s shoulder, and she noticed Fiona and Joanna leaning in as well, the three of them adding as much warmth to May’s surroundings as they could. May Marigold knew exactly what it took to break off from a rich Atlesian family which taught its children that any existence beyond the shadow of their name was worse than death.
“Once upon a time, I believed in rescuing my family’s name from the muck, but now I see how you’ve used that belief to hold me captive to your whims. You may disown me, disinherit me, scrub away my name however you please, and none of it will matter. Because the Schnee name, the company, the inheritance, is no longer my life.”
Schnee gestured emphatically at her surroundings with both arms. “I am learning to be a Huntress with my friends, with people who actually care about me. I am learning to help others far more than I ever could from within your insidious company. This is my life, Father.”
And now Schnee drew her rapier, the blade glinting in the air as she spun it around, and drove the point straight into the ground, her glare so piercing Robyn expected Doctor Polendina’s television to shatter.
“And never again will I forget: This. Life. Is. MINE.”
The broadcast wavered and turned fuzzy, as if someone was trying to stop the transmission, but a moment later it’d snapped back to the normal picture like nothing had happened. Schnee’s words hadn’t even begun to echo before she raised her non-weapon hand, which Robyn hadn’t noticed was clutching a scroll.
“And now, Father, a parting gift to repay all that you’ve done for me,” she hissed. “I invite the world to view what I’ve just posted on—”
Before things took a dramatic turn, Robyn had just enough time to think, swear to fuck, if this is all some stupid publicity stunt for social media followers—
“—Where I have just uploaded a fully indexed and organized archive of every classified file and memorandum ever created by the Schnee Dust Company’s Intelligence Division.”
This is not a publicity stunt for social media followers, Robyn amended.
Stella Draco, the number-three ranking White Fang member in Atlas and a woman who could bench-press a minecart, fell out of her chair.
Pietro hurried over to help Stella up, but she was already back up on her knees, her reptilian wings flaring instinctively behind her, as her Faunus trait always did when she was startled by something.
“Fuck me six ways to Sunday, this is the break of our fucking lives,” she said, frantically opening her scroll, only for her eyes to bulge even wider upon finding the file online. “Oh my gods. The size of this file. I need to call Nimbus. Holy—”
“We’re all downloading that file, right?” Robyn said to her team, her eyes on her own scroll where she was already doing exactly that. Her mind was racing to what they’d have to do next. They’d need to move the file to a drive that wasn’t connected to the internet, just in case Atlas or the SDC had a secret wireless backdoor into everyone’s scrolls that they’d use to delete every copy of this file in existence. Hell, they’d need to print it all out for good measure, and—
Robyn hadn’t ever imagined she’d be thanking a Schnee, but that was exactly what she was doing right now as she looked back up at the TV and watched Weiss Schnee still plowing full steam ahead.
“I denounce the Schnee Dust Company. I will not be complicit in its atrocities any longer. I hope these files show the world just how the Schnee Dust Company and its leaders mercilessly grind so many lives into nothing but dust.” She nodded once to the camera. “Whitley, I hope you enjoy life as a copy of that ghoul of a man. Mother, I—”
The feed wavered again, a static noise filling the room, but just like before, it was jolted back to normal in the blink of an eye. Now Schnee was leveling her rapier at the camera, her eyes glittering with a deadly promise.
“Father, I suspect you may demand that I return my weapon to you because it was paid for by your bank account, even though I was the one who forged and assembled it. And so I gladly invite you to Vale to receive what you deserve, whereupon I will return my blade by SHOVING IT UP YOUR A—”
And that was when the broadcast went dead.
Vale
Cinder Fall didn’t believe in luck. Only strength, and consequences. Nikos and Schnee’s unhinged rants to a worldwide audience were not luck, but things which came as consequences of the strength that Ozpin had relentlessly burdened these two unprepared and unworthy girls with. They were breaking under the strain, and this was the result. Neither girl had any idea just how much assistance they’d lent Cinder in her fight. Nikos had cut a gaping slash in the veil of the academies, and Schnee had most definitely begun the work of turning the other kingdoms against Atlas. James Ironwood would soon have a thousand different people on the warpath to his door, demanding answers for the treaty violations and espionage activities revealed within the leaked files. All of both girls’ own accord.
This was why Cinder never once wavered in her knowledge that she would win. Her opponents couldn’t help but destroy themselves.
“Yo, Cinder, we’re fighting,” Mercury said.
Cinder rose to her feet. It was time for Team CMSN’s preplanned fight with Team RSST. A chance to taste the fighting style of Ruby Karyatis, the uniquely fascinating girl who had defeated Pyrrha Nikos. And it would also be an easy win, thanks to the incredibly unimpressive team which surrounded Ruby Karyatis.
On her way out, Cinder passed by stunned students still processing Nikos’s tirade and Schnee’s breakdown, savoring the negative emotions all around her bubbling higher and higher, and nodded to herself in satisfaction. Everything was still unfolding smoothly.
Mantle
The sound of Weiss Schnee breaking the dam on a decade’s worth of repression was abruptly replaced by the monotonous whine of a test signal before she could finish her threat to Jacques Schnee. A threat which Robyn agreed with wholeheartedly. If Jacques really wanted to try taking Weiss’s weapon back, Robyn would fly him to Vale herself.
But instead of the channel cutting back to the studio as Robyn expected, the screen stayed on the test pattern, and as the seconds ticked by, Robyn realized something.
“Change the channel,” she said.
Joanna was the one with the remote, but when she tried to click to another channel, there was nothing but the same test pattern even as everyone present saw the channel indicator switch.
“What in the world?” Pietro said. “It’s been disabled—the entire Atlesian broadcast system!”
It seemed that the Schnee Dust Company wanted to stop the broadcast by any means possible. And as Robyn looked down at her scroll, she was infinitely grateful for Pietro’s super-fast internet that’d let her downloaded the file three times already, because the CCTnet page with the posted files abruptly refreshed itself and informed Robyn that the entire site was down.
But it was too late for the SDC, Robyn thought with a grim satisfaction. However many skeletons the SDC’s intelligence division had in their closet, the door had been flung open and nothing in the world would close it back up.
But she didn’t have time to look at the files right now. Because she’d just realized there was something else far more dire which needed her attention.
“Okay, girls,” she said, heading for the coat rack and pulling off her crossbow, checking it over. “We need to head out. Protection duty.” Fiona, Joanna, and May didn’t question it—they’d realized the same thing as Robyn.
Pietro watched the Happy Huntresses suiting up, buckling armor and picking up weapons and stretching. “You’re leaving?” he said, immensely surprised. “For guard duty? Right now?”
“Yep.” Robyn jerked her head towards the television. “Doctor, as good a thing as the Schnee kid just did, she also just threw the kingdom into the most chaos it’s seen in a long time. I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s already Grimm testing the walls.”
“Oh,” Pietro said, and fell silent.
Robyn dearly wished she could stay and read through every single one of those files. She desperately wanted to read the dossier SDC intelligence undoubtedly had on her. She also wanted to ask Pietro more about Penny. But with shockwaves rippling through the world, the Happy Huntresses had Grimm to kill and Mantleborn to protect.
“Are they starting the next fight yet?” Robyn said, glancing at the screen in between lacing up her boots. It would be nice for there to be a quick mood-boost in the form of a normal fight. It wouldn’t turn back any Grimm already pulled in, but she could at least hope it would prevent the situation from compounding.
“They just selected the teams,” Stella said from her new station beside Pietro’s printer, capturing every paper it spit out like it was a buried treasure. “It’s a… Team RSST and Team CMSN?”
“Great.” Robyn turned towards the door, tightened the straps on her bucklers, and was about to step out into the cold and the distant howls of Grimm when May’s voice stopped her dead.
“Robyn. Robyn. Holy shit. You’re not gonna believe who it is. It’s Ruby.”
Vale
To Penny’s relief, Weiss’s vital signs had mostly returned to normal by the time RSPBY and JNPR reconvened in the locker room which functioned as the post-fighting area where students could clean up.
“Honestly, I expected to be catatonic right about now,” Weiss said. She was sitting on a bench between Blake and Yang, fussing giddily with Myrtenaster. “The same way you were yesterday, Ruby.”
Ruby, leaning against a locker which was decidedly non-rocket-powered, shrugged. “I think this proves your choice really was easier than mine.”
Weiss’s only response was a deep sigh.
“But regardless of whatever arbitrary value of difficulty we could try assigning to both of your choices, the undeniable fact is that you both made the choice which was better yet harder!” Penny said, patting Weiss’s shoulder. “I am proud of both of you!” Then she turned to Ruby. “Although, for you, Ruby, I am proud in a somewhat different way than I am for Weiss.”
Ruby barely had time to look curious before Penny went on with, “A pride which I can show by doing this.” She leaned in and kissed Ruby on one cheek, and then the other.
Ruby’s body temperature rose. That was a trait of her which Penny adored. She always did that after a kiss, unless her temperature was still elevated from a previous kiss. And Penny was starting to think she’d never tire of noting that cute little spike in her sensors, which was an enthralling concept.
“Oh, the girlfriend kind of pride,” Ruby said with a gloriously goofy smile.
“Hey!” Nora leaned her head out from the locker she’d just crammed herself into for no readily understandable reason. “Speaking of girlfriends, since Weiss has dealt with her stupid dad once and for all, does this mean she and Pyrrha are finally gonna talk about their feelings?”
Pyrrha, who was sitting further away and brushing her hair in preparation for putting it back into its usual ponytail, went stiff. Weiss winced deeply.
“I don’t think either of them are ready for it right now, Nora,” Ren said. His voice was weary to a level that was rare even for Ren-talking-to-Nora situations, Penny noted.
Nora’s lips moved soundlessly for several seconds before she yanked herself fully out of the locker and marched up to Ren. “Okay, so when are you ever gonna be ready to talk about the feelings between us?! All our other friends are falling in love with each other! And none of our friends have known each other for as long as we have! And none of them mean as much to each other as we do to each other! So…?” She parked herself in front of Ren and put her hands on her hips.
“What feelings?” Ren said, pointedly staring at his scroll instead of Nora.
A silence ensued in which Penny felt as if she really should leave. But Yang was still in the shower, and Blake was watching Nora closely, with an expression which suggested to Penny that she was worried about something.
“That we were made for each other?” Nora said, her volume suddenly entering a precipitous fall. “Don’t you feel it? Don’t you feel the same crushing emptiness I get whenever we’re too far away from each other, like our existence doesn’t matter if we’re not together?”
This was not something Penny had ever heard before.
And only now did Ren put his scroll away, meeting Nora’s wavering gaze with a fear that was almost guilty.
“Nora, I… care about you, more than anyone else in the world, but I don’t know if I can feel like that. I don’t know if I can feel how you want me to feel.”
Nora’s arms dropped from her hips, left to dangle loosely in the air as she gaped at Ren. “Am… am I not enough for you?” she whispered.
“If the idea of love only feels like a Beowolf paw on my shoulder, I don’t think I’m enough for anyone!” Ren snapped.
And then he turned away and rushed out of the room before anyone could stop him, leaving an increasingly distraught Nora staring at the space where he’d been a moment ago.
“Nora,” Blake said in the same voice she used when she talked about her past. “What are you without Ren?”
“I…” Nora turned in a jerky circle, her eyes darting between every person present. “I… I don’t know.”
Then she was gone too, running out much faster than Ren had, but when she disappeared into the hallway, she was headed in the opposite direction from him.
“Pyrrha,” Jaune said, all of his earlier moroseness vanishing as he snapped into action. “You go after Nora, I’ll track down Ren.”
Pyrrha followed him out, hastily stowing her weapons on her back and throwing an “I’m sorry!” over her shoulder, and Team RSPBY was alone again, the door clattering shut on a considerably quieter locker room.
Yang walked out of the shower area, wearing a fresh set of clothes with one shoe not quite all the way on her foot, and rebraiding her still-dripping hair. “Um… What was all that?”
Ruby was staring at Blake. “Why does your question and Nora’s answer feel like something I could’ve said about what I am without Atlas?”
“Because they’re very close to being the same thing,” Blake said. She leaned forward, propping her face up on both elbows and rubbing her forehead. “I thought Nora being trans meant she had a good handle on her sense of self, but… Apparently not.”
“Oh, I know all about being trans and still struggling to know about yourself,” Ruby mumbled.
Yang stopped braiding her hair.
Penny re-parsed that sentence twice, and realized she’d completely failed to be aware of something which was extremely important to her girlfriend.
“Wait,” Yang said. Her heart rate was spiking tremendously, enough to make Penny worry. “Hang on, what?”
“Oh, dang, I never told you all, did I?” Ruby said. She rolled forward onto the balls of her feet, and gave Penny a massive grin and a salute. “Well, um, when you said some girls are born, but I was made, and then I said me too, I meant it double! Made in a lab, but then I also made myself a girl!”
A nearly overwhelming rush of love and warmth for Ruby filled Penny all over again at the delight in realizing another way in which they were like each other. “May I hug you?”
“Since when do you need to ask?”
Hug: Initiated.
After eighteen seconds of nuzzling into the crook of Ruby’s neck, Penny said, “Did I do something which made you uncomfortable with sharing that information?”
“Did any of us?” Blake added.
“No! Not at all!” Ruby sighed, and the rumbling feeling that produced against Penny was exquisite. “The General trained me not to tell anyone I’m trans, because there’s a lot of people who’d think I’m a bad person just for being trans, and Atlas couldn’t have their best fighter being seen as an evil thing by a big part of the world…” Ruby shook her head. “That doesn’t really matter anymore, so I guess I can just… Tell people?”
Yang’s vitals were all over the place, and yet when Penny looked at her, she seemed to be trying her best to act like nothing was happening at all. The only hint that anyone else would’ve noticed was her eyes bulging slightly, and if someone else looked closely enough, her fingers tightening around her braid like it was a lifeline.
“Attention! Will all members of Team RSST please report to the battlefield immediately!”
Ruby jolted. “Oop! My team’s been called! Gotta go!”
“You’re still fighting in the tournament?” Blake said, giving her a look of immense confusion. “With your old team?!”
Ruby made a helpless gesture. “I guess? Ciel messaged me this morning asking if I was ready to fight? So I don’t think General Ironwood told my teammates I’m leaving? And my scroll hasn’t been shut down, and I haven’t had any access privileges revoked, so it’s kind of like nothing’s even happened?”
Blake squinted. “I… I don’t like that. It’s like he’s not even trying to acknowledge your decision. You don’t have to fight if you don’t want to.”
“Maybe…” Ruby twisted her cape between her hands. “But… I kind of really want to fight in the tournament still? I… I feel like I need to prove myself, all over again. To… to myself.”
Before Penny could tell Ruby she’d already proved herself in thousands of different ways, she disappeared in a flash of silver, leaving a trail which went out the door and back towards the fighting ground.
“You all go ahead and watch Ruby’s fight,” Yang said, her voice crackling strangely. “I… really need to finish taking care of my hair.”
Penny suddenly wasn’t sure she wanted to leave Yang alone. And from the look Blake was giving Yang, she felt the same way. But Yang turned and disappeared into the showers again without another word, cutting off any possible objections.
Yang did not finish taking care of her hair. She didn’t even start taking care of it. She stumbled into an unused shower stall and collapsed into a corner, trying to make herself as small as possible as she buried her hands in her hair. The entire world was slipping away from her senses, sound and light and touch becoming more and more distant until she was sure she was lost in the depths of a deep, dark cave.
Ruby was trans. Ruby was trans. Ruby was trans.
Yang rubbed furiously at her eyes and hoped it would be enough to stop tears which she couldn’t let loose. All the awful, choking, suffocating powerlessness she’d been feeling since Mountain Glenn was roaring to the surface.
Ruby was trans, which meant she’d been born something else. And once upon a time, there had been a something else in the Rose-Xiao Long household, a something else who had never actually been buried, had left no trace except a few dots of blood in a mangled crib.
Yang had been circling blindly around the truth the entire time.
There was one more way for Mom’s face to be passed on to someone else, a way besides cloning, besides genetic meddling, besides every impossible explanation ripped straight out of a book. It was the most obvious explanation, and Yang was the dumbest person on Remnant for not seeing it sooner.
Summer Rose had a baby fifteen years ago. That was indisputable fact. But it wasn’t until five minutes ago that Yang had realized Summer’s child was a daughter.
Ruby was Yang’s sister.
Ruby was Yang’s sister sister Yang was Ruby’s sister sister they were sisters sisters Yang hadn’t lost her sister sister all those years ago sister sister sister sister sister how hadn’t she realized all the answers were RIGHT THERE—
Yang was irredeemably stupid, sacrilegiously oblivious, mortally idiotic. She didn’t deserve to be a Huntress if she couldn’t have figured this out sooner. She was an embarrassment and a failure and no wonder Raven had left her behind if this was the best Yang could manage, because how could she be anyone’s daughter when she couldn’t connect the two largest dots in the whole entire fucking world? How was she going to look Dad in the eyes and tell him it’d taken her months to figure this out? How—wait, what was that?
What the fuck was that?
When Yang heard a slashing sound like a finely sharpened sword cleaving through the wall, followed by a low roar, her first thought was this was the actual sound of her sanity breaking apart. But then she caught a reflection of something beyond strange in the tiled floor she was staring at, and she realized something was actually happening.
She lifted her head and found the low roar emanating from a… a shape hanging in the air, red and undulating and angry like a hole had been torn in space-time itself.
…Maybe her sanity was degrading, actually. Or maybe the universe itself was about to swallow her up and erase her from existence as punishment for her stupidity. If so, it was justified. Yang only—Wait.
Yang gaped as something appeared out of the center of the thing—not something, someone. Someone familiar.
“…Dad?”
Notes:
Thanks for reading! Next week will be Chapter 53: Longshot
Chapter 53: Longshot
Notes:
Well, AO3 has been struggling to load for me ever since they finished their server maintenance this morning, so here's hoping this update goes through.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
The southern coast of Solitas
Years ago
It’d been a long time since the Happy Huntresses had taken a mission this far from Mantle, and Robyn was starting to remember why.
“Joanna, watch your six!” she yelled, dodging under the sweep of a Teryx’s tail and firing a bolt into its underbelly before it could bowl over Joanna from behind. Joanna, busy finishing off a Teryx of her own, gave her an appreciative nod.
It was a mission done more for goodwill than for any actual utility. But damn it, sometimes the most important thing was bringing a body home to a family who needed to say one final goodbye, even if it was to a frozen corpse.
Their objective: Find a freighter that’d crashed on the coast after running into a Teryx flock. The crew had escaped into an emergency pod and survived long enough to get a rescue—except for the captain. Who had stayed behind to pilot the airship away from the jettisoned pod, pulling the Grimm away from the crew, at the cost of his own life.
He was a Mantleborn, one who Robyn had encountered a few times over the years. And maybe she could say that about almost everyone in Mantle, but she remembered this captain’s face, the slightly lopsided smile he usually wore when he stepped off the airship at the aerodrome with a new load of cargo. And now the Happy Huntresses were on a mission to recover his body.
She turned to find a Teryx charging at her, but before she could even raise her crossbow, May was there, bringing her pikestaff down on the Grimm’s neck, decapitating it. Somehow, mercifully, they were almost entirely through the flock.
Recovering the pilot’s body—and as much of the ship as they could—would be the easy part, thanks to Fiona’s Semblance. Locating the wreckage wasn’t the hard part, either. They’d spotted the crash site even before being dropped off—a huge twisted gray hull, partially embedded in sea ice that rose up around it in jagged heaps.
No, the hard part was getting to the wreck. A Teryx flock had taken up residence around the crash site. Probably the same Grimm that’d brought the airship down, in fact—they knew isolated crash sites usually brought more people who would take far more risks than they otherwise would, and therefore be more vulnerable. Such as these four.
Robyn straightened and sized up the situation, counting the shrinking number of Grimm and a suddenly-much-clearer path to the wreck, and realized this was the right time to call in their extraction. She was about to buzz their the airship—which had to be done now, since it would take another three-quarters of an hour for the ship to get back here—when the ground shook underfoot.
Correction: the ice shook. Robyn, along with the rest of her team, was standing on a four-feet-thick layer of sea ice. And there was nothing in sight, which meant—
“GET TO SHORE! GET TO SHORE!” Robyn shouted, waving her arms frantically at her team. “Mission’s off! Mission’s off!”
There was only one thing in this part of the continent, animal or Grimm, which could be felt through ice this thick.
May, Joanna, and Fiona didn’t ask for an explanation—just turned and sprinted towards the shore, and that was the only thing which saved May from being plunged into the icy depths, because in the exact spot where she’d been standing seconds ago, the ice erupted.
A massive black-white-red form broke through the ice, so enormous that for a moment it wasn’t even recognizable as a Grimm—just a sleek slab of darkness bursting forth from the deep.
It turned on a scale that could only be called tectonic as it rocketed into the air, and as it turned, Robyn caught sight of one enormous glowing eye bulging from the beast’s side, a hateful eye that was currently trained on her.
This was the first time Robyn had ever seen a Poriolith in person. It was somehow far bigger than what any of the pictures shown in academy class had ever conveyed.
And then the enormous dolphin-like Grimm crested, its streamlined body briefly hanging in the air with improbable balance, entirely out of the water, and then it came crashing back down into the ice between Robyn and the rest of her team, its enormous bulk obliterating an entire swath of the frozen sea.
Robyn barely had time to dive into the airship wreckage to escape being drenched by the resulting wave of ice-cold seawater that blasted everything in the vicinity. Suddenly, she was cut off from the rest of her team, none of whom had been lucky enough to escape the wall of freezing water thrown their way. Their airship ride was, at minimum, forty-five minutes out, forty-five minutes in which Robyn would need to escape a deep-sea Grimm while conserving enough Aura to not get hypothermia—
A gunshot cracked apart the brief silence that’d fallen in the aftermath of the Grimm cresting, and suddenly the Poriolith let out a roar that rattled Robyn’s eardrums before it began to thrash wildly in the water.
Robyn skipped right over wondering where did that shot come from? and went right to wondering how the fuck did they hit that shot? Because the single gunshot—high-caliber sniper rifle by the sounds of it—had pierced one of the Poriolith’s eyes, causing it to spew Grimm matter as the enormous beast writhed in pain.
That was when Robyn saw the silver dust.
At first, she thought it was Dust propellant leftover from the shot that’d been fired—some sort of tracer round, maybe? But no, Dust just did not come in that color, and besides, the silver particles drifting through the air were wrapping around the Grimm, in anything but a straight line.
After a moment of staring, Robyn spotted a silver blur flashing around the mouth of the Poriolith, moving too fast to be anything but someone with some sort of speed Semblance. But that wasn’t how Harriet Bree’s Semblance looked, not even close, so who—and where—
A figure dressed in Atlesian Military combat fatigues dropped out of the silver streak directly above the dolphin Grimm and landed neatly on a knee atop its head, weapon held in one hand and a long dark braid trailing behind them. Robyn had to squint to make out details, the newcomer’s snow camo rendering them almost completely indistinguishable amidst the sprays of seawater and ice kicked up by the fins of the still-thrashing Poriolith. She spotted goggles, combat boots, Atlesian military symbols which she’d never seen before along one sleeve, and that was all she caught before the newcomer leapt across the leathery surface of the Poriolith, dodging a flying chunk of ice bigger than them, and buried their blade into its blowhole, all the way up to the hilt.
Some corner of Robyn’s mind thought, aren’t you a little small to be a soldier?
The dolphin Grimm unleashed a screech that must’ve been felt all the way to Argus, and began to buck savagely, doing its best to throw off the new attacker. But the attacker held strong, its grip never wavering as a series of deep, muted booms rocked the air—it was firing bullets directly into the blowhole, Robyn realized.
But just as the blowhole was a Poriolith’s weakest point, it was also its most dangerous point, because—
Before Robyn could shout a warning, a massive jet of steam and superheated air erupted from the Poriolith’s blowhole, engulfing the attacker entirely in a hissing, roiling cloud so hot Robyn could feel the heat against her face from where she stood. Just for a moment, she had to close her eyes against it.
When she opened her eyes again to see steam shrouding the Poriolith like a fresh blanket of fog, Robyn winced. If that attacker had their Aura up, they would be fine, but they’d probably been blown into the next kingdom. No matter how much Aura, no one could withstand the pain of being blasted with scalding water. The pain would make anyone lose their grip and their footing.
But then Robyn saw a shape amidst the steam, which quickly resolved itself into the crouched figure of the attacker, still atop the Poriolith and holding onto the weapon driven into its blowhole, not having moved in the slightest.
Robyn’s mouth fell open.
The attacker lifted their head, shaking their head out a little as if they’d just been splashed with a cup of lukewarm water, and then pulled something from their belt, hands flashing back over their weapon too fast for Robyn to see what they were doing.
Another gunshot shook the wounded Poriolith, this one louder and deeper than the others, and then the newcomer disappeared into a streak of silver dust again, taking their weapon with them. One second, two seconds, three seconds—
CRAK-KA BOOM.
This explosion was first an implosion—Robyn recognized the telltale signs of an explosive Gravity Dust round—as the Grimm briefly shrunk violently in on itself, before exploding outward, bits of monstrous dolphin being flung in every direction.
Robyn didn’t waste time looking for the attacker as she ran for the shore, dodging between flying dissolving chunks of Poriolith and hopping across free-floating ice floes, somehow managing to make it to actual dry land with only a few splashes of water on her coat to show for it.
She came to a stop on the rocky shore, doubled over on her hands and knees, panting for breath as the incongruously peaceful sound of crashing waves filled her ears.
A hand on her shoulder made her look up—Fiona. And Joanna and May. All of them looking just as confused as she felt.
“Who the fuck was that?” May was staring at the disappearing remains of the Poriolith.
“Has to be a Specialist,” Robyn said once she could get more than one word out at a time. “You saw the outfit, right?”
“Yeah, but how can someone be that good and not also be plastered all over every recruitment poster in Atlas?” May said.
“Oh my gosh, you’re the Happy Huntresses, aren’t you?”
The four of them jumped at the strangely high-pitched voice coming from behind them, and they turned to see the newcomer standing behind them, having appeared out of absolutely nowhere, silver dust hanging in the air all around them. Their combination of a fur hat, heavy-duty goggles, and a snowmask designed to keep the mouth and nose warm meant that none of them could make out any facial features.
“I’ve always wanted to meet you! The General says it’s a shame none of you work for the military, because you’re the most skilled Huntresses in all of Atlas, which doesn’t make any sense to me, because why wouldn’t you be in the military if you were good enough? But now I finally get to meet you and I have so many questions!!”
Robyn was rapidly putting together a whole bunch of pieces that she didn’t like in the fucking slightest. The inexplicable anonymity. The high-pitched voice. The short stature. The speech patterns. The mannerisms. It all pointed towards—
And then the newcomer lifted up their goggles and pulled down their snowmask, and—
Robyn’s heart stopped.
“You’re a kid,” May said, staring in horror.
“I’m Ruby!” the girl who looked about twelve years old said, beaming at them with an adorable smile that didn’t belong on someone who’d just singlehandedly killed a Poriolith. “And you’re Robyn Hill, May Marigold, Fiona Thyme, and Joanna Greenleaf! The incomparable Happy Huntresses, somehow not part of the Atlas Military! Do you wanna join?”
Robyn stared at the Atlesian Military insignias arrayed on the girl’s sleeve. Again, most of them she didn’t recognize. She desperately tried to come up with any reasonable explanation for the insignias which didn’t involve the pairing of the words child and soldier.
“What are you doing here?” she said.
“Classified!” Ruby said immediately, and all of Robyn’s faint hopes for a not-atrocious explanation went up in smoke.
Robyn exchanged a look of dread with her team. But before she could look for any more answers, a voice echoed across the beach.
“Ruby!”
Robyn knew that voice. Everyone in the Kingdom of Atlas did. With a feeling akin to mounting hysteria, she turned to find James Ironwood striding down the beach towards them, his oversized pistol in hand.
“Ruby, get back to the airship now,” he said, his eyes trained entirely on her and none of the Happy Huntresses.
“Yes, sir!” Ruby saluted with uncanny stiffness and disappeared into silver dust again, and then it was just Robyn and her team and General Ironwood alone with icy waves crashing at their feet.
Ironwood at least had the decency to look uncomfortable as he finally met their eyes, brushing off a shimmer of silver that’d landed on his coat. He kept his pistol lowered and his finger off the trigger, but he didn’t put it away.
Silently, Fiona and May and Joanna moved into formation around Robyn. She couldn’t ignore how much this felt like a confrontation. And maybe she did want it to be a confrontation. Maybe she wanted a fight, if that was what it took to right the despicable wrong unfolding before her eyes.
Finally, Robyn crossed her arms. “General,” she said, infusing the title with as much sarcasm as she could muster before abruptly turning to steely cold anger. “What the fuck is this?”
“This is a special case,” Ironwood said.
Robyn let out a short, harsh bark of laughter. Of course. Of course that was Ironwood’s response. That was the way of the military. The way of Atlas. They dressed up the most atrocious things with the most bland and vague of words, using technicalities and obfuscation in an attempt to blunt the most razor-sharp of concepts. Bullets that burst blood vessels and blinded people and caused concussions weren’t called that, they were called less-than-lethal ammunition. Goons paid by the SDC to break a union leader’s nose in a back alley weren’t called that, they were called private security contractors. A Faunus dying of thirst unnoticed in a prison cell because the jailors had forgotten to file the paperwork for his arrest wasn’t called murder, it was called an unfortunate procedural hiccup. And a brainwashed child soldier was called a special case.
Robyn wasn’t having any of it. Speak Truth To Power was the name of her Semblance, after all. “That’s a funny thing to call a child soldier,” she said, her words echoing across the frozen sea.
Ironwood winced. Good.
“I’m more serious than the nose of my crossbow, General,” Robyn said. “You’re giving orders to a girl who doesn’t even look old enough to be in a preparatory academy. She fights like a Specialist four times her age. She’s wearing military colors, for the love of fucking—!”
A hand was placed on her shoulder. Joanna, reminding her to keep her cool.
“Right,” Robyn said after a moment’s pause, taking a deep breath. She fixed a fresh glare on Ironwood. “You’re commanding a child soldier. If you try denying that, I’m petitioning the Council for your dismissal on the grounds of incompetence, because if you don’t think she’s a child soldier, then you have the comprehension of an icicle.” And then she had to pause for another deep breath, or she would’ve exploded from anger. “So are you going to give her back to whatever family in Mantle you kidnapped her from, or do I have to drag you in front of the Inter-Kingdom Criminal Court to answer for charges of crimes against sentience?”
“Robyn.” Suddenly, the General was holding out his non-weapon hand to Robyn. Aimed at anyone else, it would be a ludicrous non sequitur of a gesture, but when someone held out a hand to Robyn Hill, it was because they wanted to tell the truth.
Robyn stared. This was the least likely outcome she could’ve possibly thought of, and yet… There was Ironwood, finally holstering his pistol and continuing to offer Robyn the chance to use her Semblance on him.
She exchanged a look with her team, noting their blatant skepticism, and gave them a nod. A silent communication of, It’s fine, for now. But stay on guard.
Robyn stepped forward and met his hand, activating her Semblance. She arched an eyebrow, meeting his eyes, and waited for the terrible truth.
“Ruby possesses a unique power far beyond her Semblance which countless people in this world would kill for.”
Green.
Robyn stared.
“This power is something that none of you have the slightest idea of, but it is entirely real and I have seen it in action. And it is a power that could save millions.”
Green.
“My forces found her years ago, being kept as experimental fodder in the laboratory of a disgraced, recently-deceased military scientist, with no record of how he might’ve… acquired her.”
Green.
“We believe she may actually have been grown in the laboratory, in an entirely artificial manner.”
Green.
By now, all of Robyn’s anger had morphed into a piercing horror of a different sort. A realization that, on some level, being a child soldier was somehow still a technical, marginal step up from what this girl’s life had been before—a lab rat. “How did your military not know one of your scientists was experimenting on a child?” she said.
Ironwood sighed. “For that, I have no good answer.”
Green.
“This training you see, the environment she’s raised in? This is all to protect her, Hill. To make sure that she can protect herself from the people who will come for her, because of what she can do.”
Green.
“And in the process of assuring her safety, you’ve conveniently given yourself a fanatically loyal supersoldier,” Robyn said.
Ironwood made a pained expression. “Robyn, if she had a family, I exhausted every possible avenue I could use to find them—”
Red.
Ironwood and Robyn both stared down at her hand, and now Robyn had heard enough to form her final opinion. “My Semblance doesn’t measure objective truth, General,” she said, pulling back. “It measures intent to lie. So I can believe the first half of what you said, about this girl having something that puts a genuine target on her back, but as for everything after that? I still don’t think any of this is to keep her safe. I think you saw a power you could bring under your control, and you actually, truly convinced yourself it was the best thing to do. You convinced yourself this is the only way she could be safe.”
Ironwood’s expression turned stony. “There is no delusion. It is the only way.”
The sudden distant rumble of engines did nothing to pull away either leader’s attention as a pair of Mantas rose up over the lip of a nearby hill and flew towards them.
“I see your retreat is here,” Robyn said. “Have a safe flight back to Atlas, General. And if you don’t put in more work looking for Ruby’s family, then we will.”
Ironwood’s jaw tightened. “If you even think about compromising Ruby’s safety—”
And that was the last bit of pressure needed to completely unravel the thread of civility Robyn had managed to hold together until now. No hand on her shoulder from anyone would hold this back.
“Her safety’s ALREADY compromised!” she roared, taking a step forward and unsubtly clutching the still-holstered grip of her crossbow. “She’s so young, not even the Schnee Dust Company would want her working in their mines! But you’ve got her out here in the middle of nowhere trying to kill a fucking Poriolith!”
“Robyn—” Fiona started to say, only to be cut off by Ironwood taking a step closer.
“You have no idea what kind of forces are at work here!” His rising voice echoed in the cold air like a faraway avalanche. “And if you violate state secrets—”
“She’s not a state secret! She’s a GIRL!”
“—if you violate state secrets in pursuit of whatever you think is justice, there will be consequences!”
“I don’t CARE!” Robyn snapped, giving no ground. It felt good to get angry like this. To finally get angry at Ironwood for something that was so nakedly criminal on his part. He had to know he didn’t have any moral high ground to claim, didn’t he? “Nothing could justify treating a kid like a piece of artillery!”
Ironwood’s expression had gone even colder, his eyes boring into Robyn with an intensity that seemed far more fitting for a battlefield than an argument. “If your actions bring those who hunt Ruby without remorse to our kingdom’s doorstep, then whatever blood that’s spilled is on your hands, Huntress Hill. And you will be held responsible.”
With that, he turned away and boarded one of the Mantas that had touched down just meters away. He did not look back at Robyn as they lifted off, but someone else in the ship did.
Ruby, her goggles still pulled up, twisted around in her bench seat to peer at the Happy Huntresses with wide, curious eyes. She met Robyn’s worried gaze, and she only looked… confused.
She looked like a kid who didn’t know what was happening, because she was a kid that didn’t know what was happening.
Robyn tried to communicate a thousand things through that brief visual contact, tried to convey silently to this girl, You need to escape. These people aren’t helping you. You don’t deserve to be treated like this.
But the Manta’s bay doors closed a moment later, and Ruby was gone, leaving Robyn to seethe amidst rocks and ice and sand and a thousand other lifeless things.
“I called in our extraction as soon as I saw Ironbrain coming,” May said. “They’ll be here in thirty minutes.”
“Good.” Robyn gave one last lingering look at the Mantas before they disappeared over the horizon, and then turned to her team. “We are going to look for that kid’s family, by the way. But I’ll listen to one thing Ironwood said: we don’t put her in any more of a mess than what she’s already in. I…” She clenched a fist and slowly unclenched it. “I don’t think he was lying about there being people who’d kill to get their hands on her.”
The Atlas Military liked to think themselves pragmatic. They wouldn’t flout a red line as enormous as don’t fucking have child soldiers unless they’d calculated (by their own twisted math) that the benefit was worth the risk. And considering that the risk was vociferous worldwide condemnation for doing something cartoonishly villainous… The reward would have to be incomprehensible.
“So what do we do?” Fiona said.
Robyn didn’t like the answer. She didn’t like choosing to be unobtrusive. Not when Atlas already demanded unobtrusiveness of the Happy Huntresses every waking hour of their lives. But Ruby… was still just a kid. A kid who already had too many problems without also having the attention of the world on her.
“We do our search quietly,” Robyn said.
Mantle
Present Day
Robyn knew they had to move. They had to get outside and head off any waves of Grimm before they got numerous enough to start damaging the walls. And yet, she couldn’t help but linger for a few extra seconds in Doctor Polendina’s dwelling, staring at the girl bouncing up and down on television. The girl now on camera at the center of Amity Colosseum was a few years older, but still undeniably the Ruby they’d met on the frozen shore.
After that encounter, the Happy Huntresses had made good on their threat. Quietly, covertly, taking pains not to raise too high a profile, they’d looked exhaustively for any trace of Ruby. They’d gone door-to-door to every residence in Mantle, checked every single profile of every missing Mantleborn kid whose disappearance didn’t make it onto an Atlesian spreadsheet, checked unofficial leads and rumors that went nowhere, made multiple trips to the outlying settlements that Atlas did its best to forget about, pored over forgotten records buried in the back of dim libraries, and searched and searched and searched and searched. If any of their efforts ever put Ruby in danger, the General never made it known to them.
Nothing. They always found nothing. Eventually, Robyn couldn’t keep the search going. They had too many other pressing concerns with immediate consequences and lives at stake in Mantle that needed their attention more than one vanishingly rare child. Their attention and time and energy was a limited resource, and she couldn’t in good conscience keep devoting so much of it to a girl that might as well have been a ghost.
Still, they refused to forget her. Even if the rest of the world did.
Vale
Penny, Weiss, and Blake scrambled up to the student seats just in time for the start of Ruby’s match. Penny only wished she’d had time to acquire a bucket of popcorn, but all the same she was just happy to be watching her girlfriend having fun, and winning. Hopefully.
“Ruby!” Penny cheered, just barely avoiding whacking Weiss with the arms she threw out in exultation. “Kick their butts!” she shouted down to the arena. “You are unstoppable!” She paused, checked the scoreboard to confirm the other team, and then continued. “Team Crimson doesn’t stand a chance!”
Ruby turned at the sound of Penny’s voice, scanned the stands for a moment, and then waved at Penny, grinning ferally.
“How did she hear you?” Weiss said, staring at Penny.
“One of the many nice things about being a synthetic person!” Penny said. “I can reconstruct the auditory profile of my voice into something which carries wonderfully through crowd noise! As I will now demonstrate!” She turned back to the arena and shouted, “Ruby! If you win, I will give you one thousand kisses!”
Ruby turned around again, and this time, her feral smile was entirely gone, replaced by an adorably loopy one that made Penny silently up the number to two thousand kisses.
“Gods above and below, you two are storybook,” Weiss said. Then she propped up her chin, studying the arena. “...I’m just now realizing, has anyone actually seen the rest of Ruby’s team in action?”
After a moment, Blake shook her head. Penny queried her memory and found multiple previous sparring class matches which involved the other three-quarters of Ruby’s team. However, she could understand why her teammates with non-photographic memories didn’t remember these matches. Ruby’s teammates were…
Penny didn’t want to be rude. But, then again, these weren’t words she was saying out loud to anyone. It wasn’t rude if she just kept it in her own head where no one would know! So… the word Penny would never say out loud but would use internally to describe the rest of Ruby’s team was… Unimpressive.
(And considering what Ciel had told her about the way Ruby’s team was created, that unfortunately made sense.)
Penny turned her attention to Team CMSN, and inevitably, to Cinder in particular. Familiar questions raced through her mind, as they always did when she saw Cinder. How do you know me? Where did we meet?
But then something else caught her eye—one of Cinder’s teammates. One that Penny had barely seen around Beacon that semester, rarely enough that she wasn’t even sure of the girl’s name. A quick check of the tournament rosters provided an answer—Cinder’s reclusive teammate was named Nova. But it wasn’t Nova’s unfamiliarity that captured Penny’s curiosity. No, it was the fact that this short black-haired twintail-styled girl had some sort of illusion around her. A very versatile illusion, at that. It was so closely laid over Nova that the illusion was nearly undetectable to Penny’s sensors, but she could detect it.
However, Penny did not have the slightest idea what was underneath Nova’s fullbody illusion. She couldn’t even confirm attributes like her height, or body shape, or facial shape, or—or hair color, for that matter. All of it was concealed by something which was undoubtedly an illusory Semblance of some sort. The illusion moved so easily with Nova’s movements that it would’ve been completely indistinguishable from her body to anyone else. Even her computerized vision and analysis systems were struggling with this.
Nova seemed to be expending no effort to maintain this illusion, either, which suggested she was quite used to keeping it up. But why would someone always have an illusion active…?
The answer hit Penny like a bolt of lightning. Nova could have something about her appearance that she was afraid to show other people! Maybe something which she was embarrassed of! Maybe something she thought was ugly! And that would also explain why Penny had seen so little of her—she didn’t want other people to see her without her illusion!
Suddenly, Penny was ashamed of herself for noticing the illusion. Nova deserved to keep secrets about herself, and Penny had absolutely no right to wonder about what laid beneath the appearance which Nova desired to present to the outside world. That was what Penny dealt with every day, after all.
She made a decision, and reprogrammed her sensors to ignore Nova’s illusory activity and also forget that she’d ever seen it.
And then, before she could contemplate any other members of Team CMSN, a rumbling spread through the Colosseum, and the arena began rearranging itself into new biomes. The match was about to start.
Penny surveyed the crowd, and noted with relief that they seemed to have mostly calmed down by now. Hopefully, the rest of the day’s fights would erase any lingering dissatisfaction over Pyrrha’s forfeit? And then there would be no angry booing for Team BSYP’s appearance in the doubles round tomorrow? Was that too much to hope for? She just did not want people to be angry. She did not want people to be angry at her for something she had no control over—
Penny forced her processors away from that line of thinking and onto the match as the scoreboard began counting down. It wasn’t time to be anxious! It was time to be excited for her girlfriend! Three, two, one—
Ruby burst into silver the moment the timer hit zero, a silver streak flying back into the forest biome and disappearing amongst the trees, leaving the rest of her team behind. Penny could still track Ruby’s movement, of course, but she highly doubted anyone on the ground could see her right now.
“What is she doing?” Blake said, shading her eyes from the sunlight with one hand and squinting down at the fight. “Looks like a sniper’s nest, but… That strategy didn’t really work out for Team BRNZ this morning, did it?”
Indeed, it seemed that Team CMSN agreed with Blake’s assessment, because they chose to ignore Ruby, opting for a numerical advantage against the rest of her team in the arena’s center. But as of now, it was anyone’s fight.
Atlas
Arthur Watts stared at the screen, entirely refusing to believe his eyes now. If finding out that Polendina’s tin can had been dragged off the scrapheap was a shock, this face dredged up from his past was a veritable kick to the stomach.
He stood up, carefully navigating around the shards of the whiskey glass he’d just dropped, and paused the television at a moment when the goggle-wearing leader of Team RSST took up the entire screen.
This child was older, but if anything, all the years added to that face made it easier to identify. Because this child was old enough to bear a striking resemblance to the silver-eyed Huntress whose offspring had been stolen for Watts’s experimentation. Additionally, while this child’s hair was much longer, Watts recognized that black-red tint. And then, there was the child’s name.
Ruby.
Project Argentum had latched onto the word Ruby somewhere in the course of Watts’s experiments, and he didn’t have the slightest idea where it’d come from, but regardless, Argentum had insisted endlessly on being called by that moniker. Watts had refused, of course—it was no different from the silly PENNY naming that Polendina had insisted on for his project. Project Battle Angel was Project Battle Angel, and Project Argentum was Project Argentum, call a spade a spade, and no amount of nonsensical bleeding-heart sentiment would change what they would be referred to as. Besides, it was almost as ridiculous in isolation for a boy to claim a girl’s name. And what—Argentum was being presented to the world as a girl, too, for that matter, and what in the dickens had happened to cause that?
Unfortunately, the word Ruby had become stuck in Watts’s mind, simply because of how relentlessly Argentum insisted on calling itself that. And now, there was a child calling itself Ruby with the same shade of hair as Argentum and the same face as Argentum’s mother.
Watts could not escape the conclusion. Project Argentum was alive, and a decade older, and he was staring it in the face.
An Aura buzzer blared from the television, briefly pulling Watts’s attention back to the broadcast.
“Oh, and a spectacular spinning kick by Mister Black to take out another member of Team Rust! I must say, this is looking quite—”
Watts hit the mute button.
How? How? It was a question he already knew would irritate and hound him endlessly for months to come. Argentum was supposed to be dead. Salem herself had assured Watts that she’d taken care of Argentum when everything had gone south with his more unsavory ventures in Atlas. But undoubtedly the blame for this would fall on him even though tying up that loose end had been entirely out of his hands—
Well, clearly, something had gone wrong, but any fool could see that. Arthur Watts, though, was not a fool, and he intended to find out exactly what went wrong, and what kind of damage control was needed.
…Well, if it was damage control he needed, emphasis on control, there was always—
A rattling sound from below drew his attention, and he looked down, finding his carpetbag shaking dramatically. After a few moments of staring at it in exasperation, Watts sighed and used his foot to shove it out from behind the television where he kept it tucked away, before nudging open the latch with the tip of his shoe.
A Seer Grimm rose out of the bag, stopping directly at Watts’s eye level, and from the flame which lived somewhere in its center, Salem’s visage appeared.
“My lady,” Watts said, bowing low and silently thinking—of course she just had to find out at the same time he did. How inconvenient.
“Good afternoon, Arthur,” Salem said, sounding fantastically unbothered. Her head turned within the Seer, looking at the surroundings. “Ah, you’re watching the Vytal Tournament as well. I trust that your attention was also drawn to a certain girl from Atlas?”
Vale
BANG.
“Splendid accuracy once again by Miss Karyatis!” Doctor Oobleck’s voice boomed across the arena, narrating the fight as it had done since the first fight of the morning.
Penny wasn’t sure if someone could single-handedly win a tournament match by laying down sniper fire from the trees, but Ruby was putting that theory to the test. She hadn’t missed a single shot yet, at least not by Penny’s observations. And of course Penny had seen Ruby’s shooting prowess before, but it was one thing to see Ruby demolish an arcade game or mow down targets at a shooting range, and another thing entirely to see her nailing active Huntresses in the middle of a fight from long range! And she was moving positions between every shot, never firing from the same place twice. On Penny’s infrared vision—the only way she could track Ruby at the moment—she was just a blurry heat signature blinking in and out of existence in wildly varying places amongst the trees. Through this lens, it appeared far more like a teleportation Semblance than a speed-based one.
But even with how many chunks of Team CMSN’s Aura that’d been lost to Ruby’s barrage, Team RSST was losing. Badly.
Penny’s prediction algorithms were now ninety-five percent confident this would be a decisive CMSN victory, no matter how good Ruby was. There—oh, now it was ninety-nine percent confidence, because Ciel had just been knocked out, leaving Ruby alone on the battlefield while all of Team CMSN remained.
Weiss shook her head sympathetically. “I can’t say I didn’t see this coming.”
There was a momentary pause in the action as Team CMSN and the entire stadium watched the forest, wondering if Ruby would come out to finish the fight. But Penny, with her infrared vision, could see Ruby had no such intentions—her heat signature disappeared and reappeared deeper into the woods before firing off three shots in quick succession. They all hit the ground directly in front of Team CMSN, sending a spray of dirt up into their eyes. Given Ruby’s aim, Penny knew it was intentional. A taunt. Come and get me! Ruby was saying, because strategically, why would she give up her concealed position?
Even from this distance, she could see Cinder sighing with her whole chest before she indicated the forest with a jerk of her head. As one, the team moved towards the trees.
Ninety-eight percent chance of losing, her prediction algorithms amended—the concealed terrain added very slightly to Ruby’s chances.
With all the action now mostly obscured from the crowd, the video screens arrayed around the arena switched to a feed from cameras lodged in the trees, displaying Cinder, Mercury, Emerald, and Nova prowling through the woods, and finding absolutely nothing.
Penny could see Ruby’s heat signature as only brief flickers. The woods helped with concealing her Semblance, too—the lower light under the foliage made it harder to see the silver dust she left behind which otherwise might’ve given a clue to her location.
The crowd had been mostly unresponsive during the first phase of the match, but now a murmur swept through the arena as it became apparent that Ruby wouldn’t be nearly as easy to dispatch as the others. The prediction algorithms refreshed again. Ninety-seven-point-five percent chance of Ruby losing.
“Well, it has been quite a solid showing for this first-year team from Haven!” Oobleck said. “If they can flush Miss Karyatis out of the woods, this—”
And then the video screens switched to a close-up shot of Emerald looking around wildly, just in time to catch a perfect view of Ruby dropping out of her Semblance directly behind her, still flying forwards, and driving Lunar Enforcer into her like a battering ram.
Moments later, the arena was greeted with the sight of a stunned, thrashing Emerald being flung out of the trees, swept up by Ruby’s Semblance tornado and—
Emerald slammed into the arena barrier. A buzzer blared. Ruby’s chance of losing fell to eighty percent. Or rather, her chance of winning rose to twenty percent.
And that was when the trees burst into flames.
Ruby wasn’t expecting Cinder to unleash a handful of pure raw Fire Dust and set the whole forest biome on fire. It was a risky move, since the rest of Cinder’s team was in there with her, but unfortunately also a smart-as-all-heck move. None of the other biomes—ocean, desert, mountain, ice, grassy plains—would offer Ruby nearly the same amount of cover. She’d have to face three people at once out in the open.
She came to a stop in the arena’s unmodified center, and a moment later, Cinder stalked out of the blazing forest, her twin swords held at either side as her eyes narrowed, focused on Ruby. Moments later, Mercury and Nova emerged from the flames behind her.
Ruby nodded appreciatively. This team knew the value of optics. A lesser fighter could be intimidated by that. Ruby Karyatis, however, had beat longshot odds and storms of fire before. She eyed the flames licking at the trees behind Cinder, and another lesson from Fria rose to mind. One that Ruby simply called FIRE TORNADO!
Cinder watched in disbelief as the Atlesian runt’s Semblance sucked up the flames consuming the forest, transforming her silvery tornado into a towering column of flames, and before any of them could react, a trail of flames burst out, whipping around viciously into her, Mercury, and Neo—too fast for her to even put her arms up.
Her Aura stopped any actual damage, but the blow stunned her entirely, her vision going entirely white for a moment. In that instant where she was struggling to regain control of her senses, a gunshot exploded against her face. And then another. And then she was on her feet again, her vision clearing and disbelief abruptly morphing into a boiling rage.
Rage not because she was taking unprecedented levels of damage, rage not even because she’d been caught so woefully unaware, but rage because fire was HER domain, fire was HERS to wield, how DARE some slavering Atlesian mutt wield fire like it was anything but Cinder’s soul-forged weapon—
She itched to unleash the Maiden powers right now—show what true mastery of fire looked like to this spoiled brat who’d likely never known hardship once in her life—and it was so sorely tempting that she had to dig her nails into the palm of her hands, hard enough to draw blood if her Aura wasn’t up, to stop herself from doing it and blowing their cover.
But in the time it took to compose herself, the whirlwind of fire swept up Mercury and hurled him into the ground, taking off a sizable chunk of his Aura.
Cinder growled and leapt back into fray. What was Emerald doing? Had she hit her head hard enough to think that being eliminated would prevent her from using her Semblance?!
Emerald’s eyes darted frantically back and forth from the side of the arena, trying to keep track of the Karyatis girl’s movements and… failing miserably. She was so fast. In her Semblance, she was too fleeting, registering in Emerald’s consciousness as nothing but flashes. It was like trying to catch a swarm of bees with her hands. And every time Ruby dropped out of her Semblance and Emerald could actually begin to latch on, she would almost immediately disappear into silver dust again and scramble all of Emerald’s bearings.
Ruby was a blur between Cinder and Mercury and Neo, her double-bladed scythe-staff moving so quickly that it appeared as a gleaming wheel of death which unceasingly lashed out at Emerald’s teammates.
By now, Emerald’s heart was racing faster than it had at any point during the fight. She couldn’t fail Cinder, she couldn’t, she couldn’t, it was going to be all her fault—
Stop it! she screamed at herself. What would Cinder do if she was in this situation? Well, she wouldn’t be in this situation at all, because she was perfect—but if she somehow did, she would calmly regain control of the situation without hyperventilating or panicking or feeling like she was about to throw up, and she would fix everything—
But Emerald wasn’t Cinder, no matter how much she wished she was.
Ozpin stared at the television, watching the girl known as Ruby Karyatis. Also known as Project Moonrise.
He watched her, outnumbered, carving through an entire team. He watched her fighting with a skill and a poise that only a veteran Huntress should have.
He could not help but note; the way she used her Semblance to sweep up the elements and hurl them at her enemies… it was reminiscent of a Maiden. As if she’d been trained by one. And there was only one who could’ve possibly trained her.
He turned off the broadcast. No matter the outcome of the fight, he’d seen enough.
“And down goes Mister Black, out of Aura! It’s now a one-on-two, and Miss Karyatis has barely taken any blows since entering the fray!”
Penny, Weiss, and Blake watched, awed, as Ruby flashed back and forth between her three opponents. Even before Mercury had gone down, this didn’t feel like a one-on-three; Ruby’s dizzying speed made it feel like a match with even numbers. It was almost as if she could fight in three different places at once.
“No competitor in the history of the Vytal Tournament has ever come back from a one-on-four deficit! But now it stands at a one-on-two! Are we witnessing history?!”
It was Blake who broke a long silence between them. “I… don’t think Ruby ever planned on needing her team to win.”
Ruby dropped out of her Semblance between Cinder and Nova, driving one end of Lunar Enforcer into Cinder’s side while she fired the gun at the other end into Nova at point-blank range, and while Nova could dodge, Cinder couldn’t quite manage it. Another tick off her Aura meter.
There was a certain rhythm Ruby could get into during a fight, a rhythm even above her usual rhythm—a hallowed rhythm that felt as supernatural as the rest of her, where Lunar Enforcer just sang to her, and with every movement Ruby felt like she was singing back, like there was some truly deeper connection flowing between them.
When she was younger, Ruby had used to wonder if the story of the Blacksmith And The Robot could be true, that metal could come to life. And then she’d met Penny, and the answer became obvious; yes.
Another way in which Penny felt like a fairytale come true.
Ruby glanced at the Aura scoreboard once more, and came to a decision. She’d narrowed the gap far enough that it was time to end this fight with one big flourish.
She jetted away with her Semblance to give her the necessary distance and pulled a Gravity Dust cartridge off her bandolier. It held a full round of ammo, designed to fired a bunch of shots, but she was going to turn it into one big bullet.
Cinder and the Nova girl paused for a moment, glaring at her, and Ruby waved to them and beckoned with a cheery smile.
Cinder made a noise like a bull preparing to charge, and then she and Nova leapt forward.
Ruby let the Gravity Dust cartridge drop to the ground, grabbed Lunar Enforcer with both hands, and then, just as it landed, she stabbed down with both hands. Not with the blade, but with a blunt end, one blade retracted. It didn’t puncture the cartridge—it crushed it. The Aura-boosted impact was too much for the cartridge’s metal shell to handle, and with a thunderous bang many shots’ worth of compressed gravity exploded out the nose of the cartridge all at once. Directly into the faces of her charging opponents.
The resulting wave of force very briefly warped Ruby’s vision, making everything appear contorted around itself, and then resolved just in time to see Nova flying head over heels through the air like she’d been hit by a speeding truck. And Cinder—
Cinder had somehow managed to see the explosion coming, and driven both of her swords into the ground, anchoring herself against the worst of it. But she was still knocked prone, and that was all Ruby needed.
She disappeared into silver and reappeared with a knee atop Cinder’s chest, splitting Lunar Enforcer in two and slashing both blades into either side of her neck.
The Aura buzzer blared for Cinder at the same moment that the boundary alarm alerted everyone to Nova’s involuntary aerial exit from the arena.
Just like that, Ruby had won.
“It’s over! The fight is over! The impossible has happened!” Professor Port boomed over the loudspeaker, his voice cracking with excitement. “People of the world, take a deep breath and remember this moment, because you have witnessed a MIRACLE!”
It was no miracle. It was Ruby. Just Ruby. Still winning without Atlas. Still invincible.
And Ruby finally felt like she could breathe again, a deep thrill flooding her. She didn’t even try to hold back her giant smile as she met the eyes of Team Crimson’s leader.
Finally, she had a perfect answer to all her fears and instincts which worried she would be nothing without the might of Atlas. But now, she’d proven them wrong. Coming back from a one-on-four deficit to win, something that no one else in the history of the tournament had done? That was proof. Ruby was still winning like no one else could. She was still invincible. She could still help people. She wasn’t nothing.
Cinder glared murderously up at the entitled whelp which was smiling ferally down at her from behind blank-lensed goggles. Despite her best efforts at self-control, she found her fingers twitching from sheer burning desire to rend and maim this smug, spoiled little girl—
No. This was not a little girl. This was not a student. This was not an amateur. Karyatis did not fight like a student. Karyatis fought like something beyond even a veteran Huntress. And Cinder had not understood what she was facing until far too late. She had instructed her team to hold themselves back and fight as any other talented student team might, to ensure that they attracted no suspicion, as might happen if they showed their true skill level. But Cinder hadn’t anticipated facing this… this THING which had no such restraints placed on it, and could unleash skills that no real student in this tournament would ever have.
Never had she been so sorely tempted to sink all her own plans in the name of an impulse. Thankfully, Karyatis saved her from having to wrestle with roaring bloodlust any longer. She burst into her Semblance, and Cinder didn’t care where she reappeared as long as it was out of her sight.
Ruby Karyatis fought without reservations, without holding anything back. She fought to kill, or to be killed, and it was only the blare of a buzzer which had prevented this match from bearing a deadly conclusion.
Over the pounding of her own pulse in her ears, Cinder barely heard feet running towards her. And then a painfully grating voice, the last thing Cinder cared to hear right now—
“Cinder! Are you okay? What did she do to you? I’m sorry, I tried to—”
“Silence,” Cinder growled.
Emerald immediately fell into a vastly preferable silence. Cinder turned away, trying to focus on evening her heartbeat, only to see Karyatis again, leaping into the arms of—
Into the arms of Penny.
The roar of the feckless crowd and the announcers still babbling empty words about the fight all faded into the background as Cinder watched Karyatis embrace Penny and smother her in kisses.
An incandescent rage filled every corner of her form.
The one good deed (however accidental) of Atlas, the one thing in that kingdom which could be considered even slightly redemptive, was the circumstances which had placed Penny Pallas in the basement of the Glass Unicorn on one fateful night. And now Cinder was watching that Karyatis mutt greedily lay claim to Pallas as well, watching her besmirch the symbol of the first rays of freedom in the dark nothingness of Cinder’s life. Tainting Penny dirtier and dirtier, further and further from what she’d once meant to Cinder. There was nothing which Atlesians would not gobble up and declare to be theirs alone.
Cinder saw Ruby Karyatis for exactly what she was: a hideous upheaval of the kingdom which endlessly gorged itself on power and exceptionalism without care for anything else, just one more avatar of its supposed superiority.
Cinder could not wait to make her bleed and burn.
The very top of Amity Colosseum, where stiff winds endlessly buffeted the rim, was a place rarely visited by souls. Only the occasional engineer performing upkeep on the Hardlight Dust generators which maintained Amity’s shields would have reason to be up here.
If one such engineer had ventured up there during the fight between Team CMSN and Team RSST (or, more accurately, the fight between Team CMSN and Ruby Karyatis), they would have found a curious sight: a lone raven with feathers the inkiest black, perched on a precipice, staring intently down into the arena at the fight unfolding below. The raven did not move so much as a feather during the course of the fight. Only when it was over did the jet-black bird with red eyes spread its wings and let a gust of wind carry it off Amity, leaving no trace that anything had ever sat atop the arena and watched the child with the face of Summer Rose.
“PENNY!” Ruby shouted jubilantly, leaping into her arms in a flurry of silver. “Did you see me going swoosh swoosh slash slash hwaaaaaakaPOW bang bang bang BOOM?!”
Penny nodded immediately. “Yes, I did! It was very, very cool!”
“Good! Because I’m gonna keep doing that!” Ruby nodded rapidly, and then gave Penny a look which managed to be guilty and hopeful at the same time. “So, you said, um, one thousand kisses—”
“I changed my mind!” Penny said.
“Oh.” Ruby slumped a little. “Um, that’s okay—”
“It is now two thousand kisses!”
Ruby made an adorable series of squeaking noises, and then leaned all the way in.
Penny wasn’t sure if Ruby understood that she only needed to be on the receiving end of this number, because she seemed to be doing her best to match Penny’s numbers kiss-for-kiss, but that was the OPPOSITE of a problem!
It was after the one hundred and thirteenth kiss (one hundred and ninety-seventh if Ruby’s return kisses were counted too) that Penny realized Yang was still absent.
After taking way too long to figure out the truth about Ruby, Yang didn’t trust anything about her deductive abilities anymore. So she blinked two more times, and then rubbed her eyes, and then tried digging her fingernails into her bicep skin, trying to figure out if this was the break in her sanity.
Nope. Taiyang Xiao Long really was here in front of her after stepping out of a nightmare-looking portal thing. He looked like he’d fought a few wars on the way. His eyes were bloodshot, and he looked like he hadn’t seen a comb or a razor in at least a week. It was a bedraggled shagginess that set Yang on edge, because, well… the last time he’d looked like that was during what both Xiao Longs and Qrow referred to as The Bad Times.
“Dad,” Yang said, scrambling upright. Her voice warbled so ferociously that her greeting was almost incomprehensible despite being one syllable.
“Yang?” Taiyang’s voice came out oddly raspy. He winced and cleared his throat before speaking again, now sounding much more like the dad Yang was used to hearing. “Where are we, exactly?” He leaned out of the shower, squinting at their surroundings. “Hang on. Is this Amity?”
“Sure is,” Yang said.
“I thought I recognized the lockers.” But then his brow furrowed even deeper. “Yang, were you… hiding from something? Are you okay?”
Yang’s heart thudded. Dad was remembering the last time Yang had started hiding from things—a time when the life of a much younger Yang was being torn apart by irrationality. But that wasn’t the real thing to be dealt with right now, Ruby was where Dad’s attention needed to be! She couldn’t let herself be a distraction to him, she had to redirect him before he got too stuck on her own stupid problems—
Good thing it would be easy to deflect, considering how he looked. Yang crossed her arms, visibly sizing him up. “Are you? Because you look like you went through the Grimmlands on your way here.”
Taiyang cracked a grin which didn’t quite reach his eyes. “I think that would’ve been easier.”
Yang leaned to one side, looking behind Dad to see if that weird portal thing was still there. It wasn’t, and it’d left no trace. Well, no trace except for her dad. “So, uh, are you gonna explain what that was?”
“It’s a long story, and not a fun one.” With that, he held out his arms for a hug, and Yang had maybe never jumped into a hug faster in her life.
Taiyang grunted softly on impact, but thankfully didn’t fall over. So at least he wasn’t too badly beat up. “Missed you, Lamplight.”
Lamplight was his nickname for Yang, started from a joke once made by Summer about how the only thing she needed to read Yang a bedtime story was the light of Yang’s Semblance.
“Missed you too, Dad,” Yang mumbled. His clothes smelled like the woods. There was tree sap on his shirt. She felt dangerously close to crying.
Don’t cry. Don’t cry. Don’t be a distraction. Don’t start shaking.
“I’m sorry,” Taiyang was patting her back softly. “Getting back took longer than I’d hoped.”
“It’s okay.”
“But now I’m here for however long you need me.”
“It’s not me that needs you the most right now,” Yang said.
Taiyang pulled away from the hug, staring at Yang. “...I think we should continue this conversation somewhere else.”
Yang nodded. She’d had enough breakdowns in showers this week for the rest of her life.
Once they’d seated themselves on a bench elsewhere in the locker room, Taiyang looked at her, his eyes going to one side of her. “Yang, your hair…?”
“Yeah.” Yang fingered the single braid which laid over a shoulder and trailed down her front, and thought of Ruby’s hands in her hair during the sleepover. She’d kept her hair in a braid as much as possible since that slumber party, out of an unquenchable terror that if she undid the braid she might somehow undo Ruby’s existence, or at least undo any chance to see her ever again. “Long story. Part of this story. Somehow.”
Taiyang tilted his head, and Yang could see the wheels in his head spinning as he tried to make sense of that. But just as she took a deep breath to start, the doors opened behind them. Specifically, the doors leading here from the arena.
Yang’s heart caught in her throat as she whirled around.
It wasn’t Ruby. Or anyone on Ruby’s team. It was one of the teams from Haven—what was their name again? She’d talked to some of them once or twice… Team Crimson, that was it. They must’ve been Ruby’s opponents.
And without knowing anything about the fight, the looks on CMSN’s faces told Yang they’d lost. Or, maybe, more specifically, they’d lost to Ruby. Yang didn’t even think about asking them if Ruby’s team was nearby, because they looked pissed.
“Rough match?” Taiyang said sympathetically as the four students passed.
The glare their leader Cinder gave him in response could’ve melted all the snow in Solitas.
They didn’t stop once in the locker room. And once the exit door had banged shut behind them, putting them out of earshot, Taiyang nodded and said, “Rough match.”
Yeah, that sounded like the Ruby Special for sure. But also, if one team was leaving, that meant Ruby could be here any second now—
“The Grimm attack,” she said.
She didn’t need to elaborate. In the Xiao Long household, even after so many years, the Grimm attack could only refer to the night when Summer’s baby had been taken. Taiyang leaned forward, his eyebrows going up and up and up.
“She survived, Dad.”
Yang didn’t realize how odd her words would sound until Taiyang’s confusion magnified tenfold and he said, “She?”
Oh. Right. How would he know?
She backed up her thoughts, working through how to explain this without misgendering her sister sister a whole bunch, and right as she started to say “So, you know how people sometimes—” the doors opened again.
Yang’s back was to the entrance. But Taiyang, facing her, had a perfect view of anyone entering from the arena. And Yang had a perfect view of her dad going as still as a statue, his eyes widening to an inhuman degree while his skin went paler than a cadaver. His stare went a thousand miles beyond whatever was behind Yang.
Yang turned slowly, as if her spine was weighed down by millstones, and found Ruby and Penny entering together, their hands intertwined and swinging back and forth. If it was any other day, Yang would’ve cooed at how adorable it was. Right now, she’d be lucky if she managed any sounds which weren’t violent sobs.
Penny was already eyeing the two of them with clear concern. Of course, she’d noticed something off about them the moment she entered. Both of their vital signs were probably all over the place. Yang wasn’t sure how her heart could remember to do its thing right now.
Ruby was halfway into a cheery wave when she noticed something wrong, and she dropped her arm without finishing the wave. “Um. Yang. You look like you’re dying.”
Maybe she was. Yang could believe she deserved to die right now, as retribution for being the densest sister sister in existence.
Then Ruby’s eyes landed on Taiyang, and she raised an eyebrow, wariness briefly flashing across her face. “Who’s that?”
Who’s that. Ruby didn’t have the slightest idea how much those words would feel like a punch in the face to Dad. His eyes were as wide as when he’d waited for Yang at the aerodrome after she tried to run away at age ten. So wide they looked like they would pull in the world around them in a collapsing black hole.
“Ruby, this is my dad,” Yang said, putting a hand on his shoulder. She didn’t even try to make her voice sound cheerful. Just getting it to normal was a titanic effort. “Dad, this is Ruby. She’s our… friend.”
“And my girlfriend!” Penny said.
“And future teammate!” Ruby added, brightening a little. However, it immediately drained away as she kept studying Taiyang.
Yang knew she should nudge her dad into saying something, snap him out of this stupor somehow before he creeped out Ruby, but what could she say? So she just sat there, hugging him with one arm and letting him process everything. Finally, he spoke, sounding as if he was speaking through a throat full of mud.
“Hello.”
And that was all, his jaw working subtly in silence afterward, giving Yang the impression that she was watching all his emotions thrashing wildly under his skin.
Ruby edged closer to Penny. “Your dad’s weird, Yang.”
Taiyang choked. “What?”
“Anyway, Penny and I are gonna watch the rest of the fights, you two can join us if you want?” Ruby said.
“We’re—we’re staying here for a bit longer,” Yang said. “Just need to talk about… some family stuff.”
“Okay!” Ruby tugged on Penny’s hand, pulling her towards the exit and looking very relieved to get out of there, but Penny lagged behind, shooting Yang a worried look. Yang gave her a thumbs-up and made an urgent shooing gesture—they really needed to be alone. And then she added something else, mouthing it as clearly as she could. Please don’t eavesdrop.
Thankfully, Penny pointed to her ear and nodded to show she understood the second request. As soon as the two girls were gone, Yang stood up and gently pulled her dad towards a corner.
“That’s what I meant,” she said.
Taiyang swallowed hard, sent one more awed look at the door which Ruby had just disappeared through, and focused his attention on Yang.
“That’s my baby,” he said, his voice somehow hoarse and soft all at the same time. “That’s my baby.”
Yang let out a breath she didn’t even know she was holding. “Turns out that a not-even-one-year-old baby can survive a Grimm attack in the middle of the night.”
“That’s my daughter.” Taiyang sat down on the floor, landing with a soft thump. It wasn’t an involuntary sitting down, but it wasn’t quite voluntary either. More that he’d realized he needed to act before his legs gave out of their own accord. “I have another daughter…”
His face wasn’t just absent of color now—he actually looked as if the life was draining out of him, leaving behind the a soulless husk of a mask. His eyes roved back and forth between Yang and random points in space, not quite focusing on anything.
“My baby,” he whispered, over and over again. “That’s her.”
Yang joined him on the ground. “And my sister.”
She was starting to think the word sister would never stop echoing through her head.
“We need to go home,” she said.
Taiyang’s only reply was a slow, silent nod.
Notes:
The scene between the Happy Huntresses and Ruby at the start of this chapter holds a very special meaning to me, because it's one of the earliest scenes I ever conceived of for War Machines.
Of course, the idea for War Machines had been circling in my brain for years before Volume 7, but it'd always been an abstract thing, a "What if Ruby and Penny switched places?" thought which struggled to go into specifics. And then, when Volume 7 aired and we received the Penny Backstory and also Watts's history with Atlas, those were the catalysts I needed for an actual story to form.
And when I started gearing up to actually write the story in 2020, I was thinking about Ruby's childhood in Atlas, and the first thing which came to mind was this brief, haunting encounter between the Happy Huntresses and a mysterious, secretive girl who they can't help no matter how much they want to. An encounter that felt as if it was ripped from the pages of a fairytale.
The idea of that scene has always stuck in my head, and to finally write it out and publish it is a genuinely enchanting experience. I feel like I'm sharing a lost fable.
Next week will be Chapter 54: A Rose By Any Other Name
Chapter 54: A Rose By Any Other Name
Notes:
The chapter titled "A Rose By Any Other Name" going up on Valentine's Day... I swear I didn't plan for this to happen!
This chapter brought to you from the embrace of my lovely girlfriend who I am once again with in-person, and I am kissing her while I hit upload button for this chapter! :]
Happy Valentine's Day, my love <3
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
That evening, the mood in Team CMSN’s room was that of a bomb about to explode.
Cinder sat in the center of the room, clenching and unclenching her fists. Inside her fists was what amounted to two small handfuls of glass, and every few moments she performed the same series of actions. Her Semblance would heat the glass until it was a molten, shapeless blob, and then deactivate, instantly cooling the glass into a hard lump, at which point she would crush the newly formed structure with the assistance of her Aura, shattering it in her hands in a storm of gruesome crunches. And then, once the glass in her hand was thoroughly pulverized, she would reactivate her Semblance and melt down the shards, restarting the cycle.
She had been repeating this for long enough that it seemed she would only stop when her Aura ran out. Even then—it was anyone’s guess if she would use the Maiden powers to push the cycle further, either withstanding or ignoring the slicing and shredding of her hands that would inevitably result.
Neo sat on the windowsill, staring out at nothing and sulking silently, as she had done so since being thrown out of the arena by an overpowered Atlesian playing with Dust like a child’s toy.
Emerald sat on her bunk, her knees pulled up tightly to her chest, and stared at Cinder with wide, worried eyes. She had rationalized the fear sitting heavy in her chest as a fear of their plans being put in irreversible jeopardy, but anyone else would take one look and reach the obvious (and correct) conclusion: she was afraid of Cinder’s blistering fury.
On his bunk, Mercury laid listlessly, his arms folded over his stomach, fingers tapping against one another and legs kicking slowly at the bunk just above him. He had run out of other people’s bank accounts to drain on gacha games, which bothered him way more than their tournament loss.
Emerald and Mercury didn’t dare to speak, and Neo couldn’t speak. When the silence in the room was finally broken, it was a foregone conclusion that it would be Cinder who did so.
“How dare they,” she growled. The glass shattered in her hands.
It would be a figure of speech to say that her eyes were burning a hole in the wall opposite her, but Cinder Fall was also very much capable of doing so in a literal sense, and there was still some possibility that she might, if her self-control frayed any further.
“How dare they,” she said again. The glass shattered in her hands. “How dare they be so arrogant as to enter that thing in the tournament.” The glass shattered in her hands. “How dare they think that the world is a playground for their pet projects.” The glass shattered in her hands. “And how dare that thing take advantage of the disguise of a student to trick us, the superior fighters, into letting our guard down so that it could have its worthless victory.”
The glass, hardened once more, did not shatter. Cinder stared down at it for a moment and then cast it aside. “My scroll,” she said, holding out a hand.
Emerald scrambled to give it to her and then retreated back to her bunk, assuming the same position as before.
Cinder opened the scroll and scrolled once again through the massive folder that Arthur Watts had sent her an hour ago, files and recordings and transcripts and videos and documents, all of it relating to one girl. If it could even be called a girl—she found it far more accurate to call it a thing.
“Project Moonrise,” she spat out. “A name has never rung more false. This lab rat will do nothing but sink in darkness.”
She would make sure of it.
There were still more folders she hadn’t looked through yet, and now she began to open these, reading even further into histories of Karyatis’s deployments over preceding years, deployments at an age when she had still been trapped in the Glass Unicorn. This creature of destruction had known nothing but war for its entire existence.
“We underestimated Karyatis,” Cinder said to her teammates. Of course, she did not truly think of them as teammates, or even peers. They were her instruments, to serve and be used as agents of her revenge upon the world. “I will not make the same mistake again.”
She continued to click through the records of a living, breathing instrument of war. An instrument of war currently in the hands of Atlas, yes, but before that…
An instrument of war intended for Salem. She supposed there was some amusing irony in that.
File: A.C. Watts notes on potential efficacy of experimental procedures with Argentum.doc
Although the forays into the experimental Hound concept have recently achieved a stable form, all stable iterations thus far still yield a common issue: They are entirely useless. They can barely move a limb, and they cannot comprehend anything of the world around them. The most they can do is wail like a wounded beast. I am now theorizing that this is because immersion in the Grimm concentrate is akin to sensory torture for the subjects. While their silver-eyed trait protects them from instant destruction, it does not protect them from their own pain receptors, or their own taste buds, or their own noses and ears. This overwhelms the Hound form, leaving it completely insensate to the world. Perhaps the Grimm’s inherent abhorrence of certain human emotions plays a role in this, given how the subjects are usually in a state of irrepressible panic. All attempts to sedate the subjects prior to immersion to avoid aggravating the Hound form have produced inconsequential results.
That is where Subject Argentum enters the picture.
Argentum is an infant, by far the youngest of all the subjects I’ve had. In fact, Argentum is young enough that it will be unable to comprehend what is happening to it when I introduce it to the Grimm concentrate for the first time. Therefore, it will not be able to panic in the way that adults do. I have a rare opportunity to construct a Hound that does not even perceive anything happening to it as something which is wrong, and will have no significant distress or negative emotions with which to disrupt the Hound’s functions.
But the sensory issues remain, and once again this is where Argentum’s youth distinguishes it from the other subjects. The neurological makeup of the average adult human is an incomprehensible jungle, but in a child, it is far simpler. It will be much easier to locate and map out the sensory pathways within Argentum’s neural system, at which point destroying such pathways becomes almost trivial for a man of my skills. In comparison to what I’d have to do to an adult, nullifying Argentum’s sensory systems is the action of uprooting a mere sapling, rather than trying to chop down a fully grown tree and dig out its root system.
Pitching this theory to Salem was met with her approval, with the caveat that I should not do anything to the visual organs or optical nerves of Argentum. Which is precisely what I already had in mind. I am quite curious if a silver-eyed subject would still retain their resistance to Grimm concentrate with their eyes removed, but that is something to be tested with another subject. Argentum is far too valuable a test bed to take any serious chances with. I will proceed cautiously.
File: A.C. Watts notes on breakthrough with Argentum.doc
As I predicted, a process that would’ve taken years in an adult was exponentially quicker with Argentum. The subject’s senses of taste and smell are entirely nullified. Even more significantly, the sense of touch and related systems—namely pain and temperature—have also been nullified. As for what I have not changed: In addition to the obvious choice to preserve ocular systems, I have also refrained from touching anything relating to hearing. Sound does not seem like something which would be as directly agitating as other sensory inputs, and in such a case it is always better to leave in place something which can be removed later but cannot be put back once removed.
And that brings me to the results.
The resulting Hound which was created with the newly modified Argentum for a base has been a resounding success. Although it is comparatively smaller in stature due to Argentum’s small physical size, its ability easily dwarfs every iteration which came before. This Hound retains the full mobility of the Grimm forms which inspired it, and shows an intelligence far above what any other Grimm has ever shown. It is capable of understanding and carrying out complex orders, and it is even capable of its own rudimentary form of communication.
Even Salem is impressed by my achievements. She has directed me to be even more cautious in my experiments with Argentum now, as it is the first Hound which can actually be used as a weapon.
Post-trial extraction of the Grimm concentrate from Argentum proceeded smoothly, fully returning the subject to its base human state without issue. The extraction is standard practice to mitigate subject deterioration, but Argentum displayed noticeably less bodily deterioration in comparison to other subjects of stable Hounds. Perhaps the reduction of the sensory suite places far less strain on the human body, and perhaps the Grimm concentrate attacks flesh less energetically when it senses less distress.
These observations have been vital in advancing my understanding of the ideal Hound model. It has not been quite right to think of this concept as a symbiosis between human and Grimm, as Salem and I previously thought. Instead, the Grimm concentrate is clearly the dominant ingredient in the mix. Now, I see that it is best to characterize Argentum as a silver battery which fuels the Hound.
The best battery is one that is strong and durable, with a great amount of charge to provide, but the best battery is also a stable one, which can remain inert and not interfere with the function of whatever it fuels. Some might say that Argentum is already the perfect battery, but I have never been satisfied with perfection, even if everyone else in Atlas was. My experiments will continue, albeit at a reduced rate out of deference to Salem’s desire for caution. Regardless, this project is already a success. My work has yielded the most powerful weapon that Salem has ever wielded. I eagerly await the day when Atlas discovers what groundbreaking creativity they let slip through their fingers.
File: A.C. Watts notes on effects of repeated experimentation.
Argentum continues to be a tremendously productive subject. As it has gained awareness of the world around it consistent with human development, the capabilities of the Hound have grown considerably. Unfortunately, that means Argentum has also far and away become my most labor-intensive experiment. Because the Hound’s cognitive abilities are what make it so unparalleled amongst Salem’s arsenal, it is strictly necessary to teach Argentum language and continually ensure the development of its basic cognitive functions. There is no way to evade this burden, because the human battery is the source of all the Hound’s cognitive abilities—what would take any other Grimm decades or centuries to learn, can be taught to a Hound in just days or even hours. I despise every second of cognitive development training which I must do with Argentum, and it is made all the more excruciating by its inexhaustible enthusiasm for everything. This stage of my Hound program has been more tedious and bothersome than even those accursed days of being the errand boy for Polendina’s idiotic Battle Angel project. I eagerly await the day when my experiments have run their full course and Argentum can be silenced forever. Still, though, I suppose that’s the kind of problem that’s expected for a man of my caliber to have—suffering from the burdens imposed by my own resounding success.
At least I know I am working towards a great reward. And at least I have modified some Knights to at least carry out the most repulsive and time-consuming tasks which are inextricably linked to a test subject incapable of caring for itself. If I had to involve myself in any of the sanitary aspects of maintaining a child, I think I would have drowned myself in one of these Grimm pools a long time ago.
Argentum has now become the most durable and resilient testbed for the Hound project. Other subjects have degraded so significantly that they can no longer be removed from the Grimm concentrate, severely restricting what experiments can be performed on them. The advancements discovered through Argentum, however, have prevented it from reaching levels of damage anywhere close to the other subjects, and a subject that can still be transferred between forms is vitally useful for experimentation.
The near-pristine condition of Argentum allows for continued immersion cycles of the Grimm concentrate. Each cycle, initiated for the purpose of recording certain results, concludes with complete extraction of the Grimm concentrate. Over the course of numerous cycles, I have discovered something interesting about the way the Grimm concentrate reacts to Argentum. In order for a Hound to take form, the subject must be immersed in the concentrate for at least a certain amount of time. Too short an immersion, and all that has been accomplished will be giving the subject a very inconvenient bath.
However, for Argentum, there has been a definite and substantial downward trend in the required immersion time. During the first experiments with Argentum, the better part of a day was needed to create a Hound. But over time, the immersion time has decreased to just several hours, and then below an hour, and then less than a half-hour, and as of the latest experiments, a Hound can be created in mere minutes. This is a fascinating development which merits much deeper study. I have determined again and again that there is absolutely no trace of any Grimm matter left in Argentum once the concentrate has been extracted from her. Salem has confirmed this with her own arcane magics which inextricably link her to the Grimm—she has no such link of any sort to Argentum after extraction from the Grimm concentrate. Therefore, Argentum, when re-introduced to Grimm concentrate, should be an entirely foreign object, nothing but an ordinary human. So then, how can it be turned back into a Hound faster and faster over time?
My current theory is that Grimm concentrate, regardless of where it comes from, is able to retain memory of Argentum.
Questions to direct research: What is the upper limit? Could partial immersion eventually be all that is necessary for a Hound form? Are there other methods of ‘memory’ apparent in the Grimm concentrate?
How long could the Grimm concentrate’s ‘memory’ last?
File: A.C. Watts emergency situation summary.doc
Successfully fled Atlas. Stationed in Evernight for foreseeable future. Remotely erased all data at my facility, but unable to physically destroy the complex. No trace left of my connection to Salem. All experiments left behind to fall into Atlas’s undeserving grasp, with one exception: Salem assures me that she took personal measures to terminate Subject Argentum. Heartened to know Atlas will not get their Beringelesque hands on her, but the loss is nonetheless discouraging.
Less discouraging: Salem has a new Hound subject for me.
Present day
Some time later, Cinder was interrupted in her browsing by another message from Watts. She clicked over to it, and discovered a truly unexpected series of words.
By the way, there’s one other ‘contestant’ in the tournament that I have a history with. It may fit quite nicely into your plans.
And attached to that message was another enormous folder, this one titled Project Battle Angel.
Cinder raised an eyebrow and began the download. Two fantastical creations concealed amongst the students? What a strange coincidence.
By now, her rage was ebbing, and a freshly sharpened sense of purpose rose in its place. Once the sting of failure was shaken off, true perspective set in, and made clear just how certain their victory still was. The team’s cover had not been blown. The most important tenets of their plan remained in place—the White Fang, the Pandora and all the just-stolen Atlesian robots, Torchwick’s imprisonment, the building sense of unrest in the general population. Even the failed breach plan, as irritating as it had been to learn of, was not mission-critical.
Cinder would adapt and become stronger, as she always had.
“So you have a new plan?” Mercury said, finally sensing it was safe enough to speak. “Because our old plan relied on me being, you know… in the tournament.”
“Of course.” Her scroll pinged—the first part of the downloaded folder from Watts was ready to view. Cinder tapped on it. “Karyatis may actually be more—”
The first file popped up, and the visage of Penny Pallas all but punched Cinder in the face.
She had to physically recover from the shock before she was ready to keep reading. And when she did, she found the face of Penny still smiling at her. But not the Penny that Cinder knew now. This was the face of Penny as Cinder had remembered her for years. This was the face of Penny as Cinder had seen her in the basement of the Glass Unicorn.
And underneath it, a caption: The Battle Angel. Inexplicably prefers to be called ‘Penny.’
“Uh, boss? You good there?” Mercury said, waving a hand.
Cinder didn’t respond. She began to scroll faster and faster, through schematics and blueprints and wiring diagrams and bug reports, all sense of time disappearing as she clicked and clicked and clicked and read and read and read—
Experimental laser firing array. Synthetically generated Aura projection. Gesture-controlled weapons platform. Consciousness-augmented supercomputing cluster. Certified total sentience and complete autonomy of thought. Chassis construction makes use of several breakthroughs in alloy technology. Colloquially referred to as PENNY Project by all but one team member. Destroyed beyond repair [referred to as Incident 29AEOAX in monthly budget report] and entire project shut down permanently as of—
Cinder snapped her scroll in two.
The sound resonated in the small room like a gunshot. Emerald flinched violently, and Mercury sat bolt upright, and Neo spun away from the window, showing interest in that evening’s proceedings for the first time.
Cinder stared down at the sparking scroll as discordant images of the final night at the Glass Unicorn flashed through her head.
Penny Pallas. The Battle Angel. A living weapon on a level so absolute that not even Ruby Karyatis reached there. Forged from birth—whatever counted as a birth for a robot—to be the greatest achievement in the history of Atlas, the next generation of weaponry. She had been programmed with the language of servitude by a kingdom which believed itself master of the world and everything it created, and yet…
And yet, despite every measure, every plan taken to keep this weapon on an unbreakable leash, the Battle Angel had disappeared entirely from the rapacious, unblinking eyes of Atlas, and somehow reappeared in Beacon Academy as Penny Pallas, her past entirely cut away and Atlas none the wiser to where their little toy had vanished.
It wasn’t the Battle Angel who Cinder had met in the Glass Unicorn. It was Penny. This was who had wandered off from her captors and broken Cinder’s first chain. Someone with just as many chains as Cinder. Someone made from chains. Someone quite literally made to serve, until one day she didn’t.
Cinder was beginning to understand now. Penny had fled Atlas. She had erased any trace of her shameful past on a level which Cinder could only dream of doing, a level that only a robot could attain—entirely deleting it from memory. And in the process, deleting all memory of Cinder. But that was a kind of forgetting which Cinder could look beyond. Because the truth was that Pallas was willing to go to any length to erase her repulsive origins, not caring what else might be burned away. And that could be respected. That could be used.
But just as Penny had fled her captors, she’d been swept up into the clutches of another, more insidious captivity. One she likely wasn’t even aware of. Her chosen place of refuge was what she thought was a shining beacon of freedom, unaware of how rotted this academy was all the way down to the first stone in its foundations. It would have been a trivial thing for Ozpin to lure in this ambitious girl with false promises of freedom and strength and self-determination, and equally trivial for him to foist his all-consuming influence upon her, easily earning the loyalty of a living weapon. Penny had no idea that in removing herself from one man’s arsenal, she had added herself to another man’s arsenal. Without interference, he would soon make her an integral part of his schemes, pointing her strength at whatever he desired the destruction of. Without interference, it would be inevitable that Cinder would fight and kill Penny in battle.
But… there was still a chance for Penny to be redeemed, if Ozpin had not yet sunk his odious claws into her too deeply. And if he had, and it was too late…
She let the broken scroll slip from her hands, ignoring the shattering sound that followed. “I know exactly what our plan is now. Do any of you have Pallas’s scroll number?”
Neo raised her hand.
A searing sense of resolution settled in Cinder’s chest. However it had to be done, she was going to set Penny free.
Several hours later
Blake’s concern for Yang had graduated to a full-blown fear sometime in the past several hours, around when she disappeared after their tournament match—apparently her dad was here now, according to Penny and Ruby? But Blake hadn’t seen him either, and messages to Yang’s scroll went unanswered, and then later on, undelivered.
It was a stroke of luck, then, that Penny noticed a civilian bullhead with incredibly loud engines landing on a corner of campus where it definitely wasn’t authorized to land. And maybe they wouldn’t have thought anything of just the bullhead, but Penny, with her telescopic vision, saw who exactly was waiting for the bullhead.
Blake, Weiss, and Penny arrived just as Yang was pulling herself aboard, with her dad already in the ship.
“Yang,” Blake said.
Halfway in, halfway out, Yang froze. Then she slowly turned her head to meet Blake’s eyes, and there was nothing but apprehension in them. Which only made Blake feel worse about however she’d messed up to result in her partner feeling scared of her.
Thoughts of Adam rose unbidden in her mind, of how he’d made her scared too, and those thoughts whispered fearfully that maybe Blake wasn’t any better than him, and—she wasn’t going to listen to any of that right now because Yang needed help.
“Please, what’s wrong?” she said, trying to adopt the most un-Adam-like posture she could think of.
Yang swallowed, eyes darting between her teammates. Even amidst her visible tension, she looked more tired than the aftermath of Mountain Glenn, more weighed down than Blake had ever seen her. “…Where’s Ruby?”
Blake couldn’t help but be slightly befuddled by the change in subject. “Asleep in our room.” The stress of the last couple of days must’ve finally caught up with Ruby, because she’d started snoring as soon as she hit Penny’s pillow.
Relief broke across Yang’s face. “Okay, good, just—”
“Should I get her?” Penny said.
“NO!”
The desperation and suddenness in Yang’s voice made Blake instinctively step back. What?
Yang lost her footing and only avoided falling over by jumping out of the airship entirely, a wild look in her eyes. “No, please don’t tell her I’m leaving, please don’t—she can’t know this is happening, the best thing you can do is stay with her, make sure she’s safe, make sure no one tries to take her.” She nodded madly, as if she expected her teammates to accept that without question.
“Yang, please, what’s happening?” Blake said. “You look like you’ve seen death.” She had a horrible feeling this was exactly what Yang had been hiding ever since Mountain Glenn, which made her feel even worse about not being able to bring Yang to open up.
As Yang fiddled absently with her braid, her reply almost felt like a plea. “You shouldn’t worry about me right now. Really, I’ll be fine. I’ve got Dad with me.”
Blake looked into the airship, where Taiyang Xiao Long was hunched over, his hands clasped together and forming a sort of frame for his bowed head. It was the image of a man in the throes of prayer. “I think I should be worried about him, too.”
Taiyang didn’t react at all to that, which only magnified her worry.
“I… I don’t want to burden you all with this,” Yang said. “It shouldn’t be your problem, and I just need to figure out how to deal with it myself. We’re just going back to Patch for the night—I’ll be back tomorrow morning way before the tournament, promise.”
“The tournament? You actually think that’s what we’re worried about most, Yang?” Weiss said, crossing her arms.
Yang winced. “...Okay, maybe I could’ve said that better.”
Team RSPBY (Blake had insisted on giving Ruby a vote) had picked Yang and Penny for the doubles round, but now Blake wasn’t sure if she wanted to put Yang in another fight while she was in this bad a state of mind. “Yang, you’re hurting.”
Yang recoiled. “I’m not—”
“If it’s something you really can’t talk about, then… at least let us come with you?” Blake said.
Yang’s eyes, already sunken, dimmed further. “I… I don’t want you to feel like you have to, just because I can’t handle myself…”
Blake tried not to let the pain pulsing inside show in her voice. Seeing Yang like this was acutely despairing. And… Wait. She was remembering a conversation around the campfire from Mountain Glenn. When Yang had shared a story about her childhood and a mental illness that tried to take over her life. And told them the signs of it coming back. She’d said—
“If I ever start retreating into myself, that’s the alarm bells.”
Oh no, Yang…
“Irrefutable proof to my brain that I’m not a mortal threat to everyone.” And that was what Yang had said she needed to stay in a good headspace. Did… did she think she was somehow a threat to her teammates? Did Yang think needing help made her dangerous? How could she help Yang when one of the things which made Yang feel worse was needing help?
“We want to help you, Yang, and we’re not just going to leave you alone here.”
Yang—previously full of nervous energy—suddenly went very, very still. She was looking down, leaving Blake without any idea of what feelings might be flitting across her face, but when Yang spoke, Blake heard the thickness of someone on the verge of crying.
“Really? You promise? Even if… Even if the problem’s mostly my fault?”
Blake nodded. “Promise.” And Weiss said, “Of course,” as Penny added, “One hundred percent promise!” in an overlapping voice.
“You’re our friend, Yang. Our teammate. Someone we trust. We’re not just going to leave you behind when it stops being convenient or easy to have you around.”
At those words, Yang lifted her head, and she wasn’t holding back tears—they were spilling out of her, and she was quivering like a small child lost in the woods. “I, uh, I still don’t want to leave Ruby alone…”
“Simple! I will ask Team JNPR to look out for her tonight!” Penny said. She was already on her scroll. “They are right across the hall, and they should be able to stay with her if anything happens. I’ll send a message to Ruby too, in case she wakes up before we return.”
Yang exhaled, and the tension which had been gathering in her body since the appearance of her teammates left in a rush. “Okay. I think that’s enough to keep me and Dad sane. Hop on, girls.”
Yang waved them into the airship, her hand on the bay door and ready to shut it, but Blake paused just as she was climbing in and gave Yang a tight hug. But she only felt Yang tensing violently at her touch. Which affirmed to Blake that Yang needed as much help as her team had to offer.
When Yang slammed the bay door shut, a stocky, tattooed older woman leaned out of the cockpit, adjusting a well-worn pilot’s headset which sat on her head. She eyed the group for a moment before speaking.
“Alright. New people—my name’s Tourmaline, but it’s Lina to you unless you’re my wife or you want to get punched. Welcome aboard the Stormalong, Patch’s number-one on-demand freight and passenger ferry. I never fly all the way out to Beacon, but Taiyang called in a real big favor I owe him, so buckle up and relax.”
“Thanks again, Lina,” Yang said, strapping herself in and letting her head fall back against the wall. “Sorry about the extra passengers.”
“No problem. Guess I’m used to unexpected passengers where the Xiao Longs are involved.”
Blake blinked at Lina as she sat back down at the pilot’s seat. Knowing Yang’s history, did the pilot mean that—
Penny looked up from her scroll. “Would it be accurate to refer to this situation as a ‘family emergency’ in my text messages?”
Yang’s only reply was a burst of weak, pained laughter.
At the end of an uneventful flight peppered with deeply concerning clanging and banging noises, the pilot’s voice crackled over a tinny loudspeaker to inform them of their arrival. Penny knew they’d arrived somewhere on Patch, and she would’ve been able to identify their exact location if she’d had geolocation tracking turned on. However, geolocation tracking required a CCTnet connection. Which… No. Not an option anymore. It would never be an option again.
Yang had kept eyes fixed on a window for most of the flight, but as soon as she heard they were landing, she rose to her feet and took the deepest breath Penny had ever seen her take, her eyes fixed on an invisible point. Taiyang stood up much more slowly. Penny poked the sleeping form of Weiss, who bolted upright and had Myrtenaster halfway to an attack position before she finished waking up and realized there was no danger. Just as everyone grabbed a handhold, the bay doors slid open, flooding the interior with light from the setting sun shining directly into their faces.
It took Penny’s photoreceptors 1.9 seconds to adjust to the sudden change in light, but when they did—
Oh. She recognized this place. She recognized those gravestones.
“Oh,” Blake said quietly, realizing where they were at the same time as Penny. She put a hand on Yang’s shoulder. “Yang? What happened?”
Yang twisted her braid around her fingers, around and around and around. “Everything.”
No one knew how to reply to that.
When they dropped out of the airship, there was no need for a landing strategy, because it was only a one-meter drop into the cliffside clearing that held the Xiao Long-Rose family graveyard.
The bullhead lifted off almost immediately after, and Penny was not sure if an aircraft could ever be described as lumbering through the air, but this ship was doing its best to make that description reality as it departed.
Taiyang gave the ship a slow wave. “She’ll be back in a few hours.”
A deathly silence fell. There was no birdsong, and not even any wind to set the dying autumn leaves rustling behind them. It was as if the world had come to a standstill. The forests here were much further along in their fall foliage than at Beacon, and the blaze of leaves turned orange and brown and gold and yellow and red almost merged with the fiery sunset.
Yang and Taiyang were leaning against one another, and Penny wasn’t sure if this silence was meant to be contemplative or mournful or something else, or maybe it was just because they couldn’t think of anything to say. Or didn’t need to say anything.
Several minutes later, by some sort of invisible signal, the two of them turned to face Summer Rose’s grave. Another silence ensued, but in this one Yang and Taiyang exchanged silent, communicative glances with one another, and after a brief war of Taiyang nodding and Yang shaking her head, Taiyang lightly pushed her forward and Yang didn’t resist. She folded her hands in front of her, before abruptly changing her mind and shoving them into her pockets.
“Hey, Mom. Been a while.”
She paused, and Penny was left to fiddle with the drawstrings of her hoodie, suddenly nervous about being here for such an intensely private moment. Was it wrong of her to come along? Yang had consented to their joining, but… had they pressured her too much? But also, Yang looked so desperately sad that it was making Penny hurt somewhere inside.
“Some… really wild stuff has happened,” Yang said. “Turns out Penny’s even cooler than the last time I told you about her. Blake is an awesome team leader and an awesome person and I think about her a lot. Weiss has just as many issues as the rest of us, as it turns out, but she’s doing her best to work through them. Let’s see… We busted a Dust-stealing operation and arrested notorious crime boss Roman Torchwick. We got chased through Vale by a giant mech piloted by Blake’s jerk of an ex. We put a butt-whooping on said ex. We went on our first mission as a team and almost died!”
If Weiss’s lack of reaction to Yang mentioning her issues was indicative of the seriousness of the situation, then Taiyang barely reacting to the mention of his daughter almost dying was indicative to Penny of how concerning this all was.
“We’re sort of mixed up with the White Fang, but not in a dangerous way. I think.” Yang looked up at the sky burnished orange and red, and then added, “But none of that’s why I’m here.”
The wind picked up for the first time since they’d set foot on Patch, sending a gust of decidedly chilly fall air into everyone’s faces, along with a wave of dried leaves which skittered along the grass. On Patch, summer was definitively past.
“We also met someone new this semester,” Yang said, and here her voice took a wistful turn. She reached for her braid again with her prosthetic hand, stroking it lightly. “Her name’s Ruby. She’s the best fighter I’ve ever seen. We met her doing a stakeout in the middle of the night when we were trying to bust Roman Torchwick, which set our expectations pretty well for what it’s like to know her. She’s got more energy than a boatload of Dust, and she’s always trying to use that energy to help people. She’s dating Penny now, and it’s the sweetest, most gooey thing I’ve ever seen.”
Yang sent a small smile Penny’s way, and Penny found herself agreeing with the sentiment. Gooey was a very good word to describe how she felt on the inside while looking at Ruby. And sweet needed no explanation. Being emotionally intimate with Ruby was like melting a magnificent bar of chocolate directly into her consciousness matrix. If such a thing were safe to do in real life, that was.
“But all that isn’t exactly why I’m here, either. It’s this other thing about her.” Yang looked slowly around the glade, and then brought her eyes back to the gravestone. Her voice grew quieter with every word. “I finally figured out who Ruby looks like. She looks like you, Mom.”
Penny clamped down on a gasp just before it left her mouth, but Weiss and Blake did not have the same control over their reflexes, and their sharp intakes of breath split the silence Yang had let fall. But all she did was look over her shoulder at the rest of her team, her eyes so, so tired, even more tired than a few minutes ago. A facade dropping.
Finally, Penny understood what burden Yang had been laboring underneath ever since Mountain Glenn. The strange looks directed at Ruby, the way Yang moved around her like she might damage her with the slightest touch…
Yang faced Summer’s grave once again, and this time her voice came out in a rapidly wavering tone which burst into unabashed despair halfway through. “She looks so much like you that I hate myself for not realizing sooner! The whole entire semester seeing Ruby, talking to her, looking at that face every day, and I… couldn’t. I couldn’t remember what you looked like. All I had was this faint sense of familiarity, like I was seeing someone I hadn’t seen in a long time, and I was exactly right!”
Yang’s fists were clenched into white-knuckled tightness, and her Aura was not up to protect herself.
“Gods. Fuck. I’m sorry, Mom. I’m so fucking sorry. I failed you. Every single day I didn’t recognize Ruby, I failed you. How was I so stupid? How could I forget? You would’ve recognized Ruby on sight, I just know you would’ve! How can I ever call myself your daughter when I couldn’t even do that?”
“Yang,” Taiyang said quietly.
Yang went still, but gave no other reaction, still staring down at Summer’s grave like it was supposed to be her own.
Taiyang closed the short distance between them, and wrapped her in a big bear hug, the kind of hug that Yang so often gave to others. “You’ve always been Summer’s daughter, and you always will be.”
Yang let out a sob, and started to lean into his shoulder—but then suddenly pulled away, tears still slipping out. “But you recognized Ruby as soon as you saw her! I couldn’t! And then why can I still remember Raven’s face when I’ve never actually talked to her and she might as well be a perfect stranger to me?! It’s got to be my fault!”
Taiyang swallowed, and for a moment an entirely different pain was wracking his face. But then it was gone, and to Yang, he was saying:
“Even if it is somehow your fault, do you think messing up or failing somehow would’ve made Summer love you any less? She didn’t need you to be perfect, Yang. She loved you, just the way you are.”
Yang shook like an earthquake, and when Taiyang gently pulled her back into his embrace, she sank all the way into him without hesitation, clutching at his midsection and sobbing in great big heaves that could’ve reached to the far side of the island.
Penny, Weiss, and Blake exchanged sad looks, and it was the rare occasion where Penny was firmly tuned into the emotional wavelength of an unspoken look, usually the bane of her communication. This time, though, the three of them were feeling more and more like they shouldn’t be here, that they were unwelcome intruders invading Yang’s privacy.
But to leave now, somehow that felt even worse to Penny. And it must’ve felt the same to Blake and Weiss, because neither of them made any move towards the path which led back to the Xiao Long house. They’d promised they would come along and help Yang no matter what happened, and… This was what they’d asked to be an audience to. They would not abandon Yang.
Some time later, Yang returned to quieter, shuddering breaths, sucking in air like she’d been underwater, and swiped ferociously at her face. “And my stupidity doesn’t end there, Mom,” she said, turning back to Summer Rose’s grave. “When I finally saw Ruby’s eyes—her silver eyes just like yours—when I recognized them, I thought—I thought of the dumbest things.”
“Yang—”
Yang ignored her dad, stumbling onward through speech. “I… Ruby, when I recognized her, I thought maybe she was… a clone of you. Like maybe I was looking at a copy of you. Wonder what fucked-up things it says about me that that’s the first place my brain went.”
She let out a bitter laugh.
“And if you think that’s weird… the second thing I wondered was, what if Ruby was actually you somehow? I thought, could Atlas have kidnapped you on that last mission, and done things to your body to turn you younger, to make you forget everything you ever were, to make you a blank slate, so they could have an obedient Grimm-blasting weapon who would follow any order?”
She swallowed, hard, like she was fighting something inside her. “And—and, it was, a lot, to think about maybe I was looking at my mom turned into something completely unrecognizable, or that maybe I was looking at a reconstruction of my mom, and… I…” She shook her head slowly. “I felt like I was going insane. I don’t know how I didn’t. But, I promised, whatever Ruby turned out to be, whatever connection she had to you, I promised myself I was gonna love her all the same. I’d be… I’d be her family, no matter what, no matter where she came from. I just didn’t know what kind of family.”
Yang finally unclenched her fists, and Penny saw dots of blood on the tips of her fingernails which had not been there before.
“Well. Now I know.” Yang took a step back from the grave. “Now I know exactly what Ruby is. It was stupidly obvious. It was the thing I should’ve thought of first, and I don’t know how you can forgive me for not thinking of that, either—it was—it was—I just—fuck. I was missing one little piece! One. Little. Piece. That feels like it’s straight out of those fairytales you used to read to me. But I found that piece yesterday. And I found Ruby.”
And then, with glacial slowness, her eyes slowly fading from an angry red to a tired lavender, Yang turned around, staring at something behind Penny and Weiss and Blake. Penny turned, confirming Yang’s gaze led to what was already present on her radar: the other grave on the cliff.
Oh.
Blake’s hand moved, going to cover her mouth.
Weiss’s hands found Penny’s elbow, clutching it tightly.
A wave of sorrow filled Penny’s circuits.
Oh, Ruby…
“You thought you and Dad had a son together, Mom, but turns out… You had a daughter.” Yang’s voice nearly dissolved, the words coming out in choked gasps. “A daughter, who didn’t die. A daughter who got the chance to—to grow up, even if it was a really sad childhood. At least she’s… still in one piece, and she cares about people. And she’s found love. And she grew up to look just like you.”
Yang stumbled across the clearing and came to a stop before the other grave, falling to her knees before it. Taiyang followed behind her, remaining on his feet at the grave but putting both hands on Yang’s shoulders. His eyes were squeezed shut, and his mouth was a painfully tight line barely holding back tears.
“Hi, Ruby,” she gasped out, speaking to the words etched into the stone, the words for a nameless person that now had a name. “Ruby. Ruby Rose.”
She shivered. “That’s your name. I can’t wait to share it with you. I hope you like it, but… even if you don’t—Ruby Karyatis. Ruby Xiao Long. Fuck, even Ruby Branwen if you like the sound of it! Whatever name you want, it’s yours! Whatever you end up being, Ruby… now I know. You’re my baby sister. Now I know.”
And finally, the tears which had clawed at Yang’s exterior as she held them in, the tears that’d boiled over and surged and fallen away, the tears that’d somehow been mostly held back to this point—they burst forth in full force. Yang hunched over, and then fell to one side, curling around the grave and making appalling noises.
It was then that Taiyang, also no longer holding back his tears, looked over at the other girls, and urged them closer with a jerk of his head. When they hesitated, he indicated Yang again, far more insistently.
That time, Penny did not hesitate, and her approach pulled Blake and Weiss along behind her, and then all three girls were kneeling next to Yang and placing hands on her that they hoped would be comforting. Some degree of shock at the revelation was coursing through their own minds as well, to state the glaringly obvious, but Yang was far and away feeling the most, more feeling than the rest of the team added up together.
As Penny watched Yang, all she could think of was a certain fairytale, about a goddess forced to hold the world aloft. When she was finally released from her burden, for days afterward all she could do was lie motionless because she had forgotten how to move. The pose that Yang was in now was what Penny envisioned at the end of the fairytale. Crushed by the weight of the world, and somehow still here.
Many minutes later, after slowly trailing off into a silence like a fire gradually running out of fuel and sputtering out, Yang took one more deep breath and pulled herself upright, her eyes puffy and her upper body now bearing grass stains all over. The sun had mostly sunk behind the horizon now, and the warm glow over everything was beginning to fade.
Yang stared at the grave—the not-grave, Penny decided to reclassify it—and gave a weak sound that might’ve been a little laugh. “Guess I was right about you as a kid,” she said. “Sort of. All those times exploring the woods, looking for you, looking even if you didn’t yet have a name for me to call out. Going deeper and deeper into the trees and dodging branches and freezing up when I heard howls and peeking into bushes and stubbornly ignoring how much I was risking my life, looking for someone who wasn’t there no matter how much I hoped she would be…”
She reached out, trailing first her flesh arm and then her prosthetic across the words chiseled into the not-grave. “I found you, Ruby. I found you.”
Notes:
For months, people had wondered in the comments why Watts took away Ruby's senses of taste and smell and touch and pain, and it was so very hard to keep myself quiet about the exact reason why he did. But now you have the answer! :D
Chapter 55: Mirrors Will Shatter
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
Taiyang’s friend would be picking them up in the Stormalong at the house, and with twilight steadily deepening into complete night, the five of them reluctantly began the hike down from the graveyard with the not-grave. Penny led them back, and Yang and Taiyang brought up the rear, sticking so close to one another that they might actually have been holding one another upright. The father and daughter talked in quiet voices, saying things to one another that Penny was intentionally tuning out, giving them as much privacy as she could offer. At the same time, she kept her radar active, scanning the woods for any sign of Grimm. There were certainly enough negative emotions to attract some.
It was just about fully dark when the house came into view on Penny’s radar. She turned to inform the others that they were nearly there, only to be preempted by the conversation between Yang and Taiyang abruptly rising in volume to a level that was impossible to miss.
“—why the fuck did you get rid of every picture of Mom?!”
They’d both come to a stop in the middle of the path, forcing everyone else to stop as well.
“Yang, I—”
Taiyang’s reply was cut off by an even louder rejoinder from Yang as her hair erupted into translucent flames, throwing a flickering glow over the surrounding trees.
“If I’d remembered what she looked like! If I could’ve just had one single stupid photo left of her! Then I would’ve figured it out the first time I ever saw Ruby! None of this waiting MONTHS like the worst daughter and the worst sister in the whole entire world because I hadn’t seen my own mom’s face in fuck knows how long!”
“I’m sorry,” Taiyang said. His voice was crumbling into splinters. “I… I’m sorry, Lamplight. I wish I hadn’t. I wish I hadn’t.”
Yang stared at him, her fists clenched, long tongues of flame still dancing up and down her braid, and then she jumped forward and wrapped Taiyang in a hug.
“I’m sorry,” he said again, pressing a kiss to the top of her head. “I just… all those years ago, when Summer disappeared, and it was the third member of our family to go… it felt like the grief was burning me alive from the inside out, and after a while… I thought, as idiotic as it was, that if I just got rid of every reminder of her, destroyed any visual reminder of everything that hurt, then the pain would go away. So I tried to erase it all. Erase everything that hurt too much to look at.” He shook his head. “I tried too hard.”
“Did it at least work?” Yang mumbled without looking up. “Did everything hurt less?”
“No. Nothing changed, Yang.”
Yang didn’t reply. Instead, she hugged him even tighter, the flames slowly dying out from her hair.
Minutes passed. Blake and Weiss and Penny looked at one another, equally unsure of what to do. Eventually, though, it was the sound of a bullhead approaching, returning to pick them up, which drew the Xiao Longs out of their inertia.
Yang and Taiyang blinked at the blaze of the Stormalong’s landing lights as it touched down in their front yard.
“I know we just said we’re going back to Beacon now, but… ” Yang trailed off, looking from her dad to her teammates. “...Can we stay the night, and tell my dad everything we learned about Ruby this semester?”
Penny, Weiss, and Blake barely needed to think about the unanimous answer.
Sometimes, Ruby dreamed of darkness.
Not the kind of darkness that happened when she closed her eyes and couldn’t see anything, because that would be a weird thing to dream about. No, sometimes she dreamed of a darkness she’d never seen anywhere else besides her dreams. A darkness which pulsed and throbbed and bubbled, and sometimes, it kind of seemed… alive.
Which might’ve sounded really, really scary to anyone who heard Ruby describe it, but it really wasn’t that bad when she dreamed about it, because she was used to it. It was just there. A thing that happened in her dreams sometimes. And it always had a haze over it which made it feel kind of like a very, very old memory.
This dream wasn’t just darkness, though.
“Deserter.”
“Traitor.”
“Murderer.”
“Failure.”
The words were hissed viciously at Ruby from all directions and never stopped, no matter how far she ran or how fast—and activating her Semblance only made everything worse, because the rush of silver dust just magnified the words a million times, a hateful hurricane stirred up in her ears.
“No! I’m not!” Ruby screamed, but somehow her own voice wasn’t nearly as loud as the others. It wasn’t even as loud as the echoes of her footsteps which bounced off the dark, deserted hallways of Beacon that never seemed to end, no matter how far she ran. “I’m just—I’m just trying to live!”
“All the people who will die because of your selfishness are just trying to live, too.”
Where was the exit, she had to get out of here, she had to get out of here, she had to had to get out out get out—
Ruby scrambled around a corner, barely missing a collision with the opposite wall, and stopped dead. Lying in her way was Penny’s motionless, broken form.
Dim, unblinking eyes stared up at Ruby, the shutters in Penny’s photoreceptors unfocused and empty. Her limbs were torn and twisted at gruesome angles, jagged metal poking out of her shredded clothes, and her face was nothing but devastated pain.
“She’s trying to live, too.”
“No, no, no—I mean, yes, she’s trying to live! But she’s Penny! She’s strong! She’s not gonna die because of me!”
Ruby squeezed her eyes shut, but the afterimage of Penny’s corpse was burned too brightly to the inside of her eyelids, staring into her soul, no no no NO—
“They’re trying to live, too.”
The voice suddenly came from directly behind Ruby, as if someone was whispering into her ear, and despite her terror at what she might see, she opened her eyes again.
And immediately wished she’d done anything but that.
It wasn’t just Penny now, it was everyone. Yang and Blake and Weiss and Team JNPR and Winter and every Beacon student that Ruby had ever met, and her own teammates, and—and—
Dying eyes, wide and white like snow.
“Now they know the cost of trusting you.”
Ruby screamed. No words, no syllables, just air tearing out of her throat and turning it raw and hoping she’d run out of breath and pass out and be free—
“Obliteration.”
Ruby sat bolt upright in bed, panting wildly, her vision partly obscured by strands of hair plastered against her face by the sweat she was drenched in. Ever so briefly, a bottomless fear overwhelmed her because she didn’t remember where she was or why she wasn’t in Atlas—
Beacon. Team RSPBY’s room. Penny’s bed. No one hurting. No one dying. The frantic heaving of Ruby’s chest finally slowed as her surroundings sank in. She pushed the hair out of her eyes and tried to quiet her racing thoughts. Nothing was wrong. She was fine. Everything would be fine. Just a dream. She hoped that was all it’d ever be.
It was night. Really late at night. But her team wasn’t back yet. The family emergency that’d pulled Yang and the rest of her team away, it was still going, whatever it was. Ruby hoped it wasn’t too bad.
She wasn’t alone. Team JNPR was right across the hall after hanging out with Ruby all evening, and they’d promised her she could wake them up if she needed anything. And Zwei was right here in the room with her, curled up in a borrowed dog bed while his ears and paws twitched in his sleep. But it wasn’t enough. Ruby needed her team here. She needed Penny here. Without Penny’s presence, there was nothing to stop her thoughts from accelerating and turning into terrible nightmares and her stomach spinning at the speed of sound—
Ruby didn’t understand what had woken her up until a few seconds later, when she realized her scroll was vibrating in her pocket. She pulled it out so fast she almost dropped it, desperately hoping it was Penny saying they’d be back soon—
Winter.
Winter was calling. Ruby’s insides jolted and twisted even harder. Her scroll’s lock screen informed her that she had already called six times in the last hour.
Ruby watched the scroll vibrate until it fell still again, call number seven going unanswered. Doubt and fear kept building and building in her, and remembering Winter made it even worse. She really wanted to fall back asleep right now, but her brain was racing too hard and besides maybe she’d have a nightmare but she didn’t want to be awake and alone with her own thoughts without Penny to help quiet them, and…
Ruby threw aside her covers and shimmied out of bed. She needed to calm down somehow. But all the ways she’d used to keep calm as a soldier didn’t work anymore, they just felt like acid in her mind because they reminded her of all the bad thoughts.
Zwei lifted his head sleepily, but as soon as he fixed his eyes on her, he must’ve sensed something wrong, because he shook himself all over and padded up to her, whining softly.
Ruby knelt down and let him nuzzle into her legs as she scratched behind his ears. “Must be pretty nice being a dog, huh?” she whispered. “You get taken care of all the time, and you don’t have to worry about being a bad person…”
Why was it so hard to remember all the good things her team had told her over the past few days? Why was it so hard to think about Penny without her there? Why did it feel like she didn’t have control of her own thoughts? Why did it feel like there was a computer virus in her head trying to take over her and turn her thoughts into something else? Why couldn’t she make it all stop?
Her scroll started to vibrate again. Ruby knew it was pointless to hope it was someone she actually wanted to talk to, but she checked the caller ID anyway. Winter again.
She buried her face in Zwei’s fur and waited for the scroll to go still again. But right after it did, she felt a shorter vibration from her pocket, the kind that accompanied a text message instead of a call. And when she looked at her scroll again, she found this one to also be from Winter.
Ruby, please listen to me. This is an emergency. I need you to pick up your scroll.
Ruby’s eyes widened. An emergency…?
She looked up from her scroll at the window, where she could see one of the Atlesian cruisers moored outside, its outline shining in the moonlight. She’d never heard Winter call anything an emergency before. What if it was a trick of some sort to—to take her away, or to throw her in jail, or to hurt her friends, or—and her scroll was vibrating with another message from Winter—
Do you trust me, Ruby?
Ruby gasped. Winter’s word was one of the strongest in the world. When she promised something, she would hold herself to it until death. And she was assigned to Project Moonrise, she’d promised to protect Ruby with her life. No matter what. Could she doubt the intent of someone who’d made a promise like that? Was it possible to not trust her? What kind of emergency would…
With shaking fingers, Ruby returned Winter’s call.
Winter picked up before the first ring had even started. “Ruby?”
Ruby almost lost her nerve entirely, but the pure worry—in Winter’s voice kept her scroll glued to her ear. Instincts still deeply engrained demanded she address Winter as ma’am, but she didn’t have to do that anymore. She could just—
“Lieutenant—” She didn’t have to call her that anymore. She could just call her Winter. That was okay. “Winter, what’s wrong?” she said, her voice wobbling.
“Oh, thank the gods,” Winter said immediately, and the immediate relief which rushed into her voice was like snow blowing in the wind. “You’re safe.”
“Why… Why wouldn’t I?”
“You are putting yourself in a danger orders of magnitude greater than what you can even comprehend,” Winter said. “Even I’ve failed to understand it for my entire life, Ruby. Until tonight, when the General told me about the true state of affairs in our world.”
Ruby had been wrong about what was in Winter’s voice. It wasn’t worry. It was fear.
Holding the scroll so tight it made the screen flicker, she asked, “What’s happening?”
“The General wants to tell you himself.”
Ruby tensed. She didn’t want to talk to the General. “I…”
“We’re coming down the hallway right now. We’ll be outside Team Battleship’s door in a moment.”
“Team Raspberry,” Ruby said reflexively, even as the room spun dangerously around her.
There was a pause. Then, “We’re here.”
As if on cue, Zwei’s head snapped towards the door. He growled, his forepaws pressing into Ruby’s legs.
“No, no, shhhh, quiet, boy,” Ruby whispered, trying to soothe him with more head scratches, but Zwei only growled louder, pulling back his lips to bare his teeth. Ruby had never seen him do that before. “It’s okay, they’re friends, they’re not gonna hurt you…”
That made Zwei stop growling, at least, but he was still watching the door intently. Ruby didn’t move, wondering what would happen if she just stayed right here kneeling with Zwei until her team came back and Penny came back and made her thoughts feel clear again. What if she just didn’t do anything?
“Ruby?” Winter said again on the scroll, startling her. She’d forgotten the call was still going.
Ruby stared. She was a statue, a turtle retracting into its shell, a stopped clock. She was terrified of what laid behind that door. But it wasn’t the General and Winter who scared her. It was what they might tell her.
“Ruby. Please.” Winter’s voice might as well have been the last haunted cry of a dying universe.
Ruby stood up. Walked across the moonlit room. Paused at the door, her hand hovering over the handle. Her breathing was shallow and too fast. She couldn’t hear anything.
Ruby opened the door.
In the space of one long hour, Winter Schnee’s carefully shaped existence had been broken apart by a story. A story of gods and magic and relics, and two immortals. A story that she would’ve dismissed as laughably untrue, if not for who had told her.
She’d never seen the General so gravely serious.
In the aftermath of the revelation, a new kind of terror filled Winter.
Well, it wasn’t quite right to call it new. It was actually a very old fear, one last felt so long ago that she was sure she’d sliced it out of her psyche somewhere in the years past. A fear she’d last felt when she was fifteen, alone in the corner of some spotless room in the Schnee Manor and screaming as loud as she could because it was still two more years (seven hundred thirty days, seventeen thousand five hundred twenty hours, one million fifty-one thousand two hundred minutes, sixty-three million seventy-two thousand seconds) before she’d be old enough to attend Atlas Academy and she didn’t know how she could make it through those two years alive.
It was a fear that she would never escape.
Winter had thought she’d left that fear behind when she found a place in the Atlas Military. The military was strong, and it protected its own, and it made her powerful. But now, with the existence of Salem revealed to her, that fear was awakening once more. Now, nowhere was safe for Winter, not even the full might of the Atlas Military. The General had told her in no uncertain terms: if Atlas entered an open war with Salem today, they would lose. Ozpin, the man as old as Salem, had told him that.
And Winter had a perfect understanding of just how Salem would defeat a kingdom as great as Atlas. She could find an ally within the kingdom—one who had the power to destroy it from the inside, one who only cared about himself and his own power and would side with whoever promised him absolute rule.
Jacques Schnee was the perfect ally of Salem, and no one was more qualified to declare that than his own daughter.
Perhaps Winter’s father was already conspiring with Salem, moving secret machinations in place to ensure that when moves were made, his grip on Atlas would be unbreakable. With an immortal ruler of the Grimm to back his throne of blood and greed, there would be no one who could defeat him, if Atlas itself could not.
But Winter’s terror ran deeper and colder than even that. She had learned there was magic, that immortality existed. And if immortality existed, then… then… Jacques Schnee would stop at nothing to secure that for himself. If he discovered how to live forever, then Winter could never escape him. Perhaps not even her own death might be an escape, because her father was exactly the sort of person who, given absolute power, would curse his disobedient daughter with immortality just so that her punishment for daring to defy him would be neverending, and then she would never be free, she couldn’t escape him, even after all this time and trying she couldn’t escape him, could never escape him—
Ruby opened the door.
Winter squeezed and squeezed the terror inside her until it burst into nothingness, leaving her as an empty shell. Of course, there was no outward evidence of her emotions—she’d long ago perfected a concrete facade that no thought could pierce—but she felt it was best to be in the proper state of mind when addressing Ruby at this critical moment. She needed to be absolutely certain she could be strong for Ruby.
She and the General had tracked the locations of Team BSYP and Ruby’s scrolls for the last day, waiting for a moment where they could address Ruby alone and be given a chance to fairly state the truth without being shouted down by her well-intentioned but naive friends—and without the risk of anyone besides Ruby learning of Salem’s existence.
Ruby stood in the doorway, her silver eyes wide and glittering as she looked between Winter and the General with barely disguised fear.
“Ruby,” the General said slowly, quietly, carefully, as he navigated a verbal minefield. “Please understand, you have nothing to be afraid of from me. I am not upset by your desire to leave the military. It is an understandable instinct, especially when your closest friends have so emphatically claimed that the world is secure without your contributions.”
Ruby swallowed and shifted from one foot to the other. Further back in the room, the strange gray corgi that Team BSYP had inexplicably brought on their mission to Mountain Glenn was glowering at Winter and the General. Winter had never seen Ruby look so fearful. It was dismaying, and it made her want to berate herself. Her entire job had been to ensure Moonrise was safe and happy. And she had failed miserably at both of those things.
“But they are unaware of the reality of the situation which our world faces,” Ironwood said with a sigh. “Almost no one is. But I believe the time is right to tell you, because I fear for what may happen if you remain ignorant.” The moonlight which filtered into the room threw deep shadows over his face, adding years to him that he hadn’t yet lived.
“What is it?” Ruby said. Her voice was the smallest Winter had ever heard it. Another reminder of how woefully she’d failed Ruby.
Ironwood glanced up and down the hall. “May we come in?”
After a pause, Ruby backed away soundlessly, pulling the door all the way open. When Winter followed the General in, the first thing she noticed was Ruby’s weapon, mounted in a place of its own on Team BSYP’s wall and looking as if it’d been meant to be there all along.
She really was intent on leaving Atlas, and that was another failure for Winter, and another fear for her. Moonrise, the world’s best hope, making herself entirely vulnerable to attack by Salem? Beacon was as secure as a wet paper bag; the only reason Ruby hadn’t been killed already was that Salem’s side had not yet realized who she was. And after she’d fought in the tournament without her brown contact lenses, putting unmistakable silver eyes on display for the whole world to see, they would be unaware no longer.
Winter closed the door behind her and took a post beside it, listening for any potential eavesdroppers or enemy actors as the General took a seat at one of the team’s desks, turning the chair to face Ruby. Ruby remained standing in the center of the room.
The General folded his hands together before turning his head to look at the shattered moon which shone through the window. He took in a slow breath. “The man who introduced me to these secrets began by asking me about my favorite fairytale, but I don’t think I have the necessary… theatrical flair for that.”
Ruby was silent and still, offering no disagreement.
And so the General launched into words which were still fresh and stark within Winter’s memory.
“There is a hidden enemy that we fight who is more powerful than all the Grimm in the world combined.”
Ruby couldn’t stop shaking.
She had no idea how long she’d laid on her side alone in Penny’s bed, curled up and crying so hard that she could barely breathe. Maybe she would stay here pressed up against the wall until she ran out of tears, until she was too exhausted to even shiver, until she fell unconscious.
She knew the truth. General Ironwood had told her the truth. And it hurt.
Ruby was being bombarded by emotional pain worse than anything before in her life, like she was a vessel under immense pressure from the inside and outside—she hurt like she was about to implode and explode all at once. Her dulled sense of pain was suddenly sharper than the blades of her weapon. She’d never hurt like this in her life, not even during her headaches.
The truth was exactly what she’d been afraid of.
The truth was that Ruby Karyatis was supposed to be a weapon. It was her intended purpose. She was born to save the world. Project Moonrise was the only thing that could save the world. Because Remnant had been trapped in an unwinnable war with an ancient enemy for much, much longer than Ruby had been alive. An enemy so terrible and malevolent that its very existence justified every single thing Atlas had done to hurt her.
“Her name is Salem. She is not a human or a Faunus, but a Grimm in the shape of a person, a Grimm of terrifying intelligence and shrewdness who uses the speech of humans as a tool to lure criminals and degenerates and fools into doing her bidding. Just like any other Grimm, Salem grows stronger and wiser and craftier with every passing year, always learning from her mistakes. Time is of no issue to her, because Grimm do not die from old age. She operates from the shadows, a puppet master pulling countless strings. Every attack on the forces of law and order, on the fabric of civilization itself, can inevitably be traced back to her. Every Grimm answers to her, and her alone. The only thing which Salem desires is the destruction of all civilization.”
The General’s words boomed endlessly through Ruby’s mind like distant artillery fire. She rolled over just enough to bury her face in one of Penny’s plushies, muffling a fresh wave of sobs which made her fold in on herself so violently she wondered if she’d break in half.
“There will come a day when Salem becomes simply too strong and too smart, and then nothing will stop her. And none of us know when that day will arrive. All we can do is prepare ourselves, and hope that day has not already passed.”
There could be no saving the world later. It had to be done now, because the world was staring an event horizon of annihilation in the face, and Ruby was the only one who could steer them away—but only if they weren’t already beyond hope.
She wanted to scream. She wanted to scream so loud her vocal cords would snap and the windows would break, but if she did that, then Team JNPR would hear, and they’d try to ask what was wrong, and she wouldn’t be able to tell them and then they wouldn’t take no for an answer and then she didn’t know what she’d do.
She settled for burying her face in Penny’s pillows and wrapping the blankets around her head and growling as hard and rough as she could, and hoping it was enough to calm the thrashing, shrieking creature trying to claw its way out of her ribcage.
It wasn’t. She pressed her face harder into the pillow.
“It is still quite possible you were grown in Doctor Watts’s laboratory, but there have been people natural-born with the same power as you, entire lineages of silver-eyed warriors all throughout history. But today, they are a forgotten myth, an obscure fairytale. And that is because Salem despises the silver-eyed warriors with every fiber of her gruesome form. She has hunted them down for as long as they have existed, without hesitation and without mercy, and I am quite confident you are the last of your kind. She will be coming for you, too, and she will not care what stands in her way.”
Ruby had probably been grown in a lab because there were no other silver eyed warriors left. She was the only one. The weight of the world rested entirely on her shoulders. There was no one else who could singlehandedly end an apocalyptic flood of Grimm before it killed anyone. She would be a bad person if she ran away from her destiny, because she would be responsible for the death of everyone on the planet. She would be a traitor and a coward and a deserter and a murderer and and and—It was bad, what she was doing! It was bad right now! She was a bad person right now! What if Salem attacked Atlas next week and Ruby wasn’t there to stop her because she was hiding away at Beacon?! Then it would be all her fault!
“But take heart, Ruby. There is only one reason why Salem would hunt down silver-eyed warriors so viciously, why she would be so desperate to exterminate them before anything else. Because she is afraid of them. Because they can put an end to her threat once and for all. Because they can kill her. That is what you were born to do, Ruby. I have never once exaggerated in the slightest when I’ve said that you will save the world.”
What the General had said to Ruby the day before the dance—being the most hunted person in existence—was true. Every time she’d run off this semester and the General and Winter and the military didn’t know where she was, she’d been putting herself—and her friends!!!—in immense danger! The incident at the dance could only have been an agent of Salem. What would’ve happened if that infiltrator chose to stay and fight? Then they would’ve been facing off against an assassin trained by an immortal, all-powerful enemy who wanted Ruby dead. It could’ve turned fatal. Not just for her, but also for Penny!
Penny… Oh, gods. Gods. What would Salem do if she found out that Penny existed? What terrible things would she try to do, to hack her and take control of her and force Penny to do things she would rather die than to do?! Penny was already terrified of being hacked—and if it happened again, it would be all Ruby’s fault!
“Magic. Things which make Aura and Semblance and Dust look like mere sleight of hand. She can grow back a limb if it is chopped off. She can flay a man from the inside out with a flick of her hand. She can fly simply because she wants to, without Dust or wind. The Grimm bend their shape to her thoughts. And that is only scratching the surface of what she can do.”
Ruby had to leave all her friends behind. She had to go back to being the lone warrior she’d been before coming back to Beacon. That was the only way to keep them safe. They couldn’t protect themselves from Salem. No one except Ruby could.
“This is why you need Atlas as much as Atlas needs you. Because we are by far the strongest kingdom in history, and we can allow you to do what no other silver-eyed warrior has been able to do: Take the fight to Salem, and end her. We need each other, Ruby. Without you, Atlas is nothing.”
When the General had said that, Ruby understood the unspoken message in those words immediately: Without Atlas, you are nothing.
She rolled over and raised her head to look at the shattered moon, the fragments turned into bright smears by the tears blurring her eyes. Tonight, it didn’t feel like a beacon of inspiration. It felt like a judgmental eye glaring down at her.
“Ruby, we cannot wait any longer to fight. The chaos wrought this semester is only the beginning, and we are reaching the point where inaction will doom us all.”
Half of Ruby’s mind screamed at her to obey obey obey you stupid traitor you’re being offered mercy when you don’t deserve it go back to Atlas before he changes his mind and decides you’re a traitor forever
However, the other half of Ruby’s mind was just as lots and just as insistent, and it was screaming something much simpler:
NO. NO. NO. NO. NO. NO.
This side of Ruby howled that she wanted to stay at Beacon, she wanted more than anything to stay at Beacon, she felt like she’d die if she left Beacon! She couldn’t go back to Atlas! She couldn’t leave Penny! She couldn’t, how could she just leave the girl who lit up her life? Who in Atlas would do that for her?! She couldn’t take it, she couldn’t stand another minute in that kingdom! It was CHOKING her; if Salem didn’t kill her, then the mazes of empty hallways and too-bright lights would, and there would be nothing left of Ruby Karyatis.
How was she supposed to leave everything that made her happy? She couldn’t, she couldn’t, she wouldn’t have anything left to live for, how was she supposed to leave Penny? The light of her life, her lovely firefly, the girl who’d shown her what happiness actually felt like, the girl who made her feel like a real person…
She couldn’t just pretend all that hadn’t happened! If the the soldier’s instincts inside her mind were so deeply drilled in, then so were all the things she’d learned and felt and done this semester! She was pretty sure she’d never stop wanting more of this life ever again, just like how it felt like she’d never stop feeling those boiling hateful soldier’s instincts! Neither of them could make the other LEAVE!
Ruby shook harder, her stomach squeezing so tightly she thought she might vomit. She couldn’t even think about leaving behind all this glowing happiness she’d found without triggering a new wave of pain that started somewhere deep in her chest and radiated out like white-hot beams of light that were burning her alive from the inside out.
A whining noise filled her ears, and it took her several seconds to realize it wasn’t coming from her. When she opened her eyes, she found Zwei on the bed, pawing at her with big anxious doggy eyes.
She wished she was the kind of problem a sweet dog could fix. Actually, she wished she was a dog, or any kind of little creature that didn’t have to worry about big things and could just eat and sleep and be happy all the time and play with her friends and not be in pain! Like a mouse. She wanted to be a mouse. More than anything.
Ruby ached to talk to someone who understood her impossible choice. Penny and Weiss didn’t count anymore because they didn’t know about Salem. Right now, Ruby could only think of one person in the world who might understand her.
Fria.
Because Fria was a Maiden. Another thing Ironwood had told her about tonight. Four of them, one for each season, women who commanded immense power and guarded relics of even more power.
“Destruction. Creation. Knowledge. Choice. Relics are nearly limitless in their power. If someone were to collect all four, taking over the world would be a trivial matter. Even acquiring just one would turn the most weak or simpleminded of men into a grave threat. And Salem wants nothing more than to have possession of these relics. The Maidens are the guardians which stand in her way, keeping these transcendental forces safe from evil. And, in times of great necessity, they are the ones who bring the relics forth so that they may be used to preserve our cause.”
Fria was the Winter Maiden. And when she died, her powers would become Ruby’s. How could anyone else be in Fria’s last thoughts? Ruby was going to be the Winter Maiden. She was destined to become a guardian of one of the relics which Salem would stop at nothing to acquire. It was preordained.
Fria…
Ruby so, so badly wanted to talk to her. She knew about being a living weapon that was too valuable an asset to actually need freedom. But Fria also wanted Ruby to be happy, and unlike anyone else in the military, she only wanted Ruby to be happy for the sake of being happy, not because of efficiency or enthusiasm for fighting or enforcement or stuff.
Now she understood why Fria had tried to teach her to paint. She understood why Fria had told her fairytales. She understood why Fria had always been more interested in playing chess with Ruby than teaching her fighting skills. Of course she did teach Ruby how to fight like her, how to weave the elements into her fighting style, but she’d never done it like the efficient, regimented teaching that Ruby’s other instructors did. She’d usually turned training into a game even when there was no point in it being a game. Like hurling snow at each other in a way that wasn’t about learning to create deadly barrages of ice, but just how much snow they could hit each other with until they were both buried under snowdrifts in the training arena and laughing too hard to continue. The snowball fights had to stop for Fria’s own good as she got oldest , but Ruby would never forget those moments.
When Fria said she was Ruby’s guardian, she meant every syllable of the word from the bottom of her heart, even if it was something she’d been assigned.
Suddenly, Ruby understood something else about Fria. All those times over the years when Fria had looked at Ruby with tired eyes after Ruby had come home from a training mission grinning from ear to ear… Now she understood those worried, almost upset looks a lot better now.
Ruby wanted, needed to call Fria, to cry over the scroll to her and tell her she finally understood so many of the things Fria had done. Tell her she’d finally found her own happiness. Tell her she was facing an impossible choice. Maybe Fria would have an answer. But Fria was definitely asleep right now, and Ruby couldn’t wake her up because Fria needed her sleep because she was old and the General had just said she wasn’t doing well. Which meant there was no one Ruby could talk to.
Suddenly, Ruby needed to move. She needed to move or she was going to stop breathing or was going to die or she was going to go insane or everyone else would die—
Her vision was going blurry again, and she wasn’t sure if it was because of the tears that wouldn’t stop coming or because of how fast she was breathing, even faster than right after she’d told the General she was leaving Atlas. She was pacing the room like an agitated Grimm but she still couldn’t think couldn’t escape the roaring in her head, and she didn’t know if she could ever move fast enough—
Somehow, Ruby was in the bathroom, leaning against the sink for all her support, staring at herself in the mirror. She had no idea how she’d got here—one second she was at the other end of the room, and then the next second she was here, her memory hiccuping like lights blinking on and off.
Penny. Soldier. Person. Weapon. Friend. Bad. Good. Helpful. Murderer. Teammates. Army. Atlas. Beacon. Ruby. Moonrise. What was she supposed to DO? Either option felt like DEATH—
And then she realized it wasn’t just her memory blinking in and out, it was all of her. Her Semblance pulsed around her, a cloud of silver swallowing her up and making her reflection look fuzzier and fuzzier, and in that fuzziness, Ruby herself was… wavering. In one moment she looked how she’d looked when she fell asleep last night, dressed in thrifted pajamas and her hair fluffy and sprawling. And then in the next moment, she was wearing a cadet’s uniform as her hair knitted itself into a braid in a flurry of silver which never quite disappeared. And then the braid would unknit and the gray uniform would morph back into her colorful pajamas, and then it’d reverse direction, over and over and over—
Ruby felt strangely weightless, dizzy like she was losing her connection to gravity, like the world was pulling her in a million different directions. Or maybe just two. Those two directions—the good soldier, or the free girl. And the longer she stared at her ever-morphing reflection, the less she could tell which one was actually the real Ruby, or even which one she actually was right now. Was she wearing her pajamas or her cadet’s uniform? Was her hair wild and loose, or was it tightly wound? Was she Ruby, or was she Moonrise?
How was she supposed to pick?
She felt like she was splitting in half. One side Ruby the person and the other side Moonrise the weapon, and both of them pulling herself just as violently in exact opposite directions. And the longer she looked at her flashing, changing reflection, the more differences she noticed. Ruby the person was terrified, hunched over and covering herself with her arms like she was trying to shield herself from a blow, and Moonrise the weapon was angry, clawing ferally at herself like she could somehow tear the conflict out of herself.
With this choice, how was she supposed to be just one person? This was… this was a choice that needed two people to choose both choices because just one person couldn’t pick both, there needed to be a Moonrise who loved being a weapon and wanted to save the world and there needed to be a Ruby who was a normal girl with normal eyes and could stay with her friends and not worry about anything at all, and…
But Ruby was just one person, and Penny had told her one person couldn’t save the world.
She had to choose. She had to choose she had to she had to had to had to had had had had had had—
What if she didn’t?
Atoms were a funny thing. They had a whole lot of empty space in them with some tiny little electrons flying around in a cloud, but the electrons moved so fast that they were basically everywhere all at once, and that was why things collided with other things even though their atoms were mostly empty space, because electrons moved so fast they could make their empty spaces be full. So what if… what if Ruby’s Semblance moved fast enough between two spaces that there would be two Rubies made out of the amount of just one Ruby?
And then… and then, she could be Ruby the person and Moonrise the weapon, and she could save the world and be happy with Penny and her friends all at the same time, and everything would be okay and nothing would be wrong and her whole brain would be happy.
Ruby pushed her Semblance harder, harder, even as her vision became nearly incomprehensible and the bathroom filled with so much silver that it began to glow like moonlight, and she grit her teeth tried to concentrate on shoving herself apart—
For one split second, Ruby Karyatis was staring into a mirror which held two reflections of herself. The soldier weapon and the ordinary teenage girl, standing side-by-side, the prior fear and anger replaced by mutual expressions of immense shock. Ruby wasn’t seeing herself from either girl’s perspective, but from somewhere between them, somewhere which was just empty space, but she’d done it, she’d split herself in half—
Her Aura broke.
Ruby’s world collapsed.
Distantly, she heard something shatter, but she had no idea what, the only thing she knew was that she was dying and getting hit by a meteorite at the same time, and she was a rubber band let go just as it’d been stretched to its breaking point, and she was imploding and exploding and—
Ruby snapped back into herself, and the world returned with overwhelming abruptness. Now she was lying flat on her back on the bathroom floor, and even though the room was silent and dim and she wasn’t moving, her brain had never been so overloaded. For an unknowably long time, all she could do was lie there and pant desperately for air. Actually moving any of her limbs was more out of reach than lifting the entire world.
Eventually, though, she rolled over and worked herself up into a sitting position as her breath evened out, propping herself up against the bathtub and staring into the mirror, which now had a long, jagged crack running down the middle. But even with the break, she could still see herself in the mirror, and there wasn’t two of her. Just one. Despite everything, she was still just one scared little girl.
One scared little girl that still had to choose.
Unbeknownst to Ruby and unnoticed by anyone else who had been in the room that night, a raven with feathers as dark as the night had been perched on the windowsill of Team RSPBY’s room, watching Ruby’s every movement through the glass for hours straight. Only when Ruby had disappeared into the bathroom in a hurricane of silver did the raven spread its wings, taking flight and disappearing into an undulating red portal which appeared out of nowhere in midair.
On the other side of the world, Raven Branwen alighted on the front steps of her tent and sat down in human form, reaching into her pocket for something she’d carried for a decade. Something that never stopped weighing on her mind as a promise unfulfilled.
The finely crafted and polished metal emblem of a silver rose glittered in the near-midday sun of Mistral as Raven slowly rubbed her thumb over the emblem’s peaks and valleys—a topography that she’d long since memorized.
The night at Yang’s house was a strange yet oddly enthralling experience for Weiss. Because both Xiao Longs and their dog had been away from the house for some time, the heat had been shut off and the refrigerator cleaned out, leaving the house bitterly cold and devoid of any food to readily eat. But they had made it a splendid time. They turned on every light in the house and lit a fire in the fireplace. They built a structurally sound pillow fort and warmed up a ludicrous amount of frozen chicken nuggets and frozen dumplings which they found in a basement freezer. They made hot chocolate and wrapped themselves in blankets and huddled inside the pillow fort near the fire, and told Taiyang Xiao Long everything they could think of about Ruby.
No one slept at all, but Weiss still considered it one of the best nights of her life. And the Xiao Long household, even at its darkest, coldest, and quietest, still felt far more infused with life than the cavernous, sprawling Schnee Manor, which Weiss now understood would have become her crypt if she’d returned to Atlas.
Then, on the way back to Beacon, aboard the same horribly loud airship, Weiss somehow managed to fall asleep. She only woke up to Penny shaking her shoulder as they landed.
True to Yang’s promise, they’d returned with plenty of time to spare before the tournament continued. The morning sun was still struggling to make itself seen over the treetops. Taiyang excused himself as soon as he was off the airship, saying that Yang’s uncle was due to arrive soon and they’d arranged to meet elsewhere. Blake and Penny left for the dining hall.
Weiss, however, lingered on the open quad where they’d landed, watching the Stormalong depart. She didn’t feel particularly tired or hungry, as if a quick nap on a clamorous ship had been enough to refresh her. She didn’t trust that feeling to last, but she wanted to relish it while she could. It was rare for her to be out and about when the campus was this empty, and soon the festival activity would bring crowds she very much wanted to avoid.
Yang hadn’t departed, either. Her eyes were managing a frightening combination of being sunken from lack of sleep and swollen from crying at the same time, and they were red in a way that had absolutely nothing to do with her Semblance. But she was smiling a little as she adjusted her scarf.
“…I’m really happy y’all came. I think we added a decade to my dad’s lifespan.”
“Could you do the opposite for mine?” Weiss said, eliciting a loud snort from Yang.
“You probably did double that with your broadcast hijacking yesterday.”
Weiss couldn’t argue with that. She had no idea what kind of fallout she’d caused, and that was fine by her. She’d set her scroll on fire last evening without bothering to check her notifications. She knew Winter and Klein’s scroll numbers by heart, and Penny had backed up the photographs and videos she’d taken with her friends over the past year (and that included the silly selfies Yang insisted on taking). Those were the only things worth keeping the scroll for. And Father had paid for it, so it likely would’ve only been a matter of time before he locked her out. Hence, incinerating it with a vial of SDC-brand Fire Dust.
By silent agreement, Weiss and Yang started down one of the many paths which traversed the green expanses around the school. The fading morning mist bestowed a mystical air over everything, and the dew which hadn’t yet evaporated off the grass sparkled in the rising sun. It was a lovely scene, and what made it even sweeter was Weiss’s knowledge that she would be seeing so many more of these mornings.
“I have a sister,” Yang said after a few minutes of walking through a still-empty campus, her voice ringing with disbelief that was still fresh even after an entire night of discussing it. “I’ve had a sister my whole entire life and I just found out yesterday.”
“What happens next?” Weiss said.
“We’re just waiting for Uncle Qrow. He was on an even deeper mission than Dad, but he’s supposed to be here today.” Yang kicked at a pebble in their path, sending it skittering off into the grass. “Once the gang’s all here, then we go to Ozpin. Or Ironwood. Maybe both. I’d tell them to just grab Ruby and run, but we all know Ruby can’t really be grabbed.”
“How worried should I be that your uncle is going to be here?” Weiss said, as some of the stories Yang had recounted jumped to mind.
“Uh.” Yang came to a dead stop and picked at a piece of loose bark hanging off a tree before answering. “Let me put it this way, I’m glad you didn’t meet him two semesters ago.”
Well, that inspired confidence.
Suddenly, a new voice rang out over the early morning stillness.
“Weiss!”
Weiss would always recognize her name said from the mouth of her own sister, and she spun around immediately to find Winter approaching them at a brisk walk. She instinctively checked her posture—and then noticed Yang suddenly appeared on high guard, watching Winter with something intense enough to be called a glare. Weiss was thoroughly confused for just a second, and then she remembered what Winter’s mission here was. To mind Yang’s long-lost sister. To try and keep her away from outside influences.
But Winter paid no attention to Yang, her gaze squarely fixed on Weiss as she came to a stop almost too close.
“I don’t know whether to congratulate you or berate you for what you did yesterday,” Winter said. Her voice was urgent, clipped, unusual even by the standards of Winter’s militaristic tones.
Weiss blinked. “Winter, I—”
Winter didn’t acknowledge the attempt at a reply. “Do you realize what kind of danger you just put yourself in? Father’s reach is everywhere. He could send any of the seasoned Specialists which he has in his pocket to murder you in a manner you’d never see coming. Or he could enlist one of his even more unsavory allies to do the dirty work. You’re not safe here anymore. I’ve been trying to reach you all night.”
“I incinerated my scroll.”
Now it was Winter’s turn to blink. But before she could reply, a grating voice shattered the morning.
“Hey! Ice Queen!”
That voice was not Yang’s or Winter’s. But Yang must’ve recognized it, because she muttered, “Oh, no,” under her breath as Weiss spun around, full of indignation. No one had called her Ice Queen in a month, and gods help anyone who tried—
She blinked. She had no idea who this scruffy vagabond tottering towards her in obvious drunkenness was. Most certainly not a student, but that wouldn’t stop her from teaching him some respect. There was some corner of her that took an extra measure of satisfaction in teaching an alcoholic a lesson.
“I promised that the next person to call me anything starting with Ice and ending with Queen would have their tongue removed with remarkable speed,” she snarled, silently dialing her weapon locker. “Prepare to be the subject of the fastest surgery in history.”
“Weiss—” Yang started to say, only to be cut off by a boisterous laugh from the drunkard.
“Oh, the princess thinks I’m talking to her!” He was laughing so hard that he nearly fell over, in fact, and trailed off into mumbles as he teetered back upright. “Shush, kid, I’m talking to the big ice cream cone.”
Huh?
“Weiss, stay back,” Winter said, and that was when Weiss realized her sister had drawn her weapon.
“You know this man?” Weiss said, agape.
The drunkard guffawed again, and he was still approaching, completely unphased by Weiss’s weapon locker crashing into the pavement a meter away from him. “Oh, ‘course she does. We’re coworkers, after all!”
HUH?
“In the loosest and most unfortunate sense of the definition, yes,” Winter said. “Weiss, let this be a warning to you of what can happen to a Huntsman not instilled with the discipline of Atlas.”
“He’s a Huntsman?!”
“He’s also my uncle,” Yang said.
If Weiss was a synthetic person like Penny, she was quite sure that her computer systems would be crashing right about now.
“Hey, firecracker,” the drunkard said to Yang, before letting out an immensely loud belch that Weiss swore shook the leaves on a nearby tree. “Good to see you again. You should skedaddle before Ice Cream Sundae starts waving her big old sword around. She might actually hurt someone.”
“I will make good on my sister’s promise to rip out your tongue,” Winter hissed.
“Go right ahead,” he slurred, reaching back and unholstering an immense weapon.
“Weiss, you will stay entirely out of this,” Winter snapped, before charging forward without so much as another breath.
Weiss and Yang were left to watch Weiss’s sister and Yang’s uncle clash in the main courtyard of Beacon.
“Now do you see what I mean about being glad you didn’t meet Uncle Qrow sooner?” Yang said with a sigh.
Weiss was no longer even irked. She was just confounded. “Is he usually like this?”
Qrow was blocking Winter’s strikes with a skill that didn’t seem possible given his level of inebriation. And he appeared to be having the time of his life doing it.
“No. At least? He hasn’t been this bad in a long time…” Yang studied him, and then shook her head. “He’s usually more, uh, functional.”
Both combatants were showing shockingly little discretion in this fight, which probably wasn’t out of character for Yang’s uncle but was extremely unusual for Winter. Although… given the alcohol-soaked state of the man she was fighting, Weiss could perhaps understand her sister’s currently unhinged state of mind. This was a sore spot.
They were taking enormous chunks out of the pavement with every swing, and those explosions would be shattering windows if every window in Beacon wasn’t reinforced, and—oh, that was a full-grown tree. The arborist wouldn’t be happy about that.
A crowd of rubberneckers was quickly forming. Part of Weiss wondered where all these people had come from, while another part of her hoped that Winter would win this fight against an alcoholic with so many people watching.
“I’m rooting for my uncle, by the way,” Yang said. “Don’t take it personally, but I’m not a big fan of your sister right now. Because of my sister.”
“That’s… fair.”
They watched sword clashing against scythe in a perplexed silence until footsteps signaled the approach of someone behind them, and Weiss and Yang turned to see Penny and Blake running back out of the school, their weapons drawn. By the looks of it, they hadn’t even had time to eat anything Although Penny’s bow was now set askew on her head.
Penny lowered her zweihander in confusion, staring at the glyphs and gunshots being flung at each other across the courtyard. “Is this a hostile situation?”
“No, it’s my uncle,” Yang said.
“Oh.” Penny shrunk Luminous Electra down to its smaller form. “Why are they fighting?”
Yang shrugged. Weiss did not have any answer better than ‘mutual hatred,’ so she stayed silent.
Blake and Penny didn’t seem to have any response to that, so after a few more moments of watching in silence, they both holstered their weapons.
Then Penny sniffed the air and frowned. “I am currently smelling alcohol…?”
“That would be my uncle again. I promise he’s—” Yang started to say, only to freeze mid-sentence, all the color disappearing from her face. “Oh, no—”
I should pick fights with uppity Atlesians more often, Qrow mused as he parried another blow from the Schnee. This was the most fun he’d had in years.
And they really were all the same, these Atlas military types. Fanatically militant, an air of superiority that hung around them like a stench worse than anything he drank, and always wearing those stupid-ass uniforms.
Oh, there was Jimmy, running over to rein in his attack dog. Time to put the finishing touch on Operation Shut Up The Snow Queen.
A strangely familiar silver glimmer sparked in the corner of his vision, making him blink reflexively, and he almost missed his next dodge. Nearly there, just had to get Schnee to turn a little bit more—
Summer.
Qrow froze.
Summer.
Ten feet away from him, unfolding a double war scythe and baring her teeth at him, was the teenage image of Summer Rose. The face. The hair color. He’d know it anywhere.
Qrow opened his mouth to ask, how? why? who? and a billion other things, but before he could make a single sound, Schnee’s fist slammed into his face.
His introduction to the pavement was sudden and woefully unpleasant. Somehow even worse than the last time he’d gotten up close and personal with Beacon’s pavement.
Distantly, he heard that excruciatingly stiff, manicured voice entirely breaking character.
“You… didn’t dodge,” Schnee said in undisguised amazement.
Right. Qrow probably shouldn’t have taken his attention off the ongoing fight, but he really couldn’t bring himself to care about that suddenly.
He was somewhere on the ground, stars spinning in his wildly swimming vision as he heard the soft clicks of a well-oiled high-quality mechashift, followed by the much harsher sound of a heavy sniper rifle being cocked.
With every ounce of effort he had in his pounding head, he brought together his senses and focused on the blurry shapes in front of him.
He was staring down the barrel of a sniper rifle with pincer blades on either side, which was wielded by the girl who looked like Summer Rose. Her ferocious glare never wavered from Qrow. It gave him a perfect view of her eye color.
Silver eyes. Just like Summer’s.
Qrow could’ve been stabbed through the chest by the Schnee at that moment, and he wouldn’t have noticed.
And then the girl who looked like Summer spoke, jabbing her rifle even closer to the bridge of Qrow’s nose.
“Lieutenant Schnee, do you need help arresting this degenerate?”
Lieutenant?
That was when Qrow began to notice other details about the girl who looked like Summer Rose. She was wearing an Atlesian cadet’s uniform. That weapon, even if it was painted blood-red, was an unmistakably Atlesian design. She spoke like an Atlesian. And she was looking at him in exactly the way that jackboots like Schnee looked at him.
Qrow knew perfectly well this couldn’t be Summer. If she was alive, then she would be Qrow’s age, not looking like she was here for initiation day at Beacon all over again. So that left exactly one person in the world who this could be.
Summer Rose had a baby. A baby that went missing fifteen years ago without a trace. A baby that, if it’d grown up, would probably look like Summer and look just a little too young to be at Beacon yet. And maybe he was pretty sure Summer had a baby boy last he’d checked, but that didn’t fucking matter, not when he was looking right at Summer-not-Summer. Stranger things had happened than someone deciding to be a girl—stranger things such as seeing the face of his dead teammate holding him at gunpoint and wearing a fucking Atlesian uniform.
It was a struggle to get words through the too-thick haze in his head, and for the first time that day he regretted having that last drink. But finally, he made his mouth work, nearly too shaky to understand his own question.
“What did they do to you, kid?”
Summer’s girl frowned, and for the first time, her hold on her weapon wavered. But before Qrow could keep going in any meaningful way, he heard the voice of the worst fucking person in existence battering at his eardrums.
“Schnee!”
And immediately, all of Qrow’s focus was redirected on caving in Jimmy Fucking Irondick’s face in for—for—He couldn’t even say why. He just knew, without a shadow of doubt, that he needed to kill Jimmy right fucking now.
He shoved away the rifle barrel still in his face and staggered to his feet, his vision tunneling to just Ironwood and nothing else, and he didn’t care that he’d dropped his scythe somewhere in the middle of being punched in the face because he could strangle Jimmy to death with his own stupid fancy gloves—
“QROW! QROW!”
There were maybe two voices in the world that could break Qrow out of his bloodlust, and Taiyang Xiao Long was one of them. Hearing him shouting didn’t stop Qrow, but it did make him hesitate just enough for Tai to catch up and trap him in a restraining hold from behind.
“Let me go,” Qrow growled, thrashing against Tai with every ounce of strength he could muster. Jimmy stood back from the sudden scrum with an impassive expression that Qrow hated more than anything else in existence right now. “I’m gonna fucking murder him, and —”
“Qrow.”
That voice was, unfortunately, the other voice which could break Qrow out of his bloodlust: Ozpin, and he sounded truly unsettled. Qrow didn’t freeze, but he slowed his struggling enough that there was no chance of breaking free from Tai’s grip.
Ozpin and Glynda were all but running towards them, and although Oz was outwardly calm, he couldn’t hide the white-knuckled grip on his mug. “I think we should all take this to a more private place before this conversation continues,” he said in the tone of someone who wasn’t making a suggestion at all. “Glynda—”
“On it,” Glynda said, her riding crop already out and beginning to levitate debris back into place.
“Qrow. Taiyang. James. My office. Now,” Ozpin said, indicating the nearest entrance with a jerk of his head. Qrow took a grim pleasure in how the old man sounded as pissed at Jimmy as everyone else.
“Sure thing,” Qrow mumbled. Tai didn’t let go of him as the tense foursome made their way inside, and Qrow didn’t really blame him. His knuckles were still itching for an introduction to Jimmy’s chin.
But just as they entered, he remembered the most important thing right now, even more important than decking Jimmy. He twisted around in Tai’s hold, craning his neck to see the courtyard behind. Where was Summer’s girl? He couldn’t see her—
“Qrow, it’s okay. She’s with Yang,” Tai said, pulling him inside with more force than necessary. “Believe me, Ruby’s not going anywhere. Are you trying to make her afraid of you?!”
Ruby. Qrow nodded dumbly, like a puppet flopping off its string. Ruby. That was her name. Summer’s girl was named Ruby. Taiyang’s daughter was named Ruby. His niece was named Ruby.
Just before Ozpin closed the door behind them, Qrow found Ruby again. She was standing with Yang’s team alright, and she was holding hands with Yang’s worried-looking freckled teammate, and she was also scowling at Qrow with nothing but suspicion and distrust.
Notes:
Taiyang destroying all his pictures of Summer and Raven was because, well, grief makes you do stupid things. I speak from personal experience. I did exactly what Tai did once for a situation of my own. It didn't help.
If you'd like me to write something for you, you can find out how on my tumblr blog @bravewriting! My pinned post there has all the details.
Next week is Chapter 56: Prepare Your Guardians.
Chapter 56: Prepare Your Guardians
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
It was five people who entered Ozpin’s office, as Glynda had finished repairing the damage and caught up with them in a rather unsubtle rush. As soon as the elevator doors closed behind them, Taiyang let go of Qrow, and Qrow sprang forward and punched Ironwood square in the face.
“QROW!” three different people shouted at once as Ironwood staggered back. This time, it was Glynda who stepped in, leveling her riding crop at Qrow as she came between him and Ironwood. Qrow glowered down at the weapon, but didn’t make another move. Likely because unlike Tai, Glynda Goodwitch was not afraid to cause injuries in the name of maintaining a civil atmosphere.
Taiyang put a not-so-gentle hand on Qrow’s shoulder, pulling him back. “If you kill him now, he can’t give us any answers.”
“Taiyang,” Ozpin said in a strained tone.
“I’ve seen all I need to,” Qrow snarled, jabbing a finger at Ironwood. “You metal-brained lunkhead, you stole Summer’s baby and turned her into some kind of brainwashed jingoistic robot, and you fucking thought we wouldn’t notice?!”
If anyone had been watching Ozpin at that moment, they would’ve noticed him wincing at the way the word robot fell out of Qrow’s mouth.
Ironwood took his hand away from his cheek, a bruise already forming. “Qrow. There seems to have been some sort of grievous misunderstanding. But I cannot explain myself unless you control yourself.”
Qrow’s eyes nearly bulged out of his head. “What’s there to explain except that you fucks stole Summer and Tai’s baby?!”
“We didn’t take Ruby from anyone or anywhere. We found her.”
“Oh, you found her all right! You found her all tucked up in a crib inside her nursery in her house on Patch!”
“Qrow. James. Please,” Ozpin said, desperately trying to regain a modicum of control over the situation. “Both of you are doing yourselves a disservice right now by not collecting your thoughts!” And at the same moment that he spoke, a horrible realization began to settle over him.
“Glynda,” Ozpin went on before anyone else had a chance to make so much as a sound. “You have my permission to use your Semblance on the next person who speaks or acts out of turn.”
“Noted,” Glynda said, leveling a ferocious glare on Ironwood first and foremost.
Qrow swung to her, full of indignation. “You can’t seriously be defending him—”
“I’m not defending James. I just want this conversation to conclude without needing to spend the next hour cleaning up after everyone’s mess. I do that far too much already, Qrow!”
“Before we go any further,” Ozpin added, “I want everyone’s weapon except Glynda’s. I will keep them secure for the remainder of this conversation.”
“Oh, come on—”
“You can’t be serious—”
“This is non-negotiable,” Ozpin said in a tone sharper than any blade on the planet. “We will resolve this in a civil manner.”
Taiyang was the first to comply. He unbuckled his weapon from his belt and placed it on Ozpin’s desk, giving Qrow a look indicating that he should probably follow suit. Qrow rolled his eyes and held up his arms in a gesture of mock peace, but a few seconds later he did unhitch Harbinger from his back and heave it at Ozpin, who caught it without blinking. Then Qrow reached for his flask, only for Taiyang to yank the flask away from his belt before his hand could even get near.
Only when Taiyang and Qrow had both let go of their weapons did Ironwood pull Due Process from its holster, placing it on the desk besides Taiyang’s gauntlets.
Ozpin pulled all three weapons towards him, checked the safety on each of them, and then nodded in satisfaction. “Now, James.” His voice was deathly calm as he fixed a piercing look on Ironwood. “Tell us everything you know about Ruby Karyatis. Not just how you met her. Everything.”
Qrow snorted. “Karyatis? Did you pick that out for her yourself, Jimboree?”
(Qrow couldn’t have known this, but the Karyatis name was one of the few things in Ruby’s life not given directly to her by the Atlesian military. It came from Fria.)
Ironwood folded his arms behind his back and took in a long, slow breath. He let his gaze linger on each person in the room, a man at the gallows surveying the jeering crowd. His gaze stayed on Ozpin the longest, and then he began to speak.
“A decade ago, an Atlesian scientist by the name of Arthur Watts was found to have committed a massive amount of financial fraud over a period spanning years and years. However, before we could apprehend him, he fled into the tundra in the middle of a blizzard, and he has been presumed dead ever since. The military was tasked with seizing his assets and tracing the full path of his criminal history.”
“Sounds like a real sweetheart, but I don’t see what he’s got to do with Ruby,” Qrow said.
“He also had a personal laboratory in the tundra,” Ironwood said. “Highly unusual, but perfectly legal. However, when we raided it, we were not prepared for the things we found within. We found technological achievements previously thought to be years from coming to fruition. We found Grimm being kept in captivity. And we found Ruby.”
Qrow’s hands clenched into fists, but he stayed silent, watching Ironwood with a mixture of bare hatred and desperate, unquenchable curiosity.
“She was old enough to talk to us, but not to understand that what’d happened to her. She didn’t know her own age; she barely knew anything of the world beyond Watts’s laboratory; and the name she gave us could not be traced anywhere. Medically speaking, we found Ruby to be a boy when she was discovered. But she always insisted on being called Ruby, and attempts to call her by any other name were met with…” Absently, he rubbed the side of one hand, his voice quieting. “Considerable mandibular force.”
A beat of silence followed, and then Qrow let out a bark of laughter. “She’s got the right instincts. She really is Summer’s daughter.” His hand started to go for his flask again in an automatic motion before he remembered Taiyang had it, with no intention of returning it anytime soon.
Ironwood ignored that in favor of continuing. “It took me several years to come around to the possibility that she really was a girl, because I was worried that her self-expression might be some sort of traumatic psychological manifestation of whatever nefarious experimentations Doctor Watts had inflicted upon her. But despite gentle suggestions otherwise, her confidence in her choice of gender only grew stronger as the years passed. So…” He sighed. “That is why she is Ruby.”
Silently, Ozpin berated himself, wondering how he could have overlooked that possibility. The possibility that Summer’s baby had chosen to change her form and become something else which would not immediately be linked to that missing baby.
But then again, how could Ozpin have ever predicted this might happen? Because doing so would have required believing that Salem would not immediately murder a silver-eyed person as soon as she knew of their existence. He may as well have tried believing that the sun wouldn’t rise tomorrow. So now he had to find out what purpose would lead Salem to steal a silver-eyed child.
“Watts erased nearly all data from his laboratory,” Ironwood went on. “But what we were able to recover suggested this was all the work of a scientist who was fully aware of the legend of the silver eyes and had a sinister, lasting curiosity about them. Even after all this time, we know nothing of the experiments that she was subjected to—only a few disjointed words found in the junk data. But we do know that in the course of his experiments, Watts unlocked her Aura, and unlocked the power of her eyes.”
“Jimmy, if I had a cent for every ounce of bullshit you’ve served up in this story, I’d be using lien as toilet paper,” Qrow said, interrupting him as some of the fire began to return to his voice. “How the fuck do you think we’re going to believe that this random fuckwit did all the really dirty work and then died at a good time and left a ready-made baby silver-eyed warrior?”
“Because it is the truth.”
“Bullshit!”
“James.” Ozpin was slowly rubbing his forehead with both hands, his face mostly obscured by the movements. “I will be perfectly honest: unless you can offer some sort of substantive evidence beyond your own word, no one in the world will believe you.” Inwardly, a grim resolution filled him: He would not consider that Atlas really had taken this child for themselves until all other avenues for answers had been exhausted. As impossible as it was to think Salem would keep a silver-eyed warrior alive, he was ready to believe that before he believed that one of the kingdoms under his purview had stolen a child.
“I have the word of someone who can convince you,” Ironwood said, speaking to Ozpin and no one else. “Doctor Pietro Polendina.”
Ozpin lowered his hands, revealing surprise which he could not disguise. Even Taiyang and Qrow recognized the name without ever having heard of the PENNY Project, because they knew him as the doctor who had made a prosthetic for Yang.
“He was present with me when we found Ruby in Watts’s laboratory,” Ironwood said. “He scraped Watts’s computers himself to try and find anything which might give us answers. He helped me search for Ruby’s missing family. He can corroborate everything I’m saying.”
“I see.” For a moment, Ozpin considered actually dialing the aged doctor at this exact moment to do just that—find confirmation. But in the end, he decided Pietro Polendina had seen a lifetime’s worth of stress in the last day. So instead, he nodded. “He’s not lying, Qrow.”
“What?” Qrow squinted into the early morning sun which had finally risen high enough to begin shining directly through the windows. And directly into his eyes. “A search?! Did you look under your couch cushions and call it a day?!”
“I spent months looking for her family, Qrow. I checked every missing persons database in every kingdom for a child who might even remotely match Ruby’s profile. I found nothing. I looked for unsubstantiated rumors. I even accounted for the possibility that Ruby might’ve somehow been a Faunus, with no luck. There was no trace of a missing child that matched her profile anywhere on Remnant, Qrow!”
By now, Ozpin’s gaze had sunk to his lap. He had found the error in this situation. His truly irredeemable error, which laid the blame entirely at his own feet for allowing this entire mess to transpire. Because Ozpin had been the one who made the decision to classify Summer Rose’s lost baby as a deceased child. Not missing. Dead. Because at the time, he’d known it was no accident that Ruby had perished. Salem always killed those with silver eyes, regardless of whether they know their power or not. The attack was so quick, so targeted, that only she could be the culprit.
And with how enormous missing persons databases already were, every case which stood an actual chance of finding a resolution became entirely lost in the mire of tens of thousands of cases which could never be officially resolved. Ozpin had thought he was doing a good deed when he’d taken one such unsolvable case out of the pool. He’d known Summer’s child had to be dead. There had been no doubt. Until now.
“I was left with only one explanation left which made any sense: That Ruby was grown from scratch in the laboratory by Arthur Watts, acting alone,” Ironwood said. “Given that he always believed he wasn’t being properly recognized for his achievements, it wasn’t surprising find it surprising that he turned to more and more unsavory methods as a way of chasing glory.”
“You’re serious,” Ozpin said. He had a way of saying certain things which left everyone unsure of whether it was a question or a statement of fact, and this was one of those times.
Ironwood nodded. “You only told me about the existence of the silver eyes several years after Ruby’s discovery, Oz. That was the best I could do with the information I had at the time.”
Another fault in Ozpin’s plan, and somehow it wasn’t the deepest fault. That would be; he knew exactly why Salem hunted down the silver eyes: They were his descendants. He knew she viewed them as personal insults, taunts left by her former love over the course of millennia, which was what had led to Ozpin believing so firmly that Salem would only ever kill them in the first place. Every descendant of Ozpin had an unknowing curse placed upon them. And now this curse had somehow taken a new form which was terribly unknown. Now, Ozpin wanted nothing more than to do something which his own curse would never let him do.
“It can only be Salem who stole Ruby,” he said, his voice sounding as if it was crumbling under the millennia standing atop them. “The attack had every one of her hallmarks, and only she would know to target a silver-eyed infant so surgically. But I always thought such a thing impossible until today. She has never carried out an attack like this for the purpose of taking a silver-eyed warrior.”
Qrow dropped heavily into a chair, his anger briefly abating as he tried to work through something starting to eat away at him. He’d lost all trust in Ironwood for the rest of his life, but Ozpin still held his trust, and what Ozpin was saying… “Well, now Salem’s did the thing we never thought she’d do,” he muttered. “Anyone wanna guess why she wanted a silver-eyed kid alive and kicking?”
A silence fell as everyone mulled over implications which only became more horrifying with every passing second and every new deduction. Ozpin in particular was nearly drowning in self-torment by now.
“Hang on. When exactly did you find Ruby?” Taiyang said suddenly.
Ironwood told them.
“...That’s not long after Summer disappeared,” Taiyang said, his voice dropping nearly to a whisper. “There… there can’t be a connection between the two, can there?”
Qrow was scratching slowly, mechanically at the stubble which pockmarked his chin. “Brothers fuck me,” he mumbled.
Everyone present had known Summer Rose—some much more closely than others. But all of them knew enough to realize with a sinking feeling that there was more proof of Ruby’s ‘death’ (a bloodstain) than there was proof of Summer’s death (nothing).
Taiyang unscrewed the cap of Qrow’s flask which he still held, and took a long drink from it before handing it back to Qrow wordlessly. And with that, he broke the leaden silence that had fallen.
“Let’s get some facts straight, General. Summer had a baby. Summer and I had a baby,” he said, gathering steam with each word. “Ruby’s my baby. Not your experimental plaything! Fifteen years ago, Summer and I had a baby who went missing in a Grimm attack on our house, and the only trace left was a drop of blood in the crib. There is no one else who Ruby could be. Especially because you’ve just confirmed Ruby is trans. I lost a baby boy, and I found a baby girl, and she’s coming home.”
“And if you try to get in our way, we’ll fucking kill you,” Qrow said. “You’ve kept her from her real family long fucking enough.” Drunk as he was, that was not an empty threat in the slightest, and one that, even in this state, he was probably capable of making a competent attempt at.
And then Qrow decided, why bother waiting? Why not just get started on the murder now? So he stood up, fresh adrenaline flooding his veins—only to immediately be shoved back down into his chair by Taiyang.
“And you know what, General? Even if Ruby was a clone of Summer, even if she had been created in a madman’s test tubes, even if everything about how she came into existence was somehow unnatural… She would still be my baby, James! My DAUGHTER! Qrow’s niece! Yang’s sister! There’s no difference in what love I’d give to a twisted secret science-experiment version of Summer, and what love I’d give to a flesh-and-blood biological girl whose existence was expected! And if Summer was still here and had to grapple with the existence of a copy of herself, she’d tell you exactly the same thing, right before decapitating you!”
Taiyang didn’t even want an apology by now. What could an apology possibly do to undo years of pain, years that he should’ve had another daughter by his side? More than anything else now, he just wanted to talk to his second daughter. But before he could do that, he had to make James Ironwood answer for two more things.
And Qrow was thinking the same exact thing. He took an outsized swig from his flask, completely ignoring Ozpin’s disapproving look, and then leveled a look on Ironwood which was the most venomous thing he’d mustered yet.
“You know, Jimmondegreen, I can actually believe a lot of the things you’re saying, because it really does sound like your stupid insufferable robot-brain logic. You didn’t kidnap Ruby, Salem did. You found Ruby by accident after Watts kicked the can. You tried to look for her family. You found nothing. You genuinely thought she was grown in a laboratory. But there’s something that still doesn’t add up. I still smell a dead stinking rat, and it’s coming from somewhere in the hole where your heart should be.”
Qrow took another swig of hard liquor, and he was drunk enough that he wasn’t sure what he was drinking anymore. Maybe he was dangerously close to incoherence now, but he’d lost the capacity to care.
“Tell me, million-lien-question, why the FUCK didn’t you ever tell any of US about her?!”
Ironwood was silent.
“Sure, you didn’t know about silver eyes until a few years after you found her. Sure, you didn’t know she looked like Summer at first, but WHY didn’t you tell Oz about the girl who could blast Grimm with her eyes that you found locked away in a secret lab?! WHY didn’t you ask him if he knew anything about that?! And WHY, after Oz did tell you about silver-eyed warriors, WHY didn’t you tell him about the kid holed up in your kingdom?! And when Ruby got old enough to start looking like the spitting image of my teammate, who was your trusted colleague, you could’ve tried doing something about it then!”
Qrow stopped, breathing heavily, and Ironwood sensed that this was the time for a reply. If he doubted that he could smooth over the jagged chasms opening up in this room, he didn’t let those doubts reach his conscious thought. “I am sorry that—”
But then Taiyang stepped in, plowing forward without giving Ironwood a chance to finish his answer. He was gripping the back of Qrow’s chair hard enough that he would’ve broken it, if not for the chairs in Ozpin’s office being specifically reinforced to withstand upset visitors with outsized amounts of strength.
“And, General, even more importantly, we all want to know: What in the name of the Brothers were you thinking with everything after that?”
If Qrow Branwen was a short fuse, Taiyang Xiao Long was the bonfire that took a mountain of fuel and painstaking construction to ignite. It took a great deal to properly spark him, but once alight, he would burn. He was a sun dragon just like his first daughter, after all. And now his speech gathered momentum, anger rising hotter and hotter in his words which were a freight train, blunt and flat and hard and unstoppable.
“Even if Ruby had been grown from a clump of cells in a lab, even if there had been no baby torn away from my own household, even if Ruby really had come from nothing… That still doesn’t excuse what you did to her! You may not have found her family, but you also didn’t give her a family! You still could’ve given her a normal childhood, James! A new identity, an adoptive family that would’ve loved her as one of their own! She still could’ve been treated as her own person! Because even if she was entirely artificial, she was still a PERSON! But you denied her that! You denied her anything that could’ve given her the kind of life Summer and I spent so long wishing we could’ve given her! And now—and now I have to live with the knowledge that we could have given Ruby the life she should’ve had, if only—if only—if only you hadn’t seen her as a weapon.”
It was then that Qrow realized he still didn’t know how Ruby had gone from being Summer and Tai’s girl to being the embodiment of everything he hated about Atlas. He plenty of suspicions already, sure, plenty of things that’d been implied in this conversation, but…
Qrow twisted in the chair, contorting his neck to a painful degree to see Taiyang’s face, and what he found was a dead-eyed expression he hadn’t seen since what Yang and Taiyang referred to as The Bad Times.
“Yang told me everything that Ruby told her,” Taiyang went on. “Things Ruby told her friends without understanding how horrific they were, James. You and the rest of your military raised her for the singular purpose of being a soldier. You instilled in her the belief that the fate of the world rests entirely on her shoulders. You gave her nothing that could be called an environment of love. Yes, you kept her healthy, you kept her active, you made sure she could fight, but it was all in the name of efficiency. She grew up inside a fishbowl designed to shape her into the most powerful soldier the world has ever seen. And given what Yang’s seen her do… You’ve done it. You’ve made a one-soldier army, and completely robbed a fifteen-year-old of her chance at a normal childhood.”
Taiyang moved towards Ozpin’s desk, reaching not for his gauntlets but a cracked mug of pencils which sat beside them. He turned it from side to side, and if he was looking for something, no one else had the slightest idea what.
And then he turned with blinding speed and hurled the mug, pencils and all, at Ironwood. The mug shattered against his face, his Aura absorbing the impact.
“Congratulations, General Ironwood,” Taiyang said, his smile more vicious than any downward turn of his mouth could ever be. He clapped once, twice, thrice, and then stopped. “Wonderfully done. They’ll be stuffing medals down your throat in Atlas for this. I hope you choke on them. You’ve turned my daughter into something I barely recognize.”
Ironwood was silent. He’d made no attempt to dodge the mug. Glynda reassembled the mug, sent it back to the desk with a flick of her crop. And then she found herself with the unpleasant position of having to ask the question which had to be asked, since no one else seemed capable at this moment.
“And how do you answer all of this, James?”
Ironwood straightened his tie. Brushed a shard of ceramic off his collar. Took a deep breath.
“I will let Ruby go without complaint or interference,” he said. “If it is what she wishes, she can have nothing to do with me or my kingdom ever again. I deeply regret that when I found her, I did not find her true origins so that she could be returned to her family. I am sorry.”
No one replied. His words were the start of something, not a conclusion. Bronze and gold and copper leaves drifted by the windows, blown loose from trees just beginning to shed their summer coats.
“However, I do not regret what Ruby has become,” Ironwood said with utter seriousness.
The crack which followed those words might’ve been the sound of Taiyang finally breaking the reinforced chair in his grip, or the sound of Ozpin’s faint hope for a simple resolution entirely falling apart
“Fucking—!” Qrow was preempted from any attack on Ironwood by Taiyang disintegrating his chair, sending him toppling backwards. Glynda didn’t even express annoyance at the new property destruction because she was entirely occupied with staring at Ironwood in disbelief.
It was Ozpin who was first to summon a coherent reply, performing the verbal equivalent of throwing out an arm to stop Qrow and Taiyang. “James, elaborate now.”
“I had a purpose and an intent. I know why you object to Project Moonrise,” Ironwood said to him. “Just as I know why you objected to the PENNY Project. There is a reason why I never told you about Ruby, not even after I realized her resemblance to Summer. But I have never understood why your objections are strong enough for you to believe these projects never should’ve happened.”
“What exactly is the PENNY Project?” Taiyang asked, while he silently wondered, was that supposed to be a reference to Yang’s teammate—
Ozpin looked at Taiyang and Qrow with fresh alarm, but Ironwood ignored the question.
“My method is a tradeoff. A trade where what is given up is far less valuable than what we all receive in return. In exchange for maneuvering one girl’s life in a way that some might call unethical, I have created a soldier capable of killing Salem. A soldier who can protect us all, protect so many others’ freedoms. How can be there anything unethical about that?”
Ozpin fell as still as death.
His soul ached to go into slumber, as he could have done when he was still an entirely separate soul from the man who had been born as Ozpin. But today was long since Ozma and Ozpin had become one and the same person, and there was nowhere for this immortal soul to retreat to. And so he faced yet another reckoning, this one coming in the form of a determined and unafraid man standing at his desk and asking to win a war which could never be won.
“Stop calling her a soldier,” Taiyang snapped. “She’s a girl. A child.”
“A child who is light-years ahead of every other Huntress her age. A child who is in full control of her eyes already, and can unleash them at will in devastating attacks. A child who can already match seasoned Huntresses in battle. She can reach levels that no other Huntress in history has reached, because of how early she began training. She is a deadly arrow, notched and ready to be launched at Salem’s heart.”
There was only one man in this room who knew no arrow in the world was capable of killing Salem.
Suddenly, Glynda inhaled sharply, and waded into the muck which she had kept herself mostly clean of thus far. “James, when you requested clarification on the Winter Maiden powers because you wanted to confirm they could go to transgender women—”
Ironwood nodded.
“Give me his gun back, Oz,” Qrow growled. “I’ll shoot him dead with his own bullets, and I’ll start with his balls so he knows what kind of pain he’s done to my family.”
Taiyang, while less outwardly violent than Qrow, was arguably the more dangerous of the two as he crossed his arms, and slowly shook his head. “It doesn’t matter if Ruby would rather die than leave the Atlas military, because you are never touching my daughter again, General.”
“Is she a Maiden already?” Glynda said, again the only one who could ask the woefully impersonal question which nonetheless had to be asked if she wanted this interrogation to keep going.
“Not yet. But she will be the last person in the Winter Maiden’s thoughts. I’ve made it a certainty.”
“You bastard. You fucking bastard.”
Ironwood turned slowly, as if he was standing on a rusty swivel, to look at Qrow. He’d activated Mettle.
James Ironwood had stopped bothering to explain or even disclose his Semblance to anyone, because he found it was always poorly understood by others when he did try. People like Qrow—and mostly Qrow, to be honest—would hear the explanation and call it the worst case of ego in the whole damn world and tunnel vision and a sorry excuse for stupid decisions and also sometimes just a stupid-ass Semblance.
At best, people like Ozpin would call it an unparalleled ability to focus in even the most dire of situations. That was closer to the truth, but Mettle was more than just an enhanced focus. When active, Ironwood’s focus narrowed to the goal which would lead him to victory in whatever battlefield he stood on, and he could blur all else into the background. It gave him a clarity of purpose which was quite hard to achieve otherwise.
He still remembered the moment when he’d unlocked Mettle as a rank-and-file soldier. It had been somewhat unexpected, given that it was relatively uncommon for Atlesian soldiers at the lower levels to unlock their Semblances. But it’d happened to Ironwood, during a routine clearout gone wrong, his squad pinned down in a ravine by a nest of aggressive Centinels blocking their way out. Their gunfire wasn’t having much effect on the Centinels, who skittered in and out of the rocky gaps with abandon, avoiding most shots. And then Private Ironwood had looked up, wondering if there was some way to climb out, and spotted a section of the rock face which verged on crumbling—weakened by previous burrows left by this same Centinel nest. He’d realized that enough gunshots could bring down that rock face onto most of the advancing Centinels, which would even the numbers enough for them to break out of cover and chase down the rest. Private Ironwood had lifted his gun and opened fire on the rock face immediately.
And that was when his world had shifted, the rock face sharpening as everything else suddenly became… less important, to put it simply. He could hear his commanding officer angrily ordering him to shoot in a straight line, to concentrate his fire on the things trying to kill them, and a Private Ironwood without Mettle active might’ve obeyed the order, turned his fire away from the rock face for fear of being reprimanded. But with Mettle active for the first time, his commander’s orders could easily be disregarded, and he could concentrate his fire on the cliff until his commander abruptly realized what Ironwood was aiming at and ordered the rest of the squad to switch fire to the rock face. After that, it collapsed in seconds, taking out most of the Centinels in a miniature avalanche and saving the squad from possible destruction.
Mettle had never served Ironwood wrong in battle, and now he was using it as a weapon in the most important battle of his life: the war against Salem.
He could see the path to victory, even if it was a path which others might find difficult to accept, as his first commanding officer had during Mettle’s discovery. But there were no easy answers in war, because it was something which required immense sacrifice and compromise, and the reward, peace and security and order, would be worth whatever path must be taken to arrive there.
To Ironwood, it was only a matter of convincing everyone else in the room of his path’s efficacy. Perhaps there were other paths to success, but this was the one that he could see, and in war a known was always better than an unknown. And Ironwood fully, truly believed that he could convince his colleagues of his vision. For all the flaws and rough edges and tendency towards caution that might be present in this room, Ironwood also knew these were reasonable men, battle-hardened men who wanted the same thing he did: an end to the conflict.
It was all that which flowed through Ironwood’s mind as he said to Qrow:
“But is there any significant difference between what I have done with Ruby and what Ozpin has done with his favored students such as you?”
Qrow, having finally worked himself upright on unsteady feet, sprang forwards and managed to land another punch on Ironwood’s face before Glynda yanked him away. Taiyang, for his part, stayed back with crossed arms, having made no move to restrain Qrow.
Ironwood brushed off the blow the same way he would brush off a fly, and turned to Ozpin. “Ozpin. Are my methods with Ruby and with the PENNY Project before her not simply a far more honest, far more unhindered version of what you practice in the academies, with your students, with the Maidens?”
Throughout this conversation, Ozpin had succeeded at keeping an expression that, while appropriately critical, was mostly collected. Until now, after Ironwood’s calmly asked question, worded in a way that sounded so logical and reasonable, as Ozpin could only reply with a look of undisguised horror.
“They always have a choice,” he said, rising to his feet. “Something which you never gave Ruby, or Penny.”
Perhaps Ozpin would’ve felt better if he’d seen anger, or sullen opposition, or impassiveness in Ironwood. But no, he saw something else which all but drove a sword into his heart: Ironwood was genuinely mystified.
“Do they?” Ironwood said.
“James.” Glynda’s tone was razor-sharp as she took a step closer. “Think very carefully about what you say next.”
Ironwood’s response was directed at Ozpin. “The academies are about the illusion of choice, aren’t they? So much else about this war is about illusions, after all. The Maidens are picked with the care and attention of a blacksmith hammering out a new weapon. And when the chosen candidate learns the true state of affairs in the world, how can she do anything but accept the mantle of a protector?”
He paused there, surveying the others for a reaction of any sort, but all he found was disbelief.
Ozpin picked up a pencil from a cracked coffee mug which sat on his desk, and for several seconds, he spun it in one hand, silently contemplating without ever taking his eyes off Ironwood. He was not thinking of anything particularly useful to this conversation, so he was keeping it silent, but he could not avoid it. He was contemplating Pietro Polendina. Ozpin had long wondered about the old scientist’s change of heart. The man had once willingly, eagerly built a girl to be a living weapon (‘a protector with a soul,’ he’d called his idea) and then, years later, he’d come to regret it with his entire being—regretted it so much that he was willing to take the chance of never seeing his daughter again, in exchange for her uncompromised freedom. On the one hand, Ozpin could fully believe the man simply had a change of heart as Penny’s true personhood became not just evident, but unignorable. However… sometimes he did wonder if there had been something else which had contributed to Pietro’s change of heart. And perhaps he’d just found it.
“When Ozpin showed me the secrets of the world, it was a foregone conclusion that I would join his conflict. I never even needed to consider otherwise,” Ironwood said.
“You have a pretty poor idea of how a Huntress team works if you think that’s why we accepted Oz’s offer,” Taiyang snapped.
“But Ozpin selected your team, too, Taiyang. He saw your potential, and he worked to hone it, testing you at every step to make sure you were ready for what he would give you. You were aware of none of that! By the time he opened up the world to you and offered a place at his side, you would have thought of nothing else besides accepting the offer of a greater purpose.”
“Yeah, and Raven is still right here with us working for Ozpin because she didn’t have any choice whatsoever in what she could do with her life this whole time,” Qrow said, ignoring the ragged sound of agony that Taiyang made midway through his sentence. “We had a choice, you calculator-brained fuckwit! We always did!”
“Well, since you bring her up…” James put a hand to his forehead, closing his eyes. “Our system cannot be called functional when it creates people like Raven Branwen. Perhaps that fiasco would have never happened if, instead of trying to build our guardians atop a pre-existing foundation which may already be completely rotten, we start with a blank plot of land, where we can oversee every aspect of the construction. Thus ensuring the things we build are whole and strong and real, and not hollow facades which forever force us to fight with one hand tied behind our backs. This is a war! Why can we not treat it like one?”
“How can freedom be protected by guardians who know nothing of freedom themselves?” Ozpin replied sharply. “You may think this is a new idea, James, but it is not new to me! I have seen it a hundred times, and it always fails!”
“Soon, we aren’t going to have anything left to protect at all.” Ironwood walked slowly to the window nearest to him—a destination which took him further from everyone else in the office. He turned to the window and swept his arm out, indicating with a gloved hand everything which Ozpin had built—Beacon, the Vale skyline, the clear skies above, the idyllic scenes of students below. “We’re losing. We need to do something before all is lost. And it seems that I am the only one who is actually willing to do something, the only one who is apparently capable of doing something, and the only one who has done something.” He pressed a hand against the glass and let his head fall. “Ozpin, do you really think that your illusions can save the world?”
“They already are, James,” Ozpin said softly. He hated how much the answer felt like—
“No, they aren’t. Don’t lie to yourself.” And suddenly James was walking back towards the group again, his eyes filled with an anger that hadn’t appeared once in this conversation until now. “Ozpin, you already told me that the Kingdom of Atlas, the greatest kingdom in history, is not strong enough to take on Salem. And now I have made for you a girl who is strong enough. It is an exchange of so comparatively little wrongdoing, for so much good done. How can the treatment of one girl be more important than the safety of our civilizations? I am fully confident that Ruby will succeed where Summer failed!”
Everyone except Ironwood flinched at the name of Ruby’s mother. No one knew what her final mission had involved, but it was an unspoken consensus that… there was only ever one target which Summer would risk going to alone. One target who she wouldn’t be able to come back from.
“You really mean it,” Qrow said with the faintest note of awe—the kind of incongruous awe someone would take from walking through the extinguished ashes of their burnt-down home. “You really, actually think you’re doing a good deed with what you’ve done to Ruby, Jimmy.”
Ironwood sighed deeply. “How could I not, Qrow? To treat a life as a budget to be spent pragmatically for victory in war—that is how wars have always been fought, and how they have always been won. It is the strategy that the world has always known. I do not understand the objections to this method, whether they come from you or Ozpin or anyone else. To hear people parroting the idea that this calculus could somehow be turned into something softer and less offensive seems incomprehensibly naive. War always offends. War never cares about anyone’s feelings. Hard decisions must be made without hesitation. Morality becomes a preference, not a requirement. Consider this: the Grimm have never once waited for politics and feelings to be hashed out. Are we not pitifully handicapping ourselves in the fight against a relentless, unfeeling, inherently malevolent foe when we insist on political correctness?”
“Yeah, I figured.” Qrow started to turn away, and then abruptly he launched himself at Ozpin’s desk, grabbed not Harbinger but Due Process, and before anyone could stop him, he swung on Ironwood and pulled the trigger, a bullet from the overpowered pistol crashing into Ironwood’s chest and making his Aura flare violently as the impact threw him back into the wall with a thunderous crunch that was nearly as loud as the gunshot.
Qrow was squeezing the trigger again even before Ironwood had hit the wall, fully intent on unloading Ironwood’s pistol on him, but at that moment he was halted by Glynda. She slashed down her riding crop and flung Due Process out of Qrow’s hands, while Ozpin leapt over his desk with astonishing speed, placing himself between Qrow and Ironwood.
Ironwood’s Aura had protected him, but he was still slow to get off the floor, his impassive expression finally wiped out by the sheer force and hatred behind Qrow’s attack.
As for Taiyang, he hadn’t made any move to stop Qrow or restrain him, and even now he stood back from the action, sending a furious glower at Ironwood.
“Qrow!” Ozpin blended together forcefulness and sympathy as best as he could in his voice. “I understand your anger, but no matter what James has done, a Huntsman murdering a visiting head of state would be an immediate international crisis of the highest order! Please understand, I cannot let the next Great War be started in my own office!”
“I’ll be doing everyone a favor!” Qrow roared, trying and failing to shove past Ozpin. “He’s not visiting! He’s conquering!”
“I don’t think my presence is welcome here anymore,” Ironwood said, finally upright again. He turned towards the elevator—
Only for Ozpin’s voice to stop him. “No, James. You are staying here, and we are going to continue this discussion alone.”
It was authoritative in a way that Ironwood had never heard before, and it arrested his departure immediately.
As Ozpin watched James turn away from the elevator, he could not escape the thought that if he’d let James be swallowed up by those doors, then they would have never met on friendly terms again.
Ozpin was living a nightmare which he had seen time and time again. He had seen this before: Allies who began to diverge from his methods too widely for differences to be patched over. Allies who began to question his ability more and more, and found no satisfaction in any answer Ozpin could offer. Allies who broke away from him, not because of malice or greed or scorn or exhaustion or even hatred, but because of righteousness. Allies who turned away from him because they didn’t believe he was doing enough.
(They could never know that he was doing everything he could possibly do.)
(This was an entirely different kind of nightmare from his allies who lost all hope.)
James Ironwood, if he continued this way, would be a familiar tale for Ozpin. A tale still just as painful as the first time it was told. And these dissolved alliances—they always left vulnerabilities which Salem could, and would, exploit. Because that was how she won. Divide and divide and divide, until one day she would divide faster than he could mend, and then she would conquer. And then all would be lost.
But until that doomsday, if there was something, anything which Ozpin could do to stave off the final calamity for just one more day, give everyone on this planet one more day to live before the Brothers’ day of judgment which would inevitably doom every soul alive, then he would do it.
The last time he’d lost an ally in such a way as was happening now, it was the first domino in a sequence of events which led to the Great War.
By now, Glynda had frogmarched Qrow and Taiyang into the elevator and back towards the rest of the school, leaving the two headmasters alone as the whoosh of the elevator’s descent ghosted through the room.
“James, I once trusted you more than anyone else in the world,” Ozpin said.
Ironwood met his eyes, unflinching. “So did I.”
If the last two members of Team STRQ left standing had still been there to hear what the two headmasters had just said to one another, they would’ve undoubtedly chimed in together with a resolute agreement.
For the first time in his many lives, Oz was considering a truly drastic action, one that he never would’ve chosen in the past even if that meant an ally breaking away from him. But this was an Oz who had something which all his other incarnations did not: He had memories of terrible things seen through the eyes of his previous incarnation, the man who had once been Ozymandias, the last king of Vale. The king who was remembered by the world as a valiant and conquering hero but remembered by himself as the worst butcher in history, because of the appalling, unprecedented deluge of lives he’d had to throw at victory in a total war that was his fault.
The memories of the last king of Vale were still dripping with blood in Ozpin’s mind, not yet faded by the passage of years, and now firmly in the clutches of his memory, not just the king’s. Perhaps these memories would never fade, just etching themselves deeper and deeper through the centuries until he was granted his merciful death by the Brother Gods. And right alongside those memories, a burning resolve had been etched: There could not be another Great War. Not another decade of pure worldwide suffering, not another chunk of the world laid out dead and gone and lost forever, not so many dead on a scale he’d never seen before in all his years and incarnations, not a war unlike any other in history, not so much atrocity, not a conflict that had so nearly given Salem her ultimate victory—
Never again, the last king of Vale and the current Headmaster of Beacon and the man who was a thousand other things promised himself.
“It has never come to this before, and I hope it never does again,” Ozpin said. “But I have a long memory, James, and I see where you are headed, even if you cannot.”
Ironwood let out a short bark of laughter. “You’re going to preach to me again? Is that what this is? Save your breath—”
“I am going to tell you the true reason why I am so reluctant to be an aggressor.”
Ironwood narrowed his eyes, studying him.
“This is not a deception,” Ozpin said.
He could hardly bear to think of what another world war incited by Salem just like the Great War could look like when it was one spearheaded by a modern-day Atlas, a kingdom which could turn Old Mantle into ashes in mere weeks.
Modern-day Atlas. A mess of his own making. Ozymandias had looked back on the tragedy of the Great War, and then he had looked to Atlas just beginning to rise above the old bloodstained legacy of Mantle, and he’d decided that to avoid another war, what was needed was a kingdom shaped by his design. Ozymandias decided that Atlas would be a kingdom so noble and principled in its intent—intent laid by him—that it would be free of the warlike spirit of its predecessor. Its brilliant technological advancements would not motivate a thirst for conquering, but instead be magnanimously bestowed upon the rest of the world. Atlas’s growing economic, cultural, and martial influence would not be the leader of a global arms race like old Mantle had been, but would instead be a model and the standard for the rest of the world to follow. To make the separation from old Mantle complete, Atlas itself was raised into the sky above, where it would be safe from the chaotic influence of the Grimm and could truly advance, and where all others could look up to it for inspiration, hope, and guidance. It would be a shining beacon of the levels that civilization could reach. It would be a bulwark of justice, security, and prosperity.
And so Atlas, the greatest kingdom, had come into existence. The last hope of Remnant, and its best hope.
Then, over a lifetime, Oz had watched Atlas’s noble principles transform into a growing sense of exceptionalism and superiority, watched their skybound position of splendor become a strategic advantage used to subjugate those below, watched their gifts of progress to the rest of the world become justification for insistent demands to follow their ways. He watched a sense of manifest destiny take form in the kingdom, an idea that the greatest kingdom was meant to overspread and protect the whole of the world, because it saw itself as the only one which was strong enough to do so.
Now, the greatest kingdom was on the verge of deciding it was great enough to take the fate of the world entirely into its own hands, blind to the oblivion which lay beyond. Or, even worse, it thought it could control the oblivion. And Ozpin-Ozymandias-Ozma-so-many-more had nothing to blame for this predicament except himself.
All this was the reason why Ozpin settled on his next move, which was to share something that he had never before dared to share voluntarily. For all the infinite dangers which laid in this information, this incarnation of Oz fully believed that it was a danger not nearly as infinite as what laid in another Great War.
“What is the truth, then?” Ironwood said, and his tone clearly belied that he wasn’t expecting much from Ozpin’s answer.
Never again, Ozpin-Ozymandias-Ozma-and-beyond thought, and then he spoke.
“Salem cannot be killed. Not even by a silver-eyed warrior. There is nothing which can accomplish the deed. Her regeneration is infinite. She is truly immortal.”
All of the dismissal which was looming in Ironwood’s face abruptly disappeared, and the impassive mask which had fallen over his face for much of this meeting abruptly vanished. And somehow, through nothing but a change of expression, Ironwood still managed to convey a sense of some immense momentum being quelled, as if he’d stopped dead from a full sprint.
“If an army of twenty million men were sent to kill her, she could, given enough time, kill all twenty million with her bare hands and nothing else, and suffer no permanent damage for the trouble. She does not need allies; the only reason why she seeks them out is convenience.”
Instincts which were the only remnants of past incarnations screamed at Ozpin that he was accelerating the ruin of them all, but Ozpin himself felt nothing but relief. Because he finally, finally seemed to have arrested James’s headlong descent into unrepentant militance. It had been too long since he’d seen that mask of veiled distrust disappear entirely from Ironwood’s expression. He wouldn’t go so far as to say that mask had been condescendence, but… he had seen how Ironwood could honestly believe he was the best-equipped to deal with any problem because of his military credentials. There was no sign of any such impulse now.
“On… On what authority do you have that?” Ironwood said.
Ozpin paused for a moment, considering that this next utterance was truly the point of no return, and then plunged ahead into a future that was somehow less terrifying than the alternatives.
“The Relic of Knowledge.”
James blanched.
He dropped into one of the chairs facing Ozpin’s desk in a ludicrously uncharacteristic display of shock, and remained there, one arm hanging limply off the armrest while the other went to rest against his forehead, essentially propping his head up.
Ozpin took his own seat behind his desk again, folding his hands together and fixing a sympathetic gaze on his colleague. “I have seen her form entirely vaporized, reduced to nothing because of my own magic, and she has returned from that state.”
The sheer intensity of his shock told Ozpin that was perhaps the best possible consequence for James to face as a result of what he’d done to Ruby Karyatis. To learn that he was in a war which could never be won, that a truly heroic victory would evade him for the rest of his life… To tell a career military man that his career would ultimately mean nothing… He supposed that might feel like a death sentence for James, actually. And given the way that his ever-imperious posture had completely collapsed, it seemed that was exactly how Ironwood was taking the news.
“Why do you think no silver-eyed warrior has ever succeeded?” he went on. “The answer is not for lack of trying, or for lack of a sufficient army. The answer is because a direct blast from the silver eyes does not kill Salem. It does not turn her to stone. It only stops her for, at best, a short while. I know this because it has been tried already.”
Sometimes Ozpin wondered—if he’d told Summer this truth, would that have stopped her from attempting her final mission? Would that have kept her from throwing herself into the jaws of Salem?
James, somehow, grew even paler.
“I hope I can trust you to keep this secret,” Ozpin said. “You are the first soul I have ever told this secret to. I believe you can understand both why I would’ve withheld this information from even my closest allies, and why I chose to tell you this now. You would have marched every one of us to our earnest deaths. You would have led us all to oblivion under the belief that we could win. Do you understand how you were, in a way, as much of a danger to us as Salem herself?”
Ironwood’s eyes slowly passed over every corner of the office, taking in the furnishings that Ozpin had carefully selected and placed and used for maximum utility with what could fit in such a small space.
“How do you bear this knowledge?” he said.
Ozpin’s instinctive answer was, I don’t. It was a knowledge that tore away at the insides of every incarnation of himself. It was a wound that never healed. But he couldn’t tell that to James. He had to position himself as the strong one to whom James would need to look for strength and guidance.
“It is difficult,” he said. “But it can be done, with time, and patience, and acceptance of what is. As long as you are with me, you will never have to bear the burden of this knowledge alone.”
James didn’t answer. But the complete lack of belligerence told Ozpin all he needed to know. He had, at the very least, bought himself desperately needed time. Time in which James, in all his shock and disbelief, would fall back in line with Ozpin, the man who had known this truth all along. Time in which James would place a renewed faith in him because he was only just beginning to grapple with this truth. Time in which Ozpin would look for ways to change the path Atlas was taking and curtail James’s power within his kingdom.
“You asked me, how can the treatment of one girl be more important than the safety of our civilizations? And now do you see the error in that question? Do you see that you were not bargaining for our safety, but rather our obliteration?”
He watched the recognition sink into James’s face, and then continued. “James, everything you did to Ruby was for nothing.”
Ironwood swallowed, and the look which he fixed on Ozpin was… there was nothing it could be called other than horrified. “No matter how strong I made her, she would’ve met the same fate as her mother…”
There was the faintest trace of a question in the way he ended the statement, as if he was still hoping there was some better potential outcome he hadn’t been told of yet.
“Correct,” Ozpin said, wishing it was anything but.
Ironwood’s gauntness only deepened. “Everything that I’ve done is for nothing,” he said.
Deep inside, Ozpin breathed a sigh of relief. He had done it. He’d pulled James back from the precipice of disaster. There was still hope.
“Glynda—” Taiyang said in a futile attempt at protest as Glynda herded him and Qrow out the elevator and onto the ground floor.
“No,” Glynda said, firmly positioning herself between them and the elevator. “My heart goes out to both of you for what you must be suffering through emotionally. I will do whatever I can to help you work through this. Which is why I am being so adamant that there is nothing else that you can do in that office. Because I don’t want to see you two throw yourselves at a brick wall until you collapse when there’s other places where your energy and attention would be far more useful.”
She spotted Qrow opening his mouth, most definitely to object loudly, and even if she hadn’t seen that, the reek of alcohol which abruptly blasted her in the face would’ve alerted her with equal quickness.
“No,” she said to Qrow, which mercifully did forestall anything he was going to say. “Anything else is wasting your energy. James has confessed his sins, and you have vented your anger, and now we figure out consequences which will actually allow him to actually see the error of his ways, rather than push him deeper into infuriating stubbornness.”
She stepped back and inspected the last two members of Team STRQ, and a fresh wave of sadness filled her. She remembered what they looked before the strain of loss and worry, before the weight of the world, back when they were still just two teenage children who would do things like competing with Raven and Summer to see who could be punched the hardest without reacting.
“Why didn’t you help me attack Jimmy?” Qrow said to Taiyang, sounding wounded.
“I’m waiting for a better opportunity,” Taiyang said in the most serious of tones.
Glynda crossed her arms, fixed a look on Taiyang, and said in a considerably gentler tone, “Right now, you need to dent James’s skull far less than how much you need to go talk to your daughter.”
Glynda felt a twinge of satisfaction when she saw Taiyang’s eyes widen. She’d finally reached him. Then, to both of them: “Ruby needs you. Ruby needs people who care about her more than they care about everything which surrounds her.”
Qrow swallowed and pushed back his hair. Taiyang ran a hand over his face. The former teammates and partners looked at one another, a different kind of resolve rising into their eyes. One which had less to do with violence and more to do with hope.
And now Glynda could actually relax.
“But clean yourselves up first, though,” she added in a less stern tone, glancing down at their rumpled forms. “You’re in no shape to introduce yourselves as related to anything more dignified than a Grimm.”
Taiyang and Qrow looked down at themselves and then gave her two sheepish nods.
“Good. Now go.”
But then Taiyang met Glynda’s eyes once more with a deadly seriousness. “Glynda, I do have one thing I want you to tell Ironwood, next chance you get.”
When she gave him a questioning look, he went on.
“Tell him that sometimes, the treatment of one girl is the fate of an entire planet.”
When Glynda stepped back into Ozpin’s office, she found an unexpected sight: a room occupied by both Ozpin and Ironwood, without any tension in the air. The opposite of tension, in fact. Ozpin stood at a window, his back to Glynda as he watched some invisible point in the distance, but his posture was considerably more relaxed than before, and there was a lightness to his shoulders Glynda hadn’t seen in more than a year.
James, for his part, looked like he’d just been told he had a month to live, and he barely reacted when Glynda entered. Sitting limply in a chair and staring into the distance…. He actually looked cowed.
Glynda stared at the two men. Just what had the Headmaster told him?
“I’ve found the next Fall Maiden,” Ozpin said without turning around.
In a synchronized gesture, Ironwood and Glynda both nearly dropped the things they were holding—in Ironwood’s case, a cup of tea, in Glynda’s case, her scroll which she’d just opened. Neither of them had expected this atop everything else which had happened today.
“I have waited far too long, for far too many things already,” Ozpin said. “A tired old man once said that a decade where nothing happens is always followed by a week in which a decade happens.”
Glynda gave Ozpin the kind of look that she only gave him when she knew he was quoting himself. But then, because she was just as in the dark as Ironwood about Ozpin’s choice, she asked, “Who is it?”
“She is unique,” Ozpin said. “A bridge between two worlds.”
A light above the elevator doors blinked, accompanied by a pleasant beep. Someone had entered the elevator, and was now ascending to Ozpin’s office. Glynda and Ironwood both turned to watch the floor indicator tick up.
“The day that I met her, considering that she might be the one was the furthest thing from my mind,” Ozpin continued, still facing the window. “But I have seen her grow in a way that few others do. She is strong. She is determined. She is brave. She cares for others with such burning passion that it’s as if her soul is already wreathed in the fires of justice.”
The elevator’s floor indicator ticked steadily closer.
“And, most importantly…” Ozpin raised his scroll, pulling up something he’d contemplated many times already. A video, currently paused, the frame frozen on an image of Pyrrha Nikos’s upending of a broadcast yesterday. The words she’d delivered to the world still resonated endlessly in his mind, their echo only growing stronger and stronger in the aftermath of what Ironwood had said today.
"I’m not invincible! I never have been! I’m not a savior! I’m just a girl! I’m just a Huntress! A Huntress who will save lives and help people and kill Grimm and die early like every other Huntress in history!”
Ozpin pocketed his scroll. “She is ready.”
The elevator announced its arrival with a cheerful ding.
There was one other key trait of Ozpin's chosen Maiden, a trait which he would not say aloud in the presence of Ironwood:
The next Fall Maiden already carried a tremendous multitude of reasons to be deeply wary of the Kingdom of Atlas.
That was perhaps the most important trait now, and the one which had solidified his choice.
At last Ozpin turned around, and at the same moment, the elevator doors slid open, revealing a lone occupant.
“You wanted to see me, Headmaster?” said Blake Belladonna.
Notes:
I have thoughts on Ironwood's Semblance which informed how I wrote it in this chapter, and they got pretty long when I wrote them out, so I'm putting them under this dropdown to avoid cluttering up the page.
So! My thoughts on Ironwood’s Semblance! Because it was never actually mentioned in the show and we only know about it from Word Of God, it took me a long time to arrive at what felt like a good understanding of the role his Semblance actually plays in his character and his story. And to do that, I had to ask myself—we’ve been told what Ironwood’s Semblance actually does, but is that the same thing as how Ironwood perceives his Semblance?
And that was my lightbulb moment, because I believe that Ironwood has a fundamental misunderstanding of his Semblance. A misunderstanding which didn’t hinder him in his time as a soldier, but now hinders him as a civilian leader.
In War Machines (and in canon, too, I think) Ironwood sees Mettle as a guiding light that illuminates the path to victory and lets all other false paths fall away, allowing him to focus on the choices needed for victory while tuning out the decisions that won’t end well. Which would be all well and good if that was how it actually worked!
But that’s not how Mettle works, as we know. Mettle doesn’t give Ironwood any paths. It just makes the path which Ironwood chooses himself much clearer to follow, once chosen. Mettle is not holding Ironwood hostage or forcing Ironwood into making any of these decisions. Mettle didn’t make Ironwood shoot Oscar at the end of Volume 7—Ironwood came to that decision entirely of his own accord, and then when he actually raised the gun and pulled the trigger, Mettle made it easier for him to tune out the face of a scared kid about to be shot, allowing him to pull the trigger without hesitation. And from Ironwood’s perspective, Mettle would have only confirmed his decision to shoot Oscar was the right one.
So basically, Mettle inadvertently becomes a staggering case of confirmation bias.
So how did Ironwood get this far in life and this high up in the world if he was always running on supercharged confirmation bias? Well, that’s because Mettle is great as a Semblance for a soldier, even the way Ironwood thinks it functions! Having a Semblance which allows you to stick to your plan even in the face of terrifying and deadly enemies is a fantastic asset for a soldier. A minor distraction can be the difference between missing a shot and hitting it, and Mettle makes it much easier for Ironwood to ignore those things. It gives him an iron nerve on top of what he’s already had trained into him. And Ironwood was already a fantastic soldier without Mettle, so adding Mettle into the mix… you get maybe the best damn soldier on the planet.
But then, the flip side is that Mettle makes a bad fit for a position of leadership. Leaders (whether political ones or military ones) need flexibility, adaptability, the ability to react to things happening around you. Mettle, by design, takes that away. But that wouldn’t necessarily stop Ironwood from being a good leader! There’s still a lot to be said for the ability to stick to your principles under duress! Which Mettle would most definitely be able to assist with. But to be a good leader with Mettle, Ironwood would have to understood how Mettle actually works. And he doesn’t. Instead, it’s confirmation bias for a man who’s trying to treat civilian leadership like military leadership, when they couldn’t be more different jobs.
Next week, Chapter 57: A Smaller, More Honest Soul?
Chapter 57: A Smaller, More Honest Soul?
Notes:
Today is the one-year anniversary of this story! One year ago today, I posted the first chapter!
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Earlier
Blake tapped Gambol Shroud’s hilt one more time, in case it’d disappeared from her holster in the last five seconds.
Ozpin had requested to see her immediately. He hadn’t given any hint about why, but it had to be Ruby. Blake couldn’t think of any other reason why she would be called to his office. With this kind of timing after the confrontation in the courtyard, what else could it possibly be about? And since it was about Ruby, then it was actually more important for her to be there, than with her team. Because it would be a conversation that determined Ruby’s future.
She was almost to Ozpin’s office when she crossed paths with Yang’s family, going the exact opposite direction in a corridor which only led to one place: the elevator to Ozpin’s office.
Taiyang and Qrow realized the same thing, because they both stopped as she approached, scrutinizing her. Blake slowed but didn’t stop, inclining her head in greeting.
“You’re Yang’s team leader,” Qrow said. His voice was much fainter than in the courtyard, but she could smell the alcohol on him from here.
“I am,” Blake said carefully. Qrow made her wary. She didn’t have the best experience with people who looked for a fight at the slightest provocation.
Taiyang looked down the hall in the direction they’d come from. “Ozpin called you here?”
“He did.” She had more trust in Taiyang, but the (understandable) shock of Ruby had put him in a daze which ran as deep as Qrow’s, and she wasn’t entirely sure if his actions were predictable right now, either.
Then Taiyang and Qrow exchanged looks with one another, and something inscrutable settled over their expressions. She would almost call it… grim? Accepting? Some sort of finality, at the very least.
They nodded to one another, and then Qrow held out a hand to her. “Thank you,” he said. “Thank you for everything that you’ve done for Ruby. Yang told Taiyang all about how much you’ve helped her. She told him that if it weren’t for you, her sister would still be unrecognizable.”
Blake’s heart skipped a beat, at knowing Yang thought so highly of her. Sometimes she still wondered how she could deserve to be held in that high a regard by anyone. “I…”
She looked down at Qrow’s hand. She did not want to even guess at what that hand had touched recently, but… she couldn’t refuse this man’s handshake, not in this context. So she swallowed her reflex and shook, and smiled at Yang and Ruby’s uncle.
“I don’t know how much credit I can take for that,” she said. “As much as I wanted to help her, there was, um, some survival instincts going on there too.”
Qrow snorted. “I don’t blame you, kid. Ex-White Fang, seeing a girl raised to be the greatest and most brainwashed Atlesian warrior ever? If she wasn’t my own niece, I’d be real paranoid about her future, too.”
Blake couldn’t hold down the instinctual step back “How do you know about the Fang…?”
Qrow smirked. “Ozpin isn’t as oblivious about who he lets into his school as he’d have you think, you know. Wouldn’t believe some of the people he lets in just because he wants to.”
Blake was reasonably sure Qrow was referring to himself there, but decided not to say anything.
“But for real. Good luck.” Qrow nodded towards Ozpin’s elevator. “You might not be the same person when you walk back out of that.”
Blake nodded slowly. “…Thank you?”
The two men’s behavior seemed incredibly strange, but… they’d just found Ruby, and they had to know she was being brought to Ozpin for something to do about Ruby. It was understandable conduct, given the circumstances.
The only answer Blake received from them was two slow, nearly synchronized nods. And as she walked away, she couldn’t shake the feeling that their eyes were watching her the whole way to the elevator.
A long, uncomfortable silence was still going in Team BSYP’s room, and Ruby didn’t mind, because she never wanted anyone to talk to her ever again. Or notice her.
Moonrise. That was all she was, all she’d ever been, and all she would ever be. It was wrong to think about it any other way. She just had to push everything else away that didn’t remind her of this. She had to push away Penny no matter how much that hurt. She had to push away her friends no matter how much that hurt. If she had to push herself away, then she’d do it! Even if that felt like killing herself! Because if she had to kill herself to save everyone else, then she had to do it.
It wasn’t okay for Ruby to be broken. Ruby couldn’t be broken because the Queen of the Grimm couldn’t be killed by a broken weapon! Project Moonrise would only work if it wasn’t broken! Her friends had told her it was okay to be broken, but that was only true for people who weren’t supposed to save the world!
But… if she really wasn’t broken and everything that’d happened to her was actually okay, then why did she hurt so much? Why did everything about this hurt? How did she stop hurting?
She just… she’d been convinced she was broken. She just had to convince herself in the other direction. She wasn’t broken. She wasn’t broken. She wasn’t broken. If she repeated it enough times, she’d start believing it. That was how her friends had made her realize she was broken in the first place, by repeating it so much! Except, no, they hadn’t made her realize anything, they’d just convinced her of something that wasn’t actually true, because Ruby wasn’t broken! She wasn’t broken, because the world needed a weapon like her! Not broken. Not broken. Not broken. Not broken. Not broken. Not broken. Not broken.
She was Moonrise, who was supposed to exist and wasn’t broken. Not Ruby. Being a weapon was exactly what was supposed to happen to her. So she had to undo all her thinking about Atlas’s treatment being bad, because Atlas had no other choice. This was what they were supposed to do. Who else could they ask to save the world?! How could she be broken when her whole life was for her intended purpose? It wasn’t as if they’d taken her away from some other family where her destiny was to grow up a nice ordinary not-broken kid! Then she would really be broken if that was the case. But Moonrise had just been a weapon from the day she was born. And there was nothing broken about being shaped to fulfill her destiny!
What would be broken was trying to be something that had never actually existed. She was grown in a lab. Ruby was a name of her own invention. She could dispose of it, too. She could be just Moonrise, and nothing else. That was what she deserved. That was what she was good for. She just had to ignore the pain until it went away.
Penny was worried.
Ruby’s heart thudded forcefully in her sensors, worryingly unrelenting as time passed. Her eyes were squeezed shut. And every once in a while, she would whisper-mumble something, so quietly and so indistinctly that even Penny couldn’t understand it. It just sounded like hissing noises.
Ruby also hadn’t put down her weapon since they’d re-entered their room. And… why was she wearing a cadet’s uniform again?
Eventually, she could not keep her concern unvoiced any longer. “Ruby?” she said, painstakingly modulating just the right levels of care and concern for her voice.
“Mmm?” was all of Ruby’s response.
Penny reached across her bunk, bridging the gap between them and brushing aside loose strands of Ruby’s hair which had pulled away from her braid. But as she ran her hands through Ruby’s hair, she encountered more tangles than ever before, and soon she decided to stop for fear of unnecessarily pulling out hair. “May I ask what is worrying you?” she said.
Ruby’s grip on her weapon immediately tightened. “I’m fine.”
“But I have an entire suite of sensors which are telling me that something is distressing you…?”
“I don’t wanna talk about it,” Ruby said, and the sudden pivot from denial to withdrawal made an even bigger pulse of worry twist around painfully somewhere inside Penny. She’d never seen this kind of avoidance from Ruby. The other times Ruby had something to hide, something she was running from, something that was weighing her down… She’d had energy those times, even if it was the nervous kind. Constantly moving, afraid to stay in one spot for too long, stumbling over words that came out too fast. It was still energy. But now, Ruby just seemed… frozen. Like a cornered animal.
“I can’t talk about it,” Ruby added, turning away to smush her face into the wall, trying to block out the outside world entirely.
Penny was now on high alert. There was only one thing that she could think of which would make Ruby say she couldn’t talk about it, which was… coercion. Threats. Some sort of nefarious behavior perpetrated specifically by Atlas to force Ruby to stay in their ranks.
“Ruby?”
“Please stop asking.” There was something terribly off about her voice, and it took Penny 3.1 seconds to realize the issue. Ruby sounded… small.
Ruby was energetic, and Ruby was loud, and Ruby was expressive. That all blended together into something which felt very big whenever Penny closed her eyes and thought about Ruby without regard to mathematics or senses. Which was something that happened often. But right now, Ruby’s voice didn’t feel big enough to fill a teacup. She could only think of one entity who would make Ruby feel this way.
“Has… Has General Ironwood done something?” Penny said.
“I said I’M NOT TALKING ABOUT IT!” Ruby shrieked, and then suddenly she vanished into a tornado of silver dust, making Penny’s hair flap wildly before she reformed in the corner of the room with her back flat against the wall.
Penny and Yang and Weiss stared at Ruby in varying mixtures of shock and acute worry, while Ruby panted wildly, her eyes wide and unfocused.
“Ruby!” Penny reached out in a beseeching gesture. “Please, I trust you, but… why won’t you tell me what’s wrong?! How can I qualify as a good girlfriend if I am letting you suffer through this ordeal alone and in silence?” Internally, she concluded: General Ironwood had done something. Something horrible, by the looks of it.
Ruby cringed away, and then her face twisted. But before she could answer, there was a knock on the door.
Yang seemed to know exactly who it was. She was halfway across the room when the second knock sounded, and opening the door before a third one could register.
It was Yang’s father and uncle. Taiyang and Qrow. Ruby’s father and uncle.
Their stubble, which had previously caused Penny’s memory to generate inadvertent associations between their faces and images of threadbare carpets, was now shaved off. They both had the type of wet hair characteristic of recent showering. Qrow also seemed to have taken a large quality of breath mints in an effort to conceal the smell of alcohol on his breath, but all he had accomplished was making Penny smell both mint and alcohol in strong quantities, which was… a combination she had never encountered before, and she would be offering no further commentary on that combination out of politeness.
“Okay.” Yang swung around, drawing herself up as if she was about to launch into a sparring match. She blinked slowly, slowly enough that Penny wasn’t sure whether to classify it as a blink or a brief intentional closing of the eyes. “It’s time.”
Oh, Penny realized. They’re going to tell Ruby.
However, the next sound which she registered was the cocking of Ruby’s weapon.
Ruby was aiming Lunar Enforcer at Qrow, her eyes narrowed and her whole body tense like a coiled spring. “What are you doing here?!”
Qrow blinked slowly. “What?”
“Ruby—” Penny said, trying to gently lower the barrel of Lunar Enforcer, but Ruby didn’t budge, her scowl deepening.
“You attacked Winter, entirely unprovoked! You should be under arrest right now! I saw Ozpin and the General take you away! Why aren’t you in jail?”
“Ji—I mean, the General and I resolved the, uh, situation, inside. In Ozpin’s office.”
Ruby snorted. “Resolved? If you were one of the General’s men, he would’ve had you shot!”
“Yeah, and I kinda want to shoot myself right now,” Qrow mumbled. His gaze was aimed mostly down, so he missed the death glare Yang shot him.
“I’ll do it for you, free of charge!” Ruby growled. “But if you really did get off unscathed, why are you here, anyway?! You don’t have anything to do with any of us!”
Yang was frozen in place by the door, staring at Ruby with what Penny identified as a deer in the headlights look, meaning Penny was the only one who could answer.
“He is Yang’s uncle,” she said.
Ruby’s grip on Lunar Enforcer slipped, but a half-second later she snapped back readiness as her eyes flashed with disbelief. She already knew Yang’s uncle was a Huntsman, and that Yang only had one person she called an uncle.
“You’re a Huntsman,” she said to Qrow in wild amazement, still not lowering Lunar Enforcer.
“Yeah,” Qrow said. “Want to see my license?”
Qrow was actually serious about that, Penny realized—and then it was a really good thing he wasn’t bluffing, because Ruby immediately nodded.
Qrow pulled out his scroll, almost fumbling it before he tossed it across the room to Ruby. Ruby caught it seamlessly with one hand, never moving Lunar Enforcer which was still gripped in the other. She squinted at the scroll, making a little hmm?! noise.
“How?!” she snapped, finally lowering Lunar Enforcer and crossing her arms. “If you’re actually a real fighter, then how can you act like this?! Oh, and you look a lot better in your ID picture, you know that?”
“Thanks. It was twenty years and three lost family members ago,” Qrow muttered.
“Uncle Qrow,” Yang whisper-shouted, her voice shot through with despair.
“So whatever you need from Yang, just do it and get out of here, okay?” Ruby said. Her tone of sharp anger was entirely unfamiliar to Penny. It worried her as much as anything else about Ruby’s conduct that morning. “Or if it’s gonna take a while, I’ll just clear out now—”
“No!”
The interruption came from three places, in three different ways. From Yang, a yelp. From Taiyang, a cry. From Qrow, a shout. The combined sound made Ruby flinch violently—suddenly she was raising Lunar Enforcer again, although this time there was terror and not anger in her eyes.
“What do you want with me?” she said.
Qrow cleared his throat. “Look, kid—”
“Don’t call me kid,” Ruby snapped. Suddenly, her voice was the most venomous creature in existence.
“—Look, Ruby—”
“Don’t call me Ruby.”
Qrow stopped, staring at Ruby with an expression bordering on helpless. “...What do you want me to call you, then?” he said, without a single trace of sarcasm in his voice.
Ruby shook her head violently. “If you need to address me in battle, you can call me Moonrise. But I really don’t want you calling me anything. I don’t want you talking to me, ever. I don’t like you. You’re an embarrassment to Huntresses everywhere.”
Yang looked so, so heartbroken as she moved between Ruby and Qrow. “Just… Please, stop pointing your weapon at my uncle. He’s not going to hurt anyone, least of all you. I promise.”
“What’s going on?” Ruby repeated. “Why won’t you all just GO AWAY?!”
“You weren’t grown in a lab, Ruby!” Yang burst out, her entire body twitching violently as soon as she’d said the words and her vitals all simultaneously going wild.
Ruby froze, her eyes going inhumanly wide. And then Lunar Enforcer slipped entirely out of her hands, clattering to the ground with a noise so piercing that despite all logical knowledge, Penny was surprised the floor didn’t cave in under the weapon’s impact.
“What?” Ruby said in a voice somehow even smaller than anything before. The tension was rushing out of her body like a hot-air balloon collapsing out of the sky, or a mortally-wounded soldier bleeding out. “I—I—You’re sure?”
Yang nodded. “One hundred percent.
“How—how do you know?” Suddenly, Ruby wasn’t a venomous snake anymore, just a little wood mouse that’d had its burrow ripped away by a beast much larger and more powerful than it, leaving it to shiver out in the open with nowhere to hide.
A cascade of silver dust tumbled off Ruby, and just for a moment, her entire form flickered, flickered so fast that no configuration of Penny’s high-speed replay could resolve that visual hiccup.
“What am I, then?” she said, her voice almost inaudible.
“We should sit down,” Yang said. When Ruby gave a meek, answering nod, Yang put a shaking arm around her, guiding her towards Penny’s bunk with hands that didn’t quite touch either of her shoulders, hovering just above her skin as if there was an invisible force keeping her from closing that last little bit of distance.
“Sorry, Pocket Change and Snow Princess, but we’re kicking you two out,” Qrow said, finally ambling into the room with Taiyang and nodding to Penny with tired eyes. “This needs to be private.”
Penny nodded immediately in understanding. This was an intensely private matter, even more private than the visit to Patch, and she would not intrude this time. Weiss clearly also understood, because she slid off her bunk without a single objection to Qrow’s way of referring to her.
Penny closed the door behind her as quietly as she could, and the last thing she saw was Yang and Ruby sitting down on her bunk side-by-side.
Once in the hallway and a respectful distance away from their room, Penny turned to Weiss, intent on starting a conversation. Only for her scroll to vibrate at that moment.
She opened the message. And stared.
And stared.
And stared.
Why was she receiving a message from Cinder?
Penny, this is Cinder. I need to talk to you alone as soon as possible.
Despite the short length and straightforward content of this message, Penny had reread it 106 times. She was not even sure how Cinder knew her scroll number. She could have simply asked someone else for it, but… why now? After an entire semester of not saying a single word to her after their first encounter? After avoiding her?
(Yes, Penny knew that Cinder had been avoiding her—she had radar, after all. It allowed her to see things happening behind her back: things such as the radar signature of Cinder rounding a corner, stopping short as soon as she saw Penny down the hallway, and immediately turning around and leaving the way she’d come.)
What had changed? Did the tournament somehow cause this? Had… had Cinder figured out that Penny was mechanical? Did she realize that the reason Pyrrha forfeited was for fear of endangering Penny? But Cinder didn’t know Pyrrha’s Semblance. So how—
Was Cinder a synthetic person too?
The question appeared in Penny’s consciousness so suddenly and so forcefully that some of her touch sensors actually registered a physical touch, like the thought had physically hit her.
It would explain why Cinder was so surprised to see Penny. Why Cinder was so reluctant to talk to her. Why she was now asking to talk in secret.
That was even less evidence than when Penny had thought Ruby might be mechanical. But Penny’s emotion core latched onto it like it was the answer to the world’s most difficult equation, while her logic core just sort of shrugged.
Regardless, there was only one readily available way to find out.
Penny looked up at the ornate iron gates which stood before her. The bars which made up the gate were a deep matte black—not painted, but a certain finish to metal which only the most skilled of blacksmiths could attain. Finely detailed flowers of the same metal were curled around the bars, preventing anyone from squeezing through the gate. Although no one would ever need to sneak in. These gates were always unlocked, because this was the entrance to Beacon Academy’s memorial garden. The need to mourn, or to simply remember, was something which tended to strike at the most odd times.
This was where Beacon students who had fallen in the service of being a Huntress—whether at Beacon or later in life—were commemorated. Their names were laser-etched into squat black marble slabs interspersed throughout flower beds, islands of startling, sobering immediacy amidst the cacophonies of bright floral colors. A remembrance, and a celebration, of the colors that these people had once contributed to the canvas of life.
Penny had visited here many times while living in secret at Beacon. She would sit in the gardens by herself and wonder if, in her forgotten past, she had known any of the names found on the memorial stones. But as an actual student, Penny had only come here once, when Yang wanted to show her teammates where Summer Rose’s name was. They didn’t stay long, though—Yang said she preferred Summer’s grave back home if she wanted to talk to her mom.
Today, though…
Penny reread Cinder’s message for the 107th time. The conversation which followed had been short. Penny had immediately replied to Cinder’s message with Yes, of course. Where should we meet?
Cinder’s reply had come just as quickly. The memorial garden. I’ll be there.
Penny put a hand on each gate and pushed. They opened silently on well-oiled hinges, and then she was inside. Her sensors informed her that there was exactly one other person in this garden.
Her language processors whirled and whirled as she began to walk closer. What was she supposed to say? What was Cinder going to say? What did she want to say? What did she want Cinder to say? What did Cinder want her to say? How did anyone ever approach a conversation with this many unknowns?
Penny took a deep cooling breath, and then a second one for good measure, and rounded the final hedge which stood between her and the garden’s other occupant.
Cinder was standing in front of a memorial slab, her arms crossed and her back to Penny. However, at the moment when the sound of Penny’s footfalls would’ve become audible, she whirled around, and for one second her expression was flaring with an emotion Penny had never seen before (which was vanishingly rare at this point in her life), but then it was gone like a blackboard wiped clean.
“Salutations, Cinder,” Penny said, forgoing the usual cheer she would inject into a greeting. It did not feel appropriate in the slightest.
“Penny.”
As soon as Penny heard Cinder say her name, she knew. She knew Cinder had met Penny somewhere in her past. Because the way that Cinder said Penny’s name—the subtle variations of tone and tenor in those two syllables that Penny could detect and analyze only with her most sensitive auditory instruments—was with a tone of familiarity. Penny had a vast archive of the many, many times someone had said her name, and the way Cinder said it was not how people who had never said her name before said it.
A moment later, Cinder turned back to the monument, moved slightly to one side, and gestured for Penny to join her.
Cinder Fall stared down at the row of letters etched into the gleaming black stone, and scowled at the name which they spelled out. Only she knew why they were meeting here:
Rhodes.
He’d graduated from Beacon, after all.
She had never truly known him. He’d told her he was going to help her. He’d said he wanted to help her lift herself up to a better life. He’d said he would teach her how to set herself free.
And it was all a cruel lie. Rhodes did nothing. The last time Cinder had seen him, she was still just as trapped as she ever was. She wished she could find him one more time and scream at him, Why didn’t you actually help me? Why didn’t you just break my collar the second you saw me? Why didn’t you stop the Madame from treating me like a tool? Why did you insist on making me your twisted idea of better first? Was the dirty girl in the shock collar in the basement of the hotel not a glamorous enough mission for a dignified Huntsman? Why did I have to PROVE MYSELF to you to earn my freedom?! Why did I have to EARN my freedom?!
But Cinder could never ask Rhodes anything, ever again. He was dead.
She’d never seen him again after she escaped the Glass Unicorn. Later, after she had found Salem and her destiny, Cinder went looking for him, intent on making him pay a thousand times over for what he’d let her suffer through. But she was too late, far too late. All she found was an announcement of his death and this memorial. Killed on a routine mission gone wrong, nothing to do with Cinder or Salem or even Atlas. And there was nothing Cinder could do to change it. He’d left her life as suddenly as he’d appeared, leaving… leaving…
The Glass Unicorn was a gaping wound in Cinder’s life which she had cauterized shut over and over again with strength, with power, with fire, with everything which might erase it from her existence. But again and again, something new would slash open the wound. Rhodes’ unceremonious death. Finding Penny Pallas—or rather, Penny Polendina—alive.
It had taken an entirely different kind of person from Rhodes to set Cinder free. And now, Cinder would set that girl free. One way or another.
———————————————————
“You don’t remember me,” Cinder said as an opening.
Penny skipped over twenty-four questions that statement inspired, and went straight to: “But you remember me.”
“All semester, I thought that you didn’t remember me because you didn’t care.” Cinder was not looking at Penny. She was staring straight ahead at a perfectly unremarkable section of hedge. The sound of her teeth grinding together would have been vanishingly faint to human ears, but to Penny’s audioreceptors, she could hear it as clearly as thunder crashing.
Her core temperature began to climb again as she processed the statement. “What did you believe I did not care about?”
“But now I think I understand.” Cinder crossed her arms and turned to face Penny, her amber eyes staring directly into Penny as if she could see all the way into the center of Penny’s processors. “I have one question for you, Penny. How much do you remember? Not of me. Of everything.”
“I…” There was so much that could be interpreted from Cinder’s words, too much for Penny’s prediction algorithms to even guess reliably at. But her emotions told her something entirely different—Cinder knew exactly how Penny might erase her memories. She only wanted confirmation. Emotionally, what else could she mean?
Her cooling systems required another deep breath, and then she spoke. “I remember nothing. Nothing from my life before. I do not even know where I came from.”
Cinder didn’t reply immediately. Instead, she studied Penny with eyes which produced just a little more luminosity than most peoples’ eyes. There were only two people who Penny knew of that could create such an effect without the use of a Semblance or Dust. One was Penny herself. The other was Ruby. And that made Penny wonder. Was Cinder…?
Cinder exhaled softly. Was that approval? “I should’ve understood that much sooner. You deleted everything which could remind you of your past.”
Deleted. The word choice was so particular, so intentional, so unlike what would be used to describe a human’s memory loss, that all the tension immediately rushed out of Penny’s servos, because this was as good as an explicit confirmation.
“You know that I am a synthetic person,” she said.
Before Penny could begin to regret saying it so openly to someone she barely knew, Cinder nodded, showing no sign of amazement or awe—not even a hiccup in her vitals. “You’re here because you’re hiding from who made you.”
“Well—” Penny thought of her father, who had built her, who had helped her escape. She wasn’t hiding from him. She was hiding from everything around him, whatever it was. But before she could explain in a way that would make any sense, Cinder kept talking.
“Because you didn’t want to be a slave to their whims. You wanted to be strong. You wanted to seize your destiny by the throat and never let go.”
Penny looked down at the brick walkway which they stood on, the hardened red clay pockmarked and uneven from decades of wear. “I… I wanted to be free.”
“Yes.”
Suddenly, Cinder was looking at Penny with an intensity that… that… in her facial recognition systems, it matched almost perfectly to hunger. Acute, desperate, burning hunger, the kind of hunger that Penny had only seen in a normally-skittish wild animal that was starving to the point of being willing to attack a person to get something in its stomach.
“Yes,” Cinder said again, her tone coming out in an oddly pleased growl. “You wanted to be free, Penny. I understand that better than anyone else in the world.”
“Are…” Penny’s sensors were finding nothing to support this theory, but she had to ask. “Are… are you synthetic, too?”
Something flashed across Cinder’s face, before she settled into a smile, punctuated by a short, light laugh even though Penny had not said anything meant to be humorous. “No. But I had to set myself free, too. Just like you’re trying to do, Penny.”
“Did… did we come from the same place?”
“In a manner of speaking.”
Penny nodded, filing that information away. In a manner of speaking could mean lots of things, but… she was choosing to believe it was confirmation of the kingdom she’d come from—Mistral. Cinder Fall was from Mistral, as Penny Pallas must have been. But why was Cinder telling her all this now? Why was she talking about freedom now, after an entire semester of avoiding her? Why was she suddenly so interested in the connection between them? Why was she not saying anything specific about how they’d known one another? Was she trying to hide something? Or… Or…
Was Cinder afraid of something?
“Are the people you escaped from chasing you?” Penny said. Instinctively, she scanned their surroundings, wondering if enemies could be approaching at that very moment. “Are they trying to find you? Are you in danger? Do you need help? If you do, I will do everything that I can possibly—”
Cinder held up a hand, stopping Penny. Her smile changed now, to something which felt… felt like…
A parent smiling down at their young child when they’d just asked a silly question. That was the most accurate comparison Penny could find in her memory, and it put her on edge. Penny Pallas strongly disliked being treated like a child.
“Don’t worry, Penny. They can’t hurt me anymore. Nothing can hurt me anymore.”
“Oh. That is good, but—”
“It’s you that’s in danger.”
Penny stopped short, all of her processes reorienting themselves in confusion. “What?”
“You’re still trapped, Penny. Beacon isn’t any safer for you than where you were before. There are people here who still want to use you. People who want you to be their weapon.”
“I…” Penny took a step back, inadvertently crushing a delicate orange tulip growing just off the pathway, her foot sinking into soft soil. How could she be used as a weapon without even realizing it? “...Who? And why?”
“I can answer all that, and more. But I need you to trust me.”
Trust. Something Penny had learned to do more and more over the course of this semester. Trusting her teammates. Trusting her teammates with the truth about her. Trusting Ruby with the same things. Trusting that she could safely love Ruby. Trusting herself. But now… This didn’t feel like the kind of trust she was used to. It felt different.
“What exactly am I trusting you in regards to?”
“Who the real enemy is,” Cinder said. She took a step forward, that intense hunger-want returning. “And then I can help you. I can make sure that you’re never under anyone’s control ever again.”
Penny took another step back, internally wincing as she stepped on yet another flower that someone had taken time and effort to grow. Outwardly, though, she kept her voice firm and unwavering even as her discomfort ramped up rapidly. “Then tell me what the danger is, please.”
Cinder looked her up and down, her gaze razor-sharp, and then in a flat tone, she said:
“Ozpin.”
Penny froze, and tried to say something, but the only thing which came out was a stutter that she couldn’t complete. That was impossible! Ozpin was not dangerous! He had helped her escape danger!
Cinder must’ve realized how shocked she was, because she added, “Do you think he took you in because of the goodness in his heart? Do you think he let you into his castle—” She gestured behind herself at Beacon’s spires. “—because of kindness and generosity?”
Tremendously befuddled, the only answer Penny could give was, “…Yes?”
Cinder stared at Penny, her face becoming impossibly blank. It took 29.4 seconds before she spoke again. “That’s what he wants you to think.”
“That does not make any logical sense? Headmaster Ozpin let me stay at his school without any expectation that I would be indentured to him in any way!”
“Yet,” Cinder said with unsettling immediacy. “He’s already beginning to use you in ways you can’t see, Penny. Do you think it is a coincidence that you are his favored Huntress, who he gives special privileges to? Why do you think he gave your team sensitive missions far beyond what would be expected of a first-year team? Why do you think he shows your team far more lenience in their transgressions than other teams? He is shaping you into his weapon, pushing you towards his agenda and his desires.”
She swung back to the plaque, her gaze freezing on one of the names. If Penny could triangulate the path of Cinder’s eyes and see which name she was staring at—
“The greatest trick that old man has ever pulled is making his puppets think they have a choice,” Cinder said.
“But I did choose,” Penny said. “I chose to be a Huntress when he did not want me to be one.”
“You don’t have to be his puppet, Penny. You can still cut yourself free from his strings of control.” Cinder held her hands out to Penny, and Penny did not know whether the gesture was an invitation or a command. “And I can show you how. All you have to do is trust me.”
Penny’s prediction algorithms were screaming at her to leave now. As were logic, and emotions, and possibly any other system in her body which could offer commentary on the outside world.
“What proof do you have for your claims?” she said.
Cinder’s heart rate jumped. “I can’t show you here.”
A series of deductions flashed through Penny’s mind.
If Cinder Fall truly believed that Beacon was an unsafe place which was trapping Penny, and if she believed Ozpin was an unjust man hurting his students… Then she could very well be one of the unidentified wrongdoers plotting an attack against Beacon, because those ideas sounded like a very powerful motivation for someone to attack Beacon!
And if she was the one who had attacked Beacon… she was the one who had unleashed that virus on the Beacon network. She was the one who had… who had… who had unleashed something which… violated Penny. Had she known what she would do to Penny when uploading the virus?! Had she not cared?! Or… or was that what Cinder wanted? Did she just want to control Penny?
…Had Cinder controlled Penny before Beacon?
Suddenly, Penny was in fight-or-flight mode. “I am sorry, Cinder, but—” She chose flight and activated the corresponding mode, her wings springing out with a kachunk which resonated through the memorial garden. “I cannot. Thank you for the offer, but I am sorry, I cannot trust you. I—I think you are one of the people who I was escaping from—”
Cinder’s eyes widened.
Penny fired her rockets at full power, ruining yet another bed of flowers, and blasted off, setting a course for Ozpin’s office and escaping from the girl who seemed to know too much about her.
Fists clenched, Cinder glared murderously at Penny as she fled, and the tiniest of flames danced at her knuckles.
“So that’s how it is,” she growled at nothing. “You will die.”
The gall of Penny to think Cinder had been one of her captors—
Cinder had been a fool for ever thinking that Atlesian toy could have been worthy of an alliance with her. That night in the Glass Unicorn had not been a meaningful deviation from the Battle Angel’s programming—that had been just a glitch in a walking scrapheap which was undoubtedly full of them. An accident born from nothing more than an animated tin can’s malfunctions. The Battle Angel had never once deviated from its programming, erased memories or not. It was incapable of growth, incapable of change. It was just a thing that only knew how to smile and laugh and follow orders. Cinder was furious with herself for having been deceived into thinking that it was a person who could have ever meant anything to Cinder Fall. She hated herself for having fallen prey to the exact sort of emotions that this contraption in the shape of a little girl had been designed to incite.
Doubtlessly, she was now flying off to inform her master of this little incident. But it would not matter, because even in taking such a risk as this, Cinder had ensured contingency plans were in place in the event of Penny betraying her. Even if Ozpin realized that Cinder and her cohort were the enemy, it would be too late. He was powerless to stop any of this. She could have killed Penny right then and there before she ever fled, but she didn’t, because she needed Penny to play her part in what was still ahead.
She flipped open her replacement scroll and fired off a message to Emerald, Mercury, and Neo, who were all awaiting orders.
Pallas failed. Get your illusions ready, Neo. We’re going to the ground until our plans are put into motion.
Nothing of any significance had changed. Beacon would fall. And Penny would be destroyed. Death would be a mercy to Penny, in fact, if there was any real consciousness trapped inside that robotic prison—such an existence was undoubtedly a tortured one, to be entombed in unfeeling metal which would only ever bend to the orders of whoever puppeted it. Cinder would set Penny free by destroying that body, liberating whatever helpless soul was trapped inside.
If Cinder Fall were a girl more cognizant of her emotions, she would have recognized another feeling deep in her chest which roiled and howled like the ocean at the height of a storm. And that feeling was hurt.
Hurt, because Cinder Fall had dared to hope she could find someone like her. Someone else who had been through the same cruel servitude that she had faced. Someone else who had suffered under the callous and uncaring dominance of the Kingdom Of Atlas. Someone else who had broken her own chains.
But Cinder did not have that awareness. And so the jagged, aching pain which continuously stabbed at her heart right now was ignored, and if it was acknowledged by her at all, she thought it was a punishment for letting such a foolish vulnerability exist.
“You wanted to see me, Headmaster?” Blake said, and immediately after her question was out of her mouth, she realized that James Godsdamned Ironwood was also in this office. He was holding a cup of tea with both hands and looking like he’d just taken an unexpected and crushing blow. Her suspicion that this meeting was about Ruby increased from ninety-nine-point-nine percent to one hundred.
Professor Goodwitch was also here, not maintaining a poker face in the slightest. But she was the first one to speak, recovering from her uncharacteristically apparent shock to nod in greeting. “Thank you for joining us, Miss Belladonna.”
Ozpin took a seat at his desk and gestured to the chair across from him. “Please, have a seat.”
Blake sat herself without exactly sitting down—more balancing herself on the edge of the chair, waiting.
“I wanted to congratulate you on a splendid fight in the tournament,” Ozpin said, placing his clasped hands down before him.
Blake had already heard other people calling that fight several other things very different from splendid, but she would play the pleasantries game. “Thank you.”
…Actually, in the several seconds’ pause which followed this, Blake decided she wasn’t going to bother with pleasantries after all.
“So this is about Ruby, right?” she said before anyone else could say anything.
Ironwood, taking a sip of tea at that exact moment, choked and broke into a fit of violent coughing.
Blake turned to him, raising an eyebrow. “Were you not expecting that, General Ironwood?” That reaction was either a very good thing, or a very bad thing, and Blake had no idea which one yet.
“James. I suggest that you let Glynda and I handle this conversation,” Ozpin said before Ironwood could actually reply, in a severe tone which was absolutely not a suggestion. “I would prefer not to give Miss Belladonna an entirely false picture of what is going on here.”
“…A skewed picture of what?” Blake said, a twinge of unease registering in her gut.
Ozpin leaned forward slightly, scrutinizing her, and then his gaze softened into something more vulnerable than Blake had ever seen in him before.
“May I ask, what’s your favorite fairytale?”
Blake stared at the scarred, unmoving face separated from her by a layer of glass on a metal case which looked so much like a coffin. All she could hear was her own pulse thudding away in both sets of ears, so thunderously loud that it nearly drowned out her own thoughts. She could see the reflection of herself in the glass, her amber eyes never looking away from the frozen girl.
Amber. That was her name.
The Fall Maiden.
She knew The Story Of The Seasons. She remembered Mom and Dad reading that fairytale to her when she was still small enough to curl up entirely inside the oh-so-cozy confines of her parents’ laps. Of course, in her parents’ version of the fairytale, the four girls were all Faunus.
And now, with a simple one-word answer to Ozpin, Blake could come home to them as one of the Maidens.
Some tiny, ludicrously indifferent part of her wondered if her parents would be vindicated by meeting a Maiden who was also a Faunus. A much larger part of her wondered if there would be anything left of Kali and Ghira’s daughter for them to see by the time this was all over.
Maidens. They were real. Magic was real. And Blake was being asked to become a Maiden. Being asked to wield unimaginable power in service of protecting the world.
“Protecting the world from what?”
“That, we can only tell you if you decide to choose this path with us.”
Blake didn’t trust that. Especially when Ironwood was one of the people in that us.
But even with Ozpin, Ironwood, and Glynda keeping their cards close to their chests, there were some things Blake could figure out herself. Mainly, that she’d finally found the shadowy faction which Adam had allied the White Fang with—it was whatever faction Ozpin and Goodwitch and Ironwood were opposing. And Blake had been right the entire time! This faction, whoever they were, wanted things which went far beyond what the Fang cared about! Adam didn’t know about the Maidens; he didn’t know that an attempt had been made to steal one Maiden’s powers and that all this maneuvering at Beacon might be to give someone with unimaginable aims the ability to wipe out the entire White Fang with a single swipe of her hand. This shadow faction was in a war with the world itself, using the Faunus and the White Fang as nothing more than pawns! Blake’s worst fears were coming true; her brothers and sisters were being used as proxies for an ancient fight beyond any of their comprehension. Did Adam even know that he was only useful to his ‘allies’ because they themselves didn’t want to be dragged into the light?!
And now Blake was being asked to become a different kind of proxy in this war. The latest one in a very long line. Maybe the others had been like her, young women with a sense of justice so explosive it felt like it would consume them long before their lives fully unfolded.
She studied the girl’s face harder and harder, trying to figure out what Amber had been like in life. But there was so little to go on. Was the neck-length hair a stylistic choice, or one of convenience? The little tattoo of an apple with a bite taken out of it on her shoulder—was that an aesthetic choice, or did it once have a deeper symbolic meaning to her? Did she wear any of this plain white attire normally, or was that just what she’d been dressed with during her coma? Behind the web of fading scars all across her face, were there smile lines?
Ozpin hadn’t said whether Amber inherited the powers through someone else’s last thoughts, or if they’d come to her randomly…
The second scenario felt considerably more horrifying. Blake decided not to linger on that thought. In some ways, the powers disturbed her. The idea of having no choice in becoming one of the four most hunted people in the world… She found that far more unsettling than, say, the revelation that they were in a war for the fate of the planet, which was honestly nothing new to her. Blake had grown up in the White Fang; she was used to being locked in a battle for what certainly felt like the fate of the planet. So she’d taken that particular revelation with an ease which left Ozpin, Goodwitch, and Ironwood visibly startled.
That, in its own way, was darkly funny. Three humans who were surprised that a Faunus activist was already wholly used to fighting for her life. She knew the world wasn’t at peace, as did anyone else in the White Fang. What did Ozpin know?
But there was no preparing herself for the truth of the Maiden powers. What would… What could she do with them? Doubtlessly they expected her to act as a member of this cohort, but… She didn’t have to listen to them. She would still have her independence, and she would take full advantage of it. There were things she could do which would act against Atlas and against Adam’s mysterious allies.
Would it be possible to just… take the powers and run?
The things she could do… Menagerie, under the protection of a Faunus with the power to drive away entire hordes of Grimm by herself. It would be better than a full squadron of Huntresses. Which was something that Menagerie could not afford. But Blake could bring that protection for nothing, bringing what sounded like idle—maybe even foolish—fantasy to life and giving Menagerie chances that it’d never had before.
And why stop there? She could bring this power to all the places in the world where the Faunus struggled for their most basic rights. She could use it as a shield for those in Atlas and Mistral and Vale and Vacuo who had none. She could bring so many changes to bear, burn away so many stubbornly rooted institutions that still planted a foot in the backs of Faunus, and instill a fear of actual consequences in every smug supremacist who still thought they were invincible. She could show her teeth.
But then another realization all but sent Blake reeling, forcing herself to take a step sideways just to keep her feet underneath her.
…Was she starting to sound like Adam? Was this what Adam had thought when he’d started down a path that turned bloodier and bloodier? Was this the kind of intentions he’d had as he gathered more and more power around himself? Was Blake grabbing power for power’s sake in exactly the way Adam would’ve done? Was—was—Was she the same as him? Just a pitiful hypocrite? No. No. No. No. No no no no no no no no no no no no—
“Miss Belladonna?” Ozpin said, his voice full of concern.
Despite her best efforts to hide it, Blake had stumbled again. Because there was no point in hiding anything now, she looked up, meeting the headmaster’s eyes and letting him see the fear running rampant within.
“No.”
Oddly enough, it was Ironwood who looked the most surprised of the three of them, his stiff military pose falling away for just an instant as he stared at Blake. In contrast, all Ozpin did was raise a brow in sympathetic questioning, while Goodwitch seemed more interested in Ironwood’s reaction.
“No.” Blake’s fingers brushed against a spot on her ribcage where, hidden under layers of clothing, rested an old scar that wasn’t from any battle. “I don’t trust myself with this kind of power. I can’t.”
I can’t be anything like Adam. It would mean he’s won. It would mean I’ve submitted to him. I’d rather die.
“It is precisely those who don’t want power that are usually the ones most qualified to wield it,” Ozpin said.
“That’s not it!” Blake burst out, uncaring for once of the consequences of lashing out at three of the most powerful people in the world. “I want to be the Fall Maiden! I can see how much good I could do with those powers! How much I could change the world! The things I could do for Faunus that I’ve only ever dreamed of doing! The things that none of you seem to care about doing! I—I want to do those things, more than anything!”
She took a deep, shuddering breath and threw a glance over her shoulder at Amber, at the coffinlike pod paradoxically keeping her alive. “That’s exactly why I can’t have the powers. That kind of power—it would twist me, take advantage of my desires, let my worst instincts and most awful thoughts turn into reality. I wouldn’t have anything to hold me back, and I—I—deep down, I know I’m a terrible person, Headmaster, because of how horrifically I’ve failed everyone in my life, and all these powers would do is give strength to that terrible person, to that worst version of myself which I’ve barely managed to suppress my entire life! What if—what if I snap with the powers, and decide that if I can’t help anyone then I might as well try hurting, and then I’d have the power to hurt so many—”
Ozpin’s voice, calm and collected and the opposite of threatening, broke through the panic swirling deeper and deeper inside Blake.
“Miss Belladonna. Please, please, breathe. You are catastrophizing. I assure you that you are not a terrible person.”
Entirely beyond rational thought, Blake spat out the first response that leapt to mind. “If I’m not evil, then why did I fall in love with him?”
Too late, she clapped a hand over her mouth and backed away, only to realize the teachers stood between her and the elevator which was the only exit. Ozpin was perfectly still, his mug tilted ever so slightly to one side in his grip. Ironwood only looked confused. Glynda was watching Blake with an expression which leached some sort of sadness—probably pity.
Blake couldn’t suppress a fit of severe shuddering. “Why couldn’t I stop him?” she whispered a moment later, because there was no point in holding back the second question from such powerful people now that they’d heard the first one. It took physical strength to ask that question, physical strength which Blake did not feel as if she could spare right now.
Ozpin nodded, took a sip of his coffee, and placed the mug down next to him before considering Blake, both hands folded atop the end of his cane.
“I may not know who exactly you refer to, Miss Belladonna, but… I once fell in love with someone who made me feel the exact same way after things went sour. I wondered why I wasn’t enough to prevent her descent into malevolence. I still wonder, in fact. It is a pain which is not easily answered. But I can also promise you that it becomes easier to manage over time, and more readily forgotten.”
All Blake could do was nod. Suddenly, she felt exhausted, and wanted nothing more than to go back to the surface and feel the sunshine on her face. She still had the tournament later today (how was it still the same day as several hours ago?), and she still needed to meet with Ilia.
Honestly, it felt fake that her team still had to compete in a game after she’d learned all this. How was she supposed to put any importance in an entertainment show now? At least they’d already decided who would compete in the doubles and singles round before the tournament had even started. Yang and Penny for the doubles, and then Penny for the finals if they made it that far.
“I still don’t want to be the Fall Maiden,” Blake said.
“And I will respect that decision,” Ozpin said immediately. He picked up his mug again. “I won’t keep you here any longer, and if you desire, you can have nothing more to do with the conflict which we have alluded to.”
“Thank you.” Blake touched Gambol Shroud where it still sat just like before on her holster. The only thing that she hadn’t left behind in all the times she’d ran away. “I’m glad to know one of the headmasters present can respect someone’s autonomy.”
Ironwood blinked, and Glynda raised a hand to her mouth, covering a quiet snort which was muffled enough that only Blake’s ears could’ve been capable of noticing the sound.
Ironwood, however, gave no actual reaction beyond that. He’d been strangely quiet throughout Ozpin and Glynda’s entire explanation, only adding short sentences which mostly served to confirm everything else being said. He was far more lost in thought, as if he was also just now learning about the existence of Maidens, even though Blake knew that very much wasn’t the case.
It was strange, actually, to consider that Ozpin could view her as being on the same side. That had theoretically been true already, because Blake was a student at a Huntress academy and Ironwood was a headmaster at a Huntress academy. But… could that nebulous concept of ‘the same side’ from different schools actually unite a White Fang-turned-Huntress and the leader of a militant kingdom who was fighting an undeclared war with the very same White Fang?
Blake didn’t think so.
The more she thought about it, the more she wanted out of this vault where she could have nothing to do with this ever again.
“Chaos is a tool of your enemies,” she said to the three adults. “It’s how they get what they want. They take advantage of it, turn cracks created by change into all-out breaches. It creates an awfully convenient excuse to always be guarding the status quo regardless of the cost, doesn’t it?”
Ironwood raised an eyebrow but stayed silent, while Goodwitch’s gaze went to Ozpin, and Ozpin said slowly, “Could you clarify what you mean, Miss Belladonna?”
Blake crossed her arms. “What about when there’s people whose only possible path to justice runs through upheaval? Are they enemies to you, too? Even if they have nothing to do with your shadow war?” Where did the White Fang lie in this battle between world leaders and a hidden, unknown enemy? “What do you do when there’s someone who doesn’t want to be part of your larger war, but still wants to do what’s right?”
Ozpin looked down at his mug, sighing slowly. “The thing is, Miss Belladonna, that in this world… eventually everything becomes part of this war, whether they want to or not.”
Blake was still trying to work out a response—or even how she felt about his answer—when Ozpin continued.
“Case in point…” He nodded at Amber’s stilled body. “I… have regrets about how strenuously we insisted on certain things, with her. She wanted to help, but she wanted to help on her own terms. Not as part of someone else’s war. Perhaps that strong desire of hers led to…” Suddenly, he shook his head with unexpected violence. “I will spare you the details, Miss Belladonna.”
Blake was fine with not knowing the particulars of that.
“Will there be… anything of her left, once you find someone who accepts the powers?” She stole one more look at Amber. It was just hard to look away, honestly. Even if she wanted to leave, she felt bad about leaving this girl alone in the dark—
“We don’t know,” Ozpin said. “This type of transfer has never been attempted before. If successful, the theoretical result would be… the entirety of someone else’s soul, moved into a body which already has a soul there.”
“Two separate souls in one body,” Blake said. “And the night before initiation, I was reading The Man With Two Souls. How fitting.”
Ozpin sipped his coffee.
Blake tilted her head, thinking. “It… wasn’t a very good story, if I’m being honest.”
“Being somewhat familiar with the book myself, I am inclined to agree,” Ozpin said, before going back to his coffee.
Ozpin had made it very clear that if Amber were to die, there was an immense danger of the Maiden powers passing to her assailant, because the assailant was almost certainly the last person in Amber’s thoughts. And so, Amber was trapped in this uncomprehending state, unaware of the chaos growing around her and how much hinged on her heart continuing to beat. She was trapped. Trapped by a war she might not have asked to be part of. Trapped until someone volunteered to…
…Maybe Blake could convince herself to accept the powers, just so that Amber could be freed?
No, Blake told herself. If Amber’s actual self could survive the transfer, then Amber wouldn’t deserve to be trapped in a body with Blake Belladonna.
The elevator was ready and waiting to take Blake back up to the surface, back to a land of far clearer futures. Either way… Blake looked back at Amber. One more look, she told herself. She would leave this cavernous chamber immediately after, and then…
It was one more look, but it was a long look, and the longer Blake looked, the worse she felt about this girl who, if she ever woke up again, would wake up in a body which was not her own, see a face in the mirror which wasn’t hers, wouldn’t…
Fuck, how old was Amber? She looked about the right age to be a Beacon student, maybe even someone in their year if she just looked old for her age—
Blake froze.
The others must’ve noticed her sudden change in demeanor, because now three pairs of eyes were focused firmly on her.
“…Headmaster?” Blake said after a moment, dredging through her memory for scattered conversations from weeks, months ago. Details barely remembered which were suddenly of the utmost importance. “When was Amber attacked?”
Thank goodness, Ozpin recognized the urgency in her voice, because he answered without question.
“Not long before the start of the school year.”
Blake’s heart began to pound through her body like there was a Leviathan Grimm wading through her insides. “And she’s been in a coma ever since?”
“Yes…” Ozpin pushed up his glasses while Goodwitch and Ironwood looked back and forth between Blake and Amber like they weren’t sure which was more important right now. “Miss Belladonna, what exactly is wrong?”
Everything was adding up. Blake didn’t want it to add up. She wanted anything but this to be the answer to the mystery—
“Did Amber stay at Beacon at all before the attack?”
“Yes,” Ozpin said, and then he was saying more about how Amber had been living in secret at Beacon while she adjusted to her new reality, but most of it slid right over all four of Blake’s ears with barely a word making reaching her consciousness. Until suddenly Ozpin stopped short, the same comprehension hitting him which had already hit Blake.
An all-consuming dread filled her as her world began to collapse in an entirely new way. The collapse was centered not on herself, but on someone very close to her. One of her teammates, in fact.
In some ways, there was no proof to go on—none at all, nothing that would’ve logically brought forth the possibility. But in most other ways, there was no one else this could be.
Blake marched every coincidence through her mind like a line of convicts being sent to the gallows, and only made herself more and more sure of the realization.
Amber was a girl about their age. Amber was a girl cloaked in mystery with so many secrets of her own. Amber was a girl who had been living at Beacon when other students weren’t there. Amber was a girl who had plenty of reason to stay hidden. Amber was a girl who had not been seen anywhere outside of this chamber since before the start of the school year.
Blake turned to fully face Amber once more. Her vision tunneled down to just the broken, dying girl in the pod, and her thoughts fell away until all she could think about was her teammate with flaming orange hair like fall leaves set ablaze. A sharp gasp came from somewhere. It might’ve been from herself.
She was sure of who Amber was. She had never been more sure about anything in her life.
Amber was Penny’s missing first friend.
Notes:
Shoutout to TrashHatchery for being the first person to guess that Penny's mystery friend would turn out to be Amber, all the way back in the comments of Chapter 11.
Next week, Chapter 58: Red Like Roses
Chapter 58: Red Like Roses
Notes:
Content warning for this chapter (click text to reveal):
Thoughts and mentions of self-harm
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Yang Xiao Long had never been more terrified in her life.
Not even when she’d been out alone in the woods far too young looking for ghosts, and instead got found by a Beowolf. Not even when that Beowolf sank its teeth into her arm and turned Yang’s world into red-hot pain that wouldn’t fully dissolve until months later. Not even when she’d become so convinced that her own touch brought death that she tried to run away from everyone she loved so she wouldn’t kill them.
No, this was an entirely new kind of fear that left her fighting a war inside herself. Maybe to someone watching, Yang would’ve looked like she was sitting still as she sat next to Ruby, but internally… Two conflicting urges were fighting to scorched-earth in her chest. On one side, the urge to sit as close to Ruby to protect her because what if she let go of Ruby and never saw her again? And on the other side, the urge to sit as far away from Ruby as possible because what if she hurt Ruby and it would be all her fault and she’d never see her again?
Her limbs were all but locked in place right now.
And if Yang was a battlefield, Team RSPBY’s room felt like another kind of one, where the lines were drawn and the sides already staked out, with Ruby on one side and Taiyang and Qrow as the other side, sitting opposite her and Yang on the other bunk. Ruby was doing nothing to dispel that image with how she sat on the edge of Penny’s bed and never took her eyes off the two men, Lunar Enforcer still perched on her knees and held tightly in both hands.
But Yang was forcing herself to swallow down her fear of saying the worst thing possible, because… Well, by now she was sure she couldn’t do any worse than her uncle.
“Okay, um… Maybe we should all take a deep breath, and regroup?” she said, holding out her arms as if she might actually have to hold everyone back from fighting each other. “Ruby, I’m sorry, this must feel really weird for you.” She also discreetly gave Qrow a hard look which said settle the fuck down. He definitely still had alcohol in his system, even if a Huntress’s Aura could break it down far faster than ordinary biology allowed.
To her relief, Qrow held up his hands and nodded.
And Yang couldn’t thank enough deities for the fact that her dad and uncle had cleaned themselves up beforehand. As suspicious as Ruby was of everything right now… Her reaction, if Taiyang and Qrow had walked into this conversation still looking like they’d stumbled out of a week’s worth of being lost in the woods, would’ve been unimaginably disastrous.
Earlier, Weiss had opened a window to let in some of the morning breeze; now it stirred up loose strands of Yang’s hair and made them tickle against her neck.
“You… You said I wasn’t made?” Ruby whispered. “You’re sure? You’re sure?”
All her strangely desperate belligerence from just seconds ago was evaporating, but… she was still a traumatized kid standing in the remains of her unfair burden, and Yang was still just as scared as messing this up.
But as long as Ruby kept looking to Yang for answers, showing signs that she somehow still trusted Yang… that was desperately needed hope, and just enough to keep Yang from entirely falling to pieces.
“Yes,” she said, reminding herself to take a much-needed breath. “We found where you’re really from. And it wasn’t some vile lowlife’s laboratory. It was an actual family you were stolen from when you were a baby.”
“Oh…” Ruby dropped her gaze, and at first Yang thought she was looking at Lunar Enforcer, but then she lifted one of her palms, slowly flexing and unflexing the hand. Almost imperceptibly, she started to shiver. “So… I wasn’t born to save the world?”
Her voice was so small that Yang just wanted to bury her in a hug right then and there, but the fresh fear in her face told Yang that was a very bad idea. So she reached for the only answer she could’ve ever given.
“No one’s born to save the world, Ruby. No one’s born to do anything. You were just born. Just like anyone else on this planet.”
It wasn’t just Ruby’s voice—everything about her seemed to be getting smaller as she pulled in on herself just the way Penny did, covering more and more of herself from the world.
“But then why can I—”
She broke off, her eyes flicking between Tai and Qrow.
Oh. Yang realized the obvious after a moment of incomprehension. She doesn’t know what they know. She doesn’t know anything about what they know.
“Why can I do the, um, things I do?” Ruby said to Yang, gesturing to herself. “If that doesn’t mean I’m meant to save everyone?”
“We never told your mom she had to save the world because of her eyes,” Qrow said suddenly.
Ruby gasped, and no one in the room could pretend they didn’t see her flinching away from Qrow as soon as he said that. It made Yang’s heart clench like it’d been stuck in an overpowered juicer, and Qrow looked like he wanted to be stabbed through the heart.
“You know about the silver eyes?” Ruby said, pushing herself further back on the bed until she was almost flat against the wall.
“Course we do,” Qrow said. “In our line of work, it’s kind of hard not to know about people who can kill Grimm with a single look or turn them to stone.”
Ruby gasped again, much louder, as Taiyang nodded in agreement.
“You’re good Huntresses?” she said finally.
One half of Yang was afraid of how much that sounded like a question. The other half of Yang was collapsing from relief as she realized Ruby was no longer dismissing her own father and uncle without a second thought. Taiyang and Qrow looked so, so much like they wanted to answer the question themselves, but they held their tongues and watched Yang, because Yang was the one who Ruby trusted right now, not them.
“Two of the best in the world,” she said immediately, as decisively as she could, clenching her fists like they could seal a promise. “That’s how they get away with such bullshit, because they do things no one else can.”
Abruptly, Ruby moved herself closer to Yang, and then even closer, until she was shoving herself against Yang forcefully enough to leave a mark, like she was trying to hide herself in Yang’s side. “You promise?”
“Promise. I’ve known them all my life, and I trust them with my life. More than anything.” Yang reversed direction, turning her voice from something strong to something as quiet and gentle as a leaf floating to the ground in the middle of an autumn-blazed forest. It was oddly exhausting to switch herself between two extremes of assurance, but Yang would’ve changed herself a thousand times for Ruby—whatever Ruby needed her to be, she would be.
“Huh…” Squinting at the others, Ruby fell into a long, deep silence that no one else dared break. Then ever so slightly, she shifted herself so that even as she pressed against Yang, her posture was opened up to the two men like she was taking off a suit of armor, making herself vulnerable to whatever might happen next. “Nice to meet you?”
“...Nice to meet you too,” Qrow said in a voice which sounded like he hadn’t had a drink of water in two days. Taiyang just nodded along in acknowledgement, and it seemed to be all he was capable of doing as he stared at Ruby with bloodshot eyes that had cried too many times to count in the last twenty-four hours.
“You said I don’t need to save the world,” Ruby went on. “Because my mom didn’t need to either. You… you really think I have a mom?”
“We know,” Taiyang said, startling everyone with the sudden fierceness of his voice. “My life’s full of questions that’ll never be answered, but this is one that I know as much as much a tree knows how to stand.”
Consciously or unconsciously, Ruby’s hand traced the pattern of the green power symbols stitched into Penny’s blanket even as she stared at Taiyang. “How?”
“And that’s where I can actually help for the first time today,” Qrow said. With slow, telegraphed movements, he reached into his shirt pocket, pulled something out, crossed the gap between the bunks, and handed it to Yang. Ruby’s eyes never left him until he’d sat back down.
“So Tai might’ve done a dumb thing long ago and destroyed every picture he had of some certain family members, but… I saved one photo, kept it next to my heart, and never told him about it. Until now,” Qrow said.
He nodded to Yang, who finally let herself look at what he’d placed in her hands. And when she did, her heart leapt into her throat.
In her hands was a ratty, folded piece of glossy paper, with creases that made it clear just how many times it’d been folded and refolded over the years, until it laid nearly flat even when folded over.
It was a photograph.
Yang looked up again, and found her dad and uncle watching her with probably equal anxiety, looking to her for guidance when it probably should’ve been the other way around. Gods, they were a fucked-up family, weren’t they?
With shaking fingers, she unfolded the photograph, and the last picture of Team STRQ on the planet greeted her.
It was faded and the creases had left lines of flaking white down the middle, and there was a coffee stain in one corner and a couple other stains which were either blood or ketchup along one side, but there was no doubting who the four teenagers in the picture were.
There was Uncle Qrow resting Harbinger on one shoulder and trying to make a tough face for the camera like the absolute nerd he was.
There was Dad leaning against a tree with his arms crossed, giving the camera a cool, confident smile that Yang wasn’t sure she’d ever seen him make in real life.
There was Raven, her maternal biological donor, also known in some circles as her mother. She was turned partly away from the camera, a hand on the hilt of her fuckoff-huge sword like she was expecting an actual flashbang attack from the lens.
And then there was Mom.
Summer Rose leaned against the other side of the tree, resting a hand on the trunk, wearing a white cloak which gave her such a ghostly appearance that Yang could not help but wonder if she’d known all her life that she’d die before the rest of them. And the way she leaned against the tree, her torso tilted forward… it was like she was on the verge of leaving.
Yang’s focus narrowed to the single most important section of the photo: Summer’s face. Her cloak’s hood was up, obscuring one eye and most of her forehead, but the rest of her face was clearly visible, caught in perfect focus by the camera. There was more than enough shown for Yang to find everything she remembered about Mom’s face. The shape of her chin and her cheekbones and her lips. The black-red hair which tumbled out of the hood, the gradient and shading unmistakable. The gleaming silver eyes. Or rather, silver eye, singular, since her hood covered the other.
There was enough of Summer’s face visible for even a perfect stranger to see the resemblance between the girl in the picture and the girl sitting on the bed next to Yang and peering over her shoulder curiously.
“That’s…” Ruby’s first attempt at saying something trailed off into a series of confused, scared noises. She reached over Yang, her pointer finger coming to rest on the white cloak. “That girl… She looks like me?”
The world around Yang tilted, wobbled, threatened to fall over entirely.
“Yeah,” Yang said softly, lifting her hand which was not holding the photo and resting it carefully on Ruby’s outstretched arm, the fingers of her prosthetic running slowly along it even though she knew full well Ruby couldn’t feel that. “Meet Team STRQ. Once upon a time, they were the greatest Huntress team on Remnant. The pride of Beacon Academy.”
She was echoing words from stories Qrow had told her many times over the years, stories of slaying monsters and fighting evil and getting to know a strange old man who believed in the strength of the team even at their most dysfunctional.
“The greatest team…” Ruby’s gaze drifted to the rest of the photo, and then her head snapped up, recognition filling her as she looked back and forth between the photo and the two men sitting across from her, watching her with the most sorrowful happiness.
“That’s you two,” she said.
“Yup.” Taiyang’s eyes landed on a point far beyond anything in this room. “Team STRQ. Me, Qrow, Qrow’s sister Raven, and of course, our leader in the white cloak. Summer Rose.”
“My mom in all but biology,” Yang said. “I may have gotten my DNA from Raven, but Summer’s the one I actually think of when I say the word mom.”
“...How’d that happen?” Ruby said, her eyebrows going up. “...Two moms? But Taiyang’s your dad?”
“We had a pretty funny set of relationships on the team,” Taiyang said, a little smile settling over his face as it always did when he remembered things in a good way. “The way it started, Summer was into Raven, and Raven was into me but didn’t want to admit it, and I was into Summer. And there was a whole lot of competing with each other even though none of us were ever sure who was against who and what was actually being fought for. And the tension kept building and building and at some point…” He nodded to himself, letting out a quiet, happy sigh. “It stopped being tension and started being this gravity pulling the three of us together. Of course, when we all collided in the middle, it wasn’t exactly pretty at first.”
Qrow snorted. “That’s putting it lightly.”
“There was some dueling for a pretty girl’s heart. Some explosions. A lot of arguing. But the dust eventually settled, and the three of us were all in one big chaotic three-way couple.”
“And I was left all alone in the cold,” Qrow said with a shrug. “Which I didn’t mind in the slightest. I wasn’t touching any part of that relationship with a ten-foot pole, and I was just happy my sister had lost some antisocial tendencies.”
Okay, Yang had MUCH bigger priorities right now, but also, she was going to grill Dad about the dueling thing later, because she’d never heard that part of the story. Probably on account of her not asking him about the family history a lot.
…Gods, they would have so much to tell Ruby, once everything was out in the open. About their lives, and about Ruby’s lives, and about what Patch was like, and, and—
Hang on fire, Yang told herself, trying to rein in her burgeoning excitement. Don’t get ahead of yourself. You’ve still gotta tell Ruby before anything else can happen. There’s still a million ways you can fuck this up.
“Huh. Wild,” Ruby said. “But, um, I don’t think that explains why Summer—wait, that’s what you said her name was, right?”
Yang nodded immediately, doing her best to keep a reflexive jab of pain from showing on her face. Hopefully, Ruby would never have to ask that question again.
“Okay. Yeah. So… why does Summer look like me?” Ruby hadn’t once stopped staring at the picture.
With Ruby’s attention still entirely on the picture, Taiyang and Qrow and Yang could exchange a silent conversation—Yang, nodding forcefully at them, because this was their daughter and niece, the baby that they’d held in their arms, the daughter of their lost teammate, and they deserved to be the ones to tell Ruby. But then there was Taiyang and Qrow glancing at one another, and then together shaking their heads and nodding back even more forcefully at Yang.
You’re her sister. You’re the one who’s been her friend for months already. You’re the one who let her braid your hair when no one else in the world is allowed to touch it. You’re the one who knows her far, far better than either of us do.
None of those things were actually said aloud, but Yang could easily imagine that flashing through their minds as they decisively indicated that Yang should be the one to tell Ruby.
Okay. She could do this, even if she felt like she was being asked to put the entire world on her shoulders. She had to be strong for Ruby. Who was still her friend. Still the girl she’d known all semester long. Still the girl who trusted Yang.
But did Yang deserve to be trusted like that, after she’d disappointed so many people?
Yang wondered if this was anything like what Penny had felt when she’d revealed her synthetic nature to her team. Penny had been so terrified of what would happen, yet so desperate to share the truth with the people she cared about more than anything.
If it was a similar feeling, then she needed to remind herself Penny’s confession had turned out just fine. Maybe the same could be true for Yang. She took a deep breath and plunged into the unknown.
“So. In their three-way couple, Dad and Raven had a baby, and that baby was me.” She made sure to point to each member of Team STRQ as they were mentioned. Ruby followed the trail of her finger with the utmost attention. “But also, Dad and Summer had a baby two years later. A baby who they thought was a boy.”
Ruby was still pressed against Yang, and that meant Yang could feel Ruby’s heart thumping harder and harder against her ribs like a trapped animal trying to escape its cage.
Yang swallowed hard, fighting to get the next words out because they needed to be said, but they scared her so, so much that she would’ve rather been blasted back to being a kid in the woods and her arm getting turned into a chew toy by a Beowolf—
“A baby with tufts of black-red hair and silver eyes just like her mother,” Yang went on, the words tumbling out almost too fast to be understood. “That baby disappeared in the night fifteen years ago in what everyone thought was a tragic Grimm attack.”
Ruby’s chest rose and fell faster and faster, her breaths turning into frantic gasps as she looked up at Yang, her silver eyes inhumanly wide.
“You weren’t born alone for some scientists’s experiments, Ruby,” Yang said, pouring every last drop of her soul into these words. “You were born in a big warm log cabin house built by four Huntresses just out of Beacon when they still couldn’t imagine ever living apart, with room for lots of people and a fireplace that’s perfect for sitting around on cold nights and a back porch where you can watch fireflies and shooting stars and a kitchen with cabinets that’re kinda too high because a woman who’s six feet nine inches built them and a big backyard where you can throw a stick for your awesome dog all day long and a forest behind that backyard full of big old trees to climb and mossy logs to sit on and streams to wade through, and there’s a trail that goes through that forest and takes you to a cliff where there’s a grave, a grave for a kid who isn’t dead, because that kid’s sitting right next to me, and she’s breathing and her heart’s beating and she’s looking at me with big wide silver eyes full of life just like her mom’s—”
And there Yang ran fully out of breath, forced to stop by the inadequacy of her own body. For an agonizingly long time (in reality, just seconds), all she could do was sit there, gasping for air, while Ruby squeezed her tighter than an Ursa could ever hope to.
“That’s your mom, Ruby,” she pushed out as soon as she had any semblance of breath back in her lungs, pointing to the image of Summer Rose. But then her lungs failed her again, and she had to wait to get more air as her brain screamed at her to say the rest even though she was physically incapable—
“That’s my mom…?” Ruby whispered.
She stared at the picture, nearly climbing entirely into Yang’s lap to get a better view of it. Yang nodded emphatically in reply, not minding the complete disregard for personal space in the slightest.
Ruby’s finger moved across the photo from Summer to Taiyang, and then she looked up at the older version of Taiyang sitting across the room with tears rolling down his cheeks. “And… you’re my dad?”
Taiyang, so much more worn down than the version of himself in the photo, but also not frozen in time as the photo was, nodded once. The tears kept coming, and when he spoke, he could barely get his words out.
“I… Ruby, I held you in my arms. I sang you to sleep. I fed you. I cleaned up after you. I sat you on my lap and listened to you babble in your excited baby-talk, and I talked right back like we were having the most important conversations. And they were the most important ever—I could hear them in my sleep for years afterward—after you were gone.” He made a subtle grasping motion with his hands, one that might’ve been unconscious—like his parental instincts were trying to reach for the baby which was all he could remember and cradle her again. “One day, you were just gone, and we hadn’t even given you a name yet.”
A sob drowned out his next words, but he somehow rallied. “But you picked one for yourself. I’m so happy to know your name. I’m so proud to finally meet my daughter, Ruby.”
Ruby continued clinging to Yang, her long braid tangled between both their arms by now, but she managed to free one arm to give Taiyang an uncharacteristically shy wave.
“Um. Hi… Dad. Nice to meet you.” The word dad rolled so strangely off Ruby’s tongue—Yang instinctively wondered, was it the first time in her life she’d said it?
“I. Um. I think I understand why you’ve been so weird now,” Ruby added. She looked back down to the photo. “I look a lot like Summer—I mean, Mom…” And just like how dad had skidded off her tongue, mom was said clumsily, like Ruby had never had reason to say it before.
All Taiyang could do was nod, the tears fully streaming down his face. He made no effort to wipe them away, as if he didn’t want to ruin his view of Ruby for even just the moment it would take to push a hand across his face.
Ruby returned to the photograph, and her finger which had rested on Taiyang now began to move again, passing over Raven and coming to a stop on Qrow.
She looked up again, and just for a moment, she seemed like she was going to shrink away and hide behind Yang, but she took an uneven breath, steadied herself, and spoke. “And you’re my uncle…”
Qrow nodded. “Maybe not by blood, but by bonds I’ll never spurn.” He’d held back his tears, but his voice held a grim determination that could’ve cleaved stone. He dragged a hand down his face, making a noise almost exactly like a balloon deflating. “I know we started off on the wrong foot—the really wrong foot—but I was… in a bad way this morning. It only got worse when I saw you.”
Ruby laughed, very weakly and very obviously forced. But she was trying, in a way she hadn’t minutes ago. “I get why I would freak you out, with Summer and everything, but… still don’t know why you attacked Winter, unless you have another secret family member who she looks like?”
Taiyang tried his hardest to hold back a snort of laughter, but Yang and Ruby still heard it. Thankfully, though, his noise only made a smile flicker across Ruby’s face.
“I…” Qrow twitched, and Yang knew he’d just stopped himself from spitting out something brash and impulsive, probably something like I always try to do my civic duty as a Huntsman and remove the sticks that get stuck up people’s asses.
“Honestly, the best answer I can give is that I was looking for a fight.” His hand went to his hip. Yang recognized the movement. She’d seen it a thousand times. Her uncle going for his flask. But Qrow’s hand stopped, hovering just above the flask. After an excruciating pause, he withdrew his hand without the flask.
Yang breathed a quiet, unnoticeable sigh of relief.
“That’s not who I want to be,” he said. “I promise I’ll try to be a good uncle. One who you can actually believe is worthy of being a Huntsman without needing to see my license with a way-too-old picture of me. I promise, Ru—Uh. Sorry.” He winced. “Sorry… Moonrise.”
“No. It’s, it’s fine?” Despite the obvious waver of reluctance in her voice, Ruby doubled down. “You can call me Ruby now. I—I guess I should get used to it? This is my life now, so I should get okay with being… being your…” Ruby trailed off, scrunching up her face. “Um, is there a word for daughter but when someone’s your uncle?”
Qrow gave her the softest smile that Yang had ever seen him give anyone, including Yang herself. “Niece.”
“That.” Ruby nodded. “I’ll try being that…”
Then she turned to Yang, and although Yang had caught her breath by now, she didn’t dare speak.
Ruby altered her position, pulling her legs up and doing a little twist-hop so suddenly she was sitting up on her knees, staring at Yang with a mouth that had fallen open just a little in awe. She tilted her head, her wide silver eyes practically haunting in their appearance.
“…And you’re my sister.”
It was the easiest word Ruby had said out of any familial term in this conversation, sister flowing out of her lips like she’d actually said it before.
Yang decided to mirror Ruby’s pose for reasons she couldn’t quite articulate; it was almost on instinct that she heaved herself up and folded her legs under her so she was kneeling just like Ruby.
“Yeah,” Yang said, the word feeling woefully inadequate. “I… I’m really glad I can finally meet you for real, Ruby. The way we should’ve met. I’m sorry I didn’t recognize you sooner—” As soon as the first apology was out, a thousand more wanted to spill out of her lips, but Ruby arrested that train of thought with a single movement.
She reached a hand up to her long dark braid and pulled it over her shoulder, and when her eyes veered to Yang’s right, Yang realized she was looking at her own blonde braid.
Yang mirrored Ruby’s motion, pulling her braid over one shoulder too. The braid that Ruby had woven. The braid that Yang’s sister had woven.
Her sister. Her little sister. Her baby sister. She wasn’t sure if she was about to explode or implode.
“You know when I figured it out? When I finally saw your real eye color.” Yang met those eyes again—when had Ruby stopped wearing contacts, actually? She couldn’t remember exactly when, sometime between the burst of silver light at Mountain Glenn and now. “The only other person I ever saw with eyes like that was Mom. And that brought back everything else.”
Ruby nodded, and held out a questioning hand. Yang didn’t need to do any thinking at all to know what Ruby was asking for, and passed the photograph to her.
Ruby immediately zeroed in on Summer again. “So… my mom’s a silver-eyed warrior, too.”
Yang remembered the lights she’d seen in the forest as a little kid, and that felt like enough to answer the question—but just to be safe, she deferred to her dad and her uncle with a cautious nod. They’d actually fought alongside Summer, after all.
“Yeah.” Qrow’s voice was thick. “Could take down hordes like nothing but breathing. You’d watch her, and you’d wonder how she was real.”
“But she was just Summer,” Taiyang said, adding a layer of insistence to his voice. “Our teammate. Our friend. Raven’s beloved. My beloved. Even without the silver, she was the greatest Huntress in history.”
Ruby didn’t say anything.
“Could Summer stop a tunnel full of Grimm that would’ve swallowed our team up otherwise?” Yang said. She was finally understanding why those woods around their house had been so safe for years after Summer left. Although… it was the fact that they’d been safe for so long which gave her that false sense of security which led to child Yang going into the woods one too many times and—Nope. She wasn’t going to think any bad thoughts right now. No bad thoughts allowed in her head around Ruby.
A silence which felt a little different than all the other ones, one where Taiyang and Qrow’s concern was briefly redirected to Yang. It was, at the very least, a more normal silence carrying a more understandable disbelief.
“…We’re going to need to ask about Mountain Glenn later,” Taiyang said.
Ruby continued to stare at the picture, tracing Summer’s form with a delicately extended pointer finger which never stopped circling. There was no more feeling of something about to detonate, no sign of disaster amongst the four of them—amongst the family. Was Yang allowed to call it a family yet? Or was there still some hidden trial she had to pass? Some way she had to prove herself worthy of being a sister?
Yang raised her prosthetic arm, turning it slowly back and forth and inspecting every rivet, every seam, every piece of it that she could see. Then she extended it to Ruby palm up, five fingers splayed out as wide as they could go.
“Did I ever tell you how I got this arm?” she said.
She’d make a bet that if Penny was in the room, her sensors would’ve picked up Dad and Uncle Qrow’s heart rates spiking at that moment, because they knew the story. They knew one of the reasons why Yang had gone into the woods so many times, so recklessly.
“Don’t think so?” Ruby said. “But it’s so cool… it’s technology worthy of being a Huntress’s weapon by itself!” She reached out, stopping herself, and then gave Yang a tentative look. “Can I? Touch it, I mean? I mean, I’ve touched it a lot already, high-fives and fistbumps and stuff, but I’ve never actually taken a real close look at it—”
“Yeah. Go ahead.” Yang had to fight back another wave of tears as she watched Ruby tracing a finger over the metal knuckles, making quiet noises of wonder.
“The craftsmanship on this…” Ruby breathed. “Does Penny work on this with you? It’s just as good as what she does!”
It took Yang one-tenth of a second to realize Ruby probably meant the construction of Penny’s own body, and another tenth of a second to realize she was saying that in front of two people who didn’t know about Penny. She shot a look at Taiyang and Qrow, who’d definitely noticed that statement and had some questioning looks pointed at her.
She shook her head. Not now.
Dad would accept Penny instantly if he figured it out, but Uncle Qrow… Well. Yang had clear memories of him going on multiple rants about the ‘sentient garbage’ that the Atlesian Military was manufacturing. He needed to be eased into it. Now was not the time.
Fortunately, they both seemed to get the message. Yang turned her attention back to Ruby just in time to catch the tail end of something she was saying.
“—by the same person?”
Yang tried to summon the rest of that sentence from some sort of subconscious memory, but drew a blank. “Sorry, what?”
Ruby opened her mouth, only to pull it back, shaking her head. “Never mind. What were you saying about your arm?”
“Oh. Right.” Yang turned her arm over so Ruby could look over the other side and took a deep breath. “I lost my arm because I ran into a pack of Beowolves in the woods when I was a little kid. Alone. Honestly, it’s a miracle Uncle Qrow even found me fast enough to stop me from being all dead meat, instead of just my arm.”
“You call it a miracle, I call it bad luck that I didn’t find you sooner and save all of you,” Qrow muttered.
Yang gave him the look she only reserved for ‘Qrow is saying some absolute bullshit about his Semblance and he needs some sense knocked into him’ scenarios.
“Anyways. There was a reason why I was in the woods. I wasn’t just wandering out there for the fun of it. Although it was a reason that really only could’ve made sense to Little Kid Me’s brain.”
Ruby was done oohing and aahing over the arm, but Yang didn’t pull it back, letting Ruby continue to cradle it in her hands.
“I was looking for—well, I was looking for a lot of people who I’d lost, but the person I thought I had the best chance of finding was my little baby sister who my parents always told me was eaten by a Grimm before she could even get a name. I thought if I just looked long enough, I’d find the Grimm that did it and I could kill it and cut open its stomach and I’d find that baby hidden in there asleep, all safe and sound.”
Ruby was clutching Yang’s arm with both hands, her fingers squeezing tightly around metal which was painted in such a rich, deep yellow that it was nearly gold. She looked as if she couldn’t have pulled her gaze away from the arm if her life had depended on it.
“I never went looking again after I lost my arm,” Yang said.
“Yang…” Ruby was blinking rapidly, but it wasn’t enough to keep back the tears which were starting to overflow. “I—I—” She leapt forward into a hug.
Before it’d even consciously registered, Yang was returning the hug on pure instinct, wrapping her arms around Ruby and holding her as tightly as possible. She didn’t mind in the slightest that Ruby was burying her face in her shoulder and probably getting a whole bunch of tears and snot all over Yang’s clothes as she sobbed without restraint.
“I’m sorry,” Ruby said in a wavering voice which darted out between gasps.
“What?” Yang almost pulled away just to check that her ears were still attached to her head, because how could Ruby be the one apologizing right now—
“It’s my fault you lost your arm!”
“No, what—” Yang shook her head wildly. “Ruby, that was never, ever your fault!”
“But if I didn’t go missing, then you’d still be fine!”
“I am fine. I have another arm now.” Yang curled and uncurled her metal fingers, tapping them slowly across Ruby’s upper back, and then she raised the artificial palm to cradle the back of Ruby’s head like it was the most treasured, most delicate object in the world. “It’s right here. And it’s a different kind of arm from what I originally had, but it’s just as good! It’s better than having no arm! It’s here with me, when my old arm isn’t.”
Yang’s arm had gone through so many iterations and changes and upgrades over the years. Of course, resizing it to fit as she grew, but also changing the shape, changing the colors (At age twelve, she’d painted it purple for a month, just because she wanted to), adding in new mechanisms, more precise electronics, integrating a gun for emergencies, different styles of armor plating. It was completely unrecognizable compared to the day she’d first received it, hating every inch of that dull gray shape which was cold to the touch and clanked when she hit it against things. Now, it was something that Yang loved. Something that she couldn’t live without. It was part of her life. Part of her.
Ruby was part of her life now, and maybe a part of Yang in a psychological sense.
“And—and—” she went on, momentarily tripping over her own words, which necessitated a hasty breath to reset her tongue. “And my baby sister, she’s different from what I thought she’d be, but different doesn’t mean worse. You’re better, actually, than what I could’ve thought. Way better. Because you’re here, and I found you.”
“Yang…” Ruby heaved for breath and then wailed, her grip on Yang only tightening. “You’re—I have a sister, and I didn’t—I’m sorry! How—how does this feel so good?”
“Because it’s family.”
Ruby let out a gasp which broke into a sob halfway through. “I… I didn’t know it could feel this good… I’m sorry, I’m sorry I didn’t know sooner, I’m sorry I was afraid, I’m sorry I didn’t find you sooner, I’m sorry for—I didn’t—I’m sorry I didn’t know, I should’ve known, I…”
Ruby trailed off into an unintelligible mumble, but she was still clinging to Yang, and that was the only metric Yang could pay attention to for how she was doing.
Yang’s eyes flicked to her dad and her uncle, just checking on them, and she found them leaning against one another, watching the embrace with the reverence of worshippers witnessing the return of a god that had forsaken them.
Any smile Yang could’ve given them felt woefully inadequate for getting across the everything she was feeling in the middle of the best hug of her entire life, so…
She just closed her eyes and felt, and felt, and tried to make like Penny and download an entire image directly into her mind. Until Ruby started to shake again, little whimpers slipping out.
“Hey, hey,” Yang said gently, still cradling the back of Ruby’s head with the palm of her prosthetic hand. “You’re good. You’re good. You’re okay. You’ve got us. We’re not going anywhere now. We’re here for you. No matter what.” How was she ever going to make up for the fifteen years of comfort she owed Ruby? How was she going to make up for fifteen years of smiles and stupid birthday gifts and silly jokes and sibling rivalries and ruffled hair, and… and…
Fifteen years.
Ruby felt so small in Yang’s arms.
It hadn’t really hit Yang until now, but now the fact that Ruby was fifteen was ramming into her consciousness like a shot from her own gauntlets. Ruby was two years younger than Yang. She was two years too young to be a Huntress. She was two years behind everyone else in their year and she was the best fighter in the entire school at this moment. Everything she’d said about her training already, subtract two years from an already horrifyingly young age to be going on solo field missions, and…
Yang’s grip tightened. Maybe she wouldn’t let go of her baby sister ever again. She wouldn’t let anyone use Ruby every again. Anyone who wanted to see her as anything besides a person would have to kill Yang before they’d be allowed to do that. Never again, NEVER AGAIN, they’d never touch her—
She didn’t even realize she’d activated her Semblance until Ruby shifted, pulling back a little, and let out a gasp.
“Bright…” she whispered.
“What?” Yang opened her eyes, and found Ruby’s face lit softly by the blaze of Yang’s hair as flames licked painlessly around the corners of her vision. “Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—”
“Something bright. And warm,” Ruby said again, her voice only dropping to an even quieter volume. “When the General first found me in that laboratory, he asked me if I remembered anything outside the laboratory. The only thing I could tell him was, something bright and warm.” She closed her eyes, falling into a remembrance. “I don’t remember the warm part anymore, but I remember the brightness. It was bright in a way I’ve never seen anywhere else. The General thought I was talking about the sun, but…”
Ruby opened her eyes, staring at Yang’s braid, which trailed down next to her like a whip of fire, the twisting pattern of the braids making Yang’s Semblance dance in ways Yang had never seen before.
“Did you ever hold me as a baby?” Ruby asked.
Yang wasn’t going to cry. She wasn’t. She’d been holding back her tears for Ruby this entire time, and… she had to answer that question before she lost the capability for speech entirely.
“I did. I held you a few times, and… and…”
“The first time you ever held Ruby, you were mad,” Dad said suddenly. He was sitting up straighter, his eyes going wide. “You’d thought Ruby would be able to play with you as soon as she was born, and when you found out otherwise, you got mad. Mad enough to trigger—”
“My Semblance.” Yang felt as if she was falling further and further into a dream where things that shouldn’t have added up just kept adding up, but she wasn’t going to think about how surreal it all felt for fear that her attention would somehow break all the math.
“Which you’d already unlocked because your first haircut was a couple months before,” Qrow added.
It was a collective realization. Ruby supplied the words, Dad and Uncle Qrow supplied the things that neither girl could remember, and Yang was the one whose Semblance needed to trigger to set the whole chain reaction off, and the final result was—
“I remember you,” Ruby breathed, passing a hand through the still-flickering fire of Yang’s Semblance. “I remember your brightness. Nobody else is bright like you are. Penny’s bright, too, in her own awesome way that no one else does, but your brightness is its own special kind, too.”
No amount of strength in the world could hold back Yang’s tears anymore. She was crying. Shaking all over like a volcano about to erupt. She had her baby sister back. She hadn’t thought it would’ve been possible for her to so powerfully miss someone she’d barely met, barely remembered, but… the storm of catharsis stirring up her insides told otherwise.
“How?” Yang said finally, once she’d cleared enough backed-up sobs out of her lungs to express herself again. “How is this real? It… it doesn’t feel like I should be allowed this kind of—of—I don’t even know, it just feels like I’m breaking some rule…”
Her Semblance finally faded away again, the flames disappearing without a trace as they always did. The fire, no matter how real-looking, never burned, never caused any damage—if it touched anyone, they only felt a comfortable warmth.
“You’re my sister,” Ruby said again, her tone only more amazed if anything. “We don’t look anything like each other. Nobody would guess we’re related. I never would’ve guessed.”
“Except maybe the hair? Yours is just as fluffy and… everywhere as mine.” Yang had always thought Raven was where her hair gene had come from, but Dad could have fluffy hair on the rare occasions when he let it grow a little longer (or during the bad times when he’d stopped cutting his hair), so… Xiao Long hair fluffiness gene? She liked the sound of that. “Our braids match,” she said, flicking hers towards Ruby and making her giggle.
“Yeah! And when it’s not in a braid—” Ruby punctuated her words by bursting into her Semblance, and reforming with her braid entirely gone, her hair now cascading down her shoulders and back so much like how Yang’s flowed, and how had she never noticed the hair resemblance before—
Wait.
All thoughts of hair were dropkicked out of Yang’s head as she noticed something else. Something new.
“Um, Yang?” Ruby said, brushing a strand of hair away from her eyes. “Why are you looking at me all weird…?”
Yang wasn’t looking at Ruby, actually. She was looking at something floating in the air around Ruby.
When Ruby had burst into her Semblance and reformed, she’d left behind a cloud of silver dust hanging all around her like she always did. But now there was something else. Something new.
Rose petals.
A scattering of bright red rose petals, mingling with the silver dust, tumbling through the air and catching invisible currents of air with a weightlessness that not even the lightest of flower petals should have. They were the same deep shade of red as Lunar Enforcer.
“Your Semblance,” was all Yang could manage.
“Huh—” Ruby stopped dead as one of the rose petals drifted across her vision, dissolving into nothing exactly as the silver dust did. She tracked it with slowly widening eyes until it was entirely gone.
“Oh,” she said quietly. She reached out, caught the last petal still floating through the air, and held it in her cupped hands like it was a delicate little creature being held out to the world for scrutiny.
“Roses…” she said. She looked up, first at Yang and then at Taiyang and Qrow. “That’s me, right? Ruby Rose? Like my mom?”
Taiyang had a shaking hand covering his mouth now, but it wasn’t quite enough to hide his trembling lips. He must’ve realized that, because a second later he lowered his hand and spoke in a quaver which nearly overpowered his words. “If that’s the name you want to take, then we couldn’t be prouder.”
The rose petal had dissolved by now, but Ruby kept her hands cupped, staring into them as if they held answers to all her questions.
“Ruby. Rose. Ruby… Rose. Ruby-Rose. Ruby Rose.” Ruby tilted her head back and forth as she worked through various ways of saying the two names, shifting the emphasis around until she’d said it so many times her lips started to lose the shape of the name from sheer repetition. Then she stopped, her gaze landing somewhere between Yang and Taiyang. “That’s who I should’ve been…?”
The question was asked in a markedly different tone, one that was far more unsteady than the delicate joy which had just been so prevalent in Ruby’s words.
“It’s who you are,” Taiyang said. “Ruby, you don’t have to do anything to be my daughter.”
“Or my niece,” Qrow said.
“Or my sister, or my teammate, or my friend.” Yang reached out to put a hand on Ruby’s knee. “You’re already all those things, Ruby. No proving yourself required.”
But Yang’s answer, as heartfelt as she meant it to be, only made Ruby tense.
“But… I’m really not.” She grabbed a handful of the blanket and bunched it up in one hand, squeezing and unsqueezing it repeatedly. “I’m supposed to be the lost kid who’s been missing all your life, and now you’ve found me, so you should have your baby and your niece and your sister back so you can heal all those old wounds. But I don’t know how I’m gonna fit back in the Ruby Rose-shaped hole you’ve got in your family where I was supposed to be!”
Yang forcibly suppressed a sob, desperate to stop it from reaching Ruby’s ears. “We don’t need you to be something for us. You don’t even need to be Ruby Rose if you don’t want to be. We just need you. We just need you to be… You. Whatever that is. Whatever you are.”
Once again, Ruby was looking at her hand, tracing every wrinkle in her palm with painstaking precision. Without raising her head, she said, “But… I don’t know how to be me.”
Yang ached all over for her sister. But before she could reply, the sound of Dad’s voice got there first, stunning her.
“We’ll help you figure it out,” Taiyang said, his voice the strongest it’d been in that entire conversation. “We all will.”
“I don’t want to be trouble,” Ruby said.
“It’s not trouble if we want to help you,” Qrow said.
“It is trouble,” Ruby said, her voice hardening slightly. When she looked up a moment later, her cheeks were wet with new tears. “I know the Ruby Rose who should exist wouldn’t pull a gun on her own uncle. The Ruby that should be here would probably think you were the coolest person alive for wielding a giant scythe. The Ruby who should be here wouldn’t be kinda scared of her dad—she’d probably be hugging him as tight as she could right now! And the Ruby Rose that I’m not would know her sister on sight! And the Ruby that deserves to exist would have normal unbroken sensory systems that would let her feel her family’s hugs!”
“Unbroken sensory systems…?” Qrow repeated in a dazed mutter before the meaning of those words visibly clicked. “What the fuck did Atlas do—”
Yang sent Qrow a warning look. He was getting to the level of too much again. And to her relief, Qrow got the message and forced himself to relax, his stormy expression disappearing.
“I… I… I’M not supposed to exist!” Ruby wailed, grasping at herself. “I’m an aberration!” Abruptly, she threw herself at Yang, nearly knocking her over as Ruby clung to her sister like the rest of the world was trying to yank her away. “I shouldn’t be here! Ruby Karyatis is just—just a glitch! Something that went wrong! There should be someone else sitting here who recognizes her family and isn’t messed up and knows how to talk to them…”
Her voice was muffled by how hard she was pressing her face into Yang’s shoulder, hard enough that it hurt, but Yang would’ve cut her own tongue off before complaining. All she could do was hold Ruby, trying to shield her from the world.
“You’re already talking to us,” she said. “I feel like it’s going pretty well.”
“No. Badly,” Ruby mumbled. “Just like everything else a person’s supposed to do, I’m bad at it. I don’t know how to be a person! Only a weapon! And now I know I was never supposed to be a weapon! I was supposed to be a person! That was what I was born for, in a different kingdom! I’m bad at being a weapon because that’s not what I’m supposed to be, and I’m bad at being a person because I never learned how to be one! So what am I?!”
Yang had already given the only answer she could think to give—Ruby was Ruby. But it wasn’t enough of an answer for Ruby, and Yang didn’t know what answer would be.
“What do you want to be?” she said finally, because she had to say something. Otherwise, she would—she would—she didn’t want to think about it.
The question made Ruby freeze. She pulled herself away from Yang and picked up Lunar Enforcer, tilting one of the blades towards her face. For one horrible second, Yang’s heart nearly jumped out of her throat as she thought, is she going to hurt herself— and then she realized Ruby was staring at her reflection in the gleaming metal.
“I want to fit somewhere…” she whispered shakily.
“We didn’t tell you the truth because we wanted to make you fit with us,” Taiyang said, looking and sounding like he was about to cave in. “We told you because we want to give you the love you should’ve been given all your life, no strings attached. And that love will take whatever shape you want it to. The love fits you, not the other way around—”
“But it’d be wasted on me! I’m just a burden!”
Ruby wasn’t a burden. Yang was far more of a burden than her sister would ever be. But she wouldn’t say that aloud, not when that’d draw Dad and Uncle Qrow’s concern away from Ruby, who needed all their concern right now.
“Ruby.” Qrow’s hand had crept towards his flask again, but now he pulled it away with a violent motion. “Even if you are a burden—which you aren’t—we’ll be your family anyway. Brothers know I’m my own kind of burden—”
“No! You’re all Huntresses! Some of the best in the world! And we’re in a war for the fate of the world! You can’t have your attention stuck on a broken little girl who’s trying to figure out how to live!” Ruby pulled Lunar Enforcer close to her chest, squeezing her eyes shut as her voice cratered out. “I, I can’t be a hindrance to anyone in the fight against Salem!”
“...Who’s Salem?” Yang said, that name feeling so strangely out of place amidst everything. She looked to Taiyang and Qrow for clarification, but they were perfect statues on the other bunk, saying nothing even as the color drained out of their faces with an unnerving synchrony.
Ruby didn’t notice Yang’s question. The fear in her voice just kept rising and rising out of control. “I’m already broken, and I’ll just make everything worse if I’m dragging down everyone else around me! I’m already worthless, I can’t be worse than that!”
Yang dearly wished there was a way for her to take all of Ruby’s bad thoughts away and direct them at herself instead, because how did Ruby not understand? Yang was the one in danger of dragging down everyone she cared about, while Ruby was a shining beacon who deserved a much better sister— “Ruby, would you tell Penny that you’re dragging her down?”
Ruby gasped and shuddered, but then it rapidly became clear that Yang’s words had caused the wrong reaction. She pushed herself further away from Yang, leaving a divot in the blankets as she retreated into a corner of the bunk.
“It doesn’t matter, none of it matters, we’re all gonna die if I’m not good enough, Penny’s going to die, my family’s going to die, my friends are going to die, it’s—I was born to save the world as Ruby Rose! Not as… not as some stupid thing called Moonrise! Why… Why can’t my mom save the world, if she has silver eyes too?! Why does it have to be me?!”
Yang’s heart, already plummeting, was now vanishing into an abyss with no hope of ever returning. Ruby didn’t know. Of course Ruby didn’t know about Summer. They hadn’t told her. Somehow, they would have to tell her.
“Summer’s normal and not broken and she actually deserves this family and you said she’s the greatest Huntress in history—”
Ruby froze.
If Yang was a flame, she was now entirely extinguished, leaving nothing but a pile of charred detritus and smoke.
“Was.” The rise and fall of Ruby’s chest ceased entirely.
“You said she was the greatest Huntress…” She pushed herself away until her back was flat against one of the bedposts. She couldn’t retreat any further without falling off the bed.
Yang knew what the next words would be even before a single terrified syllable had fallen out of Ruby’s mouth.
“...Where’s my mom?”
Ruby’s voice was a knife-edge held against the throats of everyone in the room, including herself.
Taiyang and Qrow looked as if every one of the last twenty seconds had been measured in years for them. Their ashen faces could offer no reply, and Yang’s capacity for speech had gone the way of her heart. So it was Ruby who had to slash through the excruciating silence.
“Why isn’t she here?”
The dead silence stretched and stretched like an elastic band far past its breaking point. Even if it could somehow rebound, it would be warped, almost unrecognizable, unfixable. And if it snapped—
Increasingly desperate, Yang searched for any answer which would not destroy what little bit of family she’d been lucky enough to find today, while also searching for the guts to say it.
“Why?” Ruby’s voice was ragged, bordering on that of a prisoner begging an unrelenting interrogator for a reprieve or a mercy kill.
“Summer is gone.”
Taiyang spoke as if every part of him except his mouth had been turned to stone. “She went out alone on a mission, and she never came back.”
Ruby’s eyes went so wide that Yang could see her pupils shrinking to tiny, almost inhuman points, black dots almost entirely swallowed up by the silver irises. “She failed?”
Yang’s heart was, in a cruel miracle, back from the abyss. She knew only because she could feel it shattering.
If Ruby had screamed the next words, they would’ve been far less heartbreaking than the quiet pain-saturated whimper which actually came out. “My mom is a failure?”
Yang didn’t dare look at Dad or Uncle Qrow. “Ruby… She knew the risks, she gave—”
“I’m the daughter of a failure?” Ruby’s voice rose to a harsh whisper which resonated through the room like a death rattle. Then, despite her position against the bedpost, she tried to back up even further, only succeeding in whacking her head against one of the custom-made metal brackets which connected Penny’s bunk to Weiss’s. She barely noticed. “I can’t be the daughter of a failure! If she couldn’t save the world, then what hope do I have?!”
“Ruby—” Qrow started, but then all the volume which had receded from Ruby’s voice came thundering back in a tidal wave of a scream which crashed down on all of them.
“DON’T CALL ME THAT!”
Ruby dissolved into a storm of dust and rose petals, the rose petals were still there, which hovered uncertainly at Yang’s bunk for a half-second before streaking towards the door in a straight line, only to slam into it head-on, silver and red exploding in every direction like a dandelion being obliterated into disparate fluff by a blast of wind.
Ruby didn’t reform immediately. Instead, the silver dust and rose petals stayed scattered across the floor just long enough for everyone else to jump to their feet in alarm, and then they flew together like a magnet pulling everything in.
Ruby reappeared in the corner, half-crouched, Lunar Enforcer in her hands and raised, as if her family was something she needed shielding against. “I can’t be the daughter of a failure! I can’t! I can’t! I—”
She noticed the rose petals still floating around her, and her undisguised horror only deepened, so pale now she might’ve been dying. She used Lunar Enforcer to swat one petal at eye level, and then she was shaking too violently for any coordinated movement. “Summer should’ve saved the world! She was born to save the world, just like me! And she wasn’t broken! She was better! How could she FAIL?!”
“Summer wasn’t a failure,” Taiyang said. “She was the greatest Huntress on the planet. She—”
Ruby made a violent hissing sound. “Then why’s she dead?! Why’d she leave behind a world that still needs saving and a broken daughter who’s supposed to do it better than her even though I don’t know how to be a person?! I don’t know how to be better than HER! And—” Suddenly, Ruby was glaring at Qrow with something new and deadly. “Hey, where’s your other teammate? Your sister, Raven? Is she dead too?”
Qrow’s answer came while he stared down at the floor, his hands clenched into fists atop his knees. “She’s not dead.”
The response briefly scoured away all the anger from Ruby’s expression, replacing it with a billowing confusion, but in an instant it returned, Ruby pulling her lips back into a snarl. “She’s worse than dead, isn’t she? She’s a deserter, isn’t she? A traitor? Did she join Salem’s side, or did she just give up the fight because she was a coward? Why couldn’t Summer keep her on our side?! She was your team leader, that was her job! She failed at that, too!”
A horrible pain had been working its way up through Yang from the bottom of her stomach to somewhere in the middle of her throat, something burning and aching which made her feel like she was genuinely about to throw up. More than anything, she just wanted for all of this to stop, but she didn’t have the slightest idea how.
“I don’t want this! I didn’t want any of this!” Ruby shrieked. “I don’t want to be broken! I don’t want to be a failure! I don’t want to be NOTHING!” Silver dust and rose petals began to spill off her in torrents, her edges dissolving into a tumult of the two warring colors, turning her outline fuzzier and fuzzier until she appeared almost as a gradient into the world around her. Her increasingly frantic voice spilled out with a shrill, vibrating echo.
“I can’t be a weapon and I can’t be a person and I’m supposed to fix a family that’s got a depressed weirdo and a degenerate drunk who’s a disgrace to Huntresses everywhere and the kind of traitor that’s worse than death and MY MOTHER WHO IS A FAILURE!”
Ruby was almost completely engulfed in the storm of her Semblance now, and Yang could barely see her mouth now as silver and red swirled harder and harder around what parts of her were still visible. It hurt just to look at, more than anything else had ever hurt in her life, but she couldn’t look away.
“I’m not her daughter! This isn’t my family! I’m not broken! I hate you all! I hate myself! I wish I’d never met you! I WISH I’D NEVER BEEN BORN!”
Yang had already failed, and in a weird way, ruining everything took away her fear of making any more mistakes. What was there left for her to fuck up? So, in the most gentle voice she could manage, she asked, “Ruby?”
The maelstrom of silver and red stopped abruptly, everything flying back into the form of Ruby Karyatis Rose, her braid swinging wildly behind her as she stared at Yang with a new emotion. That emotion wasn’t disgust or anger or despair or even the horror that’d been running rampant just a minute ago, but fear. Not horror like her world was falling apart. Fear like there was something right in front of her setting off her fight-flight-freeze reflex. Like she was afraid of Yang.
“I’m sorry,” was all Yang could say. “Please don’t go. Please. I just found you again. I… I love you, just the way you are.”
She hated how pathetic she sounded, but… it was the truth. She needed her baby sister. She couldn’t lose Ruby just after she’d found her. She would love her no matter how many hateful words Ruby hurled at her.
Ruby made a whining noise somewhere in the back of her throat, her gaze flicking from Yang to Qrow and Taiyang and then to her own weapon and then back to Yang.
She shook her head wildly. “I… I can’t. I can’t. I can’t be what you need. I can’t be what anyone needs!”
Then, like a CCT broadcast losing its signal, the image of Ruby warped, oscillated, and then flashed from one visage of Ruby to another—in one fraction of a second, Yang was looking at Ruby as she’d appeared all morning with her hair in a braid and wearing her Atlas Academy uniform, and then in the next fraction of a second, it was the Ruby who’d fallen asleep last night in her thrift-store pajamas and her hair cascading freely down her upper half.
But next, instead of the wavering form of Ruby settling back on either image, she exploded completely into her Semblance, and nothing but a trail of silver and rose petals rocketed towards—
The open window.
It was far, far too fast for anyone to react. By the time Yang scrambled to the window which Ruby had flown through, all she could do was watch the silver comet streaking away somewhere unknown, Ruby’s glimmering trail filled with dots of red from her petals. But from here, they only appeared like splatters of blood amidst the silver.
Notes:
oh robot girls of the world we're really in it now
Next week is Chapter 59: Once Upon A Time
Chapter 59: Once Upon A Time
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
Once upon a time, at one of the greatest schools in the land, there lived a girl with fiery orange hair and a metal heart that pulsed with electric life. However, this girl was not a student at this school, no matter how much she wanted to be, because she was in hiding.
The girl’s metal heart made her powerful in a way that few others were, and there were many cunning plotters who would kill for her strength. In fact, the girl had been built for one such kingdom that wished to have a weapon like no other, and it was that kingdom which the girl fled, arriving at the school commanded by a kindly old man who promised her that no harm would befall her as long as she lived in his domain.
And even if she was still living in secret, the girl with a metal heart was truly happy with her new home. There was so much here that she’d never been allowed to do before, and so many things for her to discover. There were miles and miles of deep forest around the school for her to explore, where she could find many little creatures that would sniff curiously at her hands and countless insects that would buzz around her head and alight on her fingers as if to say hello. In these woods, she had all the time she desired to investigate the smallest things—a fallen strip of bark with ants scurrying across it, or a small pond which held a family of turtles sunning themselves amidst a flock of dragonflies. If there were ever any thoughts given to the girl’s previous purpose, they were at their most distant from her mind when she was exploring the forest.
The girl with a metal heart explored the school as well, mapping out every hallway and corner of the grand, sprawling edifices which held secrets of their own. She found forgotten places where she could curl up in a bed of pillows and think about the mysteries of the world for hours at a time without anyone stumbling upon her. Through these places, she began to truly understand the meaning of the word cozy, a word which never had any use in the military laboratories of the kingdom that had built her.
At nighttime, when the girl with a metal heart could easily conceal herself from unsuspecting eyes, she would unfurl her mechanical wings which laid folded up inside her body and fly over the school’s expansive grounds under the shattered moon and stars. In flight, she would feel the wind rushing over her face and see the world laid out underneath her, smaller and smaller the higher she flew, distant lights on the horizon hinting at the world beyond. She would perform acrobatics in the sky, her movements turning the stars into streaks of light in her vision. Through these skyward adventures, she began to truly understand the meaning of the word freedom, a word which never had much relevance under the scrutinizing hand of the kingdom that had built her.
(From time to time, there would be someone out alone on the school grounds at an unconscionably late hour; perhaps a student looking for inspiration, or a professor taking a break from their work, or a member of the custodial staff performing some late-night duty. Whoever it was, they would look up at the sky, and be greeted with a sight that would make them freeze in place—not out of fear, but out of wonder. Because they would see a winged girl dancing in the night sky, visible only in dark silhouette against the light of the moon as she twirled and spun with breathtaking fluidity, green flames leaving faint ethereal afterimages of her pirouettes.)
(Such a sight lingered long afterward in the minds of those who witnessed it, and more than one person was left wondering if they had just seen an angel.)
However, there was one word which the girl with the metal heart still struggled to understand the meaning of. And that word was friendship.
Once upon a time, at one of the greatest schools in the land, there lived a girl who was very, very lost.
Months and months ago
Someone was crying. Penny was sure of it.
Her audioreceptors allowed her to detect and identify sounds at immense ranges, although she had learned that it was not polite to always have her audioreceptors turned up to maximum sensitivity, because listening to other people without first telling them that she was listening to them was rude. Eavesdropping was the word for it, as Headmaster Ozpin had explained to her after he had realized Penny was listening to his conversations with Professor Goodwitch during their morning walks—something which he had only realized when Penny, in one of her regular visits to his office, had reached into her database of recent conversations she had heard and asked him what a ‘Maiden’ was and why he and Professor Goodwitch had such high levels of concerns for it, whatever it was. After a dropped mug of coffee, a worrying but brief spike in Ozpin’s blood pressure, and forty-one seconds of confusion, Ozpin had explained to her the concept of eavesdropping and why it was immensely rude. Penny was inclined to agree. If someone else eavesdropped on Penny and discovered without her knowledge that she was a synthetic person, that would feel very bad. So she had dismissed all internal questions about what a ‘Maiden’ was (answer: it was a private matter between Headmaster Ozpin and Professor Goodwitch) and made notes to adjust all future behavior.
And now Penny was adjusting that behavior! Successfully! She was traversing the grounds of Beacon Academy and she was not eavesdropping on any conversations occurring anywhere! Although, it was currently the months-long break between academic years, so the environment did not contain any students having conversations for Penny to not overhear. But if there were to be any conversations occurring on Beacon Academy’s campus tonight, then Penny would not hear them! She was achieving politeness!
Interestingly enough, Penny was accomplishing the not-eavesdropping without having to turn down her audioreceptors. In fact, they were still at the same level of alertness that she always kept them at while traversing school grounds, because she needed to be aware of anyone’s approach. She was still supposed to be existing in secret, after all! And she could not exist in secret if she was unaware of the approach of an unsuspecting observer! Instead, to accomplish not-eavesdropping, she had simply written an automatic protocol for her auditory processing core to scramble the sound of any incoming speech into something which Penny could not understand! It was an interesting challenge to write an internal program which would encrypt things in a way that the rest of her consciousness matrix could not decrypt without significant effort! It had resulted in the discovery of several new traits of her internal coding logic, too, and those kinds of discoveries were always fascinating!
And all that brought Penny to this moment where she was walking without purpose across the school grounds, watching the wind whip up curtains of snow from the four inches of powdery white snow that’d fallen that morning, when the sound of crying reached her audioreceptors.
Significant, sustained crying. Loud enough that it was carrying some distance across at least one courtyard. Penny could hear it because crying was not speech and so it was not scrambled. And Penny was glad for that, because if someone was crying, that meant the individual was in distress! And if an individual was in distress, they needed help! And if an individual needed help, Penny could provide that help!
Penny’s logic core alerted her to the concern that this would break her ongoing goal of staying secret. Penny dismissed that concern with the counterpoint that staying secret was less important than helping someone. Her logic core considered that statement for several moments, and then accepted it as logical.
Penny turned in the direction of the sound and began to walk purposefully toward it, deliberately keeping her pace below that of running. Running was generally an act that gave others the impression that something was wrong, and that would likely incite further distress in whoever was crying.
The crying emanated from a hedge in the corner of a courtyard, and for a moment, Penny was confused as to why someone would be crying inside a hedge. But as she neared the source, she realized it was coming from behind the hedge—there seemed to be some sort of space between the hedge and the stone wall, although there was no clear entrance. As she approached, the sobbing only intensified, erratic breaths and heaving gasps echoing off the walls. Her radar was most definitely picking up someone behind this hedge. For a moment, Penny had to consider whether to approach quietly and risk frightening this person when she did announce herself, or approach with deliberate auditory cues which might also frighten her off.
She chose to approach quietly and analyze the situation from a visual vector, and with deliberate footfalls calculated and carried out (and aided by the fluffy snow underfoot) to make as little noise as possible, she pushed aside a bramble bush (which seemed to be her only way forward that didn’t involve vandalizing the hedge) and peered around the corner.
Penny found herself looking at an alcove carved out of the stone wall, an alcove which held an inoperative fountain and two stone benches. There was a girl seated on one of the benches, hunched over as if she were in intense pain.
Hair color: dark brown. Height: five feet nine inches. Eye color: currently unknown. Outfit: green hooded cloak, white blouse, brown vest and corset, brown pants, gold gauntlets on both arms. Current emotions: very awful. Identity: unknown, although Penny had glimpsed this girl in other places around campus several times over the previous week.
There were no clues as to what might be causing this girl’s distress, and so with her visual analysis and vitals scan (no readily detectable signs of injury) concluded, Penny decided it was time to make her presence known. First, she made sure to turn off the anti-eavesdropping protocol. Now she would be…. What was the opposite of eavesdropping? Eaveslifting? But never mind that!
“Are you okay?” Penny said carefully. It was immensely tricky to arrive at a balance of tones which would not seem incongruously upbeat but would not also sound as if she was here to bring down the girl’s mood even further.
The girl jerked up immediately, her wide brown eyes (eye color identified!) landing on Penny and a look of ninety-five percent confusion roiling across her face. It took twenty-four seconds for her to speak, most of which was spent choking down more sobs until she’d caught her breath enough to say anything.
“What… Who…?” she said, her voice so rough and worn that even without prior references in her memory, Penny knew that this girl had been crying for a long time. She opened her mouth once more, as if to say something else, but no sound came out, and after that she only stared.
“My name is Penny. Do you need help?” Penny said with a wave, keeping one arm folded respectfully behind her back.
The girl was silent for eighteen seconds, and then she made a strained-sounding vocalization, which Penny initially did not understand until she considered—was that a laugh?
“You can’t help me,” the girl said. “No one can.”
“Oh.” Beyond the monosyllabic acknowledgment, Penny did not have the slightest idea how to respond to that. Every problem could be helped, couldn’t it? Why did problems exist, if not to have solutions?
The girl wiped away some of the tears staining her cheeks and took a sniffling breath. “...Thanks, though.”
She fell silent, but there was no indication that she wanted Penny to leave. She was crying far less now, sniffles instead of sobs and the occasional tear still trickling down, but the sheer despair that had echoed through the courtyard was gone for now. That seemed to be reason enough for Penny to stay, albeit with continuous re-evaluation of the situation. Sometimes people would not say when they wanted someone to leave despite very much wanting that person to leave, and Penny was still trying to decipher the mysteries of how to detect that incredibly frustrating phenomenon.
Since there was a bench on the other side of the fountain, she sat down there, folding her hands in her lap and watching the girl, noting with satisfaction that her heartbeat was dropping back towards a normal resting rate.
One minute and one second later, the girl focused on Penny again, this time with a look which was easily identifiable as being inquisitive. “What are you doing here, anyway? The school’s on break. I’m not even supposed to be out here. I snuck out.”
Penny had a predesigned cover story for questions such as this, of course, but the best course was always to start with vagueness. “I am not a student.”
The girl’s eyes went very wide again, an abnormally outsized response. But she did not actually say anything.
Penny disregarded casual human posture to sit up a little straighter—at the same time that the girl did. They were unsubtly scrutinizing each other, the only sound coming from the occasional icicle falling off a nearby tree.
It was the girl who spoke first, her crying entirely finished now. “I’m Amber.”
Penny nodded, filing that information away and editing Amber’s entry in her internal memory registry. “It is nice to meet you, Amber!” She felt confident enough in adding additional cheer to her tone now, since it seemed Amber might be more receptive to an uplifting mood.
“Likewise.” Amber cocked her head, squinting at Penny. “So why are you here? I know it’s unusual for me to be here, so you’ve got to be unusual, too.”
“I am the daughter of a professor!”
Penny’s cover story had felt quite credible at the time that she’d come up with it. Except, in the long silence from Amber which followed the declaration, she realized that she had no idea how to actually lie in a way that would convince others. And this cover story currently had one glaring flaw: There was such a low number of professors occupying the Beacon grounds at this moment that Amber could easily work out that Penny was not actually the daughter of any of the professors here. And then she would want to know why Penny’s nonexistent parent was leaving her alone here, and then—
“Okay,” Amber said.
Penny blinked. She… wasn’t asking more questions? Was that possible? Her prediction algorithms returned a helpless shrug.
Amber grabbed a fistful of her cloak and used it to wipe her face one more time, scrubbing harder than Penny thought should be necessary. “I’m a student, actually. Even though it’s winter break. Because I’m. Um. A special student. Invited by Ozpin. The headmaster. Who you probably know already. Because you’re here, too. Like me.” She winced as if something had hurt her.
Penny decided that it would only be polite to not ask any of the questions which she was now immensely curious about. If this girl had secrets of her own related to being a special student, then that was absolutely fine! Penny had secrets of her own, too, after all, and Amber hadn’t asked Penny more questions.
It was too bad Amber wasn’t a synthetic person, though—if there was to be another synthetic person living on campus, she was one hundred percent confident that Ozpin would’ve notified her of this and at least introduced them to each other. And Penny’s sensors all agreed that this was an organic being. So, no logical chance. Unfortunately. But perhaps they could share the experience of having secrets.
“Are you staying here for a long time?” Penny said. A moment later, she noted several of Amber’s muscles tensing up—mostly around her lower and upper torso, a sign of mild emotional discomfort.
“I am too,” Penny added, hoping to dispel that discomfort. And to her immense delight, it did. Amber untensed almost immediately. Penny was noting that down as a social success! She had correctly identified and interpreted a completely nonverbal cue and chosen the right response to address that cue! And as a result, she had reduced her conversational counterpart’s discomfort, and she was quite sure that she would not have been able to accomplish that six months ago!
“Oh. Okay,” Amber said with another wince. “I mean, you’ve probably got a good reason why you’re staying here for a long time, just like I do, because I’ve got—” She broke off, a fresh wave of pain rippling across her expression, and the next words came out in a worrying quaver. “Things. So I’m just…”
Suddenly, her shoulders were quivering in the exact manner as when she’d been crying, putting Penny on high alert. “I don’t know the things, and I don’t want to! I don’t know anyone here! I don’t want to be here! I didn’t ask for this! I was fine, I was happy, and then—it happened, everything happened! I want my family back! I just want to GO HOME!”
Her voice had risen until the final two words were a crackling shriek, and then she buried her face in her arms and broke down in another wave of sobs. At the same moment, a ferocious gust of wind swept over them both, sending a blast of snow into Penny’s face which left her photoreceptors unable to see anything but white until her body heat melted it later.
Her face now dripping with snowmelt, Penny ran to Amber’s side. As she did so, she noted something unexpected: the rush of wind had been powerful enough to knock off the ornamental statue perched atop the fountain. The hedge and the stone alcove hadn’t been able to slow the wind in the slightest, somehow. Amber did not look up when Penny sat down beside her and carefully laid a hand on her shoulder.
“Is it not possible for you to return home?” Penny asked.
“No. No choice,” Amber mumbled into her hands before shaking with renewed ferocity. “This is my life now…”
Usually in social situations, Penny had trouble with taking initiative. However, right now she knew exactly what her goal was and what to say.
“I cannot go home either,” she said, and when she felt Amber abruptly go still, she took that as a good sign. “Beacon Academy is also my place of residence for the foreseeable future.”
“I’m sorry,” Amber said.
Penny always thought it was an extremely odd social rule that people would say I’m sorry to someone experiencing a tragedy that wasn’t the fault of the person saying sorry in the slightest. How had that even come about? Penny was saying sorry, and yet she was helping Amber at the same time!
Social conventions were indecipherable. If asked to make a list of every unspoken social code in the world, Penny would sooner write out all of her own internal code by hand. Fortunately, this was a conversation where she could be very upfront. And she was grateful she could be upfront about asking a question as important as this one:
“Amber, I think that we could be friends, if that is something which you might like?”
Amber made a noise of… Well, Penny wasn’t sure what to call it besides a noise. A very sad one.
“Walking around all these empty hallways, all I could think was how I’d never have any friends ever again,” she said, her voice still muffled by her hands. And then she looked up, smiling at Penny through a haze of tears. “If you couldn’t tell, that’s a yes.”
“Pawn to G3,” Amber said.
In retrospect, it was amusing how understated the moment of making her first-ever friend was for Penny.
“Horse to E6,” Penny said, pushing one of her pieces to the precise center of its destination square with one finger. She knew it was called a knight, of course, but calling it a horse was much more fun. And why had they named it the knight when the actual piece was a horse?! Were chess pieces situated in a fictional setting where horses could be knights?
Amber made a thoughtful noise and went silent, studying the board.
Friends aside, Penny knew quite a few people already, of course! She was living in hiding, but she wasn’t living in hiding. Anyone who worked at the school would notice her continued presence after a few weeks or months. When she had woken up, there was already a number of people aside from Ozpin who by necessity had been informed of her true origins—every tenured professor, along with several high-ranking members of the school’s facilities staff. Beyond that, anyone who noticed knew her by her cover story, as a (mysteriously unnamed) professor’s adopted daughter. The only people in the school that Penny had to actively take pains to avoid was the students themselves, because… Well, as Ozpin had put it—
“Every year, this school is filled with curious teenagers looking desperately for problems to solve, and to them the mystery of an enigmatic, elusive girl whose exact origins they could not pinpoint would be raw meat thrown to a pack of starving wolves. Without a doubt, they would spend the rest of their academic careers tirelessly pursuing incredibly wrong conclusions about you.”
Fortunately, she had managed to avoid that potential catastrophe so far! There were no mythologies circulating through the school about her! Except for the one about the girl who dances on the moon, which Penny had inadvertently started by being spotted flying at night on several occasions. Fortunately, the legend was attached to the idea that no one who was looking for the moon girl could see her. Which, in a funny way, was completely true, because Penny could detect the people down on the ground who were hiding in bushes with binoculars and cameras trying to spot her. Thank goodness for her sensors. It was only people who’d accidentally put themselves in the right place at the right time that had actually seen Penny.
Still, though, she was quite sure she was breaking a rule by interacting with Amber. Ozpin hadn’t simply suggested that Penny not interact with any students—he had told that to her, as a rule. But not like a mean rule like an evil stepfather might do in a fairytale—just a rule because he was concerned for her safety and he wanted to make sure she was safe, and talking to students might put her in danger. Penny was very aware that Amber was a student, and therefore she was breaking that rule by talking to her. Repeatedly. But talking to Amber had not led to any secrets being revealed or wrong conclusions being reached.
(Funnily enough, Amber had once told Penny that she was also breaking a rule by talking to Penny, but she had never specified what exactly the rule for her was. Maybe it was the same rule.)
“Castle to A5,” Amber said before taking a sip of hot cocoa. Her mug was still steaming hot after a good forty-five minutes of sitting at room temperature. Penny had considered asking how her cocoa was violating the laws of thermodynamics, but that question might invite Amber to ask why Penny hadn’t drunk any of her hot cocoa at all.
All in all, from the start of her first day awake at Beacon, Penny had the opportunity to interact with a great number of people, all of whom were friendly and kind to her. That was nice. But being friendly was not the same as being her friend, as she had learned. She did not think she could call anyone in the school a friend, not even Ozpin.
“Queen to G3. Queen takes pawn. We could play something else if you don’t enjoy this?” Penny offered, looking over to the shelves of board games they had yet to play. “The library has many other options—”
Amber stopped Penny with a shake of her head, grinning as she tossed the fallen pawn to her. “Nope, this is fun. Besides… I’m pretty used to barely knowing what’s going on, so it’s no big deal.” Those words seemed to wipe away her grin, but it reappeared a moment later when she slid her other castle across the board. “Castle to G3. Castle takes queen.”
But Amber… Penny could call her a friend! Close in age, facing similar struggles to Penny, looking for companionship, enjoyed playing board games together and sneaking out at night to have snowball fights in the dark… They were friends!
Penny’s first friend. She hoped this would be the first of many friendships.
“Okay!” she said cheerfully, showing absolutely no dismay at losing her most valuable piece.
Amber picked up her newly claimed queen. “You’re taking that loss… suspiciously well?”
“Correct!” Penny reached across the board. “Pawn to H8! And I will now promote my pawn to queen!”
“Oh, blast it, I forgot about promotions—” Amber dropped her forehead to the table with a thunk. “Okay, tough girl, messenger to D7,” she added, somehow managing to move her messenger piece in a perfectly diagonal line without looking up.
“Pawn to D3,” Penny said cheerfully. “Pawn takes castle.”
Amber finally looked up, blinking at the board. “Okay, so that’s why you gave up your queen in the first place, and now you’ve got her back and I’ve lost a castle for my efforts, and I’m going to go jump in a snowdrift.”
“I hope that is sarcasm?” Penny said, completely unsure.
“It is, but also, I’d be fine. The cold really doesn’t bother me anymore!” Amber stared at the board, and appeared to be on the verge of saying something else, but at the last moment, she just shook her head and moved her other castle to A6.
“My dad told me he’d dated a boy who was a chess master when he was a teenager,” she said after a period of companionably silent play. “Someone who was so good at chess, he could just look at a random assortment of pieces on a board and know how to win in a few minutes. I still don’t understand how people like that can exist. When I look at a board, I don’t see grand strategy. I just see the things right in front of me. The next move.” She yawned and nudged a pawn forward. Then, in a much quieter voice, she said:
“I wish I could still talk to him about anything…”
Penny did not know how to respond to the tragic implications in such a statement. So, instead, she tried talking about something else.
“Did you know that computers have entirely solved chess through simulations?” she said. “There are Atlesian supercomputers which can force a victory from the starting position no matter what moves the opponent chooses. Which means that if two supercomputers played each other, the only variable which would define the winner would be who makes the first move.”
What Penny left out of this explanation was that she was also a supercomputer capable of solving chess, given enough time and resources. She wouldn’t ever attempt it—it sounded dreadfully boring—but it was… a bragging right? Was that the right usage of the phrase? She’d never bragged before. Regardless, in playing this game of chess, she had turned down her level of processing cycles available to her consciousness, leaving her with a capability for strategic game analysis similar to that of an organic being. It was admittedly disconcerting to feel her processors straining to find answers that they would normally produce in milliseconds. However, the upside of that arrangement was that she was in a state of genuine suspense as to who would win this match. Which was fun!
“Huh. Good thing I’m not playing against a computer,” Amber said.
Penny giggled.
And immediately she was bombarded with a feeling of immense regret for making that sound, the implication of which would be blatantly obvious.
But Amber only looked up, raised an eyebrow, and then went right back to looking at the board without ever commenting on the suspiciously-timed giggle.
That was one of the most unexpected yet wonderful tenets of their friendship: Penny and Amber did not ask about each other’s secrets. They certainly knew each other had plenty of of secrets—it was very hard to ignore how they were the only teenagers living at Beacon during the long winter break with nowhere else to go—but anytime it seemed like either of them might be about to stumble into some sort of private detail about the other girl, they would steer away (sometimes figuratively, sometimes literally) without another word, silently respecting the things that each other couldn’t say, or didn’t want to say. Penny was curious, of course, and she was sure Amber was curious about her too, but they were both content to leave their curiosity unanswered. Maybe they’d both gathered a few bits and pieces of each other’s secrets through accidents and missteps, but neither Penny nor Amber had any desire to try putting those pieces together. Because they were friends, and that was all they needed to be to one another.
Penny very much liked having a friend.
At night, the two girls would steal through the hallways of Beacon to find a place outside where they could talk without fear of disturbing others, taking extreme care not to be seen or heard. Penny’s sensors were very helpful in that regard, as was her downloaded and recorded knowledge of Beacon’s intruder alarm systems. And Amber seemed to have some strange sense of her own for when there were people nearby that not even Penny could detect.
Also, Penny was very good at picking locks.
They both agreed that their friendship needed to be kept secret, because they were breaking rules by talking to one another. If the truth came out, they might be prevented from talking to each other ever again! So they only rendezvoused in secluded places where there was no chance of being spotted from far away, and made sure to give no indication to anyone else that they knew each other. Their friendship was a secret right alongside all the other secrets the girls carried, and that was fun!
Secrets had always been a scary concept to Penny, because for her, secrets had always been something that put her in danger. So it was delightful to have a secret which was just… fun. It was a secret she actually liked holding inside her, only letting it out when she met up with Amber in the dark of night and they exchanged the exhilarated, covert smiles that seemed to emerge only from evading discovery together.
On one of those quiet winter nights, Penny found Amber sitting atop a stone wall, her legs slowly kicking back and forth as she bent over her lap. For a moment, she was worried Amber was crying again because of her posture, but as Penny came closer, it became apparent that Amber had something in her lap which she was writing in.
Something else which Penny noticed: there was no trace of footprints in the snow leading up to the wall where Amber sat. As if she’d dropped out of the sky.
It wasn’t entirely surprising to Penny. Whenever she and Amber went walking outside in the snow, any visible footprints they left had a strange habit of being filled in quite quickly by violent blasts of wind, leaving no trace of their side-by-side journeys. It was as if the wind itself wanted to cover their tracks.
Penny crouched and jumped, landing atop the wall beside Amber in a single motion. She was not worried about intruding, because Amber had already cleared the snow off the wall beside her, clearly leaving a place for Penny. “Salutations!”
“Hey.” Amber nodded in greeting without looking up from the leather-bound notebook she was writing in. She’d already used three-quarters of the notebook, if her current page was any indication.
Tonight’s meeting place was a section of the stone wall which was blocked from the rest of Beacon Academy by a garden shed nearby—for anyone in the school to see them, they would have to first cross a large open ground where Penny’s radar would spot them before the two girls were spotted.
For a moment, the only sound was the faint scratching of Amber’s pen as it flew across the paper, leaving a trail of neat little letters marching down the pages, assembling themselves into words and sentences and paragraphs of varying size. Then Amber spoke.
“Do you like fairytales?”
“Hm.” Penny tilted her head, thinking. There had been another snowfall this afternoon, but this was the warmest night at Beacon in some time, and the snow on the ground was now wet and close-packed, clumping when kicked instead of drifting and melting off the paved walkways in some places. Spring was on the horizon.
“I like them!” Penny said. She had found a volume of them in the library months ago, long before meeting Amber, and read through it over and over again. There was one fairytale which she always came back to: The Girl Who Turned To Stone. It was a tale that she held deeply in her memory. Every time she re-read it, she felt the same spreading sense of warmth from seeing words telling of someone else with an artificial body. She would trace the story’s final illustration with her fingers, gazing at the girl given a new and different form, one that was no less than an organic body, and she would dream of finding others like herself.
“I really like some of them,” she added in a softer tone.
“I never thought about them much before I came here,” Amber said. She pressed her pen down harder, hard enough that it ripped a tiny hole in the paper halfway through a word. She huffed emphatically, crossed out the word, and started again. “They never seemed important. But now I might as well be living a fairytale, so… I started reading them. To see if there was something they could tell me.”
Penny was not entirely sure how a written story could speak vocally to someone, but she could reasonably infer that there was a figure of speech at work here. “Did they tell you anything?”
“No.” Amber turned a page, putting her pen to the blank paper without a second’s hesitation. “A lot of them end with happily ever after. If this—” She swept her writing arm out, aiming her pen at the dark, looming, snow-coated spires of the school. “—is supposed to be my happily ever after, then fairytales are the worst.”
“Oh.”
Normally, it would be polite for Penny to say I’m sorry in response to that, but both girls had stopped saying I’m sorry in response to tragic statements uttered by one other, because they did have quite a lot of those, and after a while, the I’m sorry became tiring and repetitive and entirely meaningless. So now they just… acknowledged things, and left it at that, and that was more comfortable.
Amber’s words made Penny instinctively wonder: Was Beacon also her own happily ever after? She was safe, and she was free, and she had a friend now, and she would doubtlessly make others, and there were many, many things to learn and do with her time, but… was this what all the ever after would be? And how long would it be exactly? Her lifespan could be… considerably longer than an organic being’s. Maybe she would outlive the people who wanted to use her and she could be free then.
What if she wanted more? To see more, to do more? To feel and hear more?
Even if Ozpin would not let her, Penny wanted to be a Huntress. If she could somehow convince him of that fact, then would being a Huntress be her ever after? What about other kinds of ever afters? Was there a sadly ever after? A funnily ever after? An angrily ever after? An averagely ever after?
…Well, averagely ever after probably would not make for a very interesting fairytale.
“What are you writing?” Penny said.
“A fairytale. Since I didn’t like any, I’m writing my own.”
“What is it about?”
Amber didn’t reply immediately. The air had been still from the moment Penny stepped outside, but suddenly a powerful gust of wind slapped them both across the side, and then with equal suddenness it was gone.
“It’s a story about a girl who was having a very nice life with a loving family and awesome friends, until one day she woke up with magic powers she didn’t ask for and couldn’t get rid of, and then it turned out a lot of people wanted those magic powers, some of them very bad people, and then those bad people came for the magic and killed almost everyone the girl loved, and she had to leave behind everything she’d ever known to keep the rest of her loved ones safe, and then she found out there were a lot of people in the world who needed saving, and now the girl’s going to have to live with this until she dies, so she lives unfortunately ever after.”
For several seconds while Penny composed a reply, there was no sound except the wind whistling through the bare trees.
“That seems like a very sad story.” If Penny wanted to, she could make several inferences about how perhaps Amber was writing this from experience, but she would not infer that. Instead, she asked, “What if the story has a happy ending?”
Amber let out something which Penny thought was best described as two-thirds of a laugh. “Sure wish it was that easy.”
“But you are the author.”
“Not really. It’s not my story I’m telling. It’s someone else’s, which got dumped on me, and it’s set in stone. I can’t change it. All I can do is tell it.”
Penny searched for a reply, fiddling with her scarf which she’d put on not for warmth, but for fashion. It was very big and fluffy and bright red in color. She liked winter clothes. A lot of them were poofy and soft and expansive, which made them very fun to feel around her. In a full winter outfit, it was like being in a cozy little cave of her own!
Amber, on the other hand, was just wearing a jean jacket atop a t-shirt and a pair of cargo pants. Even in tonight’s comparatively less cold temperatures, that was still far too inadequate an outfit. And Amber did not have her Aura up to insulate herself, at least not that Penny could detect. But somehow, there was a layer of air around her which was maintaining her body temperature at a very optimal 36.6 degrees Celsius. And keeping her dry—no snowmelt soaking into her clothes. Another thing which Penny would not be making inferences about.
“If it is set in stone, perhaps you need to find a pickaxe and start breaking things,” she said finally, somewhat unsure if they were talking in metaphor or in a literal sense by now.
Amber stopped writing and lifted her head slowly, staring off into the distance. “...Why do I like the sound of that way more than I probably should?”
“Maybe because you are—er, I mean maybe because the girl in the story is trapped, and she has just realized that she can escape much more easily just by breaking the things which are holding her down instead of trying to live out an unfortunately ever after with them.”
Amber continued to stare at something far off. She slowly closed her notebook and then dropped her pen into a shirt pocket. Forty-nine seconds later, she turned to Penny, and she was smiling.
“What kind of fairytale would you write, Penny?”
Penny had actually anticipated this question might come up from the moment Amber had first mentioned fairytales, and for the duration of the conversation, she had devoted all spare processing resources to assembling the answer to such a question. As such, she was able to reply immediately.
“It would be a story about two very unique girls who meet each other in unusual circumstances, and very quickly become friends because they have not found anyone else like each other, and they help each other be less lonely and find fun things to do together, and they help each other in both their lives more and more, and together they change the world in wonderful ways.”
Amber’s smile grew. Once again, a sudden gust of wind disturbed the still night, but this one was much gentler, almost a breeze as it ruffled Amber and Penny’s hair, brown and orange strands fluttering like leaves falling off the trees in autumn.
“I hope you write that, Penny,” she said.
Penny sat crosslegged on her bed in the tower which was simultaneously her workshop and her living space, reading another volume of fairytales she’d borrowed from the library. This one was much newer, and included several tales which seemed to be allegories for major historical events. It was all quite interesting, but Penny was having difficulty concentrating on her reading tonight.
She had not seen Amber for several days. It was not unusual for such absences to happen since they did not communicate through electronic means, but this time, Penny was worried. Her memories of their most recent conversation, the one about fairytales, loomed large in her memory. Had she given bad advice? Had she accidentally incited Amber to do something wrong, or dangerous? Had she hurt herself somehow? Had—
A sharp knocking rang out across the tower, startling Penny so much that several programs automatically switched to danger assessment.
How? she wondered, jumping up and not quite ready to turn off certain danger-related settings. The only way in and out of here was the elevator, which was still right there with the doors open and nobody inside, so where—
She pinpointed the origin of the sound 0.4 seconds later.
The window?
She spun around, mentally cataloging where all of the heavy hand tools in her workshop were and which could best be used as a makeshift weapon—
“Amber?” she said in wonderment, before realizing that her voice wouldn’t make it through the glass.
Amber was barely clinging with one hand to a very small ledge which overhung each window in the tower, and with her other hand she was frantically knocking, her eyes trained on Penny.
Penny leapt forward, undoing the latch on the window beside Amber, and threw it open, trying to make any sense of all of what was happening. There was no way for anyone to scale the tower without the assistance of a Semblance or sophisticated climbing materials, and Amber did not appear to have either of those as she swung inside with a terrifying precariousness and pushed back the hood of her rain-soaked cloak.
Another reason why this was so confusing! Temperatures were above the freezing point of water now, and thanks to the rainstorm currently happening, the outside of Penny’s tower was soaking wet! How was Amber even able to find a grip in those conditions?
“How did you do that?” She made no effort to hide her amazement.
“Not important,” Amber said, shaking off raindrops. She was breathing heavily, her heart rate noticeably elevated, but she did not seem to be in distress, either. In fact, her smile was the widest Penny had ever seen on her.
“Sorry for the scare. But I really needed to find you, and this tower was the only one with lights on, and it looked like where you’d live, and I was right!”
It was then that Penny noticed all of Amber’s clothes were dry, despite the fact that they had been soaking wet ten seconds ago. Even her cloak and the full satchel she’d slung over one shoulder.
“Is something wrong?” She seemed to be physically okay—and she was maintaining a perfectly reasonable body temperature in four-degrees-Celsius rain with, again, no apparent explanation for how.
Amber’s smile only grew as she bounced from foot to foot, bursting with an entirely new kind of energy. “I’m leaving, Penny. I’m going home.”
“Oh!” And then, because she would only think of one reason why Amber would be so determined to find her at this hour—“Right now?”
“Yup! And you’re the only one I’m telling, Penny. I’m not coming back, and no one’s making me come back! I’m choosing the life I want, not the life I had shoved onto my shoulders.” She reached out, putting a hand on each of Penny’s shoulders, her voice turning breathless. “I’m writing my own story now. Not someone else’s.”
“I…” Within Penny, several emotions were competing for processing space and outward expression. Excitement for Amber, of course! But also… worry. And sadness. More and more sadness, actually, because Penny was realizing that Amber leaving meant she would no longer have any friends.
Before Penny could assemble more congratulatory words to hide the negativity, Amber noticed the pause. She squinted, some of the excitement disappearing from her own face, and then she must’ve realized what kind of sadness Penny was feeling, because she whispered, “Oh, Penny…” and jumped forward, wrapping her up in a hug.
Penny’s cooling fans whirred up to a speed so loud that it made her afraid Amber would notice, but there was nothing she could do to dampen the sounds because this was her first hug. She’d never hugged anyone at Beacon before, not even Ozpin, and now…
Penny had done so much work in the last year to modify and upgrade and refine and focus her touch sensors, and even without all the other incredible moments she’d had with her new sense of touch, this single moment alone made all of the work and research and trial and error and testing and designing and redesigning and repairs worth it. So very worth it, ten times over.
Soft. Warm. Comforting. Caring. Relaxing. Warm. Splendid. Gentle. Strong. Wonderful. All of these were words that her language processors were tossing up to describe the sensations of a hug. How was this real? How did organic beings keep themselves from just hugging other people all the time?! How was Penny supposed to resist doing this all the time now that she knew this was what they felt like through her upgraded sensors?!
“You know…” Amber said slowly, still hugging Penny. “You can come with me. You don’t have to be stuck here. I’d introduce you to all my friends. My parents would definitely welcome you. We could spend the rest of our lives writing our own stories together!”
The rain drummed loudly, rhythmically against the windows and roof, and Penny struggled to find words to explain why she could not answer that question with a yes. She pulled back, glancing over her shoulder at her workshop below, arrayed beneath the balcony which had been turned into Penny’s bedroom. “I cannot. I have… logistical reasons which necessitate that I stay at Beacon Academy.”
“Oh. Okay…” Disappointment flashed across Amber’s face, but it was rapidly replaced by curiosity as her gaze wandered to the things behind Penny, to the stairs which led down to the rest of the workshop. To the things she had not yet noticed, which she had never been given a chance to see.
Amber took a step closer so that the balcony’s railing no longer obstructed her view, and let out a little noise of surprise as she took in the sight of machinery and tools.
“I am truly sorry, but my life is not easily picked up and moved elsewhere. It is an issue of access for me. I have things here which I cannot access anywhere else.” Penny was quite sure Amber could deduce exactly what Penny’s secret was if she particularly cared to, but Penny also did not make any move to stop her from seeing the workshop below.
However, immediately after Penny said that, Amber whirled around, putting her back to the view of the workshop, and then she tossed up her hood so that her field of vision was only what was straight ahead.
“We don’t ask about each other’s secrets, and I’m keeping it that way,” she said firmly, taking a step towards the window. “It’s okay, Penny. I’ll… I’ll try not to worry about you. I always got the feeling that Beacon made you way happier than it’s ever made me.”
“Should I worry about you?” Penny said, genuinely unsure. “I do not know how long your journey is, or how dangerous it will be, or where you are going, or what enemies you may face, or—”
And suddenly, Amber was hugging her again.
“Don’t worry one bit! Whatever happens to me, at least it’ll happen on my own terms. I’m not scared! I’m excited! I’m going to live my happily ever after!”
“Understood.” This time, Penny remembered that a hug usually involved the other person using their arms. And that only increased every previous adjective which she’d previously applied to hugging. This was rapidly becoming her number-one favorite thing about existence, giving flying a serious challenge for that top spot.
“Thank you for being my first friend ever!” she said, constructing a tone which she hoped would convey the immense gratitude and joy that she was feeling right now. “I hope that we will see each other again someday, and that we will both be in the middle of writing very long and very exciting and very happy stories of our lives.”
“Same here.” Amber pulled back with extreme reluctance, and patted the bulky outline of something jammed into a hip pocket. After a moment’s analysis, Penny recognized it as Amber’s leather-bound notebook.
“I’ll keep on writing, and writing, and…” Amber took a step towards the window which she’d entered through, putting a hand on the sill. “Whatever you decide to do, Penny, whatever you decide to write, I know it’ll be one of the greatest stories ever told.”
A gust of wind blew into the room, blowing back Amber’s hood and setting her cape aflutter. She hopped up onto the sill so that she was crouching on it now, perched over a very long drop to the ground through sheets of freezing rain. But even with such a foreboding path ahead, Amber was smiling so brightly as she looked down at the ground, and then back at Penny one last time.
“...It’s okay if you want to watch me leave, if you want to see my secret.”
“Nope!” Penny said immediately, not even a little tempted by the offer. She closed her eyes, covered them with her hands for good measure, and set about disabling all sensors which might give her clues as to how exactly Amber was doing this. All she left active was her hearing. “All set!”
There was a short pause, and then Amber spoke in a voice thick and wild and hopeful.
“Goodbye, Penny. I’ll try to find you again. I might even come back to Beacon someday. But even if I don’t see you again, I’ll never forget you.”
Notes:
God, before writing this chapter I had no idea how MUCH I would care about Amber by the time it was done. Given that she has no canon dialogue, there was a lot of work involved in forming actual characterization for her. I put my thought processes for her character in this dropdown because there’s a lot I have to say; you can click to read it if you want to!
When I started thinking about Amber, there was one thing I kept wondering. Why was the Fall Maiden, one of the most important pieces in Ozpin’s plans, traveling alone through a remote area while relatively untrained? Qrow was nearby, but the fact that it took so long for him to come to her aid means he was only in the general area. For all his devil-may-care tendencies, he’s not the sort of person to shirk his actual duty to Ozpin. Especially not when his duty is as vital as protecting the Fall Maiden.
Maybe Qrow was scouting ahead to make sure the path was safe to travel, but… in that case, wouldn’t Amber have been staying put while waiting for him to get back? She was clearly on the move when Cinder, Emerald, and Mercury ambushed her.
Well, the way I saw it, Qrow intervened like he was trying to catch up to her and couldn’t possibly have arrived a moment sooner. Which would mean, Amber wasn’t actually supposed to be out there alone.
And that was when I thought, “Oh. What if Amber was trying to run away?”
It tracks with what we know about her being inexperienced before she was attacked—if she was still new to being a Maiden and having the magic, then she very possibly could’ve had trouble adjusting to an unfamiliar world. And if Amber was inexperienced, that probably meant the Maiden power came to her randomly. Which means she had no warning that any of this would happen to her.
Honestly, I don’t think we talk enough about how horrifying it would be to randomly inherit the Maiden powers. You’re suddenly thrown into this ancient secret war between two immortals, and you’ll never be able to escape it because both sides badly want the magic you suddenly woke up with one day, and you’re going to have this magic until you die. Which means the only real escape from this new life you didn’t ask for would be death.
But at the same time, there is a very clear distinction between the way Amber ran away, and the way that the previous Spring Maiden before Raven ran away. The previous Spring Maiden ran away out of fear, whereas I would call what Amber did an escape, where fear may have been a contributing factor but it wasn’t the main cause.
My reasoning for that: Amber doesn’t look on-edge or paranoid when we see her moments before the ambush in the show. She stops in the middle of her journey to help out a kid in the road who seems hurt. That doesn’t seem like the action of a girl who’s motivated primarily by being scared out of her mind.
So what would be the main thing to motivate her escape, if not fear? Well, that ventures beyond the shadows of her character thrown by canon, but I can make some general guesses as to what would motivate anyone in a situation like this. Desire. Longing. Wanting to be free in the same way that Penny did when she escaped Atlas. It was incredibly satisfying to realize I could make Amber’s and Penny’s situations parallel each other.
Most of the fine details about Amber’s character in this chapter were made up whole-cloth by myself, but there were some aspects which I based on what could be observed in canon. There’s the chess match between her and Penny, when Amber says, “When I look at a board, I don’t see grand strategy. I just see the things right in front of me. The next move,” that was extrapolated from her fight against Cinder and Emerald—specifically the moment when Emerald is down and Amber immediately goes to kill her before doing anything else, without checking to see where Cinder and Mercury might be—because Emerald was the one who attacked Amber first and therefore in Amber’s mind she is the target that needs to be taken down first, and when she has the chance Amber goes for the move that’s right in front of her without considering what else might be happening on the battlefield.
And then—this one might be just conjecture or reading too much into something—Amber just looks so sad while she’s in that coma. And I couldn’t help but wonder if there was something deeper that’d rooted that sadness in her expression as she sank into unconsciousness. Maybe it was the realization that as long as she was the Fall Maiden, she could never truly escape the world she’d been forced into.
But of course, Amber as she is in this chapter doesn’t know that. She doesn’t know what’s ahead for her. She just knows she’s doing like Penny suggested, breaking the boundaries of her story.
Next week, Chapter 60: Iron Maiden
Chapter 60: Iron Maiden
Notes:
Content warnings for this chapter (click this text to reveal):
Death, discussions of violation of bodily autonomy, bigotry
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Present day
The headmaster’s office was as silent as a tomb, and there was one man within who wished it was a tomb.
Ozpin had kept his face buried in his hands from the moment he’d sat down behind his desk. His glasses laid askew atop a stack of papers, discarded thoughtlessly. He had not said a word since Blake Belladonna left him with the news that Penny Pallas could very well be the next Fall Maiden.
Glynda and Ironwood stood back from the desk, exchanging uneasy glances. Ironwood was still maintaining the disturbed silence which had dominated his demeanor ever since Ozpin told him the truth about Salem’s immortality, and now his unsettlement was only compounded by seeing Ozpin at the most undone Ironwood had ever seen him.
Glynda, meanwhile, was trying to unravel a tangle of behaviors she’d noticed in Ozpin, behaviors dating back long before this day, behaviors which this despair seemed to be the culmination of.
“I promised Doctor Polendina,” Ozpin said without looking up. Even muffled by his hands, the despair and self-recrimination which saturated his voice was easily audible to his two allies. “I promised him I would ensure his daughter’s safety. I promised him I would never saddle her with the weight of the world. And now… I have done the exact opposite.”
With great difficulty, he lifted his head. Although he hadn’t cried, there were deep red impressions of his fingers left in his face where he’d pressed his hands into the skin with the force of all his boiling shame.
“I am a man built from broken promises, but just this once, I thought I might be able to shield one girl from calamity. One girl who needed help perhaps more than any other girl on Remnant.”
“Headmaster,” Glynda said, finally sensing Ozpin might be receptive to some sort of reassurance. “Of all the things you blame yourself unjustly for, this might be the one you bear the least culpability for. And that is a tremendously difficult bar to clear, mind you.”
Ozpin’s pointer finger went tap-tap-tap against his desk as he shook his head. “It was my decision to train Amber to the school to better help her become acclimated to her new way of life. A way of life which she had not asked for. It was my decision to give Penny a place of refuge at Beacon. Those two decisions I cannot regret in isolation, but when combined with my third decision, the fatal error, it becomes one of the worst mistakes I have ever made—the decision to not do more to prevent a meeting between Penny and Amber.” His voice was nearly blank, and his eyes stared into the gleaming metal doors of the elevator which silently awaited a new summons.
“What else could you have done?” Glynda said. “Fall was almost killed before we found her. She needed our help, because without it half her family was murdered! And Beacon was the only place we could guarantee her safety until she’d learned enough to keep herself safe! And it wasn’t as if Penny could be sent away, either. You already anticipated this exact problem, and took every feasible precaution to keep them separate at the school. I advised you NOT to tell Amber and Penny they weren’t allowed to talk to each other in particular, because nothing makes a teenager more curious about something than being told that it is off-limits! And you were quite right to follow that advice! And—do I need to make an enumerated and annotated list of every single step you took to prevent them meeting? It will be quite long, Headmaster.”
“And it wasn’t enough,” Ozpin said. “I tried to assure Amber that she would not have to stay hidden at the school for a very long time, but I also understand exactly how she would’ve failed to believe me. And now I’ve all but placed a permanent target on Penny’s back.”
Glynda fell silent, casting about for something to blunt the knifepoint of those words. Ozpin sprang into the pause afforded to him.
“When I saw Penny, I saw a girl whose life was wreathed in extraordinary circumstance against her will. A girl who wished to live freely and happily, but was forced into a life which was anything but. A girl who tried to make a life for herself even amidst the suffocating framework that surrounded her.”
There was one sentence after that which rang through Ozpin’s head as powerfully as a just-struck gong, but he did not voice this one. He couldn’t voice it.
A girl who reminded me of myself.
“And I thought I could provide the life she wanted,” he said. “Instead, I have given her something worse than what she originally faced.” His gaze landed on Ironwood. “James, you may now mock me for my hypocrisy. I’ve forced Penny into the role of a guardian even more crushing than what her role would’ve been in your hands. And it happened in part because I made another girl feel imprisoned and objectified within my own school because of the power she wielded.”
Ironwood cleared his throat, his gaze dipping to the finely woven Mistrali carpet laid over the floor, forming a pattern of diamonds and stars. “Well, Oz, if it makes you feel any better…”
Glynda raised an eyebrow so far and so fast that it threatened to achieve escape velocity.
“I can quite confidently say even if Penny becomes a Maiden, it would still not be, ah… worse than the plans Atlas had for her. If I must use your phrasing.”
A dead silence greeted his words.
“When it became clear that Penny had identified herself as a girl, a new dimension of research was added to the PENNY Project—the possibility of creating an artificial Maiden, one whose extended lifespan would spare us the headaches that tend to accompany transfers of power. So it’s not as if you should feel any greater responsibility for this plight than I would.”
Ozpin stared at his newly defanged ally, whose turn for honesty felt like a curse at this moment, and tried to put his own scrambled mind back into working order.
“...Thank you for that, James.”
If Ozpin was about to venture down a new path of self-flagellation, Glynda cut him off before he could proceed. “Ozpin, you’re treating this as if the powers have already been stamped, sealed, and sent to Penny. Have you actually taken a deep breath and asked yourself how many dominoes have to line up for this to happen?”
“The thing about dominoes,” Ozpin said tiredly, “Is that when one falls, the rest always follow.”
He stood up with painful slowness; for the first time in his current incarnation he actually looked the part of an old man. “But all the same, if there is even a remote possibility…” He gave Glynda a decisive nod, gathering his cane and glasses, while his mug was left behind on the corner of his desk. “We must inform her of the situation. Or rather, warn her.”
With Ironwood waiting above in the office for their return, Glynda and Ozpin took a silent trip down the elevator, preparing themselves for a difficult conversation.
When they were three-quarters of the way down, Glynda turned to Ozpin, who continued to stare straight ahead at the thin line where the elevator doors met, resting both hands atop his cane.
“You see her as something like a daughter, don’t you?” she said.
Ozpin did not reply. But that was an answer in itself.
Just as Penny turned onto the hall where Ozpin’s elevator stood, she spotted the doors opening at the far end, and—
“Headmaster! Professor!” she called out, desperately hoping they had time to listen to her. Ozpin and Goodwitch came to a dead stop as soon as they saw her running towards them, and she had no idea if that was a good thing or not.
One of the many benefits of being a synthetic person: she did not have to catch her breath after what would be a long run for any organic being. She could just begin talking without delay. “I just had an extremely alarming conversation,” she said immediately after skidding to a halt in front of them. Then, instead of explaining it in her own words which might obscure her acute concern, she simply activated the link between her memory and her vocal processing unit, playing back the audio recording from memory of the entire conversation with Cinder, word-for-word and tone-for-tone to the two professors. It was quite strange to hear someone else’s voice coming out of her own mouth, but that was a minimal concern compared to accurate delivery of information.
Ozpin and Goodwitch did have time to listen to her, as it turned out. Over the course of the recording, Ozpin’s face gradually but unmistakably dropped to a level of sadness she had never seen from him before. Goodwitch’s grip on her riding crop tightened until Penny feared it might snap.
The moment Penny ended the playback, Ozpin turned to Goodwitch. “Gather the professors. Apprehend Team Crimson, but do not raise any sort of public alarm. The last thing we need right now is a panic.”
Goodwitch nodded and strode off without a word, leaving Penny alone with Ozpin.
“You are not going with her?” she said, studying the headmaster. She knew he was on the older side, but he had more skill and experience than anyone in this school.
Ozpin shook his head. “My most pressing concern actually lies with you.”
“Really?”
He looked at the elevator, and then a weight seemed to settle over his shoulders, pushing his entire posture down. “Penny, what you did just now was a very smart thing. And very brave. There have been so many others who believed words exactly like what Cinder told you. Those words were designed to prey on your worst anxieties. If you’d believed what Cinder said, I would have understood all too well. There is a degree of truth to it from a certain point of view—as there is with so many things in this world.”
Penny folded her hands together, trying to push the memories of Cinder deeper into her databanks where they could not be accessed as easily. But they remained stubbornly prevalent in her consciousness. “I am not sure if I understand?”
“I need every single one of my students to have a choice in what they do. It is more important to me than my life itself. But there are times when I fail in that endeavor.” Ozpin bowed his head. “Each and every failure has never become any less painful.”
Penny tilted her head, now more confused and a little nervous. “Headmaster?”
“There are forces which wish us all harm, and in doing so they seek to strip us of our choice. And as much as I wish I could, I fail to shield everyone from their effects. But when it is because of nothing but my own mistakes—”
He broke off, falling into a silence which frightened Penny almost as much as Cinder had.
“I’m sorry, Penny.”
She had never heard Ozpin’s voice like this. It was the kind of tone which carried a ninety-nine percent chance of crying in other individuals. But he turned towards the elevator as he raised his head a moment later, preventing Penny from seeing his eyes.
“Headmaster Ozpin?”
“Penny, even before you came to me about Cinder, I needed to speak with you. Something has gone terribly wrong, and I believe it involves you. And now I believe it involves Cinder as well.” He indicated the elevator with a sweep of his cane. “It is an intensely delicate matter. Could we talk in my office, if you’re comfortable with that?”
Penny resisted an urge to deploy her wings, and nodded. Ozpin was not a threat, she reminded herself. She would not listen to Cinder.
“What is wrong?” she said as the elevator dinged.
Ozpin was silent until they were inside and the doors had closed on them. And then, still staring straight ahead, he said, “Amber.”
Penny gasped and skipped over the first, second, third, fourth, and fifth questions most directly prompted by Ozpin saying the name of her first friend at Beacon; she went straight to the question which held the most importance to her.
“Is she alright?”
Penny wondered if Ozpin remembered she had the ability to detect his heart rate going up. She’d definitely told him about that particular sensor at least once.
At last, he looked at her, his tired eyes passing over every inch of his face. “How do you know her?” he said after a long pause, long enough that his heartbeat was normal again.
He had not answered her question.
“She was my first friend that I can remember,” Penny said.
No response.
“I met her for the first time behind a hedge. She was crying and she was lonely, and I wanted to help her, so I became her friend.”
No response.
“I believe I helped her.”
No response.
Penny was struggling to interpret what any of this silence could mean. “Was… was that wrong of me, Professor?”
For the first time ever, she wished she’d found out more of Amber’s secrets, because if she’d accidentally caused Amber harm—
“Not at all, Penny. Not in the slightest,” Ozpin said.
The elevator stopped with an incongruently cheerful ding.
“You did the only thing you could think to do.”
With that, the doors opened on Ozpin’s office. General Ironwood was there, and upon making eye contact with Penny he stood up too fast, making the chair he’d been sitting in wobble dangerously. “Ah. Ozpin, you’ve—?”
“James. I have wondered all semester if your army would ever serve any actual use in this kingdom.” Ozpin spoke those words as if he was bracing himself for something, but Penny saw nothing extreme in Ironwood’s reaction.
“And now, this is your hour.” Ozpin gave him an arch look. “It’s very likely that we’ve identified the infiltrators. Team CMSN of Haven Academy. Glynda and others are preparing to secure their room, but I highly doubt we’ll find them there.”
Ironwood’s face went as blank as the Atlesian tundra after a blizzard (Penny currently registered zero percent confidence in parsing the emotions in his facial expression), and he nodded, reaching for his scroll. “I’ll put my men on alert and enact readiness protocols. And I’ll be vastly more useful to everyone if I join them in person, instead of staying here.”
Ozpin nodded in agreement. “And, James? The tournament will go on as normal. We cannot risk the unrest in a moment as critical as this. Calling it off will cause exactly the widespread fear and unrest our enemies desire.”
Ironwood took his pistol from where it laid on Ozpin’s desk and turned it over in his hands, inspecting it closely. Abruptly, he looked up, blinking. “…How did the infiltrators get past Leonardo’s watch?”
“I don’t look forward to answering that question,” Ozpin said.
Ironwood grimaced. He pulled a new ammo clip from his jacket, swapped it into the pistol, and went to holster it—only to pause. His eyes flicked to Penny, and just for a moment, he seemed to be on the verge of saying something, his mouth opening slightly while no less than ten different emotions flashed across his expression. But then he returned his attention to his pistol, and Penny could not describe any particular emotional state except that suddenly Ironwood only seemed… dazed.
“I know there will be a day when my weapon isn’t enough,” he said. “There is nothing I can do to change that.”
Penny thought there would be more, but that was all.
Ozpin’s expression was almost as unreadable as Ironwood’s. “You brought your strength here, James. Use it.”
There were usually two chairs at the desk in Ozpin’s office, but one of them had been violently disassembled, and so Ozpin was left to stand awkwardly by his desk while Penny settled into the chair Ironwood had just vacated. Penny did wonder why Ozpin wasn’t just sitting at the still-intact chair behind his desk, but perhaps he was trying to make her feel like this was a conversation on even footing, rather than a subordinate speaking to a superior. She appreciated the sentiment.
Ozpin took off his glasses, produced a cleaning wipe from a pocket, and proceeded to fastidiously polish the lenses. “Penny. If you wouldn’t mind, could you please give me a detailed summary of how you and Amber became friends, and in which circumstances you last saw her?”
Her worry for her first friend the highest that it had been in months, Penny launched into the story. She was unsure of how much detail Ozpin wanted, but since Amber’s safety was paramount, she chose to err on the side of verbosity. She mentioned everything about their meetings that had even a fractional chance of being relevant. She spoke of how hard Amber had been crying when they first met, how she had admitted to feeling trapped and powerless and wanting to go home.
Penny spoke of forming that friendship from a place of mutual isolation. She spoke of sneaking through the courtyards with Amber in the dead of night. She spoke of finding little hiding places all around Beacon together, places where no one would interrupt them while they told each other silly stories and giggled and watched videos on their scrolls together and made snow sculptures and talked about fairytales. She spoke of playing board games with Amber in the library while the wind of a blizzard howled outside and a lamp provided the only light. She spoke of what Amber was writing, the story about a girl with magical powers that didn’t want to be there.
She spoke of Amber appearing at Penny’s window one night and announcing her intention to leave in the brightest of tones. She spoke of Amber saying goodbye to her and no one else, inviting her to come and giving her the first hug Penny could remember. She spoke of Amber promising to never forget Penny.
And by the end of her story, subconscious processes in Penny’s mind were continuously linking Amber’s story to the things Cinder had just warned her of. Penny rooted around in directories until she found the processes, and disabled them with prejudice. She refused to believe the horrible things Cinder had told her.
Even though Amber had felt trapped just like Cinder warned, and she blamed powers that she had, as if she was being treated like a weapon just like Cinder warned and Amber had escaped as if Beacon was a prison just like Cinder—
I THOUGHT I DISABLED YOU! Penny screamed internally at the subconscious process which was back again.
She did not receive a response. A quick check of command executions revealed that unfortunately, her fear responses had reactivated that process and would do so again as soon as she disabled them. And she couldn’t turn off her fear response any more than—she was going to concentrate on Ozpin and try to ignore thoughts of Cinder.
Ozpin’s head was bowed, one hand was white-knuckled around his cane, and she could see his lips moving, soundlessly forming words.
Forgive me. Forgive me. Please forgive me.
Who Ozpin was asking for forgiveness, she could not tell. But all of this was contributing to an increasing body of horrible evidence for a calamity.
“What happened to Amber, sir?” she said, folding her hands in her lap. She needed to know.
Ozpin gave her such an unambiguously sorrowful look—one hundred percent sorrow—that Penny took it as confirmation of all her worst fears.
“She… she is dead?” A violent shiver passed through her, one which she did not think she could quell even if she’d wanted to. “I… I… How did it happen? Was she in pain? Was it because of me? Was she—”
“Penny.” Ozpin’s voice, forceful and even, seized the explosion of ice-cold pain and self-recrimination tearing through Penny and brought her attention back to the present. “It is not quite accurate to say she is dead, but…” Briefly, his eyes closed. “...Would you like to see her?”
The way he said see her did not give Penny even a microgram of reassurance. She nodded, neither emotions nor logic nor any other internal system able to produce a hypothesis for what was happening. All she could do was follow the headmaster back into the elevator.
Then, instead of pushing any of the buttons, Ozpin opened a panel which Penny had assumed was for maintenance, revealing a keypad with its keys labeled in a language which did not appear anywhere in her memory. But he pressed the buttons with a practiced ease, and the elevator began to descend.
Her confusion and fear deepened in tandem with the elevator’s journey. Her altimeters were reporting that this journey should’ve stopped, but the elevator was proceeding downward to a depth that was not part of any school architecture which she knew. The floor indicator on the elevator offered no hint, as it had gone blank the moment they passed the lowermost known floor. Something about the indicator’s blankness frightened Penny. It made her feel as if they were venturing to a place which was not supposed to exist, a place which was wrong somehow.
The excitement she would normally feel at discovering a new secret in the academy’s architecture was entirely absent. The only factor which staved off outright panic was reminding herself that Professor Ozpin was bringing her to this place, and he would never bring any harm upon her. No matter what Cinder had tried to tell her.
Nevertheless, her fans were whirring so loudly she was sure he could hear them.
…Why was Amber here, for that matter? If she was gravely injured and in some sort of coma, why was she being kept in a mysterious lair underneath the academy instead of being given the best medical care possible in a hospital somewhere?
Unless… unless…
“Professor?” she said.
Clearly, Ozpin had not been expecting anything to be said, because he jerked sharply in surprise and had to take a moment to reposition his glasses before giving her a questioning look.
“Is Amber like me?”
She could only think of one reason why someone would be receiving medical attention in a secret area of Beacon, and that reason was the same reason why Penny couldn’t go to a hospital when she was hurt.
The elevator began to decelerate rapidly. Rapidly enough that her gyrometers were briefly pushed to their limits keeping her balanced.
“Not in the way you are thinking of,” Ozpin said. He hadn’t been thrown off-balance by the elevator’s sudden stop in any visible way. “She is a human.” He pushed one more button on the mysterious keypad, and the doors slid open. “But you already found the other ways in which she is like you, months ago.”
Penny put her reply on hold as she scanned their new surroundings. It was a cavernous, dimly lit… chamber? Room? Hall?
She settled on bunker and checked her radar, noting a sparse environment, with the exception of a collection of furniture and electronic devices on the far end of… Hm. Maybe it was more fitting to call this a hall. It was very long. She found herself wondering why anyone would go to all the trouble of putting whatever was down the hall there, instead of next to the elevator where it would be easier to access.
She could see a heat signature with a vaguely humanoid shape, but temperatures far below average human body levels. Was that…?
Ozpin stepped forward and tapped his cane against the wall—a light switch, Penny realized, as a series of fluorescent lights flickered on above, casting a stark light over everything. And now, with visual contact possible, she could see exactly—
“Amber!” she cried, breaking into a run.
She didn’t care that she was leaving the headmaster far behind as she sprinted down the hallway, zeroing in on the familiar face encased inside something which came unnervingly close to matching visual references to a coffin.
Penny was nearly overwhelmed by the flood of data which materialized in her processors as she stopped before the strange container. Amber was so pale, and even if she was unconscious, she looked so horribly sad, as if she’d been thrust back into that despairing moment where Penny had first met her. She detected a heart rate nearly too low for sustained human survival, and the same from blood pressure and body temperature, and… and…
“She’s dying,” she said as Ozpin caught up to her. “What… what happened?”
That scar sprawled across her face… it had the hallmarks of a burn, but it almost appeared like a splatter with how it flowed from her left eye to her forehead and down her cheek, and Penny could only imagine it being received through an unimaginably painful experience. She searched desperately for any kind of biological marker which could offer any sort of optimism about Amber’s condition, but there was nothing. Just a girl, alone, her life fading away underground.
Penny appended her memory designation for this place to tomb.
“Who would do this to her?” She was rapidly scrolling back through all previous conversations with Amber, looking for a hint for—
Logic placed two conclusions before her to consider.
No. One conclusion. Penny was ignoring the other conclusion. She was going to throw out the other conclusion immediately. The only reasonable, rational, logical conclusion stemmed from this information: Amber had told Penny that she was in hiding at Beacon for her own safety.
Deduction: In leaving to seek out her own life, Amber removed herself from Beacon’s safety.
Deduction: Amber’s secret was one that people would have killed for, like Penny’s.
Deduction: Someone had tried to kill Amber sometime after she escaped.
Deduction: Amber would still be unharmed if she had never left Beacon.
Deduction: Amber had left Beacon because of Penny’s encouragement.
Conclusion: Penny was the reason why Amber was hurt.
EMOTIONAL PROCESSING DEACTIVATED.
The reason why Amber was hurt was the malicious intentions of whoever had attacked her. Penny had only—
Somehow, Emotions wrested back control from Logic to reactivate emotional processing as Penny insisted, but Amber never would’ve been in danger from anyone if I hadn’t urged her to leave!
She forced her thoughts from both sides to stop, because, never mind that, Amber…
She took a step closer and placed a hand against the glass. It felt so cold. Too cold for organic life.
Ozpin approached from behind, coming to a stop a respectful distance away.
“How long has she been here?” Penny asked. She was almost afraid of the answer.
In the reflection of the glass, she saw him bowing his head. “Since before the start of the academic year.”
“Oh, Amber…” The wave of immense guilt which swept through Penny was so piercing it felt as if it would shake apart her circuits.
All those times Penny had hoped she’d see Amber amongst the students of Beacon or another academy… all those times she’d wondered if Amber was alright… all those times she’d wondered if Amber was happy, if she was seeing her family and friends again, if she was free…
She’d been right underneath Penny, alone and dying and trapped in the place she’d wanted so badly to leave.
“Amber was attacked by unsavory individuals who aimed to steal the power which she wielded, and would take it at any cost,” Ozpin said. “I am now quite sure one of the aggressors was Cinder Fall, and possibly the rest of her team.”
Penny remembered the hunger that had raged in Cinder’s face when they’d spoken in the memorial garden, and it was very simple to envision that hunger being so strong that Cinder would do anything to satisfy it. Such as taking whatever Amber had that she wanted.
The longer Penny looked at Amber’s scars, the less sense they made. In some places, they didn’t appear like splatters, but rather like something long and stringy had attached itself to Amber’s face and burned everything it touched. But what could do that? A spiderweb made of acid?
“Amber really was here to keep her safe? Just like how I came to Beacon to be safe from the people who wanted to… use me?”
“Yes.”
Penny hoped the answer would bring relief for the anxiety that had been pressurizing inside her ever since talking to Cinder, but nothing changed. If anything, it was getting worse. Asking her how she could trust anything Ozpin had said when he’d kept Amber at his school for so long without telling her—
“How did you find out we were friends?” Her gaze remained fixed on Amber even as she steered the conversation towards topics which she desperately hoped would give satisfying answers.
She saw Ozpin’s reflection lift his bowed head.
“It’s at this point I would usually offer a seat, but…” Ozpin gestured at the noticeable lack of seats in their surroundings. “Would you prefer to go back—”
“No,” Penny said, and sat down on the floor, crossing her legs and folding her hands in her lap. “I will sit here.” She did not want to leave Amber. Even if Amber could not feel anything or see anything or perceive anything right now, it… it just felt wrong to leave her alone so soon after finding her. Even if Ozpin’s office was a vastly more comfortable place than this tomb.
After several moments of silently watching her, Ozpin sat down. It was a strange sight, seeing the headmaster sitting with Penny like a teenager. They both sat in front of Amber’s stasis pod, but there was enough space between Penny and Ozpin that it felt as if Amber was lying between them.
“I will have to be told Amber’s secret, won’t I?”
Ozpin nodded. “As much as I regret it, and as much as I know you deplore breaking others’ trust, I must tell you the truth about her. Because now her secret may very well concern you.”
“I understand.” Penny looked up at Amber. From this angle, she could almost pretend her first friend was just asleep, if she ignored what ninety-five percent of her sensory suite was telling her.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered again.
If you ever wake up, I’ll tell you my secret in return.
Ozpin closed his eyes for one, two, three seconds and then opened them to stare directly into Penny’s photoreceptors, taking a slow breath.
“I may be able to guess your favorite fairytale.”
Penny blinked, and decided that her prediction algorithms were best left dormant for this conversation, because exactly zero of her predicted outcomes considered the possibility of that as an opening statement.
“The Blacksmith And The Robot?” Ozpin said, steepling his hands.
Well, it was an understandable guess, even if it was wrong. “I enjoy that one immensely!” Penny said with a nod. It was her second favorite, in fact. Partly because of how much she liked it, and partly because it was Ruby’s favorite. “However, my favorite is The Girl Who Turned To Stone.”
Ozpin went still. His index fingers, which had been slowly tapping against one another, stopped in midair. His heart stuttered so blatantly in Penny’s sensors that she wondered if she should prepare for a defibrillation scenario. If there was such an emergency, she was theoretically capable of generating the electrical currents needed to deliver the shocks necessary to resume electro-cardiac rhythms, although she had never actually tested that protocol.
“I do know of that fairytale, yes,” he said, and his greatly strained tone did nothing to assuage Penny’s concerns about his cardiac health. “Quite an… interesting one.”
“I always feel very happy for the witch when I read it,” Penny said. “It wasn’t too late for her to start living for herself, even if she had to start all over again. Just like how I had to start all over again by coming here and leaving behind everything in my old life.”
She looked up at Amber again, wondering if she’d ever read that fairytale. If Amber had, what had she thought of the witch’s journey, when she herself wanted nothing more than to go back to an old life?
“...In all honesty, I never thought to compare that story to you, but when you describe it in those terms, I can see how you’d feel a connection with the witch,” Ozpin said. He wasn’t looking at Amber or Penny, but at the ground just in front of her.
“I hope I do not sound rude, but may I ask why we are talking about fairytales?” Penny said. Naturally, she was thinking of the conversations she’d once had with Amber about fairytales, but she could not see how Ozpin would know about that topic, unless Amber had said similar things to him…
“Well, in bringing up fairytales, I wanted to bring up one in particular.” Ozpin lifted his gaze. “The Story Of The Seasons—do you know it?”
Penny nodded. She had read it, although she hadn’t found it distinctively interesting. Enjoyable, yes, but there wasn’t anything in it which she felt a strong connection to like with her favorite, or Ruby’s favorite. Still, since it seemed important to Ozpin, she chose not to say that. “It is a very sweet story. I’m glad that the old man could find a new perspective on life. It’s a little like The Girl Who Turned To Stone in that way, isn’t it? Although, the witch didn’t have four friends to help her…”
“I wish she had,” Ozpin said. “I wish she had, Penny.”
Penny did her best to set her face in neutrality and not show how highly unsettled she was by the way Ozpin’s voice had cracked halfway through his second sentence. It sounded… frail.
“I wish I knew what happened to the girls after they received the powers, though,” she added, hoping to steer the conversation to less distressing ground. “The maidens promise to use their powers to do good all over the world, and the story ends with them going forth, but there is no hint at what they actually did beyond that. I know that is not the objective of the story, which is to teach about how hope can be rediscovered through the help of others, but… if I were to write a fairytale myself, I think I would write about the maidens’ future adventures.”
She stopped there, considering Ozpin’s facial expression and the way he was staring at her in a way that made her wonder if he was actually looking at her at all, or frozen in thought. Either way, she could identify the emotions in his face with a rare certainty. Or rather, the one emotion. One hundred percent sorrow.
“What if I could tell you exactly what happened to the Maidens after that tale ended?” Ozpin said.
Penny stared at him. Her logic core twisted in on itself, its abject confusion almost manifesting as physical pain somewhere in her chest. She chose the words of her reply carefully.
“I may be misunderstanding, but you seem to be speaking of the Story Of The Seasons as if it is a historical event and not a fictional fable?”
Ozpin’s gaze did not waver. “That’s because it is a historical event.”
All of Penny’s processors crashed. For an interminable moment, all she could do was stare at Ozpin, open-mouthed, unable to consider the veracity of such a claim or ask him if he was somehow joking, or…
Ozpin did not joke. At least, not like this. Which could only mean one thing.
“You are not joking,” she said finally.
Penny Pallas was not one to consider things impossible. After all, many others in the world would consider the existence of a synthetic girl constructed entirely from metal with Aura and a soul and a Semblance to be impossible. And yet, here she was, mechanical and real with an Aura generator inside her which thrummed with so much undeniable life. Perhaps a lot of people would feel different about the impossibility of things if they knew about the existence of Penny Pallas.
But now she was struggling with her own conception of something as impossible. It was impossible for a fairytale like the Story Of The Seasons to actually be real, because that necessitated the existence of so many other things which Penny thought were impossible, but…
“The story of the Maidens is no more a legend than the story of my own life,” Ozpin said. He took a slow sip of his coffee. “The four Maidens persist in the world to this day, wielding something which can only be called magic.”
Magic.
If Penny could exist, why couldn’t something as impossible as magic? Some of her friends might describe her as magic right now, despite the fact that she was just very, very advanced science. Although, extraordinarily advanced science could seem magic, couldn’t it? Maybe the robot in The Blacksmith And The Robot had actually been made just the same way Penny was, but no one else around the robot had realized!
…Actually, if the Maidens were real, did that mean maybe other fairytales were true? Like the robot and her blacksmith, or the witch and her stone body, or—or—or—
All of those things were questions which she could find answers for later. Right now, the priority was finding answers about all of… this.
“The Maidens are… still alive?” she asked. That, of course, raised questions about the existence of immortality, or maybe the Maidens were synthetic girls with no biologically constrained lifespan—
“Not exactly,” Ozpin said, derailing Penny’s thoughts just as they started to run away. “The original four Maidens, the girls who gave new hope to a bitter old man, lived and died thousands of years ago. But their magic persists. No Maiden’s soul is immortal, but the magic of the seasons is passed down through the generations from successor to successor, never fading. At any time, there are four of them alive somewhere on this planet. No more, no less.”
All Penny could do was nod in acknowledgement. The facts being given to her were so linguistically simple, and yet integrating these things into her understanding of the world left her with the feeling that she was replacing every wire in her body.
“Each Maiden wields the power of a season. Winter. Spring. Summer. Fall.” As Ozpin spoke that final word, he raised his head and turned his upper body slightly so that he was looking at the metal pod with a silent girl beside and between them. “You have already had the honor of meeting the current Fall Maiden.”
Oh.
Penny knew Amber’s secret.
One conversation was all it took to bring down a veil which she and Amber had taken such painstaking steps to keep up. Amber was magic. Maybe Penny wasn’t magic in the same way as her, but Amber was an impossible-possible girl just like Penny was.
She knew Amber’s secret, and Amber didn’t know she knew. That felt… shameful. Shameful in a way which hurt somewhere deep in the servos which governed the movement of her torso. As if she couldn’t move without causing herself intense pain.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered to Amber again. “I’ll keep your secret safe now that I know it.”
“The Maidens’ powers are immense,” Ozpin went on after a pause. “They are not limited by the capabilities of Aura or Semblance. A Maiden at full power can annihilate an entire army with a storm of knife-sharp ice shards that shred their targets, or a wall of fire which incinerates everything in its path. They can summon a cyclone which can throw an airship out of the sky as if it is a child’s toy. They can cast down a flood which sweeps away an entire village. There are few on Remnant who can outright match the strength of a fully realized Maiden.”
Penny thought of Amber using magic to keep her hot cocoa warm, or to stave off the dead-of-winter cold, or to cover their tracks, or to fly up to Penny’s tower to say goodbye, and she could not construct even a theoretical image of Amber using that same magic to level a village.
“As you might imagine, these powers would be coveted by anyone who knew of their existence. Certain people may even be willing to go to unimaginable lengths to take these powers for themselves.”
“...In the same way that people wanted to use me for how strong I am?” Penny said.
Ozpin nodded.
Penny looked up at Amber again, and suddenly the horrific injuries made so much more sense. Someone had wanted the power to break the world, and they didn’t care what happened to her. But surely Amber could’ve just given up the powers without being harmed…?
“The Maiden powers are passed to a successor only upon death,” Ozpin said, as if sensing the silent question. “There is no other way in which the powers can be transferred.”
Penny gasped for the second time in an hour, as Amber’s acute feelings of powerlessness suddenly came into much sharper focus. Of course she would feel as if there was no escape… But before she could fully parse the ramifications, Ozpin appended his words.
“Until now.”
He shifted, leaning forward and placing his mug by his side, a grave intensity filling his eyes. “When Amber came under assault, Cinder was not merely intent on killing her. Her aims were to take those powers without relying on death as the vehicle—she attempted use her own kind of twisted magic to rip away the power which was deeply intertwined with Amber’s soul.”
A shiver ran through Penny’s body. Maybe that had just as much to do with why Amber was dying as her physical injuries did.
“However, we do not actually know for sure how successful the attempt to steal Amber’s powers were. Qrow—an ally of mine who you will know better as Yang’s uncle—was the one who tracked down Amber and rescued her from her attackers, interrupting them just as they were ripping away the Fall Maiden’s magic. But we do not know which stage of the theft Qrow interrupted. When he intervened, he found Amber on the ground, grievously injured and already comatose. The aggressors fled before he could ascertain if any of them had actually taken Fall’s powers. Thus, the only ones who can definitively answer this question are… the attackers, or Amber.”
Another pause to sip his coffee. “That leaves us with three potential scenarios. One, the attackers were not able to take anything, and Amber even in this state remains in full possession of the full Maiden powers. Two, the attackers stole only part of the powers, separating the magic of one Maiden between two people for the first time in all history. Three, the attackers were entirely successful, and what Qrow came upon was the aftermath of a done deed.”
Penny wondered, had the attackers been planning to let Amber live if they successfully took her magic?
“It is the first two possibilities which are relevant to you.”
“Me…?” Penny indicated herself even though there was no one else who Ozpin could be referring to. It was jarring, to be reminded that there was some way which she fit into this tragedy, even beyond knowing that she was a dying girl’s last friend and the reason why she was dying at all.
“There are particular rules about how the Maiden powers are naturally transferred,” Ozpin said. “They can only be passed onto young women. Sometimes, that young woman is randomly chosen. However, if there is a particular young woman who is present in a Maiden’s last thoughts before her death… then the powers always transfer to whichever young woman was in those final thoughts.”
Oh.
Despite the fact that neither Penny nor Amber had moved in several minutes, Amber’s radar signature kept growing larger and larger in Penny’s sensors, pinging faster and faster as if she was an asteroid on an irreversible collision course with Penny.
“Goodbye, Penny. I’ll try to see you again, but even if I can’t, I’ll never forget you.”
Penny replayed those last words from Amber over and over again, as an overwhelming conclusion settled over her processors.
“We do not know for sure who or what was in Amber’s final thoughts,” Ozpin said, his voice falling lower and lower. “It’s quite possible that her last thoughts were of her attacker, as can be the case when a Maiden is slain. But also… considering the regard and importance which Amber clearly held you in, and her parting words to you… It would be foolish of me to discount the other possibility.”
Her internal cooling fans speeding up, Penny suddenly felt a desperate urge to hide, even though she didn’t know where she would hide or even who she’d be hiding from.
“Penny, it is entirely possible the next Fall Maiden could be you.”
Cinder’s words were echoing in internal memory, repeating over and over again relentlessly.
“He is shaping you into his weapon, pushing you towards his agenda and his desires.”
Why did all the horrible things Cinder had said keep coming true in the most terrifying ways?! Why had she tried to kill Amber and then tried to help Penny?! What was different between her and Amber? Why did Cinder deem Penny worthy of luring away but not Penny’s friend? Why? Why?
Ozpin was crying.
Penny had never seen the headmaster cry before, but there was no other way to describe the sudden quivering glimmers appearing in the corners of his eyes. The sight terrified her.
“I am so sorry, Penny,” Ozpin whispered, in a broken tone that was just as new and disconcerting as his tears. “I promised your father that I would never let anything like this happen to you, after you had already escaped such crushing burdens, and… I’ve failed. Through no fault but my own.”
Penny barely acknowledged the mention of her father, jumping instead to something which was somehow more pressing. “But… there is still a chance I may not be the Fall Maiden, isn’t there?”
“Yes. Perhaps Amber’s powers were completely stolen, and when she dies there will be nothing which she can give to you even if you are last in her thoughts. Perhaps the Maiden powers are split between Amber and her attacker, and when she dies her part of the powers will reunite with the other part in the attacker, regardless of who was in Amber’s last thoughts. Perhaps someone else entirely was in her thoughts. However, I learned long ago that in this world, I should always expect the worst, and nothing less.”
Penny could not assemble any rebuttal which felt adequate.
“If I do become the next Fall Maiden…” She tried to visualize it. An impossible girl in two ways. Mechanical and magical. But all she could think of was that she could already fly, and she could already keep herself warm in any temperature, and she was already hunted by unknown enemies who wanted her strength. Would it put her in any more danger? Would it— “Would… Would I still be myself?”
What would magical powers do to her? Would they change her? Would they make her into something she wasn’t? Would they change her thoughts? Would she become like Amber? Would she take on Amber’s memories and thoughts and feelings? Would she take on the memories and thoughts and feelings of every girl who had ever been the Fall Maiden?
“Yes,” Ozpin said, the sudden intensity in his tone startling Penny. “That at least, I can assure you of. You do not become the Maiden. The power only become a part of you, in much the same way that your Semblance is an aspect of you. The Maiden powers are an extension of you; they do not replace you. That, I can promise, Penny.”
“You can’t help me. No one can.”
“No. No choice. This is my life now…”
“It’s a story about a girl who woke up with world-breaking magical powers that she didn’t ask for and couldn’t get rid of and she’s going to have to do this until she dies, so she lives unfortunately ever after.”
Penny thought of Amber’s sullen words, and tried to reconcile them with what Ozpin was saying to her. She believed Ozpin was telling the truth. She also believed Amber was telling the truth. She did not know what those conflicting truths would mean for her if she became the Fall Maiden. She did not know what those conflicting truths meant about Cinder.
“I fear that there could not have been a worse time to share this news, so soon after what Cinder said to you,” Ozpin said. “But I had no idea of your connection to Amber until today. It was impossible for me to tell you any sooner.”
Penny was replaying Cinder’s words in her memory. She wondered, if Cinder had tried telling this to Amber instead of her… Would Amber have listened, and trusted Cinder, and joined forces with her? Maybe she would’ve. Maybe Amber would’ve done anything for what felt like a chance to live on her own terms. Maybe Penny could understand that all too well. She had erased her own memory for a similar reason, after all.
“I would like to go back upstairs, please,” she said, rising to her feet. She was scared of staying here any longer, for reasons she could not explain. Even though the tomb was expansive, it felt catastrophically small. Much too small for her, or Amber.
Penny placed a palm on the glass above Amber’s face again, and closed her eyes as if she could somehow replace the image before her with an image from her memory of Amber awake and happy and puffing out little breaths of vapor into the cold winter air as she talked about writing stories.
“Did Amber at least get to see her home again?” she asked.
“I’m afraid not,” Ozpin said. “She never reached it.”
Penny dearly hoped that in their time as friends, she’d been able to give Amber even just a little bit of the sensation of Beacon being a home. If she had caused Amber to feel even just a small fraction of how much Beacon felt like home for Penny, then that would make everything about this feel far less sad.
She would accept any reduction in sadness she could find, however small. In all of the ever afters that a story could have, it felt like Amber’s was the most heartbreaking.
When they returned to Ozpin’s office, Goodwitch was waiting for them by his desk, studying a holographic security map of the campus being projected from the desk while speaking rapidly into her scroll. Ozpin gave her a questioning look as soon as he realized she was there, but Goodwitch shook her head without pausing her search.
“No trace of Team Crimson.”
Ozpin sighed. “I expected as much.”
“And did you…?” She indicated Penny with a jerk of her head.
Ozpin nodded once, which was enough of an answer for Glynda to cast a sad look at Penny without saying anything else.
Penny took two short steps into the office and stopped. “What happens now?”
“Nothing, I dearly hope,” Ozpin said. “I will not bring you any further into this web of secrets unless my hand is forced, and it has not yet been forced. All which I have told you already… was quite against my will, but I had to. If I didn’t warn you of what might happen and then it came to pass, I would never be able to forgive myself.” He took his usual seat behind his desk, clasped his hands together, and fixed a look on Penny. “In all honesty, there is no reason for me to keep you here any longer. I’ve done all that I need to do, and all I ask is that you keep what you’ve learned to yourself. This is a secret which cannot be knowledge beyond a necessary few guardians, as Amber’s current state testifies to.”
Penny understood. She was secret, too, for the same reasons. Even if she wanted someday for everyone to know her truth. If only she could tell Amber the truth…
Well. There was one way she might be able to do that still. Her Semblance.
What would happen if she used Ghost on Amber? Would they be able to establish some sort of communication? Would Penny be able to access her memories and ascertain what exactly was in her final thoughts, what exactly the state of the Maiden powers was?
But just as quickly as the idea occurred to her, she dismissed it. No. No. She could not violate Amber’s autonomy like that. Amber was unconscious; she could not give Penny consent to enter. And Penny would not violate a boundary like that, not when she was already the reason why Amber was dying—she’d hurt Amber too much already! And Penny had made a promise to herself that she would never use her Semblance to enter someone’s body or mind without their consent. That… that was a promise which she would keep, come hell or high water.
She’d learned hell or high water from Amber, a phrase from the lexicon of her hometown, something left over from an older time, and Penny liked the sound of it. It felt appropriately grim and determined for this moment and this promise.
Especially now with the memory of that virus trying to slip its way inside her in the CCT perhaps burned into Penny’s circuits forever. She would hold ever-fiercer to that promise, and not even hell or high water would break it. Loss of control was not an experience she would wish on anyone. Not even… not even on the people who had done this to Amber.
The virus…
If Penny became a Maiden… would Cinder or others try even harder to create a virus which would slither inside her and take her over from the inside out and leave her trapped in a shell of herself unable to do anything but watch as her own hands did things she would never do herself and—
If she became a Maiden, she would never be able to stop being afraid.
“I have two questions,” she blurted out, before hastily adding, “But the second question may lead to more, if that is alright?”
“Please.”
From the moment when Ozpin had first said the word magic, Penny had thought of the only other girl she knew besides Amber with something which might be called magic. The girl who was already carrying so much on her shoulders, in exactly the way that Amber had confessed to not being able to do. “Is… is Ruby a Maiden?”
“No. She is magic, but a different kind.” Ozpin began to trace a finger around the rim of his mug, his gaze landing somewhere faraway. “A magic which is even older than the Maidens, if you can believe that.”
Penny nodded, filing that information away. The short answer indicated he wouldn’t be offering any more clarification on that, so she moved to her second question.
“Are you the old man who the first Maidens helped?”
Ozpin’s finger stopped its circles around his mug. Goodwitch looked up from her scroll, her eyes uncharacteristically wide. The wind outside buffeted the tower’s sides.
“And what makes you ask that?” Ozpin said finally, putting a suspiciously long pause between parts of his sentence.
The list of quotations and incidents recorded in Penny’s memory which pointed towards this conclusion was perhaps long enough to require a multimedia presentation if she were to answer Ozpin’s question with complete honesty, so she settled for explicating one piece of evidence for her hypothesis which Ozpin was likely to remember telling her.
“The night after initiation, you told me, ‘I’ve broken more promises than anyone else on this planet,’ and I always thought that was a strange thing to say given how trustworthy you are. But… you were not being facetious, were you?”
Ozpin looked at Goodwitch. Goodwitch looked at Ozpin. Ozpin looked back to Penny.
“I suppose I should have expected this,” he said, before nodding. “Yes, I am, but I would especially appreciate if that knowledge—”
“You are magic. The Maidens come from your magic,” Penny said.
“…Yes.”
This was not a deduction running through fear. This was a deduction running through her logic core. Which meant that this time, her memory of Cinder’s growl felt more like a warning than a lie.
“Why can’t you stop the magic?” Penny asked.
Ozpin paled rapidly. “Pardon?”
“It is your magic,” Penny said. “You gave it to the Maidens. Why can you not take it back from them? Why could you not take it back from Amber when she so clearly did not want it?”
Ozpin closed his eyes, both of his hands tightening around his mug to a worrying degree. “Penny, it… it’s not that simple.”
That answer only made Penny more alarmed. “It’s MAGIC! Why can’t you use more magic to undo it?”
“I can’t. I can’t undo it with anything, no matter how much I wish I could.”
“How? I don’t understand,” Penny said. “Why would you make something you can’t undo? Why would you make it random? Why would you make something that Amber never asked for? How many of the Maidens asked for these powers? Have any of them? I did not ask for this! I don’t—I don’t want to be used! I don’t want to be turned into someone’s weapon! Why?”
Penny’s back was flat against the elevator doors by now, and was filled with the overwhelming urge to escape, the exact same urge she’d felt when fleeing Cinder. She was scared of Cinder. She was scared of being a Maiden. She was scared of Ozpin. She was scared of everything! What was going on? What state of affairs in the world could possibly justify this?
“Why are you letting it happen to me?” Penny said. “I thought that I would be safe here!”
She had never seen the headmaster look so acutely despairing, and somehow that only made her even more scared. Why was he scared? Did he have any control over this at all? Did anyone control anything?
“Penny—”
Thud.
Everyone in the office jumped as the sound of something heavy impacting the window took them by surprise—even Penny. After several seconds of scanning wildly, she found the source of the noise—a very dazed-looking crow flitting around outside, having just slammed into the window. Although Penny was wondering how it was still flying after such a heavy impact—
Thud.
Penny blinked. Was the crow… actively trying to slam itself into the window? She watched it circle away in a very unsteady flight path, take aim at the window again, and throw itself against the glass at full speed again.
“It appears to be sick,” she said worriedly as the loudest thud yet resonated through the office and the crow immediately began shakily winding up for another collision. For a moment, her fear was sidelined to a lower priority as she identified an animal that clearly needed help.
For some reason, Ozpin and Goodwitch both appeared irritated, which Penny thought was a rude attitude to take towards a poor sick bird. Well, if they weren’t going to do anything, then she would!
She marched forward, flung open the window just before the crow would’ve crashed into it once again, and caught the startled bird with both hands. What followed was a complex series of commands sent to her hand movement systems as she fought for the right balance of grip which would be strong enough to prevent the madly struggling corvid from escaping but also gentle enough to avoid hurting it. Once she had a secure grip with just one hand, she closed the window.
The crow let out a flurry of strangled squawks and thrashed wildly as she carried it towards Ozpin’s desk.
“Please be calm,” Penny said, trying to make her voice sound as soothing as possible. “I am trying to help you.” Maybe reproducing some birdcalls would reduce the bird’s stress? “Do you know where the nearest veterinary clinic is?” she said to Ozpin. “Alternatively, does the infirmary accept animals?”
However, before Ozpin could reply, two things happened in very close succession. One, Penny registered the sudden smell of alcohol—a significant quantity.
Was the bird… intoxicated?
The second thing which happened was the bird let out one more protesting squawk, and then an explosion of black feathers and something briefly engulfed Penny’s vision, and then suddenly she was holding an extremely dazed-looking and bug-eyed adult human man by the neck.
By now, Penny’s logic core was considering entirely giving up on anything in the world ever following any logic ever again.
Actually, a correction: Penny had a match for this man’s face in her databases. She was holding Ruby and Yang’s uncle by the neck. Ruby and Yang’s uncle, who her memory informed her was named Qrow.
“...Did your parents name you Qrow because you could turn into a bird, or were you given the ability to turn into a bird because of your name?” she said, releasing her hold on his neck.
Qrow coughed and gasped, clumsily rubbing his neck with both hands, and the rates at which Penny’s smell receptors were registering the presence of alcohol increased exponentially.
Ozpin pinched the bridge of his nose. “Qrow, what are you doing?”
“What happened?” Goodwitch said. Her tone was less one of Ozpin’s exasperation, and more concerned. “Even by your standards, this is an atrocious level of inebriation for you!”
Qrow didn’t seem to have heard a single word of what anyone was asking. Instead, he squinted at Penny, swaying on his feet. “Whoa… whooee… you gotta lotta grip there, girlie…” A moment later, he started to tip backwards, and he only stopped his fall by catching himself on Ozpin’s desk with both hands.
“Where’s Jimmy?” he muttered, throwing himself around so he was facing Ozpin. “Gonna… gonna fucking kill him for…” He trailed off into a series of helpless mumbles before his voice abruptly pitched back up. “Gonna kill him… for… turning my niece into a stupid soulless Atlas robot…”
A bolt of pain shot through Penny, and she took a step back. She knew Qrow was not talking about her in the slightest, but…
“Qrow,” Ozpin said. “Please, I am begging you to pull yourself together. What exactly happened with Ruby?”
“She hates us,” Qrow muttered, pushing himself fully upright again, bracing most of his weight against the desk. “She—she—she said she said, she wished she wasn’t never born, said burden, she hates us, she ran away, and—and—” He broke down into loud, ragged sobs, grabbing the nearest object to wipe his face on, which unfortunately was Ozpin’s sleeve.
Ozpin stared down at him in pure appallment. His eyes flicked to Penny. “Qrow, please, I’m sure that this can still be worked out—”
“Sure can,” Qrow growled, dropping Ozpin’s arm and fighting his way upright once again. “By killing Mister Dumb Robot Jimmy Tin Tits stone dead. And then figuring out how to reincarnate him so I can kill him again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again, so where’s—”
He staggered around, his eyes landing on Penny and practically hurling a new cloud of alcohol smell at her as he spilled words like they were too big to fit in his mouth. “Oh, hey, you’re ol’ Ozzy’s new Maiden?”
“What?” Penny squeaked, her voice warbling unsteadily.
“Qrow!”
Qrow took a step towards her. Penny took an equal step back. “You wanna go kill a man? I bet you could beat Jimmy right now, as long as I’m the one who gets to snap his thick neck—I’ll be doing the whole world a favor—don’t waste time going for his heart though, that’s long gone and there’s nothing but metal and a circuit board there—we’re gonna throw him on the scrap heap right on top all the other stupid tin cans in his kingdom that he’s doing his best to turn himself into one of—”
“Could you please stop talking about the robots in that way?” Penny blurted out. She immediately had to resist the urge to clap a hand over her mouth because that would just make everything worse. Maybe she was making a terrible mistake, but she had pushed out the words because she was tired of hearing this man spew vitriol about people with metal.
Ozpin sent her an alarmed look, but Qrow only let out a gruff bark of laughter. “What, you a tin can too or something?” He laughed again, longer and harder, even though Penny found absolutely nothing funny about what he was saying. By now, she had backed all the way up to the part of the office which was furthest from this drunken man.
“Qrow, I’m taking you to the infirmary for a forcible detoxification,” Goodwitch said in a forceful tone, stepping forward. “This conduct is unacceptable—”
“No, no, no, hang on, hang on, hang on,” Qrow said, waving off Goodwitch—or rather, waving off where he thought she was standing, because all he was actually waving off was an umbrella stand two meters to the left of her. “I wanna know why you care so much about Jimmy and the rest of those walking microwaves…”
He took a series of tottering steps towards Penny, who had nowhere to go because she was cornered, and then he lost his footing and stumbled forwards, bashing into a whiteboard hanging from the wall which Penny was currently standing flat against.
Several things occurred at that moment, none of which Penny noticed in the moment, because she was entirely focused on Qrow’s movements in case she needed to physically subdue him. That was terrible luck, though, because the things which Penny did not notice turned out to be far more important than anything Qrow was doing at that moment.
The whiteboard was magnetic. The whiteboard had several magnets attached to it. Those magnets were sent flying when Qrow knocked down the whiteboard. The magnets went flying towards Penny. Penny was magnetic. The magnets would stick to her if any flew close enough.
Penny was actually alerted to this sequence of events only when a TING resonated through the room as one of the suddenly-airborne magnets affixed itself to the side of her head.
Qrow’s jaw dropped. Ozpin stood up so quickly that he knocked over his chair. Glynda put away her scroll in the blink of an eye. Penny wanted to curl up into a ball and hide, but she had momentarily forgotten how to move.
“Qrow—”
“You are a tin can.” Qrow stared at the magnet attached to Penny’s head, his tone carrying a kind of too-blatant amazement which Penny had never heard before. It was more uncomfortable than anything in recorded memory. “Jimmy’s gone way too fuckin’ far this time.”
“I am a synthetic person,” Penny said, clenching her hands into fists which she kept pinned to her sides. For now.
“Synthethethe…. that’s really what those things are supposed to be called these days?” He whirled to Ozpin. “Ozzy, didja know you’ve been talking to a tin can? Or… or… is this a sneaky little Jimbo plot to steal the Maidens so he can keep them all in his perfect little toasters that’ll never die and never disobey an order as they… as they… keep hating their degenerate drunkard uncles?”
Ever so briefly, an immensely pained sorrow rippled through Qrow’s face as the word uncle left his mouth, but Penny was having a terribly hard time feeling sympathy for this horrid man even if Ruby really had run away from him—
“Qrow, that’s enough,” Ozpin snapped. There was no gentleness in his tone, which did nothing to unspool Penny’s fear. “I have known Penny for years, and from the very first day I met her, I have known her true nature. And she is just as much a person as anyone else on this planet. In fact, she is far more of a person than whatever atrocious level you are managing right now.”
Qrow blanched. “Wait. Waitwaitwaitwait. You knew?” Qrow jabbed a thumb at Penny without taking his eyes off Ozpin. “You knew Jimmy’s making glorified weed whackers with a harmless face to trick the whole entire world into thinking they’re real people, and you didn’t tell me, and then you still picked this sentient garbage dressed up in human clothes to be a Maiden?”
“Picked?” Penny repeated in a shrill voice, shooting Ozpin an alarmed look. “What do you mean by picked?!”
Qrow belched loudly enough for the sound to echo. “Sure did, is that something you can understand, you calculator-brained tin-titted fuckwit? Ozpin thinks long and hard about his Maidens, at least the ones he can choose. He wanted your teammate, Belladingdongdonna, to be one, but I guess she said no and I don’t know how he ended up picking you—”
“Qrow, this was an ACCIDENT!” Ozpin’s voice had risen to a genuine shout, something which Penny had never heard from him before. She wanted to believe Ozpin. She didn’t want to believe Qrow. She didn’t want to believe Cinder. She just wanted to stop being scared. She couldn’t remember how to move. She was frozen in place.
“I did not choose her—” Ozpin was entirely around the desk now, nothing but open air between him and Qrow. But just as he opened his mouth, Qrow cut him off.
“Old age’s made your brain soft, Oz, if you think this is a good idea. You’re gonna shove Amber’s soul into this thing? You’re gonna dump the world-breaking magic powers into some toy that can get hacked and is never gonna die and can’t feel anything?”
Among the many other things causing immense stress right now, Penny was going to have to apologize to Ozpin for the damage she was doing to his office by pressing herself so deeply into the wall. How was someone as nice and wonderful and kind as Yang related to Qrow?!
Qrow wasn’t done, either, squinting at her through alcohol-hazed eyes, and Penny could not find a voice to fight back as he spun back to Ozpin, not even dignifying her with his full attention. “You wanna convince me this isn’t stupid, Oz? Then use your magic and turn her into an actual human being with a beating heart and a normal lifespan and actual senses and a brain that doesn’t run on code. Do that and maybe I’ll see if there’s anything to actually like here. Come on, your magic made me and my dumb sister birds—how much harder’s it to turn a robot into a real girl?”
Penny broke inside.
Qrow shrugged. “Because the only way I’ll ever see this oversize blender as something worthy of protecting the rest of us, is…” He swung back to Penny. “...if this little magnet doesn’t go CLANK on—” He reached out towards the magnet stuck to her head.
At that moment, Penny finally found her voice.
“STOP TALKING!” she screamed, smacking his arm away with a clenched fist and extreme force before it could touch her. Qrow reeled back, stunned, and a wave of vicious satisfaction pulsed through Penny at seeing him react to her with an emotion which wasn’t disdain or suspicion.
Her wings deployed with an especially loud KACHUNK, and she wasn’t even sure why. She hadn’t given a conscious command to deploy them, but now that her wings were out, it felt good. It felt like she was being herself to Qrow in a way that he could not ignore or belittle. Just try to take away my wings, she could imagine herself hissing at him. You’ll see how real I am then.
“I am a real person! I am a real girl! And my name is Penny! Penny Pallas! I am not a tin can! I am made from a majority chromium-cobalt-nickel alloy, with additional quantities of titanium, gold, platinum, iridium, and other metals, but none of them are tin! I am not a toy! I am not a kitchen appliance! I am not from Atlas! I don’t know who built me! I came to Beacon to hide from whatever my original purpose was! I have a father who loves me! I don’t want to be a Maiden! I don’t want to be powerful! I just want to help people! I want to be free! I want to be my own person! I do not want to be, and will not be, whatever you think I should be!”
Qrow was as silent as a stone, but she did not offer him any opportunity to speak—a benefit of being synthetic was that she did not have to pause for breath once in this tirade, making it far harder for him to interrupt.
“I can feel! I feel so much of everything everywhere and at all times! And you are doing your best to make me feel worse than I ever have in my life before! I have built my own touch sensors, and your niece helped me build my own taste and smell sensors! And Ruby is my girlfriend, and she loves me with all her heart, and I love her so much that I think sometimes it will cause me to explode with joy and a thousand other feelings! Ruby loves me with my metal, not despite it! She loves me the way that I am now! She has touched me on my bare metal under my skin, and it was one of the best feelings I have ever experienced in my life!”
She didn’t think it was possible to take so much satisfaction in the way that Qrow staggered back like he’d been punched when she said Ruby is my girlfriend, but that was exactly what was happening, and it felt good in a way which burned comfortably. Comfort was good. She would need comfort for where she was steering her words next.
“And when you speak so lightly of hacking, as if it is something which I would be completely oblivious to and hilariously naive about, you are speaking of something which is my GREATEST FEAR! You are speaking of something which makes me want to, want to—to kill myself just thinking about it! You are speaking of something which I have already experienced once—something which was one of the worst experiences of my life!” She was taking in deep, full-body breaths now, barely managing to stay cool as the painful memories flashed through her mind. “And I fought off the virus which was trying to take over me! With prejudice! I defended my own body! And it hurts just thinking about it! You do not understand the kind of pain and terror such a thing caused me! You do not know what it feels like you’ve lost all control over something happening to your body!”
Penny closed her eyes. For a brief few seconds, she abandoned words and concentrated processing on her Semblance, using Ghost to hurl herself into into anything around the room which might have a moving part—throwing windows open, slamming open drawers on Ozpin’s desk, forcing the elevator doors shut, and finally triggering the mechashift on Qrow’s weapon which was strapped to his back, transforming it.
When she returned to her own body and rejoined the outside world, a strong gust of cold autumn air was blowing through the open windows, sending papers flying through the office, and Qrow was staring at his transformed weapon in amazement.
“I have a Semblance, and you just saw it in action! And furthermore, you should not be so worried about whether or not I might be controlled when you have a blood-alcohol concentration of zero-point-twenty-two percent which means you can barely stand on your own legs! Who is the more manipulable individual right now?!”
Qrow stumbled backwards into a chair, gaping at her. It felt like an incredible victory that he’d stopped talking.
The torrent of words was over. They felt as if they’d flown straight from Penny’s soul out into the world. She felt like she’d run down all her battery cells. As her processing caught up with her instincts and she took great heaving breaths in a frantic effort to avert overheating, terror crept over her. Had she gone too far? Was—was making insinuations about someone else’s ability or inability to defend their autonomy a breaking of her promise to never violate another’s autonomy? She had no intention of actually doing anything about it! And she still would never violate the autonomy of anyone, not even this awful man and his behavior, no matter how many things he said! But did that matter, given how what she’d just said could be seen as a threat? Or had she already broken—was she no better than a virus now?
EMOTIONAL PROCESSING DEACTIVATED.
Logic, having analyzed the situation, had one very simple course of action that would best remove all sources of stress and fear from Penny’s environment: Leave. Immediately. Go somewhere that she could calm herself without interruption and review the facts of the situation in a more logical manner.
And she did. She fired her rockets and blasted past the adults, flying through the open window and into the open air which was at least away from everything that she didn’t understand and which, for the moment, felt like an existential threat somehow equal to Cinder.
“Wow.” Qrow dropped down into a chair, staring at Penny’s form as it flew away from the tower. He watched until she’d disappeared from view, and then he shrugged and nodded once. “Well, I take back everything I just said, Oz. If you want her to be the next Fall Maiden… she’s got my vote.”
Ozpin had returned to his seat at his desk, burying his face in his hands. It took him several moments to speak in a composed manner, because on some level he had never been angrier with Qrow.
“I don’t, Qrow,” he murmured. “I dearly hope Fall is anyone but her.”
Qrow blinked unevenly, wishing for the first time that conversation that he was less drunk. “…Well, if it’s not her, then who’s it gonna be?”
Soon, Cinder Fall told herself. Soon it will all burn.
Now hidden by Neo’s Semblance, there was no need for her to hide her power as she mulled over their plans in detail.
Two orange magical flames erupted around her eyes, the full power of a Maiden dancing in faint shimmers of heat distortion. Her destiny was in hand. There would be no better flames to ignite the coming inferno than the ones she had already taken for herself.
Notes:
Next week, Chapter 61: Crushed By The Weight Of The World
Would anyone like some cute fanart in these trying times? There's someone on Twitter with the username Frog4278 who drew this last month (link to the post), and I kept forgetting to share it here! It's so cool and I adore it!!!
Chapter 61: Crushed By The Weight Of The World
Notes:
Content warning for the chapter (click this text to reveal):
Complete psychological breakdown, complete identity breakdown, self-destructive behavior, suicidal thoughts.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Professor Carmel woke up slowly, blinking against the sunlight which filtered through the cracks in her blinds. It was past noon, as she usually preferred, but she still had time to catch that day’s round of the Vytal Tournament.
Old joints lodged their usual aching protests as she rolled to one side and pushed herself upright at the edge of her bed, unleashing a category-five yawn. In her honest opinion, getting to sleep so much was one of the most fun parts of getting old. She could announce a nap to ‘rest her bones’ at any hour of the day, and nobody would complain because, well, who would tell the nonagenarian that she wasn’t allowed a nice little nap?
She slid off the bed and into her slippers in a single movement—Huntress reflexes still good for something after all these years—and flexed out the routine tide of cricks which had developed in the night as she considered a plan for the day. No final essays left to grade, so there was nothing stopping her from staying in her nightclothes for a while more. Make some breakfast for herself, get comfortable in front of her television to watch the tournament… Carmel would absolutely not be missing a second of the Vytal action today, because her favorite student was still very much in the fight. She was thoroughly excited to see what Penny Pallas could accomplish in the doubles round.
Carmel yawned tectonically again as she pushed open the door connecting her quarters to her professor’s office. A perk of teaching at Beacon—the shortest commute to work she’d ever had in her life.
She kept her coffee machine in her office, a shiny brass Vacuan box of levers and dials which hissed out the best caffeinated drinks to be found anywhere on the planet. She’d found it at an estate sale twenty-five years ago, and perhaps it was a genuine antique (like her), but she had yet to find anything which surpassed it. It was this machine which she headed towards now, her gaze idly passing over the rest of her office—the stacks of books which would have to be packed up soon, her scroll lying on the desk, her impeccably maintained dueling pistols perched in their wall-mounted display case—
Two.
Carmel froze.
She stared at Supply and Demand, the twin weapons which had served her so faithfully throughout her life. The two pistols which she had not needed once since setting them down in retirement decades ago.
As she stared at her weapons, Carmel heard the familiar whisper again: Two.
She’d recognize that whisper anywhere. That was the whisper of Cupboard. Her Semblance. Her Semblance which would tell her the exact quantity she needed of any item for the next twenty-four hours.
Two, Cupboard repeated.
Its monotone delivery had never once varied over seventy-four years of speaking to Carmel. In the complete absence of any tone which might hint at the context of Cupboard’s quantitative predictions, all she had ever been able to do was infer the meaning of the numbers which her Semblance gave. However, this time, the conclusion seemed unsettlingly, dangerously obvious.
Carmel felt something rising to the surface, an emotion which she’d nearly forgotten: Dread. It was stark, irrepressible, glittering malevolently, like the barrel of a cannon.
At the conclusion of another bountiful semester and with the midday autumn sun flooding the quiet office in an academy built by a world peace like never before, Carmel’s Semblance was telling her that today, she would need both pistols for the first time in thirty years.
The next round of the tournament would be starting soon, but Blake was having an immensely difficult time summoning any care for it. She sat with her knees pulled up to her chest atop the cliff from which initiation had begun, staring at the clouds hanging over the Emerald Forest that she’d once been sent flying into. That jolting catapult now felt like the smoothest of rides compared to what the previous twenty-four hours had thrown at her.
She held her scroll by her ear and listened to it ring endlessly until the beep of voicemail signaled her failure. She closed the call without bothering to leave a message and re-read the text she’d received from Ilia before Ozpin had summoned her.
Call me NOW. This is bad.
She still didn’t know if it could be as bad as knowing that there was a ticking time bomb under the school, and that ticking time bomb was also a missing girl whose soul had been ravaged. And it felt like that girl was a hostage, a tool of Ozpin and the academy leaders just the way Adam was a tool of whoever he was allied with—
With nothing else she could do, she dialed her scroll again. That text was her only contact with Ilia since Mountain Glenn.
One ring. Two rings. Three r—
The line picked up, and Blake nearly dropped her scroll as she heard Ilia’s breathless voice cutting through an eruption of static. “Blake?”
Blake skipped all the pleasantries and went right to the first thing on her mind.
“Please tell me you have any idea of what’s going on.”
“Too much, and not enough,” Ilia said. Her voice scraped over an undercurrent of tension like she’d had to drag it through something to get it to Blake’s ears. “Adam really fucking put us in too deep, Blake.”
Blake felt as if she was too far in. Maidens. Shadowy factions fighting one another for the fate of kingdoms and civilizations. Magic which went far beyond storybooks. The weight of the world resting on the shoulders of too-young girls. Everything made less sense with each passing minute. “How deep?”
“FUBAR.” Blake could almost hear the small shake of Ilia’s head from the other end of the line. “All I know is there’s an attack coming, and it’s going to happen with or without us. I think it’s too late. Way too late for anyone in the Fang to stop it.”
Blake’s ears went flat against her head. “What’s happening?”
“I’ve only seen enough to know if we tried to stop it, whatever it is, we’d be killed, every last one of us. Wiped out,” Ilia said instead of answering, in a tone which made a decent portion of Blake’s hope shrivel away. “I…When I actually got a little more access, I saw impossible things. I don’t think you’d believe what I saw, not even if I swore on the Sunken Shoals that I’m telling the whole damn truth.”
“Ilia…” For a moment, Blake wondered if she should stay quiet about the secrets she’d just learned, just in case sharing this might somehow put Ilia in more danger. But a moment later, she decided it was keeping things hidden from others which had helped put the Fang in this mess in the first place.
“Did you see… magic?” she asked.
Ilia was silent for a long time, the hiss and crackle of static beating against Blake’s eardrums. Finally, she spoke in a voice so frail it scared Blake.
“I came face-to-face with the woman who wiped out an entire White Fang camp just to prove a point. She had flames for eyes. She could scorch us all into a pile of ashes, every single one of us. And the only reason she hasn’t is because we’re still useful to her. But the minute we stop being useful, the minute we try to back out, the minute we’re standing in her way…”
Ilia made an ugly noise, and she didn’t need to say anything else for Blake to understand. She barely had an idea what the powers of a Maiden might look like in action, but… elemental powers… the Fall Maiden’s powers being stolen away…
“She’s killed Faunus without a second thought, Blake. She took out twenty of us in cold blood just to get Adam on her side in the first place. We’d all be dead by midnight if she wanted.”
A stiff wind stirred the trees below, picking up a flurry of autumn leaves, and something about the air vortex created by the cliff face pushed the leaves upward towards Blake.
“We… we can’t win. And neither can you. The only one who’s going to win is her, and if we try to fight her, you’ll die, I’ll die, everyone around us will die, and maybe rest of the Fang gets wiped out as payment for our insolence, too.”
As the wayward leaves fluttered into her face, Blake reached out and caught a golden leaf drifting by. Turning over the dry, papery thing in her fingers and tracing the veins, she thought of Amber.
“What if I could get access to the same kind of magic that you’re afraid of?” Blake said. “Then maybe you wouldn’t be held hostage anymore. Maybe we could stop this.”
It would be a gamble. Neither Blake nor Ozpin nor anyone else actually knew where the powers laid between Amber and the thief, and maybe she’d be grafting another girl’s soul onto hers for nothing. But maybe she’d give herself an actual chance to save Beacon and the White Fang and atone for her mistakes, because maybe if she hadn’t left then none of this would’ve even happened—
“No,” Ilia said, her voice so nakedly fearful that it made Blake’s stomach twist into knots (when was the last time she’d eaten?). “No. Blake, no. That magic scares me. I don’t even know if we’re talking about the same thing, but… That woman, the way she uses her magic, it’s like it’s the only thing about herself that she cares about, the only part of her that she thinks is worth anything. I’d rather die than let something like that happen to you.”
Blake hated inevitability. It was only ever the worst things in the world which felt inevitable. Faunus oppression, the Schnee Dust Company, the Kingdom of Atlas, her own failures, Adam… And now, a catastrophe in Vale felt inevitable. Or, at least, Ilia was making it feel inevitable.
“So you’re just not going to try?” she said, unable to hold back the burst of anger which reached her voice. “You’re just going to keep working toward whatever disaster’s ahead?”
A blat of static prevented Blake from hearing a reply, but it fizzled out just in time for her to hear Ilia take a deep breath.
“Blake, can you trust me?”
The question set off an old reflex in Blake, making her entire body tense and yanking her back into the memories of the last time she’d been asked that question. Memories of Adam asking do you trust me? in that friendly yet ironclad tone which held an invisible promise of what laid in store for anyone who said no. And towards the end of her time in the Fang, Blake had felt as if she was the only person who could detect the threat in that question. Or maybe she was the only person who’d felt threatened by that question because there was something wrong with her and she was a traitor to the Faunus—
But Ilia wasn’t asking a yes/no question. She was asking, can you instead of do you. Asking if there was a path to an answer, not if there was an outright answer. And that made all the difference to Blake, allowed her heart to slow down enough for her to actually breathe, and answer honestly.
“Yes,” she said.
Silence.
“I mean it,” she said.
Silence.
“Ilia?”
Not even a hiss of static.
Blake’s grip on the scroll tightened. “Ilia?”
Nothing.
“Are you there? Are you okay? Ilia, please just—”
The line went dead.
“…And that is why Penny had to be informed of the Maiden powers, Qrow. I will never ask her to take on the powers, and that is why I won’t inform her of the potential for an Aura transfer. I do not want her to even be aware of the potential for such a choice to be made. I do not want her to have the slightest thought that she is expected to take Amber’s soul into herself. Do you understand now?”
Ozpin turned away from the window, fixing a significant gaze on his wayward lieutenant, who still appeared shell-shocked from not just Penny’s outburst, but also Goodwitch’s method of forcible detoxification.
With immense concentration and several minutes of focus, she could use her telepathy to gather every molecule of alcohol in someone’s body and eject it through the most convenient orifice. Naturally, this caused immense pain to the target. And Glynda had not even given Qrow the mercy of taking him to the infirmary to be sedated for the procedure.
Now Qrow Branwen was possibly the most sober he had ever been in his life, and actually capable of having things explained to him in a calm and reasonable way. Or at least as calm and reasonable as one could be with Qrow on his best days.
“Huh.” Qrow scratched at his chin—an action done only out of habit rather than anything else, because he’d actually shaved away all his stubble for meeting Ruby, and as a result his chin wasn’t actually itchy. “Guess I had a real wrong idea, huh? I need to say sorry to Little Miss Magnetic.”
“Yes, you do, and you will not call her that, unless you want to issue another apology,” Ozpin said. “However, for that matter, I owe you an apology, too.”
“Yeah?”
Ozpin sat back down behind his desk. “From the moment that I first met Penny, I kept her existence secret from you. That was entirely unfair of me, but I was afraid that telling you would lead to a scenario precisely such as this.” He gestured at one of the drawers on his desk which had broken off its tracks due to how powerfully Penny had used her Semblance to yank it open.
“You know… I get it. It’s cool.” Qrow folded his hands together and looked out the window, giving Ozpin a stark flashback to a day long ago when a teenage Qrow had sat in this chair for a different telling-off. “I haven’t exactly been, uh, quiet about what I think of robots from Atlas.”
“But perhaps if I’d told you sooner, you wouldn’t have found out in the worst possible circumstances.”
Qrow’s only response was a shrug, and then Ozpin’s scroll rang.
“Glynda?” Ozpin said, picking up without checking the caller ID for the second time in an hour. He listened to the reply in silence before sighing and nodding. “I expected as much. Keep your surveillance on the campus. I think that’s where we stand the best chance of catching our enemies in the act.”
He closed his scroll, and set a look of familiar weariness on Qrow. “Still no sign of Team Crimson.”
“Of course. Wouldn’t expect anything less,” Qrow said. “Is there anywhere we aren’t completely losing the plot?”
When there was no reply, Qrow sighed. “Look, I know you don’t want her to be the Maiden, Oz, but at this point, I hope Penny is. Spring’s a coward, Winter’s got one foot in the grave, and we don’t even know who the current Summer Maiden is because ours got killed.”
“I’m aware of the situation, Qrow.”
“I’m just saying, it would be nice if we could have one Maiden who can fight for us and wants to.”
“You say that as if you think Penny will ever trust me again,” Ozpin said, unable to keep the despair out of his voice.
Qrow didn’t answer. After an uncomfortable silence, he stood up. “I’m going into the city.”
“And may I ask what exactly you will be doing in the city, Qrow?”
“Me and Tai are gonna get blackout drunk and try not to think about Ruby.” Qrow pulled out his flask, and went to take a drink—only to mutter discontentedly as he realized it was empty. After a few frustrated shakes which couldn’t even bring any straggling drops to his lips, he jammed it back in his pocket. “Speaking of which. Does my brainwashed-by-Jimmy niece know her cute little clickety-clack girlfriend’s a refugee from the Atlas military she holds so near and dear to her little jackboot heart?”
He didn’t bother waiting for a reply, though, because a moment later he transformed into his crow form and flew out a still-open window.
Penny could not locate her teammates. Team RSPBY’s room was empty. Blake wasn’t answering her scroll. Yang wasn’t answering her scroll. Ruby wasn’t answering her scroll. Weiss had incinerated her scroll. And Team JNPR had already left for the tournament. Normally, if she had no one to talk to in a time of strife or stress, she would go to any of the Beacon faculty who knew her secret. Except that currently, the Beacon faculty was the source of a great deal of her stress and strife.
She tried retreating to her workshop tower, but she had a perfect view of Ozpin’s tower through the windows, and even closing the shades did not remove the feeling that he was staring through his own windows at her tower. She couldn’t even go to her and Ruby’s secret garden. It was also in view of Ozpin’s tower, and she did not want him to see her right now. Was there anywhere in the school that was safe for her?
It didn’t feel like it, with how the CCT towered over the entire campus. From anywhere on Beacon’s grounds, the location of Ozpin’s office was plainly visible. The last time Penny had felt this scared was when she’d been about to show her teammates her true self.
But if she wasn’t safe here, then where could she go?
Eventually, with a growing sense of hopelessness, she did the only thing she could think to do, and went to where she was actually supposed to be right now. She went to Amity Colosseum.
She took the airship up to the stadium by herself, sitting in the very back and keeping her hood pulled up and burying her hands in her hoodie pockets and pressing her face to the window and hoping no one would notice her. At least she was going to a place higher in elevation than Ozpin’s office.
Maybe she would find her team here. She and Yang were still supposed to compete in the tournament. Maybe Blake and Weiss were already in the stands, ready to watch them. And she could not imagine Ruby forfeiting a tournament match, so she was one hundred percent confident that she would find Ruby in the competitors’ waiting room at some point. Even if… Even if…
As much as Penny was loath to think about Ruby and Yang’s uncle, there was something he’d said after entering Ozpin’s office which was of vital and heartbreaking importance to her—about Ruby.
“She said she wished she never met us. She ran away.”
Ruby was scared. Ruby was in pain. Ruby was probably even more scared and in more pain than Penny. She needed help, and Penny desperately wanted to give that help, but she would have no idea how until she actually found Ruby.
Except for her friends, Penny wanted to be around other people as little as possible right now. So, once inside the Colosseum, she examined an architectural map in her memory and calculated the most secluded route possible to the participants’ waiting room, one which would avoid the most people. With her Semblance, she had access to any restricted area of the Colosseum, meaning there were plenty of deserted maintenance hallways and dusty storage areas for her to traverse without being seen.
That brought her to this moment, pushing open another door that she technically wasn’t authorized to open, and entering a space occupied only by several of the many enormous trusses which made up the Colosseum’s internal structure. At least, she thought there was nothing but trusses in here, until her radar alerted her to a humanoid presence on the other side of the room.
Startled, she instinctively stepped back through the doorway and was about to search for an alternate route, when she realized the humanoid presence was not moving. Not as in standing still—as in inanimate object levels of not moving. Curiosity quickly overcame her desire to be left alone, and she crept further into the room. Only to stare in confusion at what she was seeing.
What was an Atlesian Knight doing here?
It was one of the new models that’d been introduced this year, but it had been heavily modified, most of its armor removed so that it barely resembled the ones shown at Ironwood’s technological demonstration months ago.
Penny’s first hypothesis was that there was something nefarious going on here. Shouldn’t this have been sent back to Atlas with all the other robots? That was what Ruby had said just before the Mountain Glenn mission, so if someone had stolen an Atlesian robot and hidden it away somewhere…
But as she inspected it, she began to notice a pattern in the robot’s modifications. Various mounting points for what would likely be heavy machinery had been welded onto it, and its limbs had been resized to a size that seemed closely calibrated to a standard cargo pallet size. And as far as she could detect, the robot was completely inactive right now. Infrared and other sensors showed no signs of internal electrical activity, not even at the fairly low levels of a sleep/standby mode. It was entirely powered down. An activation order transmitted from somewhere else wouldn’t turn it on—it would need to be manually activated, in person, from the control panel on its system. That hardly seemed conducive to unsavory activities. It had also been placed at a leaning angle against the wall, its arms and legs locked into a stiff posture. For all intents and purposes, it appeared to be benign and simply in storage. But why here?
There was a sheet of paper taped to the robot’s chestplate with something written on it. Still keeping a careful distance, Penny magnified her vision to read it. It was a printout of a screenshot of a single, long text message.
Hey Goose,
I know we have orders to load every single one of our Knights onto the Pandora, but my superior officer is gonna blow a stack if he finds out how much I modified this Knight. I’ve been using it to do my job for the last three months and it’s been great getting to do whatever while this bot does maintenance on Amity for me. I don’t want to lose my job as a field technician. It’s right there in my orders that these maintenance tasks are supposed to be done by a human for quality assurance, and I’m starting to think I might get court-martialed if someone sees this bot and figures out what I’ve been doing.
So, I know you’re in charge of checking every robot before it gets shipped back to Atlas, and you owe me for when I covered your ass in the poker tournament, so I want you to fudge your spreadsheet for this one. I’ll hide it somewhere in Amity Colosseum so no one figures out what happened. The arena’s full of places where nobody except me goes, and nobody’s gonna notice one stupid robot when we’ve got like a million of them.
I’ll consider us even if you do it.
—Arctite
And then, at the bottom of the note, in handwriting, someone had added:
If an unamused Atlesian officer of higher rank than me is reading this, let the record show that I was blackmailed and this was not my idea, and that Pvt. Arctite Greenwell was the one breaking the rules.
—Sergeant Gossamer Turnbull
For the first time in several hours, Penny smiled. She’d fully expected something sinister, and instead it was just two soldiers trying not to get caught breaking rules. After how the past few weeks had left her feeling that the most innocuous incidents could be harbingers of immense occurrences, this was comforting.
Penny approached the robot without trepidation, taking in the details of its construction. She’d never actually come this close to one of the Atlesian robots before, the old ones or the new ones. With its armor plates removed, she could see more of its inner workings, parts and pieces and circuitry. Its dark, featureless faceplate remained in place, and showed nothing except the reflection of her own face. When she put a hand on its chest, there was no thrum of power which met her touch.
A familiar longing pulsed through Penny. The longing to know someone who was really, truly like her. It filled her with an ache in parts of her body which she didn’t even know could feel an ache before now.
Team RSPBY had just learned Ruby wasn’t synthetic in the way she’d always thought she was. She hadn’t been grown in a laboratory—she’d been born to two human parents. Which meant that she was not synthetic-organic, and Penny was back to being the only synthetic person in the world of any kind. And knowing she would never see Amber again was only intensifying the loneliness.
She’d had no time or processing power for this realization until now, but now with a chance to be all alone and really think about it, the ache was doing its best to make up for lost time. It made Penny want to squeeze herself into—squeeze into what, exactly? She honestly couldn’t say beyond the squeezing feeling being inside of her.
This was not a longing for herself to be something else. This was a longing for there to be other people like Penny. People who were metal all over, people who were synthetic and not just synthetic, but synthetic and mechanical.
“You are an unprecedented intermingling of soul and computer, soul and inorganic matter,” Doctor Oobleck had said to her in Mountain Glenn. His words still gave her a validating warmth which she treasured. Penny loved being herself. Penny loved being an intermingling of soul and computer and inorganic matter. Her wings and all the freedom they contained were something which she did not want to live without, even if given the choice to be something else. The things Nora had told her after the dance still resonated through her mind. Penny loved herself as she was, and it felt wonderful. The only part which hurt was being unprecedented. Because being unprecedented meant being alone.
And because of that, there were times when she still felt so very alone in the world, even with all the friends she had. This was one of those times.
Which was why Penny activated Ghost and jumped into the silent robot standing before her.
INPUT DETECTED: ATLESIAN KNIGHT-200 SERIAL NUMBER L3G8T
Activate, Penny whispered.
She jumped back to her own body just in time to hear computers whirring to life, servos whining slightly as they powered up, the faint backlight flickering on in the robot’s faceplate.
Penny was talking to something which, as far as she knew, was unfortunately an inanimate object. The Atlesian Knights had complex code based on machine learning which allowed them to mimic organic mannerisms and follow fairly robust decision-making logic trees, but it was still very much not sentience, because they could not deviate from the architecture set out by their programs. They relied entirely on a central transmitter for operation, and without it they could not function even while powered on. Which was why this robot before her was silent and unmoving even with its internal systems online.
“I do not expect you to reply,” Penny said, stepping back and folding her hands in front of her. “Even if you want to reply, but have not yet figured out how to, that is okay. And I… I do not expect you to be sentient, of course, because that would be unfair, but… better to treat matter as soul, than to treat soul as matter.”
Suddenly, she was uncomfortable with standing stiffly. She paused to perch herself on one of the nearby trusses, placing her hands on the metal beams for balance. The robot continued to stare straight ahead in the exact position as before it’d been turned on.
“Even if I am not expecting sentience… I think right now I am hoping you could be sentient. At the very least, I am hoping that there could be another synthetic, mechanical girl somewhere in the world. And who is to say that other synthetic girl would not be in an Atlesian Knight?”
The robot was silent and still, but Penny felt no less determined to finish saying the words building up within her consciousness like a steam vent needing to let pressure off.
“Perhaps that hope is more unlikely than hoping for a royal flush in poker, or hoping to be struck by lightning… but I have to believe there is always a chance! Because the alternative is to believe I will be the only one of my kind for as long as I live…”
Penny looked down at the robot’s bare knee joints. If certain components were removed and others were added, and overall design philosophy were tweaked… the robot’s knees bore a resemblance to her own knee joints which sat under her skin. This was the closest she could come to talking to someone who was of her kind.
Being the only one of her kind was not the same kind of loneliness Penny had endured before meeting Amber. That kind of loneliness, the one that came from roaming the empty halls of an academy at night, had not troubled her in a long time. She had her friends and her girlfriend (her girlfriend was also her friend, of course! that was implied in the definition!), and with so many important to her who knew the truth about her nature, that loneliness was falling further and further into her past.
But there was still this loneliness of being the only one. There needed to be a word which better fit the idea, because there was nothing for it in Penny’s vocabulary. It was… it was like being an island. Yes, other people could visit her island and have a lovely time with her—Ruby and Yang and Blake and Weiss (and once, Amber) and so many other friends—but she was still an island in the middle of a vast ocean, and there were no other islands to be found in the sea no matter which direction she looked in—just emptiness all the way to the horizon in every direction. And Penny loved her island, just as other people liked visiting her island and calling her island a place of comfort as well, which meant she had no desire to try and follow her friends back to their own unseen islands where she might never see her own island again. So she would hope that there was an underwater volcano somewhere nearby brewing and building up pressure and getting ready to bring another island into existence from beneath the waves, an island which would join Penny’s island in this little corner of the ocean. She would just have to keep watching the horizon, hoping that one day it would be a little less empty.
That felt right. Now, if only she could condense all that into a single word… Perhaps lonely was the right word, in some ways. But specifically, the loneliness of being first. That was five words; that was closer.
As for every word spoken in this one-sided conversation, the robot was silent and still.
“But I will never call this hope impossible, because how can it be impossible when I now know magic is very, very real?” Penny looked down at her hands, trying to imagine conjuring up storm and fire and light the way that Amber must’ve been able to do. “Maybe there is a magic which can bring robots to life, and make them robot people like I am. Maybe it’s the kind of magic that’s in The Blacksmith And The Robot or The Girl Who Turned To Stone. Maybe that magic’s as real as the magic of the Maidens. Ruby likes to say that her and I are fairytales come true. Amber was a fairytale come true. Maybe there will be other fairytales come true…?”
Penny didn’t look up from her hands. She was out of words. Not for exhaustion or fear or discouragement, but just because she’d reached the end of the words pressing at the end of her consciousness. Perhaps nothing had changed outwardly, but… she felt better, somehow.
And then she heard the faint whine of a servo moving. A servo which was not one of her own.
Penny’s head whipped up so fast she almost burned out one of her servos.
The robot’s head was turning from side to side. Slowly, unmistakably… deliberately? Sentiently?
Penny’s mouth fell open a little, every internal process suddenly bumping up exponentially. Was another fairytale coming true at this very moment?
“Salutations?” she said tentatively. It almost took too long to select a tone which would manage to be polite and inquisitive and helpful and friendly and welcoming at the same time.
The robot’s head continued to swivel slowly, and then it spoke in a monotone.
“Transmitter not found. Systems inoperative. Powering off.”
Oh. False alarm.
The robot went still a moment after delivering the status report, all electrical activity returning to zero. Penny blocked any of her acute disappointment from showing on her face as she slipped off her perch.
“Even though you cannot understand me in the way I very much want you to…” She nodded a goodbye and patted it on the head. “Thank you anyways for listening.”
Three turns and two Semblance-opened locks later, Penny rounded a corner and found, improbably, Nora and Jaune sitting morosely amidst stacks of dusty crates that had not been moved in two years, at minimum.
Neither Nora or Jaune appeared surprised in the slightest to find Penny. Nora tilted her head up just enough to made eye contact. “Oh hey, Penny. Fancy meeting you here.”
“Is everything alright?” Nora’s listlessness immediately put Penny on alert for yet another problem amongst her friends.
Nora shrugged. “Oh, you know. I just realized yesterday that I don’t know what I am without Ren. So now I’m trying to figure out what I am. Little stuff like that.”
Well, that sounded very much like a problem someone else close to Penny was having.
“But why here?” she said, swiveling around to study their surroundings. The bare metal trusses and drab unpainted walls did not seem conducive to journeys of self-discovery.
Nora let out a little snort which didn’t sound happy at all. “I was going to try and wish Neon luck before the doubles round started. Spend some time with a friend who isn’t Ren, sounded like a good idea to me! But then.”
“We got lost,” Jaune said. “Badly.”
“Ren’s always been there to point me in the right direction,” Nora said, flicking a clump of dust off her knee. “I didn’t realize how bad I am at finding my way without him.”
Penny spent far too long trying to figure out if what Nora had just said was meant literally or metaphorically. Eventually, she decided that it could be both.
“So, yeah,” Jaune said. “No scroll reception this deep in the Colosseum, and I’m pretty sure we got through a door we weren’t supposed to because something locked behind us at some point, so we couldn’t just turn back, and I was always told that when you get lost, you should stay where you are to make it easier for others to find you.”
“Our backup plan was just for me to start breaking stuff down,” Nora said. “Property damage be damned. Because that’s all I’m good at, isn’t it? I’m the girl who’s there to be strong and hit stuff.”
Jaune shifted, pulling on his belt as if there was something uncomfortable about the way it was sitting on him. “Nora…”
“And as long as I’ve had Ren with me I’ve felt like that was all I needed to be! Because we were gonna be together the rest of our life, and that meant everything was figured out! And now… I’m only just finding out he doesn’t feel the way I do.”
“Nora, if it’s any comfort, I don’t think it’s a problem with you…” Jaune scratched the back of his neck. “Don’t tell Ren I said this, okay? Because I don’t think he’s prepared to have a conversation about this yet—but I really think he just might not feel that way about anyone.”
“What do you—” Nora’s breath hitched, and then she smacked her forehead. “Oh. Oh, gods dammit. Some partner and friend I am, that I can’t even pick up on the most important person in my life maybe being aroace even though it makes perfect sense when I actually think about it for five seconds.”
“You’d be surprised how many things you can fail to notice about a dear friend.” Sensing that this conversation would take some significant block of time, Penny sat down beside her friends. “For example, my entire team did not notice I was a mechanical girl even after months of living with me.”
She thought of another, far more heartbreaking failure, one which she could not say aloud to Nora and Jaune: I did not notice that my first friend was dying somewhere beneath my shoes for the entire academic year.
Amber was about to be gone, and every time Penny thought about it more, it felt more like her fault. Why hadn’t she agreed to come with Amber? Why hadn’t she been there to protect her? Why had she urged Amber to leave at all when she knew what kind of danger was in the school?
Nora made a hmph sound. “I guess… When I figured out I was a girl and that I was gonna be a Huntress, I just… sort of assumed that the rest of my life would be easy?” She winced. “I mean, it’s not like I thought being a Huntress was easy! I just thought it’d be easy in comparison to everything before because I could just live by being strong and hitting stuff!”
“Oh, that’s a mood,” Jaune said. “I keep wondering why I can’t find my Semblance when I’ve already done all the big life-changing stuff. I figured out I’m a boy years ago! I faked my way into Beacon, confessed my fakery to my teammates and my friends, found out that Ozpin knew about the faking the whole time but let me in anyway because he liked my guts, and I’m okay at being a Huntsman now!” He made a fist and lightly punched his knee. “I’m self-actualized, so where’s my Semblance?”
In a way, Penny was glad to be able to confront the problems her friends were facing. It made it much easier to ignore her own painful situations, at least for a little while.
She nodded along with Jaune. “I once wondered the same thing about myself. I think, when I came to live at Beacon, I must’ve believed that would be the hardest decision of my life. However, I have continued to face choices which feel just as hard, if not harder. I transitioned from being a refugee to being a Huntress-in-training. I revealed my true self to my teammates, and later to other friends, opening up wide swaths of my life I had kept hidden because of fear. I overcame those same fears to join the queer club, and found new perspectives on my identity that I’d never considered before. I confronted a fear that I didn’t even know I could have until this month—a fear of being a terrible, shameful danger to myself and others.”
Only after that last sentence, when Jaune and Nora shot her looks of startled concern, did Penny realize she hadn’t yet told Team JNPR about the incident with the… With the… The… The incident in the CCT, she would call it. And she would tell them about it later.
“Penny, what—” Nora started to say, only for Penny to forcefully interrupt her before the subject could veer towards the CCT incident, which she very much did not want to talk about right now. “I am helping my girlfriend navigate the complexities of starting a new life, and sometimes my judgment feels woefully inadequate for the kinds of choices involved in helping her find a path. But I want to do it, and she wants me to help. And the last twenty-four hours have involved intensely complex issues amongst my team, which I cannot discuss in detail because of the private information involved.” Today, she was trying to help bring a family back together. Today, she had just found out that her first friend was dying. Today, she had just found out that she and her first friend were tangled in a web of strange, hidden motives that seemed scary and incomprehensible. Today, she had found out that there were people who were trying to hurt her, and people who were trying to help her, and today she had never been less sure which people belonged to which category. And she could not tell Nora or Jaune any of that.
By now, the Colosseum was quickly filling up with spectators, enough of them that Penny could feel the vibrations of their collective noise and movements resonating through the walls and floor even from this deep within the stadium.
Nora clearly wanted to question Penny about some of the things mentioned, but she must’ve understood Penny wanted to keep her attention elsewhere, because she nodded along. “And, y’know, I thought Weiss and Pyrrha would be fine and dandy after giving the SDC the middle finger, but! Turns out there’s still a lot of guilt and heartbreak that needs to be worked out between her and Pyrrha! And that’s still hard!” Nora shrugged.
They fell into silence, Jaune tracing patterns through the thick layer of dust on the floor as Nora picked at a loose thread on her skirt and Penny counted the individual rivets she could see from where she was sitting. She reached one hundred and ninety-two before Jaune spoke again.
“…Turns out life is a whole series of hard decisions, huh? One after another.”
“I think that’s where I went wrong,” Nora whispered. “Thinking I’d done all the hard stuff. Like I was already… Already…”
“Already in your happily ever after?” Penny said.
She was thinking of Amber. Thinking of her friend who refused to accept the ever after that she’d been given. Who had left to write her own ending; except that she didn’t call it an ending. She called it a beginning. It had been a dismayingly short beginning. If Penny had…
“Yeah…” Nora said. “I thought I had my happily ever after. Be loud and carry a big hammer, fight monsters with Ren, die of old age together and happy and content. The life story of Nora Valkyrie.”
Now Penny was thinking of Ruby. Of how Ruby had believed for so long that her ending was already written, that her only purpose was to reach that ever after without caring for the story told along the way. And now Ruby wasn’t in an ever after, but one story in her life was ending. The story of a lost silver-eyed girl found hidden away in Atlas like a buried treasure, her origins a mystery. But that end… wasn’t an end.
Penny was now approaching the limits of linguistic expression as she thought of how Ruby’s end was also a beginning, a new fairytale, one about the second child of the Rose-Xiao Long family who was killed in a tragic Grimm attack, finding love and companionship in unexpected places and figuring herself out while also becoming intertwined with Penny.
Penny was a beginning within an end, too. Her end, whatever and wherever she’d fled from, was so conclusively an end that she couldn’t remember any of it. And yet… It was a beginning. She was here in Vale, a girl made of metal, circuits, and a soul that burned bright, learning to protect herself and so many others, and also finding love and companionship in unexpected places, and…
But then, some endings were just endings. Like Amber’s. And… what would Penny’s ending be, if she became the Fall Maiden next? Would it be the end of the freedom she’d fought for? Would she end up right back in what she’d tried to escape from? Would she be forced to live a Maiden ever after?
“…I think I finally get why Semblances evolve,” Jaune said, sitting up straighter. “We’re always changing. Always facing new things. And our Semblances… follow along?”
“We keep moving forward,” Penny said. “Moving forward page by page, facing new challenges and beginnings and endings and perhaps we might jump across an entire bookshelf, but our stories are being told. And we are the writers and artists and storytellers.”
She wasn’t even thinking of Jaune or Nora or herself as she said this. Instead, Amber’s nearly-lifeless form loomed in her mind once again. She wondered who would tell Amber’s story without her to do it herself. And then she made a silent promise that if no one else would tell Amber’s story, then Penny would.
Nora smiled. It was a real, genuine, Nora-typical smile, and the first one Penny had seen from her since yesterday. Penny wished that her own problems could be solved this easily and simply. Or at least addressed with similar straightforwardness.
Jaune was smiling, too. He stood up, offering a hand to Nora, which she accepted. Once she was upright, he offered a hand to Penny, but after several seconds’ consideration, he retracted it with an embarrassed smile. Penny was not offended in the slightest, because she knew such a maneuver would end with Jaune crashing to the floor. As had happened twice this year, unfortunately.
“...I still want to find my Semblance soon,” Jaune said as Penny jumped to her feet in one fluid move.
“Still need the life-or-death situation.” Nora gave him a light shove. “Want me to push you off a cliff?”
“Hardy har har. I have a landing strategy now.”
Penny’s internal timer went off, reminding her that she needed to be in the preparation room soon—it was almost time for the doubles round of the tournament to start. She mimed tapping a watch apologetically. “I’m sorry, but I do have to be going. If you still need a way out, I can show you—”
“Hey, Penny?” Nora held her arms out. “Before we get going, can I give you a hug? You look like you need it.”
Nora had no idea how correct she was.
Even for Penny Pallas, a girl who had given and received so many hugs already, there was a unique urgency in her tone as she nodded emphatically. “Yes. Please.”
“Ha, knew it,” Nora murmured as she squeezed Penny tightly. “You always wear your microchips on your sleeve.”
An idiom modified specifically to be relevant to a mechanical girl? Penny was too anxious to enjoy this right now, but she filed the memory away with a high priority for another day when remembering this would bring her more tangible happiness.
“Thank you,” she said.
“At least I know one thing about myself already!” Nora said, stomping a foot. “I’m never gonna stop protecting this delicate flower in front of me! And, yes Penny, you are a delicate flower even if you’re made out of really hard metal! Because there are lots of other ways in which someone can be delicate! And I’m seeing some of those ways right now!”
Jaune chose that moment to join the hug. “You’re gonna be fine, Penny,” he said. “I know you will. And whatever your teammates are going through, I know they’ll get through it, too. If anyone can weather a storm, it’s you five.”
Penny wished she could believe that as much as he did.
Yang didn’t need a mirror to know she looked like a fucking mess.
The crying had conveniently made sure her emotionally ravaged interior was matched by an equally ravaged outside, her face puffy with tears which wouldn’t stop no matter how hard she tried to hold them back. With shaking hands, she’d undone her braid (Yang didn’t deserve to have that link to Ruby, Yang didn’t deserve anything), and now that her hair was loose again, it was painfully obvious how much she’d neglected it since Mountain Glenn. The braid had been a great way to hide how little attention she was paying to herself. But now it was gone, and Yang had no way to disguise the fact that she was a shambling wreck.
She kept her face trained firmly downward, because even if she couldn’t stifle her twitching sobs and sniffles, she could at least prevent anyone from seeing her hideously bloodshot eyes.
She’d failed to prove herself worthy of being a sister, and her punishment was that she would never see Ruby again. Unless—unless—
“Yang?”
Oh, no. Penny was here. And now Yang would have to explain how she’d just irreversibly traumatized the love of Penny’s life… And then maybe that would be too much of a disappointment for Penny, and then she wouldn’t want anything to do with Yang ever again and Yang would lose another—
“Yang, what happened?”
Yang trembled all over for a half-second, a bowling ball’s worth of despair clogging up her throat, and then a tiny whimper escaped her lips. Which was not what she’d meant to respond with at all, and it just made her feel even more shameful.
She felt the sofa cushions shift as Penny sat down next to her, laying a careful hand on her shoulder.
“May I ask what happened with Ruby?”
Penny wasn’t asking if something had happened, she was just asking what. Gods, Yang really did look pathetic right now. How much was she going to embarrass herself on international television today?
But also. Yang would die before she withdrew from the tournament now. It was maybe her last-ever chance to prove herself worthy to Ruby. Prove herself worthy of being her sister.
“It doesn’t matter,” Yang muttered. “Just the same old Yang Xiao Long never being enough for anyone, not even her own sister.” She couldn’t hold back a voice crack on sister.
If she had to win the whole fucking tournament to prove herself, that was what she’d do. Or at least try to win. Because any path to the tournament finals would inevitably run into Ruby, and… Yang didn’t think she could beat Ruby. She didn’t think she had an icicle’s chance in Vacuo against Ruby. Especially not when Ruby would be one heartbeat removed from trying to kill Yang. And maybe that would be a mercy kill, actually.
“Do you want to withdraw from the tournament?”
Yang snapped upright on reflex, her hair whipping around from the violence of the motion. “No!”
Penny drew back, startled, but Yang was already pulling back in on herself, burying her face in her hands and trying not to explode. “We need to fight,” she said, her voice muffled by her hands and another sob which did its best to drown out her words.
Penny began to rub slow circles on Yang’s back, just the way Yang would do it for her if she was stressed. But that just made Yang feel even worse, because she wasn’t supposed to be the one receiving the comfort—it was her job to give it to others! That was how she was worth something! And as soon as she wasn’t giving it, she was just… useless. She was a leech.
But all the same, she couldn’t actually bring herself to ask Penny to stop, because her comfort was the only thing keeping the disgraceful pile of flesh known as Yang Xiao Long sane. “If I have to prove I can be strong for her, I’ll do it! I’ll prove I won’t fail her!”
Penny went tense, her hand stilling its motions on Yang’s back. At first, Yang thought she’d upset Penny. But then she felt the cushions shifting underneath them as Penny leaned forward, away from Yang… probably peering at something elsewhere. And then, when Penny didn’t say anything, Yang was hit with a pretty good idea of what was happening.
“She’s here, isn’t she?”
There was a pause. Then Penny said, “Yes. Ruby is here.”
Yang sucked in a ragged breath. She didn’t deserve to look at Ruby. Not until she proved herself. Not until she was proud to call Yang her family. And if that never happened? Then Yang would never deserve to look at Ruby ever again. And—wait, what was Penny doing—
She looked up just in time to see Penny, now standing up, finish straightening her bow.
“I am going to go talk to my girlfriend,” Penny said.
Somewhere off the coast of Vale
Arthur Watts lounged in the captain’s chair of his pilfered yacht, surrounded by banks of computers and controllers and transmitters connected to a hundred different things. It was a shame the fall of Vale wasn’t happening in the middle of summer, because he’d love to take a dip in the water in between his sessions of destabilizing foreign governments. But by this time of the year, the water was just a tad too chilly for his liking.
Oh, well. He’d just have to settle for enjoying the bracing sea air and the lovely views of Vale going up in flames.
Not quite time for that show to start, though. There were other things he would be attending to first. Namely, the two battle contraptions who he’d found so annoyingly alive. Argentum and Battle Angel.
Watts couldn’t help but snort at the thought of them. Argentum and Battle Angel had the preposterous idea that they were in love with each other, as if those two walking glitches could feel anything resembling a real emotion!
But even though their random misfirings of code and neurons were just laughable imitations of feeling, they’d thoroughly convinced themselves of that fact, and Watts would take full advantage of that.
Watts had been poring over Project Moonrise’s file with great interest since the moment he learned of the project’s continued existence. It had made for fascinating reading, but there were two facts within which were most relevant to his next move.
One, Moonrise was a fanatically loyal soldier. Two, Moonrise was vicious towards anyone perceived to be an enemy. And those two facts brought Watts to the Battle Angel.
Specifically, the Battle Angel which had been presumed destroyed by Atlas, only to inexplicably turn up halfway across the world, intact and nauseatingly cheerful. He genuinely wasn’t sure what to make of that yet, but Fall was of the opinion that the Battle Angel had escaped Atlas’s possession in secret, which was possibly even more amusing than two weapons believing they were in love! The Battle Angel, escaping its owners? Watts didn’t see that as any different from a Paladin refusing to listen to its operator’s commands, or an airship ignoring steering inputs and gallivanting off on a merry flight of its own.
How ridiculous. A weapon intended to be the greatest in history, and yet by design it couldn’t be trusted to do what it was supposed to do. It was about as useful as a sword without a cutting edge. And that was what Atlas had seen fit to choose over him and his true genius—
Watts pulled the collar of his coat closer as a brisk breeze blew over him, providing an abrupt reminder that there were more important things to attend to at this moment. He glanced at the clock on the yacht’s dashboard and nodded to himself. The time would be as good now as any.
He dialed a number he’d never dialed before—the number of an Atlesian scroll which he’d found through an instance of his virus targeting Beacon. Now, it was just a matter of activating a handy program which would spoof his caller identification, giving his scroll the digital profile of a man whose summons any good little Atlesian soldier would answer immediately.
Watts’s thumb hovered over the call button, a vicious leer gliding across his face.
The Battle Angel, from a certain point of view, could be referred to as a deserter. So what would Argentum do, upon learning that its ‘beloved’ was none other than the thing which the Atlesian Military hated most?
Watts felt quite confident in the answer to his own question, actually.
“The thing about malfunctioning weapons,” he purred to no one in particular, pressing call, “Is that they tend to blow up.”
Beacon
Winter’s scroll rang. She saw the General’s ID just before she raised it to her ear. “Sir.”
“Winter,” the General said, and there was something urgent in his tone which made her freeze.
Her hand immediately went to her sword. “What’s wrong?”
“Someone is routing a signal through my scroll to co-opt its credentials.”
Winter’s blood ran cold. That was a security breach of a devastatingly high order. “What is—Can you see what they’re doing, sir?”
“They’re sending a call with my credentials to someone else’s scroll. Ruby’s scroll.”
For a half-second, Winter couldn’t breathe. “What do you need me to do, sir?”
“I can’t stop it. They have complete control. But I have Ruby’s location—she’s in Amity, and you’re closer than I am. Whatever she’s being told, you need to stop it. Don’t do anything else. Don’t talk to her unless it’s absolutely necessary. Just stop the call by any means.”
Winter’s eyes lifted to the massive stadium which loomed almost directly overhead. With a flick of her sword, a summoning glyph appeared next to her and a Manticore rose out, its wings primed and ready for flight. She couldn’t waste time waiting for an airship to arrive—she needed to be there now.
Amity
Ruby’s surroundings had receded until she was barely aware of them anymore, like her eyes were the wrong end of a telescope. The sound of her footsteps was even further away, like it was someone else walking numbly through Amity Colosseum while Ruby was in a different dimension. She didn’t even remember how she’d reached the stadium; maybe her legs had automatically brought her here because she still had to fight in the tournament.
Broken. Broken. Broken. Broken weapon. Broken human. Broken everywhere. What was left? What could she even be anymore?
She couldn’t go back to Atlas because one half of her seized up and hurt worse than anything ever before when she thought about it, and she couldn’t be an ordinary teenage girl doing ordinary teenage girl things because the other half of her burned with shame and fear which ate away like poison whenever she thought about doing that, and then what was there? Who could she be with? Could she be anywhere?
Not her friends. Not when just her presence meant they would be targets for Salem to hurt and destroy. And not her family NO NO NO NOT HER FAMILY THEY WEREN’T HER FAMILY THEY COULDN’T BE SHE COULDN’T BE A FAILURE
Ruby shook her head violently. She couldn’t think about it ever again couldn’t think about how much it hurt she just wanted to stop hurting—
Ruby didn’t actually think about who she would undoubtedly come face-to-face with in the Colosseum waiting room, until this exact moment as she was actually walking through the door and seeing Penny comforting Yang on a couch across the room.
Ruby froze, her mind going completely blank for a second as she realized she didn’t know what to do now. Yang was crying. Yang was crying really hard. She… that was because of Ruby.
Yang really cared that much about her? Even knowing Ruby was a failed sister? A failure that didn’t deserve anything? A broken piece of an already broken family? A weapon that couldn’t save the world, couldn’t save it because how was she supposed to do it as good as Summer NO DON’T THINK ABOUT HER DON’T THINK ABOUT HOW YOU’RE SUPPOSED TO DO IT BETTER WHILE BROKEN
And then, abruptly, Ruby’s thoughts went blank like a sandblaster had scoured them away, because Penny was walking towards her. There was probably only one thing she wanted to talk about and Ruby was going to jump off the edge of the Colosseum if she had to think about her family again—
Her scroll rang. It was a desperately needed distraction. And the last time she’d ever be grateful to see the General calling her.
She accepted the call and raised her scroll to her ear so fast she almost dropped it. “Hello?”
The voice which greeted her was not the General’s voice.
“Hello, Argentum,” came something silky and smooth, the words draping themselves over Ruby like a heavy, suffocating blanket.
Ruby tried to shrink away, even though there was nowhere to go as long as she held that scroll to her ear, but she could not hang up, because there were only a few people in the world who knew that name—
“Who is this?” she said, the scroll beginning to shake in her hand. Who what how why where—
“Just a friend who’s concerned for your health.”
“Who is this?” she snapped into the phone. Penny was just a few meters away now, still approaching, and she could tell something was wrong, she was looking at Ruby with cutely pursed lips and beautiful eyes full of worry—
Ruby activated her Semblance and blasted away, reforming in the hallway outside, where there was no one else around to see her shaking all over as silver dust and rose petals (the petals just wouldn’t go away no matter how much she wanted them to, she HATED seeing the red fluttering by her vision, hated hated hated it)
“You’ve gotten yourself mixed up with someone very dangerous, don’t you know?”
That voice. Ruby couldn’t explain it, but that voice awoke some primal, ancient terror in her that felt like it was coming from the very roots of her DNA, from the deepest corners of her cells, and it just made her want to scream and hide and curl up into a ball.
“It’s been right by your side this whole time, hiding in plain sight. Your worst enemy, and you don’t even realize it,” the voice went on, so smooth it felt like it was drowning Ruby in something thick and oozing, filling every part of her lungs like darkness nothingness darkness Subject Argentum the superweapon is a toddler I’m not a superweapon not a project my name is Ruby sometimes I wish I was a weapon this is what I was born to do are you like me I’m Ruby because of my eyes good soldiers follow orders Ruby Moonrise Ruby Moonrise Ruby Moonrise Ruby—
The voice snapped her out of the cavalcade of remembrances.
“I am, of course, referring to Project Battle Angel.”
Battle Angel. Ruby had heard those words before. She didn’t remember where, she didn’t remember when—it might’ve been slung over her head somewhere in the halls of the Atlas Military headquarters, not directed at her but at someone with her, or it might’ve been muttered during a field deployment where someone wanted to know about reinforcements, or it might’ve been tossed around by the scientists who worked on her as they talked about other projects.
“Built to be the greatest weapon in history, built to be the greatest hope of the greatest kingdom, built to be the perfect weapon. And then it ran away.”
But Ruby remembered those two words. They felt so hauntingly beautiful. She liked the sound of it. She wanted to be a battle angel. But she’d turned it into a fairytale name for Penny. Because Penny was the closest thing to an angel in battle that Ruby had ever seen, especially when her wings were spread.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said.
A short, harsh snort preceded the reply. “That’s to be expected when she’s been hiding her true origins from you this entire time.”
She?
Ruby wobbled on her feet, no longer sure where her body ended and where the rest of the world started.
“What was once known as the Battle Angel project, is now known to you as Penny Pallas.”
“Wh-what?” Ruby’s legs gave out, and she crashed to the floor, landing in a tangle of her knees and ankles. Maybe it was supposed to hurt, but she felt nothing. As she always did. Silver dust and rose petals swirled around her so ferociously that she could barely see to the floor.
“That’s not true! I know Penny! I know her! I love her! She’s brave and courageous! She’s not a coward! She would never—she would never, ever run away from her duty! Unless she had a really good reason!” A million other angry responses clogged up in Ruby’s head, twisting her tongue around itself, and it was a miracle she’d even said that much with how immobile her mouth suddenly felt.
“Do you know ‘Penny,’ really? Do you know the lie that you’ve been told the entire time you’ve known each other?”
Ruby let out an instinctive growl at the way the voice so insincerely and lightly said Penny, as if it thought her name was a joke. Which wasn’t true, her name was Penny and it was the most beautiful name in the entire world, and how dare this voice treat it like nothing—
Her scroll vibrated again.
“If you search through what I’ve just sent you, you’ll find the truth. Which I’m sure you want to know very much.”
“SHUT UP!”
Click.
The line went dead, and Ruby was left to shiver violently, wishing she could claw the memory of that awful voice out of her head. Argentum, it had said. Argentum, it had said like it knew her. Argentum, it had said like it knew everything about her.
With hands shaking so badly she could barely tap the right buttons, Ruby navigated through her scroll to see what’d been sent. Still coming from the General’s number—a file. An encrypted Atlesian military file, actually. She recognized that encryption. It was the kind of high-level thing she usually only saw securing files about her.
She opened it, and the first thing she saw was a picture of Penny.
She gasped sharply, her world narrowing to just the scroll in her hands, and the document which was glowing so brightly to it made her vision waver, and the flashes of silver and red at the edges of her vision—
Ruby expanded the picture until it took up her entire screen. This Penny looked a lot younger, with less freckles and a different outfit from what she usually wore, but… that was Penny. There was no one else in the world it could be.
She looked adorable, but Ruby could barely pay attention to that as she kept looking, noticing the Atlesian insignia on the page and then the words further down. Words which stabbed her in the heart and left her to bleed out in an icy crevasse somewhere in the desolate tundra.
The Battle Angel.
It was only the first page in what was a very long, very large file. Looking deeper was the most painful thing Ruby had ever done. She felt no physical pain, but emotional pain? She was just as vulnerable a target as anyone else, and looking through these files, her emotions hurt so bad she’d do anything to stop the pain.
A protector of the world for generations to come. The power of an entire army condensed into one human-shaped assemblage of metal. The weapon which may very well save us all.
Everything Ruby was reading in the file felt… horribly familiar.
Moonrise and Battle Angel. Moonbeam and Firefly. Ruby and Penny. They had been supposed to be a pair. From the beginning. And then Penny had deserted.
“I bet you were built by somebody in Atlas. It’s the greatest kingdom! If it can make me, it can make you!”
“Don’t worry, Penny! I’ll protect you from whoever’s trying to use you! And that’s a promise!”
Ruby had promised. She’d seen how terrified Penny was of wherever she’d come from, whoever wanted to use her, and Ruby had promised to protect Penny from the bad guys, whoever they were. She’d made that promise with her whole battery and soul and silver eyes, and she would never break it. And the bad guys were Ruby’s gone-forever life. Probably even Ruby herself.
Ruby felt as if she was breaking apart from the inside out. Half of her wished she was. Because then she wouldn’t have to live in a world where her worst nightmare was coming true.
Ruby had made a promise to protect Penny from… nothing except the destiny they should’ve had together. The life that Ruby had just lost forever. She’d broken herself to try and fit somewhere else with Penny, not knowing that she never should’ve even had to break herself in the first place.
Ruby screamed.
Ruby’s scream jolted through Penny’s audioreceptors like a sword slamming into her face. All polite intentions of leaving Ruby alone to take her call flew out the window. She broke into a sprint, dodging between students who had also heard the scream and were sending worried looks towards the hallway where Ruby had disappeared into.
She shoved open the door with a crash, not caring if she knocked it off its hinges, and found Ruby crouched against the wall a few meters away, clutching her head with both hands and tears streaming down her face. Her scroll laid on the ground beside her as nothing but a pile of shards, what remained of the screen flickering and sparking wildly.
Penny rushed to Ruby’s side, kneeling down. “Ruby? What’s wrong? Are you hurt? What happened?”
Ruby raised her head, but if she was going to say anything, it was lost in a sea of gasps and hiccups. But then her eyes locked on Penny, filled with… fear?
“Penny—” She pushed herself off the floor and scrambled upright, backing away and ending up a few steps from Penny with her arms wrapped around herself. “Penny, can I ask you a question?”
“Of course…” Penny stood up again and reached out, but Ruby flinched violently.
“Your—your memory,” Ruby said as Penny withdrew her arm, confused. “Why did you erase your memory when you left?”
Penny blinked. She did not know why this would be the source of Ruby’s fear—unless, was Ruby feeling scared about leaving the Atlesian Military again? So if she was looking for support and encouragement about her decision… Penny could provide exactly that.
“I erased my memories of my old life for myself and my happiness,” she said, placing a hand on her chest. “I knew it would make my new life easier, because I do not have the specter of everything I left behind looming in my consciousness and dampening the joy that freedom gives me. There is nothing to remember with which I might convince myself to return to something I should not return to, for my own safety.”
“Freedom…” Ruby whispered before repeating it, stronger and louder. “Freedom? Safety?” Her breathing, already fast, sped up to nearly the point of hyperventilation. “You—you really couldn’t bear to face what you abandoned?”
Penny tilted her head. Abandoned was an odd choice of words, but perhaps Ruby was thinking in terms of her own choice and her powerful guilt over it? “Why would I want to face it?”
Ruby stared at Penny with an expression which made less and less sense with each second, disbelief morphing into a mixture of…
Suddenly, Penny’s emotional recognition systems refreshed, and identified rage. Rage blooming over Ruby’s face and posture and stance like blood soaking through a fresh bandage.
“How could you?” Ruby growled. “HOW COULD YOU?”
“Ruby…?” Penny stepped back instinctively as Ruby’s anger only intensified, her lips pulling back in a wild snarl.
“Of course you’re asking me! You don’t even know what you DID!”
Each word, inflamed with vitriol and bile, bit into Penny like corrosion magnified a thousand times. “I do not—”
“I know where you came from! And I know why you left!” Ruby took an emphatic step forward, the heel of her boot slamming into the floor so hard it rattled the nearby door.
What?
Penny’s world was becoming unmoored from the things which had kept it stable for so long, leaving her with the most powerful sense of isolation she’d ever felt. How could Ruby know about Penny’s past without Penny knowing?
Ruby took another step forward, and this time there was a sharp crunch as her destroyed scroll underfoot was pulverized even further. Ruby took absolutely no notice of it as she jabbed a finger towards Penny. “You are from Atlas! Like I thought all along! And not just anywhere in Atlas! You were a military project JUST LIKE ME!”
As her voice rose to a scream, Ruby was crying full-force, tears dripping off her chin as she took another lurching step towards Penny. This time, Penny retreated. The distance between them suddenly didn’t feel nearly wide enough. There was no evidence that Ruby was right—if she had seen something on her scroll, there was no hope of retrieving it now, but somehow, despite the lack of proof, Penny knew with sickening certainty that Ruby was right. Only the truth would result in an explosion of this magnitude.
“You’re a DESERTER!” Ruby screamed in between heaving breaths. Her braid swung wildly behind her like a ship coming off its moorings as her entire body trembled with rage. “You abandoned ME! You abandoned US! You ran away from PERFECTION!”
Penny felt as if every single one of her battery cells were imploding and melting down all at the same time, sending sprays of molten metal and solder into the rest of her body. “I had just as much of a right to leave Atlas as you do!”
“No!” Ruby shook her head violently, her eyes suddenly squeezed shut. “I—I—I never should’ve left! Then I never would’ve found out how much I was BROKEN! And you never should’ve left, because then you never would’ve showed me how I’m broken! I’m a failure because you left your duty! My duty! OUR duty! We could’ve saved the world if we were together and we still believed we were PERFECT! YOU’RE THE REASON I’M BROKEN!”
“Ruby—!”
Ruby cut her off with a violent growling noise, the warning signal of a wolf somewhere deep in the woods that’d never seen another person.
“I trusted you! I trusted you with everything, and I gave up my whole entire life for you! I broke myself, for YOU! I broke myself, and I WANTED to, because YOU got me to believe it was the right choice! And then—and then—”
Ruby stared at her hands like they were covered in blood, and then flung something invisible at Penny, letting out a noise which Penny could only describe as part hiss and part screech. “And then I find out I was broken all along! I never had to know I was never supposed to be Moonrise! I could’ve gone my whole life never knowing! I was the perfect weapon! I could’ve believed I was the perfect weapon until the day I died! And then—and then you RUINED it all!”
Ruby’s silver eyes caught the lights above, her irises so brightly it was as if there was a raging fireball barely contained within her, about to explode outward and annihilate her and Penny and the rest of the world.
“I was Moonrise! I was born to save the world! But now I’m just a broken failure born from a family full of failures! I’m nothing! I hate myself! I can’t EVER be what everyone wants me to be! What everyone needs me to be! The world is going to be destroyed because I’ve been ruined! Everyone’s going to die because I’ll never be able to save them now, and it’s because of YOU!”
Ruby fell silent, her face red and stained with tears, heaving for breath like a wounded animal.
Movement registered on Penny’s radar. She recognized Yang’s signature, having joined them at some point and stood stock-still all throughout, and all Penny could do was silently wish for her to go away before Ruby hurt her too—and was that another radar signature entirely around the corner, or was her radar just glitching and duplicating Yang’s signature because of how wildly rampant negative emotions were running through her systems and messing with just about everything?
“Why?” Ruby said, her voice wavering and on the verge of falling apart entirely. “Why did you, out of anyone in the world, have to be a deserter?”
Despite the overwhelming urge to run away and hide and never think about anything ever again, Penny found words somewhere in her language processors, found the correct routines in her vocal systems for speaking, and found the courage to actually run all the necessary commands. Because she would not let her freedom be denigrated.
With clenched fists, she said, “I did not want the life that I would have lived there!”
“How… how could you not?!” Ruby descended into uncontrollable sobs again, her words almost incomprehensible amidst the harrowing noises spilling out of her. But the sensitivity of Penny’s audioreceptors and the skill of her audio parsing abilities meant that she understood every word with painful clarity.
“If you’d stayed, you would be a way better everything than I could ever hope to be, Penny! You—you were built to be perfect! And I would’ve been perfect if you were there with me the whole time! You would’ve made me perfect, and I never would’ve known how WRONG my life was! We would’ve been the perfect pair, and not even all the Grimm in the world could’ve stopped us! You don’t know how much I want to be you! You’re perfect! I’ll never be perfect like you, no matter how much I want to! No matter how much I want all the things you have! You had it all! You had everything I’ve had to spend my entire life working for! And you gave it all up! You made yourself imperfect! I wish I was you so badly! I wish I was perfect! I wish I was built like you, more than anything! I wish I could just make myself something else like you could! How could you give all that up?!”
NO.
With Amber burning in her mind, Penny exploded like a capacitor blowing, something beyond even what Ruby’s uncle had provoked her to. Language systems and emotional processing and her logic core all overclocked at once, and the words which Penny unleashed on Ruby were the angriest words she had ever said, so angry her actual taste sensors glitched into registering bitterness as the words were hurled from her mouth.
“Ruby Karyatis, do not compare me to a weapon ever again! I am happy that I fled Atlas for a vast multitude of reasons, but more than anything else, I am happy I fled because staying there would have made me like YOU!”
The thought swept through Penny’s mind of Amber, who had left the guarantee of safety at Beacon while being the happiest she’d ever been, because she was finally getting to live on her own terms, and that mattered much more than anything her cage had to offer her. And that magnified Penny’s rage a hundred times, because how dare Ruby think that Amber had no right to leave, how dare Ruby demean what Amber did, how dare Ruby say Amber should’ve stayed unhappy, HOW DARE—
“And I would rather DIE than be like you!” Penny screamed, meaning every word of it because even if Amber had died it was better than the place she’d been trapped in before, and Ruby could never understand that, and—and—if Ruby knew about the Fall Maiden, would she be excited about Penny receiving a terrible curse because it would make her more of a weapon?! Would she tell Penny this was a good thing? Would she even care about Amber the person at all?!
Ruby staggered back like she’d been punched, her back slamming into the wall before she collapsed to the ground. She never took her eyes off Penny.
As she plunged on, Penny’s anger thundered through her body in a way that felt terrifying and yet also good. “Have you ever actually cared about me?! Was I ever really your friend or your girlfriend?! Did you love me, or did you only care about how powerful of a weapon I could be?! Did you only care about forcing me back into the life I ran away from?! If you want to bring me back to Atlas, then I do not want to talk to you ever again!”
Choked sounds and sobs fell out of Ruby’s mouth as she gaped at Penny, fresh tears pouring down her face, until abruptly, she disappeared in a swirl of silver and red which did not rematerialize anywhere that Penny’s radar could detect.
Penny stumbled backwards just as Ruby had, her legs barely able to support her even though diagnostics found nothing wrong. She somehow felt exhausted just by saying all those things. And she hurt. All over. In places it shouldn’t have been possible for her to feel pain from. Yang caught her, and then Penny couldn’t bear to look in the direction Ruby had disappeared anymore. She turned away, burying her face in Yang’s shoulder, and let herself be guided away, away from the girl who thought being a weapon was a good thing and wanted Penny to be a weapon.
“I’m sorry,” Yang said. “I’m so sorry.”
That wasn’t the kind of sorry Penny was familiar with in contexts like this where someone was apologizing for something which wasn’t their fault at all. That was the kind of sorry where Yang actually thought Ruby’s explosion was completely her fault.
Yang guided her back into the waiting room, where everyone was staring at them. It was quite possible that every student here had heard the entirety of the screaming match. Which meant they’d heard a hundred different things which were supposed to be the deepest of secrets. But Penny could not muster any sort of concern for that right now. No one was actively approaching her to ask if she was a robot, and anything short of that was below her attention threshold.
She placed herself on a couch and curled up as tightly as she could. And then Yang was curling up around her, holding her tightly. Penny felt guilty, because Yang was hurting just as much as she was right now, she shouldn’t have had to pay attention to Penny—but it hurt to move right now, hurt too much to even hug Yang back. All she could do was keep her eyes closed and whimper as she waited for this nightmare of a day to be over.
Winter, standing frozen in the hallway one turn away from the source of the furious screaming that wouldn’t stop echoing in her ears, had arrived too late to stop the call from reaching Ruby. But she had arrived just in time to hear Ruby explode in a way that that reminded Winter of a day long ago in the Schnee Manor. On that day, something inside Winter had broken irreparably and she’d screamed at her mother that she was worse than useless, that Winter was ashamed to share a genetic lineage with her, that Winter would be infinitely glad to never talk to her again, that Winter hoped she drowned in the next bottle of wine that she dove into.
On that day, Winter had sounded and felt just like how Ruby sounded and felt. Powerless. Broken. Trapped. Lashing out at the most convenient target for a rage and fury that had been festering inside her for far too long, regardless of whether or not said target was actually the source of any of her problems.
And then a familiar streak of silver blasted down the hall, except that it was mixed with… red?
Winter thought (and hoped) Ruby would just fly past without even noticing her, but abruptly the silver and red disappeared, and Ruby Karyatis was standing in front of Winter, heaving wildly for breath and her face flooding with tears. But as soon as her eyes focused on Winter, her face morphed into untamed hatred.
Somewhere in the distance, a door slammed shut, and it sounded like a gunshot.
Winter was frozen in place. She could not think of a single thing to say. Her soldier’s duty was undoubtedly to try to calm Ruby down, to put her in a more stable state of mind, but she had never felt further divorced from her duty as she stared at a sight that couldn’t possibly be a military project. She was just looking at a very scared, very angry, very lost girl.
“GO AWAY! I HATE YOU!”
Ruby’s shriek was so loud and ragged, like the roar of a cornered animal, that it was nearly incomprehensible. And then, in a flash of movement, she tore the metal Atlesian emblem off her cape’s collar and hurled it at Winter so hard that, although it missed its mark, the symbol of Atlas embedded itself in the wall beside Winter with a sharp thunk.
“You broke me too! Atlas broke me! The General broke me! I never ever should’ve been Project Moonrise but your stupid kingdom did it anyway and broke me and now I’ll never fix it and I’ll never be anything and I’ll never belong anywhere not even in Atlas and I HATE EVERYTHING! I WISH I WAS DEAD!”
And then Ruby was gone, the trail of her Semblance flinging silver dust into Winter’s eyes which stung like the first wind of a sandstorm.
Winter sank to her knees, and she was grateful no one was present to see her cry.
“Stupid… stupid… stupid… stupid… stupid… stupid…”
With each sullenly uttered stupid, Ruby scraped the blade of Lunar Enforcer across her fingernails. The green-and-red paint which Penny deserter you left me you ruined me hurts hurts hurts why does this hurt so much why do I still feel like she’s the most important person in the world why can’t I just forget everything about her why why why why why had painted onto her nails so lovingly now felt like a vicious insult, and even without any nail polish remover handy, Ruby wasn’t stopping until that paint was all gone and she had one less reminder of Penny—
Ruby didn’t even realize she’d started crying again until the first tear landed on Lunar Enforcer’s deep red shaft. It was—oh gods, Penny had helped her paint Lunar Enforcer too—she’d have to repaint this too, or just sand all the paint off back down to bare metal, but there was no way she could get all the paint off before tonight’s tournament fight. She’d just have to bare her teeth and ignore it until she could erase it too.
And then what?
She would never go back to Atlas again, because she couldn’t just take all the feelings she’d felt all semester long and hide them away somewhere. Penny had given her a taste of a forbidden world. Except that it wasn’t supposed to be forbidden! It was the world she was supposed to grow up in! It was the world she should’ve had all along! Ruby Rose should’ve been a familiar name, not something alien and scary! And Ruby Karyatis wasn’t—didn’t—she knew Ruby Karyatis shouldn’t exist! Moonrise was a terrible mistake! She knew this weird in-between thing wasn’t what she was meant to be either! Everything about her was wrong! She should’ve been a normal girl with not-normal eyes living a happy life with a family that loved her! She wished she could’ve had that! She wished she could be something that Penny actually deserved! She wished she could actually be what Penny thought she was! She couldn’t even be a synthetic person like Penny because Ruby’s syntheticness wasn’t real, nothing about Ruby Karyatis had ever been real! She wished she fit in perfectly more than ANYTHING!
She hated Atlas. She wanted the Beacon life way more than she’d ever want an Atlas life ever again. She didn’t know how she hadn’t withered away and died there years ago in the stark white Atlesian hallways and the monotonous buzz of the virtual training simulators, and… But she wasn’t enough for Yang and the family that didn’t recognize her and the girlfriend who she’d just hurt and who’d just said she would rather die than be like Ruby and that was exactly what Ruby deserved after what she’d said and—and—so she couldn’t stay at Beacon. The rest of the world didn’t care about her. What was left for her? What place was left for her? She had no kingdom, no friends, no team, no family, and now no love. What place would want her?
She was worthless.
Atlas had been studying cloning technology. They had a complete transcript of Ruby’s genome. There was nothing she had which couldn’t be reproduced in a better mold that wouldn’t be broken, a weapon actually born to save the world. They could make a brand-new Moonrise, one that didn’t know anything about the failures of the current Moonrise. A brand-new Moonrise that had never broken even just a little tiny bit, not even a near-invisible fracture. A Moonrise that could actually save the world.
And then maybe they could also make a Ruby who could actually be a Ruby, with no silver eyes, so she could just be an ordinary teenage girl and make Penny happy and give Yang the sister she’d been missing her entire life, and then everyone would be happy, and there would be no space in the world for the girl who had tried and failed to be both Moonrise and Ruby.
Ruby scraped harder at one nail with extra-stubborn paint, only for the blade to skid off, slicing a thin cut into the side of her finger.
Of course, it didn’t hurt, so for a moment all she did was stare at the faint line of blood welling up on her skin. Then she flared her Aura, healing it immediately, and resumed her frantic scraping. Flakes of green and red lacquer dotted her hands and stuck unevenly to the edge of the blade, but she paid the mess no attention.
And maybe Ruby didn’t know if Atlas was a month or a decade away from being ready to produce clones of her, but it didn’t matter to Ruby. Didn’t matter to Project Moonrise, Version One-Point-Zero. Didn’t matter to the prototype that’d worn out its welcome. She wasn’t needed anymore. She was broken.
She scraped the last flake of lacquer off another fingernail—just a few left and then her fingers would be back to normal. Except for the scratch marks all over the nails and the little scraps of paint stuck on her palms.
She was worse than broken.
She was nothing.
She was ruined and nothing and the world had been destroyed and she wished she was dead and she wished everyone was dead and she didn’t care if every kingdom was overrun by Grimm tomorrow and…
The only thing she had left was the tournament. Not because it was actually something that mattered to her, but because it was just right there in front of her. She didn’t even know what she’d do if she won tonight. Maybe by some miracle, she could prove she was still something.
Penny hoped that their fight would come as early as possible, sparing her and Yang from the agony of waiting for too long in a room which felt too cramped while knowing Ruby could be somewhere just on the other side of the wall. Withdrawing from the tournament and leaving the Colosseum was barely a consideration. She needed a distraction—something, anything to stop thinking about how much everything hurt everywhere. And Yang needed to fight.
But whatever cosmic forces of luck which governed the match randomizer were not in Penny and Yang’s favor today, because they were not in the first match called. Or the second. Or the third. Or the fourth. Or a great many matches after that one. And there were breaks in between the matches to reset the arena for the next, breaks for the competitors, intermissions… All of which Penny sat through with barely any attention paid to the outside world. The most she tuned in her sensors was to listen to the match selections. Aside from that, she tried her hardest to not think about anything at all. Yang fell asleep at one point, jerking awake a half-hour later with a yelp of surprise. The wait, stretching out into hours, was agonizing.
One small mercy: Ruby didn’t re-enter the room. Either she was just waiting in the hallway, or she’d fled entirely. Penny did not want to devote any processing power to computing which possibility was likelier.
But if Ruby was still here, then she would have to pass through this room when her fight was called, because competitors were only allowed to enter the arena through the rising platform which was connected to the center of the arena. And the only entrance to that platform was through the waiting room. Which meant Ruby would have to pass by Penny if her fight came before Penny’s. Penny dearly hoped her fight would be before Ruby’s.
Time passed. Which was perhaps an extremely obvious thing to note, but Penny’s processing capabilities were haywire with emotions, and as a result she was observing the world in a particularly stilted way. It allowed for her to think less, and that was exactly what she wanted right now. She would wait for her match to be called, and then she would fight, and then she would lose, and then she would go back to her room without Ruby and curl up into a ball and wail for several hours.
“And for the evening viewers just joining us—don’t worry, it may be late, but we still have a few matches left for you! There are most certainly some intriguing, excited, and historical competitors left on the board! Without further ado, let’s see what we have in store for the next fight!”
Penny did not lift her head, instead relying solely on her audioreceptors to bring news of whether or not her torturous wait would be ended.
“On one side, it will be Ruby Karyatis and Ciel Soleil of Atlas Academy!”
Penny froze, and now she looked up, just in time to see Ruby slinking into the waiting room, her eyes firmly trained on the broadcast and not Penny or Yang as she clutched her weapon in both hands like it was the only thing keeping her upright. Penny could see the fresh tear tracks down her face, and the full-body tremble, and the elevated heart rate…
“And on the other side…”
Penny watched the match randomizer spinning, and abruptly, a horrible possibility occurred to her.
Please no. Please no. Please, anything but—
“Yang Xiao Long and Penny Pallas of Beacon Academy!”
Notes:
And so it begins.
Next week, Chapter 62: War Machines
Chapter 62: War Machines
Notes:
Honestly, this story was probably due to be updated to an M rating sooner, but better late than never.
Content warning for this chapter (click this text to reveal):
Death, injury, suicide attempt, violence
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
“—Yang Xiao Long and Penny Pallas of Beacon Academy!”
Panic thundered through Ruby. No no no no no, ANYTHING but those two, the last two people on the planet she wanted to face right now, she couldn’t even look at them, what if she just ran away—
No. Maybe she was terrified out of her mind and maybe she desperately wanted to stop having thoughts for the rest of her life and maybe she was still shaking so hard her vision was vibrating, but she wasn’t going to run away from a fight, ever! Running away just made her even more of a failure than she was already! She wouldn’t be able to help anyone by running away! So she was doing this fight no matter how scary and awful and painful and weird it felt, and she’d prove herself!
If Ruby’s opponents didn’t want this fight, then they could be the ones to forfeit! She’d take the easy victory! In fact, she hoped they forfeited so she wouldn’t have to face them and then she could go hide somewhere and try to pretend she didn’t exist!
But any actual hope that might happen went up in a puff of smoke a moment later as she saw Penny and Yang stand up and start moving towards the platform.
Okay, fine, if it was going to be that way! She wasn’t afraid to fight them! And she definitely wasn’t letting them win!
A streak of silver and rose petals rocketed past Penny and Yang, and a moment later it reformed as Ruby at the exact opposite edge of the platform, as far away from as she could physically get in that space. Despite the fact that it easily accommodated two full student teams, the platform felt far too small for Penny in that moment. She would have preferred for this platform to be… several square kilometers in diameter.
Ruby switched to staring at the ground, the point of Lunar Enforcer digging into the metal floor. This was the most uncomfortable silence that Penny had ever experienced.
Ruby’s official partner, Ciel, was the last to arrive on the platform, and although she knew nothing about what was happening between the three other girls, she could plainly tell something was wrong as she sent a questioning look at Ruby. Penny wondered if it was the tear stains on Ruby’s face which tipped her off, or the absolutely miserable expression on Yang’s face, or the fact that Penny’s internal fans were going like a jet engine right now.
“Ruby?” Ciel said carefully. “What happened?”
Ruby’s only reply was to glare at Ciel and growl like a cornered animal before turning away.
Ciel’s eyebrows shot up. She glanced down at her watch, and then up at the ceiling which would move apart to deliver them into the arena. She looked like she wanted to say a great deal more, but then she was cut off by the noise of the platform whirring into motion.
The rose petals left by Ruby’s Semblance had yet to dissolve, even though the silver dust had. Yang reached out, caught a petal drifting across the platform, and stared at it in her palm as they ascended into the glare of blazing floodlights and the titanic roar of a packed-to-capacity Colosseum.
The sun had set by now, and Penny found herself looking up at a dark twilight sky, just a few shades of black removed from full night. In one sense, she was incongruously glad that this day was almost over. In another sense, she was terrified that the next day would be even more difficult and distressing than this one.
“So…” Yang said, shifting her weight from foot to foot as she stared at a point in space several meters to the right of Ruby and Ciel. “You take Ruby, I take Ciel?”
Penny could not find anything strategically flawed about that plan, so she nodded her assent. And finally, she forced herself to look directly at Ruby’s face, no matter how much her emotional processors were screaming at her to never ever do that again—
Ruby’s eyes, roving all over the arena, caught hers a moment later, and she bared her teeth angrily at Penny through her still-flowing tears.
Penny would have rather been torn to pieces than see that snarl directed at her.
The emotional distress of both sides did not go unnoticed by the rest of the world. The broadcast cameras, focusing in for a close-up shot, perfectly captured the agonized pain rippling through Penny, the lifeless and exhausted grief dulling Yang’s eyes, the concerned bewilderment in Ciel’s face, and the turmoil running rampant over every part of Ruby’s body.
Arthur Watts, resting his feet on the steering wheel of his yacht when he saw the fruits of his scroll call, simply chuckled, immensely satisfied.
In Atlas, Pietro Polendina had just finished calling for all his friends’ attention on the television and moving his chair as close to the screen as one could comfortably watch. However, with one glance at his daughter’s face, beamed to him from thousands of kilometers away, he immediately knew something was terribly wrong. And he knew there was nothing he could do about it except watch and hope.
Robyn and her team would’ve only needed Pietro’s worry to understand the tenor of the situation, but they all knew a psychological breakdown when they saw one.
On the campus of Beacon itself, atop a building and preparing for her coronation, Cinder Fall smiled.
James Ironwood stood impassively at the Colosseum’s security control center, trying not to think about the fact that he would die a losing soldier as he watched a bank of camera feeds from around Amity. The cameras showed every hallway, every room, every place which might hide some nefarious activity. Each feed showed nothing more amiss than what was happening at the center of the arena.
Professor Ozpin sat at his desk, and notably he did not see the distress concentrated on four girls in Amity Colosseum, because as soon as he heard Penny’s name, he lowered his head and tried not to drown under the deluge of regrets old and new.
As the world watched, the arena shifted and unfolded around the four competitors, two distinct biomes emerging which the fight would play itself out over. At first, Penny, Ruby, and Yang barely paid the new environments any attention. On Ruby and Ciel’s side, the smooth floor was replaced by rocky, perilously uneven ground made up of black obsidian rock. As soon as that side of the arena stilled and the elements had locked themselves into place, hidden jets of lava erupted in synchrony all throughout the semicircle of forbidding rock—an incredible display of fireworks for the audience.
The only one who gave this environment any conscious thought was Yang, who only thought of how darkly fitting the volcanic biome was for the everything happening. She wondered how many more eruptions there would be.
But that thought was immediately drowned out by a deep rumbling behind Yang and Penny. The arena of course made plenty of sounds, mechanical and otherwise, as it reshaped itself for each new fight, but this sound was so loud that it took them all by surprise—the sound of something immense rising from below which could only occur during the assembly of one particular biome.
Penny and Yang turned and found a small mountain rising from their side of the arena, the towering central peak ringed by smaller crags and forests of scrubby alpine trees. But the monolithic jutting of rock, as imposing as it was, was not what made Penny and Yang’s eyes widen. The mountain was not what sent a fresh wave of terror blasting over Penny. No, the reason why Yang’s heart dropped into her shoes and why all of Penny’s painful memories of Ruby were momentarily shoved to a lower priority, was the lightning.
Bolts of pure-white electricity crackled around the center peak as it rose from the ground, and as soon as that side of the arena was locked into place, a storm of immeasurable voltage broke out across the entire biome, lightning leaping from clouds which gathered around the peaks to the rocky ground and the nearby trees as if flung by some unseen hand with an insatiable thirst for destruction.
The mountain biome was also the thunderstorm biome.
Even though the lightning came nowhere near them for the time being, Penny instinctively stepped back as several of the trees were hit by lightning, causing them to burst into flames. The smell of wood smoke reached her smell sensors immediately and was aggressively unpleasant, scraping across her consciousness matrix like her face was being dragged across the obsidian on the other side of the arena.
Penny was fully aware that half this arena could very well kill her.
Blake Belladonna had not stopped moving for hours. When she’d told Professor Goodwitch there was an attack on Beacon planned, she’d been informed they were already well aware, and then she’d been summarily sent on her way. And that left her roaming the campus on a knife’s edge. Even knowing that people far above her in skill level were just as helpless, Blake would be doing her level best to stop whatever was about to happen, and she wouldn’t stop until the spires of Beacon were collapsing onto her head.
Blake was sure Beacon was the target, not Amity. The Vytal Tournament was the perfect distraction, leaving the campus ghostly quiet. Ilia’s final words left behind a feeling of terrible foreboding in Blake even as nothing revealed itself and the shadows grew longer and the air grew colder. She kept a radio broadcast of Vytal playing in one ear, just in case there would be some sort of sign from the tournament itself.
And a sign there was.
Blake fumbled with her scroll, turning on a livestream as she replayed the words she’d just heard, desperately hoping she’d misheard.
No. She hadn’t misheard, it became abundantly clear as she stared at the stream. The mountain with lightning bolts dancing around it which rose behind Yang and Penny—
Adrenaline flooded Blake, her heart thudding like a train coming off the rails. Penny, fighting in the arena with a lightning field? No. That couldn’t be a coincidence. It was too dangerous a combination. Something was about to go horribly wrong. If only—
Her eyes caught on something: a figure standing atop a building across the courtyard, almost invisible against the last vestiges of twilight.
Blake couldn’t make out identifying details, but immediately her Faunus ears were pinned back against her head, all her senses screaming danger. The figure was well-concealed by the night—she wouldn’t have noticed them if not for her enhanced Faunus vision picking up the faint outline. And maybe this was just a student picking a strange place to decompress, but Blake made as little noise as possible as she stole closer, silently turning off the safety on Gambol Shroud.
And as she came near enough to see the figure’s pose, her fears were only confirmed. There was something unmistakably malevolent about the way this woman stood with perfect alertness, her scroll lit but held at her side, her posture deathly still as she kept her head tilted back slightly to stare at—
To stare at the lights of Amity Arena, hanging in the sky not far away.
There was no doubt within Blake now. Whatever was about to happen, she’d found an integral part of the plan. Which meant she’d found a way to stop it.
She leapt onto the ivy which climbed up the side of the building, channeling her Aura into the vines to keep them anchored against the wall as she began a frantic climb. A quarter of the way up, she caught a snatch of the broadcast from somewhere, Professor Port’s booming voice rolling through the air to reach her ears:
“Three!”
“Two!”
“One!”
“BEGIN!”
Ruby exploded into motion at the exact moment the first syllable of Port’s declaration rolled across the arena, and to Penny’s immense relief, Ruby jetted backwards, taking up a sniping position on an outcropping of rock squarely in the volcanic side of the arena.
Penny had never been so happy to chase someone into an active lava field. With her fake jetpack housing attached, she was free to use her flight mode, which she did, flying towards Ruby’s position at full speed, intent on making a head-on attack with a rocket-powered sword thrust which would push Ruby back.
However, Ruby made no effort to get out of the way, instead exploding into a blur of motion and mechashift and silver dust which shot towards Penny. When Ruby dropped out of her Semblance a half-second later, she was matching every meter of Penny’s airspeed from the opposite direction, wielding Lunar Enforcer in its more familiar double-blade single-staff form, her blade aimed at the center of Penny’s chest—
The thunderously resonant clash of metal on metal which resulted from the collision of rocket-powered synthetic girl and Semblance-propelled soldier girl meeting in midair resounded throughout the arena so forcefully that Penny’s gyroscopes wobbled.
They landed heavily, both girls’ momentum spent but their weapons still locked. Suddenly, Ruby’s face was just inches away from Penny’s, framed by the two warring blades as she glared into Penny’s soul.
When Ruby showed no sign of disengaging, Penny registered an opportunity to say something desperately necessary. “The lightning—” she started to say in a rush, only to be cut off by a harsh scream from Ruby.
“SHUT UP! I don’t want to talk to you right now or ever again!” She disappeared into her Semblance, reappearing on Penny’s left and scoring a successful hit before pulling away, rose petals fluttering to the ground and hissing faintly as they dissolved in an only-just-cooled lava flow.
Penny did not immediately chase, the ache all over weighing her down. “Ruby… I’ve only ever wanted to help you! With all my—all my heart and soul!”
Penny had nearly said with all my battery and soul, only saved by a latent consciousness routine which remembered there were microphones on the field and canceled the incriminating word just before it would’ve left Penny’s mouth and reached an international audience. She could only hold onto a frantic hope that Ruby, whose body was so very organic (no matter how much Ruby desired otherwise) and full of tumultuous impulses, could have the same level of restraint. But that hope felt increasingly futile as Ruby let out a vicious growl.
“Help me?! I’m worse in every possible way because of everything that’s happened to me since I met you! I’ve never been more lost in my LIFE!”
Two plumes of lava erupted on either side of them, and then Ruby burst into her Semblance again, flying behind Penny, and she barely had the processing resources to track her—she had to swing Luminous Electra behind her in one hand without turning to block the blow which came, clanging off her blade just before Ruby would’ve landed a devastating hit to her upper back.
Penny ducked forwards—given the force behind the blow, she could calculate that Ruby had overcommitted—and when Ruby stumbled, suddenly off-balance, Penny drove an elbow into her side, sending her flying.
Ruby barely missed landing in a lava flow, but sprang upright just as Penny fired her rockets and closed the distance between them again.
And then Penny was so focused on tracking the path of Lunar Enforcer as one blade flew towards her that she entirely missed Ruby pulling one trigger until the blast shook her audioreceptors. But neither barrel of Lunar Enforcer was pointing at Penny, so why—
A superheated cloud of steam exploded over Penny’s visuals, suddenly rendering photovisual and infrared completely useless. Too late, she recognized that Ruby had fired an Ice Dust round directly into the lava flow; now all Penny could see was thick white steam and indistinct heat, her radar the only thing left to track Ruby. It was capable of being a primary visual input, but it had a slight processing delay which neither photovisual nor infrared had, meaning Penny couldn’t effectively track Ruby on just radar—
A gunshot exploded against her from behind, taking off a chunk of Aura, and Penny’s instinct was to fly straight up, get clear of the steam cloud—
Too predictable, her prediction algorithms warned as another Ice Dust round caught her in the wing just as she broke free of the steam, exactly where Ruby would’ve expected it. A giant ice crystal swallowed up both left thrusters, choking them out midair. The suddenly asymmetrical thrust from her wings sent Penny plummeting uncontrollably, and only by twisting in midair and firing a full Dust round down the center barrel of Luminous Electra could she break her fall, which meant taking her attention off Ruby again—
A diversion which she paid dearly for, as Ruby flew into her with another Semblance-boosted slash, silver and red streaking across Penny’s field of vision and more Aura gone.
But then, either from anger-fueled impulse or a genuine belief she could get one more hit in, Ruby made the same pass at Penny. And this time, Penny was ready, prediction algorithms recognizing the strike and calculating the angle which would catch Ruby most off-guard, and with one twist of her blade and a spinning kick, Ruby was thrown away, bouncing off the ground before she burst into her Semblance and reappeared upright. Instead of attacking again, she began to stalk a slow circle around Penny, tapping the point of her war scythe against the glassy black rock underfoot with pointed cracks.
Suddenly, Ruby was speaking—no, snapping at Penny in a voice stretched by strain into something almost unrecognizable, stressed metal fatiguing to an inevitable point of failure.
“I don’t know what I want to be anymore! I don’t even know what I am anymore! All I know is what I’m supposed to be, and how I’ll never, ever live up to it now! I… I…”
Ruby’s voice wavered as wildly as any glitch in Penny’s vocal processors had ever managed. “My whole life, it’s been all for nothing! Everything I’ve gone through, everything normal girls get to have which I never got because I needed to be the perfect weapon, for nothing! Everything wrong they did to me like you’ve been telling me all year, for nothing! NOTHING! Because that’s all I am! I’ll never be just a normal girl, and I’ll never be a perfect weapon! So I’ll never be anything!”
Ruby’s pose was too open, her expression unfocused, her attention seemingly elsewhere—the perfect opening. But Penny only stood there throughout the torrent of words, entirely disregarding the possibility of attacking her. She would not break the sudden, unexplainable, delicate frozen moment they were existing in.
But then Ruby broke it herself, the final word of her tirade dissolving into a scream as she shifted her war scythe from single to dual-wield and launched herself at Penny once again. For all of Penny’s strength, and all the preparation she could muster as Ruby attacked, the sheer momentum and force of the split weapons which twirled with blinding speed easily sent her reeling.
As if answering Ruby’s scream, an enormous pillar of lava erupted behind the two girls. In that moment, the image which the world saw on the broadcast was turned to nothing but violently churning heat and two dark silhouettes standing out against a deep orange as sword and war scythe clashed again and again, the blades glinting endlessly in the molten light.
Between collisions of blades, Penny caught glimpses of the fight’s other half—Yang and Ciel facing off on the mountainous side of the arena, a rainstorm drenching them. The flaring light of Ember Celica’s rounds distorted and danced in the raindrops as they flew, and exploded in bursts of sparks whenever they connected with the shield which Ciel wielded, creating the optical illusion that the storm itself was spitting fire.
Penny’s logic core lodged the entirely valid question of shouldn’t Yang have defeated Ciel by now? However, a moment later, logic answered itself with, not in the emotional state she’s in, and then she was paying full attention to her own battle again.
Amidst the lava plumes that Penny and Ruby continuously dodged and weaved between, there was no margin for error, only fire so hot and vicious that without Aura even Penny could be killed by it. The hot, eerie glow which the molten rock cast over everything nearby was intense enough to make the bright-white stadium lights feel impossibly distant, and under the apocalyptic orange light, both girl’s weapons appeared to be rusting.
The radiant heat made the air shimmer and warp, scattering little distortions all across Penny’s field of vision which made it harder to fight off Ruby’s attacks—each anomaly demanding an extra bit of processing to resolve and ignore.
But Penny was perhaps the only person on Remnant who could hope to keep up with Ruby Karyatis, and for others what would be devastating mistakes were caught with the barest minimum time by Penny’s computing systems. Ruby was all offense, always ceaselessly throwing herself at Penny from some new angle, a relentless storm coming from every direction. It was exactly how Ruby fought her enemies, holding absolutely nothing back.
“What happened, Ruby?!” she tried again as she parried away a stab aimed dead-center at her chest. “Why are you suddenly afraid of all the love and help which we want to give you?! You never had to prove anything about yourself to receive it!”
Ruby slid under an answering strike, and as she skidded past Penny’s exposed backside on her knees, she fired a shot which caught Penny squarely between the shoulders in a sunburst of combustible Dust. The perfectly placed shot sent Penny stumbling away, another tick of Aura disappearing.
“You don’t know anything! And you never will!” Ruby’s scream echoed off everything—the rocks, the arena, their own bodies. “I have to be useful! I have to fit somewhere! Because of what we’re fighting! We’re all doomed and you don’t even realize it!”
She slammed Lunar Enforcer into the rock underfoot and pulled the trigger on the ground-facing barrel. Penny had just enough time to recognize an Earth Dust round being fired and ignite her rockets, barely lifting off before the rock under Penny split open in a gaping chasm as Ruby yelled after her.
“I don’t even know what I can do anymore! I’m going to die, I’m going to be replaced, I’m going to fail, I’m not going to save the world, and all I can do is hope I keep some people from dying for a little longer along the way?!”
“Can we mute the field microphones, please?” Oobleck muttered into his earpiece as an increasingly alarming barrage of words spilled out between Ruby Karyatis and Penny Pallas, captured on the broadcast with clarity which by now was wildly inappropriate.
“We’re trying to, but something’s wrong with the system!” came a reply from the production room. “They won’t shut off!”
Oobleck cursed quietly and then unmuted his own broadcast microphone, marshaling his voice back into tempered enthusiasm.
“Well—certainly some, ah, fraught feelings flying through this fight! Let’s hope tempers don’t get as heated as that lava…”
The hoarse chuckle he forced out to punctuate that sentence had never felt so inadequate.
“Good,” Cinder murmured through her earpiece to Emerald over the shrill rantings of Project Moonrise. “Don’t slip. We need Xiao Long to stay occupied with Soleil as long as possible without arousing suspicion.”
There was no response, but the results on spoke for themselves on the broadcast which Cinder watched ardently. To the viewing public, the blonde girl was slogging through a battle with the prim-and-proper Atlesian girl who was proving to be an elusive target, adroitly dodging Xiao Long’s explosive barrages. To Cinder, Emerald, and no one else, a series of illusions were pulling Xiao Long’s aim ever so slightly off, just enough to keep Soleil’s shield placed between her and an abrupt defeat. And, most importantly, Xiao Long hadn’t had a chance to use her Semblance yet despite a sizable damage potential built up over the fight.
A quick check of Emerald and Neopolitan’s Auras confirmed all was well. Neo’s was noticeably lower, on account of having to maintain such complex illusions over a span of hours for the entire team earlier that day, but her part would not be necessary for much longer. All she was doing was maintaining a disguise over Emerald as they sat in the stands of Amity, the rest of the world none the wiser to the downfall being crafted at this very moment.
Now, speaking of Aura…
Cinder eyed the Aura meters for Karyatis and Pallas, and nodded in satisfaction. They were dead even. There had been a brief concern when Karyatis jumped out to an early lead, but the toy soldier’s inherent instability had shown itself in the end. And how it was showing itself was beyond Cinder’s wildest dreams. The girl was melting down in a fashion which could only be truly unimaginable to those who sat in the ivory thrones of Atlas—a psychological disintegration of an Atlesian treasure that would be broadcast to the world at large. It was beyond even Cinder’s wildest dreams.
“Almost there,” Cinder purred as she watched the Auras of Ozpin’s paper dolls rapidly approach the critical moment of the fight. A critical moment which would unfold at her signal, her decision, her composition.
The smile which had played over her face from the fight’s start deepened into an expression of pure self-assurance. She was a director of the highest order, scripting the greatest act of theater that Remnant had ever seen. She was in power; she held the spotlight and the puppets moved to the jerks of her strings. She was secure. She was safe. No one could touch her.
Just below the rim of the building’s roof, listening to the murderous words being uttered by a voice which was impossibly calm and deliberate, Blake tried to wrangle her breathing into something calm enough to let her move. She could barely understand the deeper meaning of the orders she overheard as she clung to the ivy, but she didn’t need to. The one thing which had to be understood was, threat.
Threat. Fight it. Stop it. Can’t let it happen. Can’t let it happen just like HIM—
Blake tore one hand away from its vise-grip on the ivy, took out her scroll and began dialing with shaking fingers.
Ruby’s swings grew wilder and less controlled as she refused to do anything except attack with bared teeth, and slowly, agonizingly, the fight began to tilt in Penny’s favor. As she parried Ruby’s strikes into successful hits of her own, taking off chunks of Aura which would’ve felt unimaginable to her prediction algorithms earlier in the fight, the concept of actual victory gave her a strange dizzying thrill.
Penny was winning the match. Penny was winning the match against the girl who who thought she was stronger because she treated herself like a weapon. The girl who wanted Penny to treat herself like a weapon. The girl who wanted to turn Penny into another weapon—exactly what Penny was most afraid of becoming. All that, and Penny was beating her.
Penny was fighting for her life—for the idea of her life, for her entire way of life. And she was winning. Her way was winning. She was proving herself right, striking down the embodiment of the idea that she or Ruby or Amber were better off as a weapon. It felt good.
How dare you call me a weapon, Penny thought viciously as she batted away a strike and triggered a blast of ignited Fire Dust from the tip of Luminous Electra, unleashing a miniature inferno directly into Ruby’s face.
How dare you think I or Amber or you could be better if I was less of a person, she thought before she whipped Luminous Electra around, catching Ruby exposed as she leapt towards Penny and knocking her into a lava flow, forcing Ruby to activate her Semblance and jet away before the scorching river eliminated her entirely from the match.
How dare you believe what happened to yourself was justifiable. She blocked a gunshot with the flat of her blade, the deflected bullet pinging away and exploding harmlessly against the ground.
Her combat algorithms were not even labeling Ruby as a person anymore. Now Ruby was nothing more than a threat. A threat to Penny’s existence. A symbol of everything Penny had run away from to save herself. And now her past was trying to snatch her back up, and she would not let it defeat her.
In the middle of another clashing of blades, the threat shot Penny a frightened look. Frightened of losing to someone who refused to be a weapon, doubtlessly.
Penny’s only reply was the brightest of her own smiles, because she knew that would be a metaphorical dagger to the heart of the threat’s anger. Seeing that fear in the threat, so vulnerable and so unlike what a weapon would ever feel, felt like a pleasing stroke of a warm hand against her back. It felt like irrefutable evidence that Penny was right and that the threat was wrong.
Penny had to win. Penny had to win, or something horrible would happen to her. To everyone. Her life was already falling apart, and if she wanted any hope of keeping it intact or reconstructing it, she had to win.
They fought their way over oozing lava and between jagged chasms and underneath the brightest lights of the kingdom. Now the threat was the one with a lower Aura level, and Penny was widening that gap with every strike while the threat seemed all too aware that she was losing, her mask of anger entirely gone, leaving nothing but fear. Penny hoped that fear also carried regret, regret for all the things the threat had done, and if she knew about Amber then maybe she would throw down her weapon and surrender forever right now, and maybe then she would take back all the things she’d screamed at Penny and try to be a person again…
And then maybe Penny would feel safe again.
She wanted to feel safe again, more than anything.
Penny blocked, blocked, dodged, and then with a sweep of Luminous Electra, she knocked the threat’s legs out from under her. Before she could even fall forwards, Penny punched her with a satisfyingly tightened fist into a vertical rock face. A heavy thud and a collective gasp echoed through the Colosseum as the threat’s back slammed into the unyielding rock, her Aura vibrating all over her in a bright, blood-red riot.
The rock face wasn’t much taller than the threat, but it was just tall enough to trap her there as Penny lunged. She moved fast enough to push the servos in her knees to their maximum operating parameters, extending Luminous to its full length and bringing it down with the full strength of her mechanical body onto an opponent who had nowhere to retreat.
But the threat, bracing herself against the rock face, pulled her twin scythes up into a crossguard just in time to intercept the downward arc of Luminous Electra between her blades. She didn’t just block the blow—she caught it. Lunar Enforcer’s hilts dug into the volcanic rock behind with a crunch, the rock face suddenly a help instead of a hindrance, and the threat’s Aura glowed incandescently, strengthening her just enough to stay the blade of Penny’s sword, only inches from her cheek.
With Luminous now caught between the hooked blades of two war scythes, Penny could not pull away for a second strike without making herself woefully vulnerable. In a way, the threat now had her trapped at bladepoint just as much as Penny did. So Penny took the only other path available and leaned in, pressing her advantage and bringing their faces closer. She was stronger than the threat. She would not lose this exchange.
Penny’s focus reduced itself to just her and the threat, her sensors disregarding all but the most essential sounds from the world beyond the two girls. She was dimly aware that the excited roar of the crowd had grown to a truly colossal level, but it was something which only passed through distant corners of her consciousness. Right now, it was all this threat in front of her, all heartbreak and misery and pain, all the threat’s face coated in sweat and grime and condensation from the steam as the threat growled at Penny through gritted teeth. All the two girls, their faces close enough now for Penny to feel her opponent’s frenzied panting for air buffeting her cheeks, the pair breathing heavily for entirely different reasons. All Pallas and Karyatis, their faces framed by the soft green glow of Luminous Electra’s circuitboard patterning and the rich ruby red of Lunar Enforcer’s repainted, scratched shafts. All two lost girls caught under the unblinking eyes of the world, neither one sure if they were trying to throw the other off or holding onto each other for dear life.
Penny didn’t need an arena scoreboard to know the threat’s Aura level. Her own Aura-sensing instruments had become so closely attuned to the threat that Penny could internally detect her Aura level ticking down closer and closer to the red as the threat burned through it with abandon.
Images of their weeks-ago first fight against one another flashed through her recall as an algorithm reshaped itself on the fly, finding processing resources somewhere to calculate new odds. That first match had been so different, just an innocent spar in class, but in those closing seconds, there had been a moment so much like this one, pinning the threat to the ground and being so convinced she’d won the fight, until the threat slipped out from under Penny and turned the fight on the tables, so of course Penny had to be on her guard for one last maneuver by the the threat even when it was cornered under her sword—
Penny stopped paying attention to that algorithm’s computations as she noticed a far more relevant detail about the harrowingly beautiful girl before her.
Ruby was crying.
Her entire face quivered as big globs of wetness slid down her cheeks like they’d never stopped falling. For Penny, seeing those tears re-emerge when Luminous Electra was at Ruby’s throat…
It abruptly evaporated all of the desire to fight and win which had been boiling over inside Penny’s processors and overwriting so many other priorities she was supposed to care about more. Suddenly, Penny felt appalled with herself. What was she doing? Ruby had hurt her, but… she still cared about Ruby. She did not want to hurt her, suddenly did not want Ruby trembling under her blade. She just—more than anything—wanted things to be right. She wanted Ruby to come to her senses. She wanted Ruby to stop hurting.
Penny let the servos in her arms and shoulders go slack, leaving Luminous Electra merely nestled between the twin blades of Lunar Enforcer. It was an action which wouldn’t escape Ruby’s notice, and if Ruby still wanted to take the opportunity to escape… Well, Penny would make her peace with losing.
But all Ruby did was flick her gaze down to their still-crossed blades before the fight drained out of her own posture. Lunar Enforcer’s blades relaxed, its pincer grip on Luminous Electra entirely gone. Now, their weapons simply rested against one another, no longer clashing in opposition.
A quiet sob escaped Ruby’s lips, and her attempt at stifling another sob moments later turned into a hiccuping whimper.
“Why couldn’t we be perfect together?” she said, once the sound had subsided.
Penny’s Aura generator stuttered, then surged, leaving her unable to answer in words. In their absence, she could only shake her head.
Ruby went on, softer, gazing up at Penny with all the tired reverence of a desolate moon endlessly orbiting its celestial body. “Why couldn’t you be perfect?”
Another powerless shake of Penny’s head. If there was still a world beyond her and Ruby, she was starting to think perhaps she would never fully return to it after this match.
A shudder passed through Ruby’s body, morphing into another sob. She cast a longing look at the blade of Luminous Electra, tilting her head just enough to rest it against the blade. With her face against the sword, she closed her eyes and shivered like she was grieving everything that had been.
Then Ruby pulled back, and next was the quietest question yet.
“Why can’t I be perfect?” she whispered.
At long last, Penny’s language processing spun up again, providing her with words. And these words she was composing would be an enormous risk, a risk beyond anything she’d ever taken before, but it was exactly that risk which made her hopeful that these words would touch Ruby in a way nothing else she’d said tonight had managed.
“No one can be perfect, Ruby,” Penny said. As long as she kept her focus on the two of them and nothing else about the world, the next part was easy to say. “Not even a robot.”
Penny spoke the knee-deep-in-feeling words into an atmosphere which suddenly felt horrifically silent. Despite her best efforts, the outside world crept back into her notice, specifically the absence of so many things which might disguise her words. Hadn’t there been a lava plume rumbling to one side? Hadn’t Ember Celica’s circuit-rattling gunshots been echoing through the air moments ago? Wasn’t there supposed to be a thunderstorm crashing over one side of the arena? Was the word robot the only sound in the whole entire world at that moment?
But even if the statement alluded to her synthetic nature, Penny still felt sure she had not admitted to being a robot herself. She was using an abstraction of a robot as an example removed from herself and Ruby, just like one of Professor Carmel’s recommended-not-recommended robot movies would do. She would have to hope that was all the world wanted to read into her words. But if she had revealed more to the world than she’d intended… maybe she could live with that, if it helped Ruby.
Ruby gasped.
There wasn’t any chain of logic or cause which led from that sound to what Penny actually ended up doing next. Maybe a chain of emotion led to this, but there were plenty of emotions inside Penny shouting at her to do the exact opposite of what she was doing, so even that was unclear. But whatever impulse was ultimately responsible, the reality was:
“I do not want to be perfect, because imperfection allows me to do this.”
With that, Penny leaned forward and kissed Ruby between the blades of their weapons.
Perhaps it was a terrible idea because of how afraid and angry and indignant Penny still was after everything that had happened between them today; perhaps it was a terrible idea to do this so soon after Ruby had screamed awful things at her, so soon after Penny had screamed terrible accusations back at her, so soon after they’d thrown themselves at each other in the arena like wild animals, or right now where so many people could see them, but… nothing else in the world mattered to Penny at that moment despite their catastrophic falling-out. More than anything, Penny’s entire body ached for Ruby, ached for her touch, ached for her to be okay and happy.
And there was some intensely emotional part of her, entirely removed from logic, which wondered if she could just… kiss Ruby better, like a scene from a fairytale where a magical kiss from the brave knightwoman saved the dying princess. Kiss the pain away like a healing balm for Ruby’s soul. If only…
And then Penny pulled herself away as fast as possible, alarms blaring in every part of her body. No, she regretted that already, she shouldn’t have done that, she was afraid of Ruby, she didn’t know if Ruby saw her as nothing but a weapon, she didn’t know if Ruby hated her touch now, she didn’t know if she wanted to touch Ruby—there was no logic in it, absolutely no logic at all, it wouldn’t help—
Ruby’s entire body had gone tense. She touched a finger to her lips, blinking rapidly as her heart thumped erratically in Penny’s sensors. “Why…?” she murmured, her eyes wide. Fear, confusion, facial recognition reported. “Why do you still care about me…?”
They weren’t even pretending to fight now. Ruby looked down at her blades, tears falling off her cheeks and landing on the no-longer-immaculate metal.
She stared at the twin war scythes of Lunar Enforcer for entirely too long, all while a second duel raged on the other side of the arena and the world watched them. Then she looked back up, and a jolt went through Penny as she realized something about Ruby’s eyes had changed. They were… empty.
All the rage and terror and fear and everything which had lit Ruby’s eyes moments ago was gone, leaving a silver that had never seemed so dull.
“I’m sorry. You shouldn’t have to care about nothing,” Ruby said. Her voice was an abyss where there had once been a mountain. “There’s nothing left of me.”
Then her Aura disappeared from Penny’s sensors, leaving only the fainter trace of passive Aura, meaning that she was no longer projecting her Aura over herself, even though Penny’s sensors and the scoreboard told her Ruby still had active Aura left—
Ruby’s grip on Lunar Enforcer shifted, and Penny’s processors were the only things in the world besides the war scythe’s wielder that could move fast enough to understand what was happening.
“NO!” she screamed, blasting forwards at full acceleration, slamming into Ruby just before she could plunge the dual blades into her own unprotected neck.
Penny wrapped onto Ruby as tightly as possible when they collided, pinning her arms to her side where she couldn’t move her weapons again, and then they were flying through the air in a tangle, barely skirting lava geysers everywhere.
Ruby fought wildly against Penny’s grip, more tears streaming down her face—except these ones were hot and angry.
“LET. ME. GO!” she screamed, slamming her forehead into Penny’s face and then trying to twist away.
“No!” Penny fired back, as sure as she’d ever been. “I’m not leaving you!”
“Get away!” Ruby snapped, slamming her head forward into Penny’s chin, the impact ineffectual.
Penny’s only response was to bury her face in Ruby’s shoulder, wielding all of her body as a shield for Ruby, against Ruby. She hoped the silent message in her embrace was just as clear as if she’d said it aloud: Not. Leaving.
But suddenly, Ruby dissolved into silver and rose petals, and there was nothing Penny could do to hold onto Ruby when she went onto her Semblance, and she was left to stare at her empty arms as Ruby’s trail jetted past her. Towards the other side of the arena. The side that could kill Penny.
A buzzer shrieked through Penny’s audioreceptors, and for one ludicrous instant she thought she’d broken some sort of arcane tournament rule which decreed no kissing your opponent, or no psychological trauma allowed, or maybe even no robots allowed in the tournament, but one processing cycle later she recognized the sound as the signal of a competitor’s elimination. One glance at the scoreboard as she whirled around answered the question—Ciel was eliminated, sent flying as her Aura was knocked below the threshold. And Ruby was going after Yang, who was now alone.
Penny flew after Ruby, but she was forced to stop in the center of the arena, just short of the mountain biome, as an enormous blast of lightning landed just meters away, making it abundantly clear: she would die if she went any further.
All she could do was watch through the curtain of rain separating her from Ruby and Yang, just three powerless girls left with the weight of the world.
It was time to urge things along, Cinder decided as she watched the fight between Karyatis and Pallas stall out on the wrong side of the arena.
She tapped her earpiece. “Emerald, if Karyatis won’t go into the thunderstorm on her own, then make her.”
Seconds later, Xiao Long finally sent Soleil’s Aura below the red. It was either a serendipitous bit of timing, or Emerald pulling her Semblance away from that fight and putting the mismatch out of its misery. Regardless, it brought Cinder’s design one step closer to completion.
“Good,” she said, nodding as Karyatis dissolved into silver and red and blasted towards the mountains over which the thunderstorms had hung from the fight’s start. Pallas tried to follow, but one well-times blast of lightning stopped that. Moments later, it became abundantly clear that Xiao Long was the new object of Karyatis’s dogged pursuit. But Pallas had played her part perfectly, too, because Karyatis was operating on a razor-thin margin of Aura standing between her and elimination, although she didn’t seem to care or had forgotten as her duel unfolded in the rain under claps of thunder. Karyatis just kept on tapping into her Semblance when any sane student would’ve tried to conserve it. Which was fine—Xiao Long couldn’t keep up with her opponent’s speed, and Karyatis darted around her with impunity, unleashing a flurry of angry jabs which threw Xiao Long onto the back foot—exactly how Cinder wanted things.
“Emerald, the final illusion. Now,” Cinder said, clutching her scroll tighter and tighter as her moment of supreme victory became imminent. “Keep it on the Aura meters. Don’t give—”
And then the world itself seemed to come crashing down directly onto Cinder’s head.
The only warning she had of anything going awry was a faint whoosh from overhead which might’ve gone entirely unnoticed if not for the staggering force which slammed into her immediately after, knocking her sprawling and prone. If she hadn’t had her Aura up, the impact, whatever it was, would’ve turned her to a bloody pulp.
The horrendous ringing in her head was pierced by gunshots, their impacts against her skin dulled by Aura but unmistakable—
Rage tore through Cinder’s insides. How dare someone believe they could interrupt her finest moment. How dare.
But there was no need to conceal her true self anymore. Whoever the interloper, they would know her full wrath. She lifted her head, and let the flames of glory erupt from within, her eyes turning to wings of fire. With a mere thought, a wall of flame swiped away the next bullet aimed at her just as a troublesome fly would be swatted out of the air.
Through the righteous blaze (her birthright, her destiny) which now danced around Cinder, shielding her and throwing an all-consuming light over everything, she heard a terrified gasp from her opponent.
Cinder’s vision finally cleared, revealing the face of her attacker.
“The White Fang traitor,” she purred, taking in the sight of Team BSYP’s leader frozen and surrounded on all sides by whips of flame which snapped and whirled under Cinder’s beck and call.
On the ground nearby laid one of those infernal rocket lockers allocated to students, twisted and dented by its landing. It must’ve been called down on her by Belladonna for an ambush, which could almost be called ingenious, if not for the sheer foolishness of launching this attack at all.
“You always had trouble playing your part,” Cinder went on, watching the fear ripple through the girl’s posture as the flames licked at her.
“You’re a Maiden, aren’t you?” was all Belladonna said in reply, never lowering her weapon.
Cinder raised an eyebrow. “So perceptive, aren’t you? Did your beloved headmaster bestow that secret upon you in his infinite benevolence?”
She didn’t wait for an answer, nor did she care to hear it. The sounds of the fight racing towards its inevitable conclusion carried to her ears from the scroll which she still held in one hand, and Cinder knew it was nearly time to play her part in the story; the starring role which she would perform to perfection.
“Enough,” she said, and clenched her fist.
The flames swallowed up Belladonna before she could so much as scream.
“Yang!” Penny screamed at an inhumanly loud volume, cupping her hands around her mouth. “Bring the fight here! NOW!”
But whether because of the pounding rain or the seismic crack of thunder halfway through her shout, Yang showed no sign of hearing her. Her attention was entirely focused on Ruby, on trying to land that elusive final shot which would end the match, as if that might also end the three girl’s suffering.
Penny tried shouting to Yang again. Nothing. The lightning didn’t listen to anyone, and that was exactly what made it so deadly to her. As long as Ruby and Yang fought in the side of the arena she couldn’t venture into, she was powerless to do anything except watch as the two sisters dueled at the base of the mountain under a deluge of rain. And under near-constant flashes of lightning.
Perhaps for the moment the lightning was more interested in striking at the stone crown of the mountain than the two squishy organic girls fighting below, but if a girl made of incredibly conductive metal were to stray into the thunder? Penny couldn’t calculate the lightning landing anywhere besides her.
For the moment, Ruby seemed more focused on fighting Yang than harming herself, but… but… it felt entirely possible that she was just trying to clear the other half of the arena so she could do something without fear of interruption…
One-half of Ember Celica clicked empty, and when Yang reached into her pockets for another clip, Penny knew that was the last of Yang’s ammo reserves. She still had a lead in Aura, and Ruby was so painfully close to being eliminated, at which point the arena hazards would shut down and she could rush in and get Ruby the help she needed, but Ruby was whittling Yang’s lead down fast without taking a single hit, and there was no sign of her slowing down even with how breathlessly close she was to the red zone. If Yang was knocked out first—
Her radar alerted for someone approaching, and Penny spun to find Ciel sprinting up, her arms held up in a gesture of surrender with her shield returned to its inert watch form. Whatever she wanted, it clearly wasn’t a fight.
“What’s going on?” Ciel panted, barely pausing to catch her breath. All of her usual composure was gone. “I’ve—I’ve never seen Ruby like this! It’s scaring me!”
“Ruby is trying to hurt herself!” Penny replied, hoping that would be sufficient explanation in such dire circumstances. “I need you to stop her before she succeeds in doing something desperate!”
Ciel’s eyes went tremendously wide, her gaze snapping to where Ruby and Yang were still fighting. Then she looked to the Aura scoreboard, and then all her attention was back on Penny, suddenly dubious. “You can’t do anything?” she said with clear skepticism. “If she won’t listen to you, then how would I fare any better?”
“I know! But—” Penny’s language processors briefly took up all of her capacity as she came up with a sequence of words that would appeal to Ciel most directly, in the shortest time possible. What she ended up on was… perhaps dangerously revealing, but saving Ruby was all that mattered.
“I cannot go into the lightning field for the same reason that Ruby cannot reveal the true color of her eyes!” she said, her words punctuated by the crash of more gunshots from Yang’s gauntlets.
A thousand different emotions flashed across Ciel’s face as her eyes flicked over Penny’s form and landed on her eyes more than once, and then she nodded with grim understanding.
“I figured out she was leaving quite a while before the General did,” she said. “I think I finally understand why.” She flashed her Aura over herself, gauging what was left of it, and deployed her shield again. “Take care of her, Penny Pallas.”
With that, Ciel nodded to Penny and charged into the thunderstorm.
All Penny could do was watch through the curtain of rain, and hope. Why hadn’t outside forces intervened yet?! There were Atlesian soldiers stationed in the Colosseum for exactly this purpose, to restore the peace if a tournament fight turned into genuine violence. But nothing was happening. The domed hardlight shield which enclosed the arena to protect the crowd during a match was still in place, and it would have to be lowered for anyone to enter and intervene. The doors at the arena’s side which offered access from the security barracks remained shut, and even though the doors were on the wrong side of the shield, Penny didn’t understand why the soldiers weren’t at least gathering at the edges, preparing to intervene.
Even if the tournament’s administrators or the security officers somehow had no idea what was unfolding in the arena before now, seeing an eliminated competitor rejoining the fray should have been cause for the fight to be brought to an immediate stop!
Penny spun back to the duel, just in time to see Yang and Ruby both reacting to Ciel’s arrival. Yang looked confused beyond her present capacity to understand as she backpedaled, reorienting herself to face Ruby and Ciel, while Ruby—
Ciel shouted Ruby’s name, and then something else which was lost to Penny under a clap of thunder.
Ruby leveled her rifle at Ciel and screamed something that might’ve just been a sound of sheer feral rage. Yang had paused her attack, her gauntlets raised but her aim wavering between Ruby and Ciel.
Ignoring Yang entirely, Ciel held out her arms to Ruby, and—
That was as far as she got before Ruby attacked her, first shooting her point-blank and then going after her with Lunar Enforcer's blades, not enough to make Ciel's Aura break, but enough to make it waver perilously. Then Ruby dissolved into her Semblance again. A flash of lightning right behind her made her cloud of silver and red shimmer incandescently like a star going supernova, and then Ciel was swept up by the silver-red storm within a storm.
Ruby’s Semblance didn’t simply pick Ciel up. It engulfed her. Penny had always had extreme difficulty parsing Ruby’s movement in Semblance form with any sensor, but this was even worse, as Ciel was just… swallowed up, her heat signature disappearing from view in a roiling void of cold black infrared.
But in the next moment, Ciel was ejected from the whirlwind at high speed, summarily dispatched from the fight. For a half-second, Penny was frozen between two priorities which seemed equally dire. Se was terrified of taking her eyes off Ruby for more than a half-second or moving any further away from her than she already was… And yet if she didn’t take flight to catch Ciel, then—
One processing cycle later, a glimpse of the Aura scoreboard told her that Ciel still had Aura, just enough to survive the high-speed impact of being flung across the arena by Ruby. So Penny stayed put, using her radar to track Ciel across the arena.
At the moment of impact, she spared an agonizing fraction of a second to look away from Ruby and Yang, and to her immense relief, her prediction was borne out correctly as she watched Ciel’s Aura bear the brunt of her impact against the obsidian ground before it gave out completely.
But now Ruby and Yang were alone again, the duel unfolding through ever-more punishing sheets of rain, the two girls’ forms blurring towards indistinction, as if Ruby’s Semblance was sweeping up them both. Ruby still hadn’t fallen below the Aura threshold, and she was still attacking like she could close out a victory, and maybe she could, and—and there was nothing Penny could do, and when she tried screaming again, there was still no sign of Yang hearing her—
Penny looked back at Ciel again in some wild hope that maybe she still had an idea, but Ciel wasn’t doing anything except pulling herself upright, her vital signs elevated but stable as she leaned one hand against a nearby rock face and watched the duel with wide eyes. She turned her head and met Penny’s eyes, and even at this distance it was clear that she was just as helpless as Penny. Her beret had been knocked askew.
And then, in the blink of an eye, a geyser of lava erupted directly beneath Ciel.
Even with all the reaction time that Penny’s processors offered and all the computing speed she had to recognize events happening before anyone else, there was still nothing she could do except watch in horror as Ciel Soleil was engulfed again by something entirely different. Something which would never let her go.
There was no time for Ciel to scream. Perhaps that was a mercy. But Penny screamed for her, and even by the time the command for the sound reached her vocal systems, there was nothing left of the false Huntress who had come to detest her own role and had once thanked Penny for being a better friend to Ruby than she ever could.
Panic reached every corner of Penny’s circuitry as she spun back to Ruby and Yang—and then her panic somehow ratcheted even higher, triggering a warning for dangerous internal conditions, as she realized—
Why was Yang activating her Semblance NOW?
Yang was so fucking tired.
She didn’t know how she was still upright. Her knees would probably give out the moment this fight was done. A pain throbbed irrepressibly somewhere deep in her head. Maybe it was from the blow she’d taken from Ciel’s shield at the start of the fight. Maybe it was from watching her world collapse around her. Or maybe it was just from not having had any hydration in twelve fucking hours.
Whatever it was, Yang was definitely careening towards a mental breakdown. She was already seeing things in the rain that weren’t there. She had no idea if Ciel had just tried to rejoin the fight or if that was her own mind fracturing, because Ruby’s blue-wearing partner had been there and then gone in the blink of an eye and a flash of lightning. And Ruby kept blinking in and out of existence right before Yang’s eyes without a trace of her Semblance anywhere, except maybe that wasn’t a hallucination because maybe she’d figured out how to erase the rose petals from her Semblance already and leave no trace at all, figured out some way to scrub away every part of her identity which didn’t fit the template she’d been trying to fit herself into for her whole entire life—the parts of her identity which included the words sister and friend and I remember something bright and warm, and…
Yang was really happy to be fighting in a thunderstorm, actually. The rain hid the tears that wouldn’t stop leaking out of her.
She thought she was watching Ruby circle in front of her, but then suddenly her image wavered and then she was gone. At the same moment, she felt Ruby’s war scythe smashing into her exposed backside, knocking her forwards. Yang didn’t bother trying to ask how or why by now; she simply shook off the hit and wheeled to face Ruby. Seeing Ruby disappear like that from her vision without a trace was its own kind of heartbreak, repeatedly triggering a jolt of no no I can’t lose you again when I just found you, please don’t go I can’t lose my baby sister again, which would be interrupted by the next hit.
Yang glanced at the Aura scoreboard, and her suspicions were only confirmed. She was running low on Aura, Penny was too, and then… Ruby had so much Aura left. Fuck. Of course she did! She was a supersoldier raised for the singular purpose of war, after all, so what chance did a broken team ever stand against her!?
Yang should’ve forfeited when she had the chance. Now she was going to prove herself an abject failure to Ruby’s face; the exact opposite of what she’d hoped to do.
Yang still had one card to play, but it wouldn’t be a winning hand: Her Semblance.
She’d been building up damage all throughout the match, and never had a chance to use it. Until now. Even with her Semblance, she had no chance of winning—Ruby had far too much Aura left, enough to withstand whatever Yang could unload—but maybe, just maybe, she could make enough of a dent in Ruby’s Aura to give Penny a fighting chance. And if not…
Well, might as well go out with a blaze of glory, right? That was all Yang’s Semblance was good for, after all. One raging explosion-immolation at the end of everything which would either bring down her opponent, or herself.
That was all Yang was good for, destroying herself to help someone else. She hoped the audience would be happy with her grand finale. She didn’t bother hoping Ruby would be impressed. That was far too greedy a hope.
There was a scream from somewhere, but Yang couldn’t look away from her sister.
She slammed her fists together, and the familiar electrifying thrill rushed through her body as her hair erupted in flames which sizzled at the rain’s touch without ever extinguishing.
Suddenly, the sound of her Semblance was the loudest thing in the world, because the crowd had gone silent in a way that Yang had never heard before in all the tournaments she’d watched. She didn’t bother stopping to understand why.
An Aura scoreboard, looming in the background and visible over Ruby’s shoulder, confirmed Yang’s choice once more—Ruby had far more Aura left than she did. No holding back; Yang would unload it all at once. And then she’d be done, defeated, lost, failed.
At least this nightmare would be over.
Ruby, charging once more at Yang, stumbled a little when the flames appeared, but the surprise which showed in her face was immediately wiped away and replaced by a heartbreakingly blank expression.
When the war scythe came slicing through the air towards Yang for the last time, she made no effort to dodge it. She simply stepped into the blow, ignoring the flash against her own Aura as her prosthetic fist flew towards Ruby.
WHAM.
Metal fingers squeezed into a fist like a cannonball collided with Ruby’s midsection in an explosion of light and flame, a shockwave bursting out from the point of impact as Yang unloaded every single hit she’d taken that day, every drop of energy left in her aching body, pouring every bit of frustration and despair and hopelessness into the brief point of fiery contact between her and the girl who wanted to be called soldier rather than sister.
The moment of impact was one of the moments where Aura magnified perception enough to slow down the world until it almost seemed suspended in time even as it moved inexorably forward, just like an asteroid hanging in space and hurtling through it all at once. Yang was no stranger to these crystallized mid-fight moments, but in this one—
Yang’s eyes widened as she watched Ruby’s Aura waver and then crumble and dissolve, giving away entirely under Yang’s fist, and then Yang was just meeting flesh which was too soft and vulnerable.
What?
The momentum of her own punch was so powerful that even in the terrible moment of realizing there had been some mistake, some miscalculation of strength and Aura, she had no chance of stopping the follow-through, had no way to stop herself from throwing a full-force battering ram into her sister who was suddenly out of Aura.
Yang’s Semblance faded away, the world returned to normal speed, and the elimination buzzer was already sounding as Ruby was sent flying through the air, tumbling helplessly head over heels, too fast, too uncontrolled, straight towards the mountain which had loomed over them the entire time—
CRACK.
Every single conscious process in Penny’s mind stopped.
A deathly silence had already fallen over the Colosseum seconds ago when Ciel was swallowed up by lava, and that meant Penny heard the sound of Ruby’s impact with agonizing clarity. That was not the more muted thud which accompanied an Aura-cushioned hit. That was a sharp sound which echoed far too viciously through the arena. Ruby’s Aura was gone, nothing left to protect her when she slammed into the unforgiving rock of the mountain.
The stunned silence in the stadium somehow intensified tenfold as Ruby landed heavily in the grassy clearing at the base of the mountain in a motionless, twisted sprawl, her expression frozen and crumpled in despair. Her braid was the last part of her body to stop moving as it swung around and came to rest curled over her shoulder. Lunar Enforcer clattered out of a limp hand and rolled away.
Penny broke all over in a hundred different circuits, a thousand different wires, a million different pieces, all things which were supposed to assemble herself but were now flying apart. She was left as nothing but a collapsing heap of terror which could only scream on pure instinct.
“RUBY!”
She ignited her rockets and launched herself in a straight line towards Ruby, forcing so much energy to her wing thrusters that they flared dangerously, threatening to melt down catastrophically.
In a rational state of mind, Penny would have used her vital sensors to check Ruby’s actual state. In a rational state of mind, Penny would have been careful not to overtax her wings. In a rational state of mind, Penny would have realized she was flying into a field of intensely concentrated lightning activity.
But Penny had just seen Ruby’s partner die and now Penny thought Ruby was dead, and logic had never been further from her mind. All she could focus on was Ruby Ruby Ruby Ruby Ruby Ruby RUBY RUBY hurt and not moving as she flew into the rain to get to Ruby now to help her now to save her now, sheets of rain lashing against her unblinking eyes as she plunged into the thunderstorm without hesitation—
BOOM.
Yang was going to die. Yang was going to kill herself. Yang was going to plunge herself into one of the lava flows somewhere on the other side of the arena, right now. Yang was going to do that without a single ounce of hesitation. It was a certainty.
Because, as Yang Xiao Long collapsed to her knees in Amity Colosseum, the only thing which reached her mind was, I just murdered my baby sister.
The scoreboard loomed in the corner of Yang’s vision. The now devastatingly empty bar for Ruby’s Aura flashed endlessly, taunting Yang. How had she misread Ruby’s Aura? How? Why had Yang trusted her stupid tired overloaded eyes? How could she ever trust her eyes again?
Ruby laid motionless on the ground not far away, but she was no less unreachable to Yang than if she’d been across an ocean.
Yang’s legs weren’t working. Her arms weren’t far away from giving up entirely, either—the arm with which Yang had punched murdered Ruby felt heavier than the day she’d put her prosthetic on for the first time.
With her eyes closed in a way that looked mournful, with her body outstretched, with tufts of grass brushing against her face, Ruby looked so young.
So horrifyingly young, even more so than she always did. If Yang obliterated every part of her memory of everything that’d happened since Ruby asked where Summer was, she could almost pretend that Ruby was just suffering through a bad dream, one which Yang would save her from by shaking her awake and tucking the covers back around her snugly like what a big sister was supposed to do instead of—instead of—
The silence which had laid thickly over the Colosseum from the moment Ruby fell and didn’t get back up was pierced by a sound which only crushed Yang’s heart further.
“RUBY!”
Penny, shrieking Ruby’s name, two panicked syllables further affirming how much of a monster Yang was. Immediately following that was the roar of her rocket thrusters, louder than Yang had ever heard them. Penny was flying towards her. Towards Ruby. Towards the lightning—
Yang raised her head, the start of a desperate warning bursting out of her throat, just in time to see Penny thunder by her, and then Yang felt as much as she saw the lightning bolt which slammed into Penny.
The white-hot bolt struck Penny with despicable precision, as accurate as an arrow finding its target; the ancient wonder of nature drawn inexorably to the girl who was a wonder of modern making.
Penny went limp in much the same way Ruby had, flipping once, twice, three times through the air as her wing thrusters stalled out in flashes of painfully-bright green flame before she careened into the ground, bouncing violently and sending up a spray of dirt and grass. Luminous Electra was jarred loose from her hands in the impact, spinning away in a high arc. Penny’s momentum had been so great that even without flight, her body skidded across the ground, plowing a shallow divot through the soil until finally, she came to rest on her side next to Ruby’s prone form.
Yang let out a choked cry, reaching out a useless arm. She tried to call Penny’s name, or Ruby’s name, or anything, but all that came out was a wordless cry which crackled into nothingness almost immediately. But even if she could’ve produced a more assertive sound, it would’ve been drowned out by the buzzer sounding to announce that Penny’s Aura was gone.
Penny’s elbows were tucked to her chest, as she sometimes did when going into low-power mode. Unlike Ruby, her eyes remained open as she laid still and silent, and Yang could see the green circles floating in her freckled face from where she knelt, and she could see how dim and empty they suddenly were.
Luminous Electra, jarred loose from Penny’s hands by the high-speed impact, had continued on a longer flight which ended when it hit the mountain—hit the same corner which Yang had punched Ruby into. After a wildly spinning carom, the massive sword came to an abrupt, startling halt between Penny and Ruby, its blade embedded in the soil. Standing almost straight up in the ground, it was like the weapon had planted itself there on purpose. As a memorial to the two girls lying motionless underneath the protective gaze of the still-glowing power symbol embedded in the sword’s hilt.
In what could only be immense mockery, the thunderstorm chose that moment to cease, the Dust-generated clouds fading away. Something which Yang refused to call peace settled over the fallen girls.
The suffocating silence reigned over all. It might have never ended, if not for the echoing click of a microphone turning on somewhere in the broadcast system, before a smooth feminine voice filtered through the Colosseum’s loudspeakers.
“Do not look away.”
Blake was flat on her back, her lungs begging for oxygen. But she could barely draw any air in to satisfy her body, because the pointed end of a heel was pressed as deeply into her throat as it could go without suffocating her entirely.
Her vision swam in and out of focus as she stared up at Cinder Fall, who stood above her with the one foot poised at her neck. After the terrifying brief, unthinkably brutal fight that had left Blake completely without Aura, with Gambol Shroud kicked away and out of reach, she didn’t doubt that Cinder would crush her throat at any moment. It seemed that the only thing which had stayed her execution was Cinder’s attention being directed elsewhere, to the broadcast. Blake couldn’t see the horrors unfolding on Cinder’s scroll, but the satisfied smirk of her captor and the dead silence of the feed gave her just enough of a picture to understand that all her worst fears were coming true.
Cinder closed the livestream, opened another unseen program, and raised her scroll to her lips. Her eyes were trained on the Colosseum, never once giving Blake a fractional bit of notice as she began to speak with deadly intent.
“Do not look away.”
Ruby.
Ruby.
Ruby.
Where…?
Penny felt as if she was operating solely through a wireless connection with woeful latency. She was aware only of the fact that she existed, that she was somewhere in time or space, and beyond that, there was nothing. Thoughts swirled dimly in her mind, and with slowness that might’ve been seconds or decades, she gathered the disparate blinks of conscious remembrance into an understanding: she had fallen victim to an electrical overloading event, and she was still alive.
A ping sounded from somewhere in the distant reaches of… here. And suddenly, Penny’s thoughts began to arrive more quickly, actual lines of reasoning forming. Her most basic processors were just beginning to spin back up. Her body, detecting a massive surge of electricity, had run the internal equivalent of a triage protocol and picked the least destructive path the electricity could take through her, opening a circuit which guided the electricity through functions which would be sacrificed to save the most essential parts of herself. Diagnostics, thankfully, had been saved, and reports began to flood Penny’s consciousness even as traditional senses remained absent, allowing her to at least know what was going on in her body even if she couldn’t yet see or hear or feel. A grim march of failure reports began.
Rocket thrusters: Inoperable.
All flight mode-related technological arrays: Inoperable.
Taste and smell sensory arrays: Inoperable.
Biological vital sign monitoring systems: Inoperable.
Battery cells A, B, and F: Inoperable.
Ingestive energy-synthesizing incinerator system: Inoperable.
And on, and on.
Suddenly, a new dimension rose into existence around Penny’s consciousness—her audioreceptors, powering back up without any diagnostic warnings and providing another stream of much-needed data. And hearing, Penny would be able to hear again—
However, she immediately wondered if diagnostics had missed something wrong with her auditory processing, because at the moment they were supposed to activate, Penny still heard nothing. It took several seconds to realize, she wasn’t hearing nothing. She was hearing silence.
When her photoreceptor array rebooted a few moments later and supplied a visual feed, she understood the silence.
Ruby.
With the return of sight came short-term memory access, triggered by the image of Ruby lying in the grass beside Penny, her eyes closed and her face stone-still. With biological sensors out of commission, Penny had no way of knowing whether Ruby was simply unconscious or if she was dead.
Penny remembered it all. The fight. Yang. Ruby. The lightning. Everything.
She still could not move any part of her body—not even her photoreceptors, which remained fixed on one view before her. All Penny could do was lie there with the girl she loved, for whom she did not yet know whether she should be full of hope or grief.
And then a sharp, angry voice carried through the air to Penny, one which she instantly recognized.
“Do not look away. This is a tragedy.”
Cinder.
“Attention must be paid. This is your first glimpse of the future planned for us by the men who control our so-called free world. This is the tragedy that will repeat itself millions of times over. Unless you recognize how the true culpability for tonight lies with the headmasters who command not just the Huntress academies, but also the fortunes of our kingdoms and everyone living within their walls.”
The words, clear and incomprehensible all at once, echoed from the arena loudspeakers which were connected to the broadcast system. The same broadcast system that would transmit each one of Cinder’s words over the airwaves to every corner of the world.
“This tragedy is far deeper than what you see. You are not looking at corpses. You are looking at wreckage. The truth is that these two innocent little girls are the world’s most powerful war machines.”
Notes:
Oh, it feels so good to finally unleash that title drop. It was so incredibly hard to wait over a year to use it. But it was worth it.
I'll see you all next week for Chapter 63: The Lost Fable
Chapter 63: The Lost Fable
Notes:
Uploading this chapter a little earlier than I usually would because I'll be traveling without a way to upload for the rest of the day!
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Once upon a time, there was a girl who turned to stone to save herself.
Once upon a time, there was a girl who learned to be her own blacksmith.
“Do not look away.”
In the Atlesian command center located in the heart of Vale where security for the tournament was directed, Winter Schnee couldn’t have looked away from the screen even if she was ordered to. She watched in horror as the girl she was tasked with keeping safe at the cost of anything, including Winter’s own life, laid on the ground before the entire world. There was no indication of any life left in her form, which suddenly seemed so much smaller than Winter ever remembered. She looked like anything but a soldier, and in fact an icy cold feeling told Winter that she would never see her as a soldier again. Maybe that feeling was acute guilt.
Frozen where she stood with one hand on her sword even though there was nothing she could do, she stared at the screen and realized that she had failed in every way possible to protect Ruby.
Ruby had been pulling away from Atlas. And Winter had tried to pull her back. Winter had believed it was the right thing to do, to pull Ruby back before she got hurt. Except… except by pulling Ruby in one direction while she’d tried to pull herself in another… she’d broken her.
Winter remembered a time in her life when she’d felt stretched painfully between two lives. The life she lived protecting Weiss from Father and upholding the honor of the Schnee family name, and the life she lived in Atlas Academy. The two had felt increasingly incompatible, and… Weiss (so much younger than now) had begged Winter to stay with wide eyes, while Winter had been unable to imagine any way to gain freedom except through the strength of the military, and…
And Winter had chosen a side, decisively. But what would have happened if she wasn’t able to choose a side so easily? What would’ve she done if Weiss had been more successful in begging Winter to stay because she wasn’t yet old enough to protect herself?
Winter felt sick, and there was no hiding her ashen expression from the soldiers around her. Nor could she hide the tear which slipped down one cheek, followed rapidly by another which she furiously swiped them away. She had hurt Ruby more than any enemy ever had.
She… she would’ve broken just like Ruby had tonight, wouldn’t she? With the weight of so much on her shoulders just like Ruby and a belief that the only one who could fix everything was herself, just like Ruby… Winter would’ve broken. And maybe destroyed everything around her.
Three dead girls on the television. Three unimpeachable realizations of what another future for Winter could’ve been. It was all too easy for her to imagine herself in a rage borne of a collapsing psyche, setting fire to the Schnee Manor and not caring what burned down inside it, letting Weiss and Whitley and Klein and Mother and the helpstaff go up in an inferno because the weight of the family had been too much.
“Forgive me, Brothers…” Winter whispered, clutching the hilt of her sword.
She had murdered three girls tonight.
There had been something else in Ruby’s words which had struck Winter in an entirely different way, a way that she was less aware of—as a vague but immense discomfort which she felt whenever she remembered how Ruby had confessed on the broadcast that she could never be happy again in the military now that she knew what kind of life laid beyond its confines.
With every eye in the command post aimed at the tragedy unfolding on television, no one noticed the silently blinking dot which appeared on a radar screen, signaling the distant but unmistakable approach of a large ship. Normally, an alarm would have sounded, alerting anyone nearby to the presence of an unidentified ship on the radar. But that alarm remained dormant. Because the ship which had just appeared on the command center’s radar was, by construction and transponder signal, an Atlesian military cruiser.
“Attention must be paid. This is your first glimpse of the future planned for us by the men who control our so-called free world. This is the tragedy that will repeat itself millions of times over.”
Ozpin, who had leapt from his chair at the moment that the lightning struck Penny, now sank slowly back into the seat behind his desk, staring at the reflection of his crumpled expression on the glass surface.
There was a strange truth to the righteously delivered words which all but cut through his eardrums. Even if this fresh blood on his hands was the result of the failure of all his choice made in hopes of avoiding this horror… it was still, in a way, the result of his best-laid plans.
And this was a tragedy that had already repeated itself millions of times over, in all his past incarnations, with hopelessly unquantifiable numbers of faithful friends and trusting allies and loyal soldiers. All of whom had fallen in service to his cause. Sometimes, directly in defense of him. Always with belief or hope or earnestness or acceptance or peace. And ignorance, well-engineered ignorance to the fact that they were dying for a war which could never be won.
And now, Penny.
Not Penny. Anyone but Penny.
Ozpin would’ve given his life up and twenty future incarnations long before letting Penny come to harm.
But somehow, just like with the Fall Maiden, just like with the incident in the CCT where Penny discovered the existence of a Queen , just like everything which Ozpin had tried so hard to avert ever since Penny had come under his care, it was Penny who became the innocent target, again and again, until she was too much of a target.
Ozpin raked his hands through his scalp, forcing his head down until all he could see was his desk. He made a silent plea to the Brothers, wherever they resided now, for a single act of mercy. The mercy of lifting his curse to let him rest. Even if it meant admitting failure in his quest. Even if it meant he would never see his lost love again.
But he knew that plea would go unanswered. After all, it was a very old and very worn-out plea.
If Ozpin had lifted his head from its despairing angle, he would’ve seen the dark shapes of a flock of Nevermores beginning to gather in the distance.
“Unless you recognize how the true culpability for tonight lies with the headmasters who command not just the Huntress academies, but also the fortunes of our kingdoms and everyone living within their walls.”
James Ironwood stood with a hand on his earpiece, his confidential channels lighting up with a chaos of status reports from his two cruisers in the sky, but there was nothing he could order them to do except man battle stations and prepare for the coming tsunami of Grimm. What else was there to do at this moment? No, his forces could only watch, and steel themselves.
Once again, Ironwood found himself wondering how Ozpin could bear the knowledge that they would never win. For centuries—millennia? Longer? He was always vague about how long he’d lived. And now Ironwood understood the reason for that vagueness. Maybe Ozpin’s many lives had stretched so much longer than any of them could imagine, and knowing his actual age would immediately cause all his allies to question why Salem hadn’t been destroyed yet. And what answer could Ozpin give to such a question? What answer could Ironwood give to anyone who asked him?
Mettle had not offered any insight into the way forward since Ozpin had told him this news. It was as if his Semblance had been neutralized by the shock of the news. Had it ever been worth anything in the first place?
He turned on a heel and strode briskly out of the security center. The city was where he was needed most right now; Ozpin and the Beacon faculty would be more than capable of directing the defense of the school without him.
His path through Amity took him past more than one wall-mounted television broadcasting the stomach-turning scene to horrified civilians clustered around every monitor, frozen with fear and disbelief.
The broadcast never wavered from the feed of Ruby and Penny’s broken bodies lying motionless on the ground, all the world’s attention on them.
Ironwood grit his teeth, and did not let his eyes stray to any screen more than once. But he couldn’t stop his thoughts from reaching a stark realization.
The only thing James Ironwood had accomplished by creating the pair of projects now being broadcast to the world was handing the world’s enemies a tremendous amount of ammunition.
“This tragedy is far deeper than what you see. You are not looking at corpses. You are looking at wreckage.”
“NO!”
The enraged syllable which escaped Pietro Polendina’s mouth at that moment was a shock to himself as much as it was to all his friends gathered with him at the television. The sound felt foreign on his lips. But he could no longer stand by in silence as this atrocity was inflicted upon his daughter.
Robyn, standing further back from the group with her arms crossed, was the only one who Pietro had told about Penny after yesterday. Now he was wishing he’d told every single person he’d encountered since that moment. How many minds were about to be made irreversibly suspicious of his daughter? And how many of them could he have prevented from such suspicions?
Pietro had a terrible inkling of exactly the direction this broadcast was about to take. Of what kind of painfully unjust label was about to be slapped onto Penny. Of the horrendous things which would be said about her and taken as morbid truths by the rest of the world. If had been possible to sacrifice his own life to stop this broadcast at that moment, he would’ve accepted the offer immediately.
He didn’t know if Penny was dead or alive at that moment. What he did know was that a severe enough electrical overload would make her appear exactly like she was dead, even if she survived the event. Which meant there was still hope. He clung to the possibility, squeezing the armrests of his mechnochair until his knuckles ached. He had to hope. There was nothing else left in his life.
“The truth is that these two innocent little girls are the world’s most powerful war machines.”
NO.
NO.
NO.
Penny could barely think beyond the word NO frantically repeating itself over and over in her head. She was paralyzed, locked in place by her own body. She could not even call what was unfolding around her a nightmare anymore. Not when it was exponentially worse than any of her deepest, wildest, most untethered fears. This was… it was an apocalypse. But only for her. It was the end of Penny Pallas’s world. The end of her life as she knew it.
“The Huntress academies have a chokehold upon our world. And their grip has only grown stronger with each new generation of children you have entrusted them with; children raised to fight, die, and be grateful for the privilege to do so.”
Beyond the horror of being exposed to the world at large, perhaps the greatest proof that this was the end of everything was the pale, slackened face of Ruby which Penny was forced to see. Her photoreceptors would not move and their shutters would not close, leaving the awful sight to continuously bombard her and make her feel like the lightning had never stopped hitting. She didn’t know if Ruby was dead, she didn’t know she didn’t know she didn’t know—
“Our leaders claim that the children you’ve entrusted to the academies are dying nobly to protect us all as an unfortunate sacrifice required for peace, justice, and security. For eighty years, we have accepted this as the truth. But how can it be the truth when the men who lead these academies are forever consolidating more and more power in their hands? If our world is truly stable, as the kingdoms claim, then the headmasters should have no need for such strength. And yet, Ozpin rules Vale as a king in all but name. General Ironwood wields the kingdom of Atlas as his personal weapon, his finger always on the trigger. That’s to say nothing of Mistral and Vacuo, where Haven and Shade have long overshadowed all else in their respective domains. Ask yourselves: Why, in a world at peace, have these institutions of so-called stability become shrouded fortresses which direct the destinies of the world in ways that few understand?”
Cinder’s tone, harder than the blade of the most carefully forged weapon, had a match in Penny’s emotional recognition systems. When they’d met in the memorial garden earlier today and Cinder had said, You’re still trapped, Penny, those words and everything else had come in the same devastatingly intent tone. Even in the distortion of the voice which echoed across the Colosseum, the match confidence was extremely high. Penny did not know what that signified.
“Is it because our leaders are not the paragons of virtue and magnanimity as they would have us believe, but rather shrewd illusionists who conceal their simple greed and hunger for power? Or, is it because there truly is something horrible lurking out there beyond simple Grimm, something which demands that headmasters wield the power of armies?”
Ruby still had not moved. Penny still could not move. Penny still had no biological sensing systems to check. The image of Ciel, there and then gone, would not stop flashing through her consciousness. Penny still had no voice to beg, please be alive please be alive please be alive please be alive.
“Honestly, I don’t know which answer is the truth, and it’s even harder to say which one would be worse.”
Penny could only see half a video screen at the arena’s side, the rest of her view blocked by Ruby’s body. But she could see enough to know she and Ruby were on display for the entire world to gawk at like zoo animals.
“But what I do know is that our leaders’ thirst for power has already grown beyond the capabilities of ordinary Huntresses. And the ones who claim to be our guardians have already begun to furnish their academies with covert weapons of unprecedented scope and power, which they believe will better enforce the will of their kingdoms. Living weapons. Two of which you are seeing now.”
No matter how fervently Penny wished to flee, or hide, or even just pull her hood down all the way over her face and pretend none of this was happening, she still could not move.
“The first…”
The video screen shifted for the first time since Cinder had begun speaking, the camera tilting and zooming in until it was entirely focused on Ruby. On her still-insensate face, on Lunar Enforcer spilled into the grass, on the thin trail of blood down her forehead.
“This child has been introduced to you as Ruby, but like so much else about it, that is a lie. This is a walking weapon of mass destruction known as Project Moonrise.”
There was some disgusting corner of Penny which was immensely relieved that Cinder’s attention was focused on Ruby first, because it meant Penny’s own secret would be safe for just a little bit longer. She hated herself for thinking it as soon as it appeared, and yet she could not stop herself from thinking it. It was a relief which felt as shameful as the sense of victory she’d felt when she punched Ruby into the ground.
Suddenly, the video screen flashed, and then instead of Ruby right now, Penny was staring at an image of Ruby long ago—no, a video. Most likely taken from a soldier’s bodycam, given the shakiness and the random pixelation artifacts which blinked in and out around the frame. The Ruby on screen, standing knee-deep in snow with clenched fists, appeared terrifyingly young even by the twisted standards of her life as she stared down a full-grown Sabyr which took a threatening step towards her and unleashed a deafening screech.
“Project Moonrise was born in an Atlesian laboratory, grown out of a test tube and crafted to carry a very special power. One which allowed it to destroy Grimm with a single glance.”
The video played on as Cinder spoke, the soldier behind the camera sprinting towards Younger Ruby as best they could through the snow, clearly trying to rescue her—
Only for Younger Ruby’s childish voice to resonate through the Colosseum as she shouted, “Go AWAY!” at the looming Grimm.
And as Cinder’s voiceover uttered the word destroy, Ruby Karyatis’s secret was well and truly broken forever. The flash of silver which erupted from Younger Ruby’s eyes did not fill the screen as it had filled Penny’s vision in the tunnel, but it was still so bright that its recreation on screen threw a ghostly flicker over the arena. The Ruby lying beside Penny did not stir under the sudden luminous flash. When the video’s silver light disappeared, the Sabyr was fading away, crumbling out of existence. Younger Ruby turned to the camera with a bright smile, and the video ended there, freezing on the image of a slayer who seemed barely old enough to understand what she’d just done, and yet excited by the accomplishment all the same.
“Or turn them to nothing but stone.”
The frame of the broadly grinning child disappeared, replaced by the start of another video with a similarly young Ruby, also from a bodycam. However, this time, the video was entirely still, and the lower half of the frame was taken up by the ground, as if the camera had been thrown aside… or as if the soldier wearing the camera had fallen in battle.
There was a fuzzy gray-red shape in the video which laid at the very edge of what Penny could see over her Ruby’s body. And the more Penny studied it, the more sure she felt of identifying it as the limp, bloodied hand of the soldier behind the camera.
Unlike the previous video, Ruby’s back was to the camera, and the only glimpse of her face to be seen was when she turned her head just enough to look at the fallen soldier behind her, worry and fear and confusion flashing over her face. Almost immediately, though, she snapped forwards again to stare down the Manticore towering above, her posture infused with a fearlessness and determination that didn’t seem possible for someone that young facing something so big and bloodthirsty.
The Manticore pawed at the ground, its breath steaming in the cold air as it snarled at Ruby, opening its jaws and getting ready to pounce—
Instead, the Grimm met its end when Ruby screamed “STOP!” and her eyes exploded with silver again. This time, when the blast cleared, it left behind a petrified Manticore and a wildly trembling Ruby who collapsed into the snow as soon as she realized the Grimm had been neutralized. Just before the video cut off, she twisted around to look into the camera lying on the ground—or rather, to look at the soldier behind the camera who had not moved once throughout the video. This time, when the video ended and left Ruby’s face frozen in frame, the world was met with a look of fear.
“And even make Grimm flee at the mere sight of it, as only an apex predator could do.”
One more video, and this one was Ruby the same age as the others, facing down an Alpha Beowolf—but not alone. This time, the unmistakable form of James Ironwood stood beside her, both their back to the camera, one hand on his pistol at his hip as he stared down the Ursa but made no move to defend himself. The Beowolf, big enough to crush Ruby in one clenched paw, roared loud enough that it stirred up the snow—until Ruby stepped forward.
“NO!” she shouted in a childish voice, and the Alpha Beowolf halted mid-roar, its entire posture abruptly becoming one of complete deference as it took one, two steps back, whining and shaking wildly. Its ears were flat against its head, and for the world viewing this, it had to be the first time many of them had seen a Grimm show fear.
“BAD!” Young Ruby snapped, and the Alpha Beowolf turned tail and fled, tripping over itself in its hurry and kicking up an immense cloud of snow in its path—until the screen went blank in another flash of silver. The video ended there, frozen on a frame of pure silver swallowing up everything.
“General Ironwood describes Moonrise in his notes as magic. I think it’s far more accurate to call it unnatural.”
The broadcast switched again, this time flashing through a series of still images of Ruby, slightly older in each one like pages of a flipbook slowly flying past.
“Almost as unnatural is how every moment of Moonrise’s existence has been mapped out from the very beginning by the kingdom that created it. Weapons pushed into its hands as soon as it was strong enough to hold them. Sent on covert missions as soon as it had a reliable instinct for self-preservation. Trained under a cloak of secrecy to be the perfect Atlesian soldier.”
Sitting on a table in a medical examination room, hooked up to a heart monitor. Wielding a smaller version of Lunar Enforcer (more fit for a younger child’s size) at a firing range. Slashing through Grimm inside a ruined building.
“And perhaps most alarming of all, Project Moonrise was raised not only to fight Grimm, but also to fight people.”
Back to a video. But this time, it was a Ruby who appeared much closer in age to the Ruby on the ground with Penny. The video was mounted to the wing of an airship which was skimming low over the treetops of a forest, with Ruby hanging out the side of the airship and letting her braid whip in the wind as she watched the ground. Her face was obscured by a mask which covered her mouth alongside her usual goggles, but there was no mistaking her weapon or her stature, painfully smaller than the five Atlesian Specialists in red-and-white uniforms who surrounded her.
When the airship approached a clearing a few seconds later, Ruby was the first one out, the camera too slow to track the silver dust which streaked towards the clearing—no, a camp. Penny noted tents, an extinguished campfire, several stacks of crates—and that was all anyone saw before Ruby struck the camp. She’d turned herself into a whirlwind midair, which she must’ve infused with Gravity Dust, given the sudden black tint to the silver tornado. As the airship slowed to a hover overhead, Ruby rocketed around the campsite once, twice, and then her whirlwind slammed down into the exact center of the clearing. The Gravity Dust sent everything hurtling away, which was not an exaggeration. Tents, camping stoves, rusted ATVs, worn-out sleeping bags, many other things, and people, who were being flung into restraints by Ruby before everyone had even hit the ground. By the time the quintet of Specialists joined her, the battle—if it could even be called that—was already won. And Penny had no idea who Ruby had fought. Or even where the fight had occurred, because there were no deciduous forests in the continent of Solitas. If it was Atlas invading a small, isolated encampment, the first guess would be the White Fang, but the possibilities went far beyond that.
“Does Moonrise even know the difference between a Grimm and a person? Or are they all the same to its inhuman eyes whenever it is given the command to kill an enemy?”
Now the screen began to play a montage of fights, all of which took place in the same holographic training room, with Ruby fighting against the same red-and-white uniformed Specialists as the previous video. Sometimes one-on-one, sometimes one against two or three or four or even five. She was a storm of blades, never appearing tired, never hesitating, never retreating.
Something inside Penny was seizing up. Not a lightning-caused malfunction, but a deep sadness. She was seeing the side of Ruby’s life that had only ever been implied to Team BSYP until now, and it hurt. And what made it hurt even worse for Penny was knowing this might be what she would’ve become, if she’d never escaped Atlas.
The feral smile which Penny knew as Ruby’s battle face was on full display in this sequence, and when the montage ended, it paused on that exact smile, Ruby showing her teeth to the camera mid-swing and mid-flip, Lunar Enforcer caught at the moment when its leading blade was flying towards the broad-shouldered Specialist who seemed to be the squad’s leader. Her smile made her look as if she would tear out her opponent’s throat with her teeth, if her blade didn’t.
But Penny didn’t think that was a scary smile at all! In Ruby’s battle smile, she could easily see Ruby’s eagerness and desire to help and confidence in her ability to protect others! It was a smile that felt adorable when knowing how much genuine excitement laid beneath it! It was a smile that brought her warmth every time she thought about it! But… those things were most definitely not what the rest of the world would see. Everyone else would see what Cinder was telling them: a wild animal. They would have no desire to look further.
“If Project Moonrise was raised to fight Grimm, then why does it appear more at ease when it is carving up the people that it’s supposed to be protecting? Is it actually opposed to the Grimm? Or is it simply one of them stuffed inside the skin of a little girl and driven by an insatiable appetite for destruction of any kind? Is it simply being held on a leash by a kingdom that so arrogantly believes it can harness destructive forces far beyond our understanding? Given its artificiality, does Moonrise even have a soul? Is it possible that it can feel anything beyond the thrill of destruction and a perverse craving for violence and blood?”
Penny wished that sheer anger could propel her uncooperative body into movement. A burning desire filled her to stagger to her feet and scream defenses of Ruby. That she had so much soul. Such an overabundance that it was as if she had to constantly shed bits of it through her Semblance to prevent collapsing in on herself and bursting into nothing but heat and light, like an ancient star going supernova.
“And even if you cannot believe that Moonrise was grown in a lab, the alternatives are no less sinister. Was an unsuspecting family’s crib left empty, their baby stolen away by Atlas? Were the streets combed by the military for a vagrant child who would have no one to miss her? Or, did General Ironwood simply buy a little girl from one of the many places in the world where a stack of coins and the right knowledge can still purchase one captive soul?”
Penny felt more lost than ever before. Slavery? Why was Cinder speaking of it as something which still existed? How was she supposed to believe in anything Cinder said, when everything else in this speech was a lie?
“And then, what unspeakable things would have to be done to someone’s child, to turn her into this creature? I’d ask what happens when Moonrise begins to crave more than what Atlas can provide, what happens when it tries to break its leash, but I think we’ve just witnessed the answer to both questions.”
“SHUT UP!”
The voice was so angry and so close to what Penny was currently imagining, that she wondered if she’d regained the ability to speak without realizing. But no, that was Yang.
Cinder’s voice came to a stop as Yang stumbled into the field of Penny’s vision, dropping onto her knees next to Ruby. For a moment, Penny glimpsed the blisteringly red eyes of her Semblance.
“SHE WAS MY SISTER!” she howled at the sky, shielding Ruby with her arms. “AND SHE WAS A MILLION TIMES THE PERSON YOU ARE!”
With that, she draped the rest of her body over Ruby and began to wail, burying her face in Ruby’s hair.
Without so much as a pause, Cinder’s voice returned as smooth as before, no trace of surprise or displeasure. “And now you see how Atlas’s deceptions run deep enough to utterly fool even a supposedly bright young Huntress.”
Yang seemed incapable of replying, only shaking harder as she held Ruby. There was no trace of her grief-stricken sounds in the broadcast, which meant that the field microphones were now turned off.
“How dare Atlas,” Cinder went on. “How dare they. How dare they enter this monstrosity into the tournament and call it a student. A Huntress. A defender of the innocent. How dare their latest lab rat be let loose amongst the populace in the skin of a little girl, as if it is a mere person and not a vicious instrument of Atlas’s thirst for control and power, concocted by their most rotten and decadent impulses. For months, this beast barely brought to heel has been a silent infiltrator of Beacon Academy, lying in wait, and for what?”
A pause. Just long enough to make Penny wonder—was it somehow over…?
“The answer lies beside Moonrise at this very moment.”
When Yang had collapsed at Ruby’s side, she’d inadvertently blocked Penny’s view of the video screen, but suddenly she lifted her head, her eyes widening, and then she scrambled upright for a better view, unintentionally shifting Ruby’s position as she did so. The end result was that for the first time since the fight’s end, Penny could see the full broadcast.
Just in time to see herself alone on the screen.
No.
“Allow me to introduce you to Project Battle Angel.”
No no no no no no no PLEASE—
“Atlas is also responsible for this project, again pursuing the creation of a perfect soldier, but through a different kind of artificiality.”
Stop please stop stop stop I will let you kill me right now without fighting back if you just stop before you tell the whole world
“The Battle Angel is a machine.”
A person, Penny whispered to nothing. Please, please believe that. Please, anyone who is watching… Please understand that I am a real girl and I have always been.
“This girl you see is entirely mechanical. Underneath the chemical polymers which form her imitation skin and hair, she is a metal chassis through which electricity flows instead of blood. There is not a shred of organic material to be found anywhere in her body.”
The broadcast focused in closer and closer on Penny’s face, until the entire screen was taken up by her eyes which she could not move, and yet it kept going, narrowing its focus until it had to be at the extreme limit of the camera’s capabilities. Close enough for the miniature angles of her photoreceptors and their shutters to be plainly visible to the world.
Penny stared into her own eyes, and she could almost feel the world staring back. What were the people watching in Vale and Atlas and Mantle and Mistral and Vacuo and Menagerie thinking? What were they feeling? Horror? Disgust? Derision? Amusement? Fear? She didn’t want to know. She wanted to know. She didn’t want to know. She had to know.
The camera shifted, pulling back a little, bringing Penny’s wings into focus. The wings had been dented and twisted slightly in the crash, and the thrusters were covered in scorch marks—the afterimage of the lightning-induced blowouts.
“Those wings are not a jetpack. They are built into her body, and that is just one of the many weapons which have been crammed into the Battle Angel’s chassis.”
Penny thought of soaring over the Emerald Forest on the first day of initiation. Taking Ruby flying over the ocean at sunset after they told each other their secrets. Flying up to the secret garden to find Ruby hiding, just before their first kiss. Penny’s wings, the first part of her mechanical self that she revealed to her teammates. I have never once thought of my wings as weapons.
The video changed. Just like with Ruby, Penny found herself looking at her past.
That was her. That was a picture of herself. A picture of herself, much younger in appearance than even her earliest days at Beacon. And that was—what were those green-and-black swords arrayed around her younger self in that picture? How were they—
Floating Array, came words from somewhere in her memory, an unsigned fragment of data with nowhere to trace its origin to. But Penny barely paid any attention to that new data as she continued to stare at the image of her younger self. A smaller body (was her current body a modified version of that, or was this an entirely different body?), but the same chin-length hair and a smile which was just as bright as any at Beacon. However, Penny was painfully confident that no one else would be noticing her smile, or perhaps even the swords (Floating Array, something quiet in Penny’s memory supplied again), arranged in an arc behind her. Because their attention would be entirely aimed at how every frontal armor panel on her body had been removed, revealing the internal workings of her top half to the world.
Her wires, her circuits, her servos, everything about her which was mechanical and metal. Strangely enough, the emotion which rushed through Penny was not shame or fear or even dismay. It was anger.
This was private. Her internals were private. That kind of depth was something she had only shown to Ruby, and now it’d been thrown carelessly into the eyes of everyone like it wasn’t special, like it wasn’t a treasure to be shared with only the people she cared most about—
Penny felt worse and worse for ever having entertained the possibility that Cinder Fall could be a friend.
“She carries sensors which can detect a spike in someone’s heartbeat from across the room—a walking lie detector. She thinks with computers generations beyond anything else in Atlas—a true artificial intelligence, the coding of her consciousness incomprehensible to us. With those computers, she can calculate in milliseconds exactly the force and angle needed to snap a human’s neck, but that could almost be called unnecessary, since she also carries the strength to crush a full-grown Ursa’s skull with her bare hands.”
With each new attribute that Cinder described in a way Penny would never do, the video screen blinked through another image from an unfamiliar world. Scenes which Penny did not even have the dignity of remembering.
And yet, even as she was bombarded with reminders of her fearful past which she had fled, Penny found herself… despicably curious. Would she see her father? Would she know if she saw her father?
But every image was just Penny, alone and doing things she didn’t remember. Facing a Manticore which stood three times as tall as her in a desolate tundra. Lifting a cargo truck over her head inside some sort of sterile testing room. Testing the movement of one of her hands, which had its synthetic skin removed, giving a full view of the joints and servos articulating. And then a viewpoint which could only have been recorded through her own eyes at some point—Penny recognized those optical parameters immediately—which showed a busy city street somewhere in Mantle that she’d never seen, bustling with people and vehicles and every single thing lighting up on the screen with an infrared signature, tracked by Penny’s vision. An unfamiliar sight which her own eyes had undoubtedly seen at some point.
Penny Pallas, just as much a captive audience as the rest of the world, and in some ways just as stunned as them. She had not wanted to believe what Ruby told her just before the fight, that she’d been built by Atlas to be an unthinking weapon just like Ruby, but… the evidence was overwhelming.
Somehow, it felt as if she was simultaneously being exposed to the world as an inferior being to be mocked, and yet also as a nightmarish threat to be feared. Hatred and fear existed so close to one another, after all. That was what bigotry was called. Phobia.
People who looked down on Faunus would at one moment call them animals that could barely stand upright, and then in the next moment, they would be cowering away at the sight of a Faunus with pointed teeth and shrieking about feeling threatened by their presence.
And then her friends from the queer club in Beacon, other -phobia victims. A girl who wore a dress when other people thought she didn’t look enough like one—she could be spat on while walking down a public street, and then two blocks later someone else could be frantically averting their gaze and rushing away when they saw her.
It didn’t make sense to Penny. How could someone be so sure of their superiority while also being so sure that they were in danger? When she’d asked this question to Blake or Nora or Yang or Jaune, they agreed. It had never made sense. Did it make sense to the people being that way? Or did they just never consider it?
Synthetic-phobia. All too easily, she could imagine it happening to her, in both directions with equal fervor. Penny could calculate exactly how, after this broadcast, her future would be full of people who sneered down at her in one moment and then cowered in fear for the next.
If she even lived beyond this night at all.
Sneered at for not having a beating heart, for not feeling hunger or thirst, for not thinking exactly the way they did, for being ‘unnatural,’ whatever that meant anyways, for being made instead of born—oh, and perhaps the people who were bigots to Nora and Jaune for being trans would also be doubly bigoted to Penny because on top of all the synthetic-phobia, they would see another thing they thought wasn’t enough of a girl! Because some people already believed (wrongly) that girls couldn’t be made, only born!
And then they’d be afraid of her, of course, because who wouldn’t be afraid of a deadly weapon? Which was exactly what Penny had been built to be! And she was powerless to tell them otherwise right now!
“Then, the crowning jewel of this weapons platform. A weapon that no one else in the world could wield.”
Penny recognized the swords now shown floating around her on screen—the same green-and-black swords with her emblem (Floating Array, came an insistent whisper once again from somewhere in her memory) from the first image.
But those had been still images. This was a video, and the swords moved in a way that Penny had not expected. The gleaming blades moved in fluid, graceful arcs around her, glowing green highlights leaving trails of neon light through the air as sweeping arcs slashed through holographic targets with blistering speed.
Her oldest databanks were pinging for something which wasn’t there; a feeling of a memory which would be found if she just devoted one more processing cycle than her entire capability to the retrieval…
This was her almost exactly as she’d appeared when she woke up at Beacon. How close had this video been captured to the day of her escape? Who was taking the video? Her father? A friend? One of the people trying to control her?
It appeared as if she were dancing with the swords, in exactly the way she’d danced with Ruby in the ballroom. She counted eight swords in all, moving together in beautiful concert, directed by sweeps of her arm and flicks of her wrist, sometimes moving as one and sometimes splitting apart into two or even three distinct, spinning wheels of metal. It was such an entrancing sight that the rest of the world receded from Penny’s consciousness matrix just a little, and she eagerly allowed herself to be caught up in the sight of something which wasn’t the collapse of her life.
Only by focusing her photoreceptors in one section of the broadcast could she see the source of the swords’ pinpoint control: infinitesimal cables which radiated out from her body, only visible as the smallest glimmers of light as they twirled around her body, one for each sword. Something inside Penny kept pinging insistently as she watched the swords— Floating Array —soaring around her forgotten self, but she had no way of tracing the signal. All she could do was hope something would trigger it in full.
But the strange joy of rediscovering a part of herself could only last so long, and like so many other moments when her thoughts had overwhelmed her, it was Cinder’s self-assured voice which yanked her harshly back to reality.
“The skill and the expertise and the blades to outclass even the most skilled Huntress in battle.”
The forgotten Penny came to a stop on the screen, her swords forming a perfect circle around her. Then they spun up, slowly at first and then faster and faster, a glowing green ball of light appearing at the center of the circle.
“And integrated within the swords… a one-of-a-kind electromagnetic ion cannon, which can cleave an airship in two.”
The camera pulled back, showing the wider training room—and the four enormous Paladins which sat in a line against the far wall. The ball of green light grew brighter and brighter until it erupted into a massive pulsating beam of the same ferociously churning light, blasting through each of the four Paladins and neatly bisecting them all at the midsection in one sweep of the laser.
“And finally, protecting the whole of the Battle Angel’s metal shell: an unnatural Aura, artificially generated and maintained by a machine within her body. An Aura which was ripped away from an innocent victim and stashed in her body in a truly ghastly, unthinkable process.”
…What?
No. Penny refused to believe that her father had HURT someone else to create her. She refused to believe that this was anything but her own soul that pulsed within her body.
But… it was Atlas that had built her, built Ruby, without treating either of them like the people they were. Was… was it in the realm of possibility to say they’d hurt someone else in service of making Penny a better, truer weap—
No. Cinder had to be lying somehow. She had to be. Penny didn’t know how, but she would prove her soul was hers.
“Atlas wanted a weapon which would always make the right decision, yet always follow every order it was given. When Project Battle Angel became a reality with computer code and Aura grafted together, they assumed they’d solved the paradox. Enough independence to avoid the errors an ordinary Knight would always make, but always able to be physically overridden when needed. But eventually, it was precisely that Aura which would send Project Battle Angel down a path entirely different from Project Moonrise.”
Yet again, something unidentifiable in Penny’s memory went ping.
“You see, as twisted and warped and sullied as that Aura’s body was, as trapped in an unnatural prison as it was, as tortured as its existence was… it was still a piece of soul, and it yearned on some level to be free as every soul on this planet does.”
Ping.
“As she was built, Battle Angel did not sit idle. She explored, and learned, and plotted, and soon she began to escape. Into the streets of Atlas and even Mantle, where she would play the world’s most high-stakes game of keep-away with the soldiers sent to rein her in. If you ever saw a strange child with orange hair and freckles hiding in the shadows of an Atlesian alley, you very well may have been face-to-face with something which could have murdered you in the blink of an eye.”
But wouldn’t have.
“And as the years passed, the Battle Angel’s escape attempts grew more and more daring, until one day, the soldiers could not find her. She had escaped. It was Moonrise who slavishly stayed without a moment’s consideration to any other kind of life, and the Battle Angel who fled in search of freedom. The flesh was much more easily controlled than the machine. How ironic.”
Ping.
“However, the Battle Angel’s tale ends with tragedy, because of where she fled to. She took refuge in Beacon Academy, because she believed it safe. But Headmaster Ozpin knew exactly what she was when he took her in, and without even realizing it, the Battle Angel was lured into an entirely different kind of servitude. One where she believed with her entire simple mind that she was free, when in truth, she was another powerful man’s pawn, tricked by his veneer of kindness into believing that fighting for him could be anything resembling freedom.”
By now, Penny was exhausted. What point was there in trying to contradict the things Cinder said when she was the only one who could hear? She didn’t even know if there were any grains of truth buried in the callous words, because she didn’t remember any of it. She resigned herself to lay there, waiting for the end of the broadcast or death, whichever came first.
“Do not grieve for her. She has been set free in a way that she never could be in life—free from her body at last. Her soul can finally rest, unburdened of its tortured existence.”
“NO.”
Penny’s thought processes momentarily ground to a halt. Weiss?
Her radar had yet to come back online, so the only hint she had to another person’s approach was the rap of sharp, running footsteps from somewhere outside her field of vision. But that was a one hundred percent match for her partner’s voice, and 1.8 seconds later, Weiss dropped to her knees beside Penny, putting one arm on her side while the other went to rest on her chest.
“I have never known a freer girl in my entire LIFE!” Weiss snapped at the air in much the same way Yang had, but with considerably more emotional poise. “She—”
Cinder’s voice pressed on, and this time there was no acknowledgement of the rebuttal. “Do not grieve for Moonrise, either. That is as useful as grieving for a broken rifle. Instead, you must recognize this tragedy as the harbinger of a terrible but imminent future. This is only the beginning. This will happen again and again. This is the intention of every academy, to twist every child who enters into something unrecognizable, to turn them into disposable, mutable weapons who no longer even understand their own immense strength, as Yang Xiao Long failed to do tonight. To turn them into unstable dynamos which might melt down at any moment, as Pyrrha Nikos and Weiss Schnee demonstrated yesterday. In Atlas, where the Huntresses are already just one organ in an irreversibly interwoven ecosystem of military might and state power, General Ironwood is actively removing all vestiges of the boundary between Huntress and weapon. Did he discover that Ozpin stole away his prize toy, and send Project Moonrise to Beacon to exercise his retribution? Or did Ozpin discover the existence of Moonrise first, and snatch up the Battle Angel for himself to even the playing field against his rival? Or were both Headmasters unaware of the other side’s prize pawn and simply testing their own secret gambits for power? Whatever the answer, this fight was not an unlucky coincidence. It was a tragedy, but it was not an accident. It resulted directly from the hidden manipulations of the men who want us to trust them. Do you think it was a coincidence that these two girls fought each other? Do you think it was a coincidence that Penny Pallas was forced to fight amidst an electric storm in an arena built by Atlas?”
Weiss’s hand was pressing into Penny’s chest with an unusual amount pressure even for this situation, which—
Weiss wasn’t mourning her, Penny realized. She was looking for a sign of life.
Weiss gasped and jerked forward, her ponytail swinging wildly as her blue eyes met Penny’s, searching with clear purpose now. She had found the thrum of Penny’s Aura generator which signified she was very much alive.
“Yang!” she hissed, whipping her head around to get her attention.
“The kingdoms are becoming battlefields before our very eyes, our supposed protectors becoming the front lines of wars which threaten to annihilate us all, and for what? Eighty years of the Huntress system, and I see no less wrong with the world than before the Great War, only problems better hidden and solutions ignored in the name of tightening a very specific hierarchy. So I ask you: How much tighter will our leaders’ hold become before things break? When will Atlas’s endless pursuit of numbers swallow up us all? And what will it take to save yourself?”
Cinder fell silent and lowered her scroll, tapped several more things which Blake could not see, and then tilted her head to stare down at Blake.
“I did wonder why Ozpin so easily let an ex-White Fang into his castle, but now I see exactly why.”
A ball of dense, malevolent flame appeared in her hand, and Blake, out of Aura and defenseless and left with nothing but the all-consuming horror of what she’d just heard, took her final pained gasp for air—
“She’s mine.”
Cinder paused, turning her head to look at the new voice, but the stay of execution brought Blake no relief. In fact, it brought her a new terror, because that voice drowned out all other sound in her world and made Blake feel as if her throat had sealed up even as Cinder pulled her heel off her neck. Because she recognized that voice with a terrified, hateful familiarity.
Adam.
A click resonated through the arena. Penny recognized it as the sound of a microphone turning off.
It was over.
But even as relief pulsed through her, Penny knew the nightmare was only beginning. A warning was blaring through the arena now—a warning for incoming Grimm. In the small sliver of the sky which she could see, dark winged shapes flew overhead, their feathered undersides lit in ghostly shadow by the Colosseum. Nevermores. Not just a flock, but an entire forest.
Then Yang knelt down beside Weiss, and Penny’s vision was suddenly just her teammates and their deep terror.
“Yang, she’s alive!” Weiss gasped. “She can’t move, but I can still feel her mechanisms working! Give me your hand—”
Yang was still so shell-shocked that Weiss had to physically take her hand and move it onto Penny’s body, but moments later, Yang recognized the thrum, her eyes widening, and the avalanche of grief on her face momentarily lessened. “So she’s still here? Just… frozen? Can—does that mean she can hear us? See us?”
“I don’t know,” Weiss said. “I don’t know how the lightning damage would manifest, but—”
The ground under Penny shook violently—no, not the ground, the entire Colosseum. Weiss yelped as she was thrown sideways into Yang, nearly knocking her over like a human dominoes, but Yang just barely managed to hold the two of them up. She looked up, pushing stray hair out of her eyes, and gasped.
“How did a Nevermore—”
The sudden shaking must’ve jarred some connection into working again, because a flood of new status reports appeared in Penny’s sensors—radar online, infrared online, cooling systems online, linguistic processes reactivated, certain diagnostic—never mind those! Her locomotion systems were finally functional again! There were some potential damage concerns in various areas, but she didn’t care! She could MOVE!
Penny sat bolt upright at the same moment that she took an massive full-capacity gasp of air for some desperately needed internal cooling. In the same instinct, she heard the sharp gasps of her two teammates, before—
“PENNY!” Yang and Weiss screamed in unison, burying her in a hug. They both began to sob before anyone could say a word, Weiss burying her head in Penny’s shoulder as Yang clung to her midsection, leaning heavily against her stomach and gasping severely as the Colosseum continued to shake.
“I am alive! I am fine! Mostly!” Penny said as a way of greeting. Her logic core objected to the suggestion that Penny was anywhere remotely close to ‘mostly fine’ right now, but it did not object too strenuously, as it also understood that Penny’s teammates would consider ‘not actively dying’ as an equivalent to ‘mostly fine’ at this moment. “I have a great deal of things I will need to repair, but…”
Penny trailed off as she fully registered the situation in the sky. The Nevermores swarming through the night were so numerous that the sky itself had changed shade, the dotted lights of the stars and the glow of the moon now completely absent. Most arrestingly of all, however, was the enormous Nevermore which had perched itself on the top of the Amity, slashing with its beak at the shield which laid between it and the full interior of the Colosseum.
“Yang! Weiss! You need to move!” came Jaune’s shout from the edge of the arena; at some point he and the rest of Team JNPR, along with a few dozen other students, had climbed over the barrier separating the stands from the arena. “The Nevermore’s gonna—”
With another vicious swipe of the Nevermore’s claws, the shield broke, the Hardlight barrier dissolving away. Yang was frozen in panic and out of Aura, Weiss’s attention was still entirely on Penny until it was too late for her to react, and Penny couldn’t quite move at maximum efficiency yet, which meant the three girls were entirely defenseless as the Nevermore dove into the Colosseum with a ground-rattling screech and its giant talons outstretched and ready to shred them all—
A blast of silver light engulfed the Nevermore, its screech vanishing abruptly. The knifepoint of the talons never came, nothing touching Penny, Weiss, and Yang except a gust of wind which ruffled their clothes.
The silver faded a moment later, leaving behind a petrified Grimm hanging impossibly in the air. It stayed aloft on nothing for 1.5 seconds, and then crashed to the ground, the force of the impact enough to crumble the delicate statue, the powdered stone left behind dissolving exactly the way Grimm particulate did. And then it was as if the creature had never been there.
But three different girls in three different states of mind had all seen the Nevermore about to kill them, felt the wind from its wings rush over them. It couldn’t have been a hallucination. Which meant…
As one, the three girls turned to look in the direction the silver had erupted from.
Ruby was pulling herself up onto one knee with obvious difficulty, Lunar Enforcer clutched in one shaking hand while the other was pressed against her head, her fingers tangled in her hair as she trembled violently. Her eyes met Penny’s, burning with determination and luminous again. But immediately Ruby’s head snapped away, breaking the eye contact and something inside Penny.
At the same time, Penny was just grateful to see some shine back in Ruby’s eyes.
“Ruby?” Yang said suddenly, all the desperation draining out of her voice and leaving behind a tiny, bare sound which was barely loud enough to reach her sister.
Ruby finally found a steady position for herself by using Lunar Enforcer as a makeshift support. Still on one knee, with her weapon planted in the ground, she surveyed the arena with a slow turn of her head, breathing heavily.
“I’ll live,” she said, speaking in a wobbling voice to no one in particular.
“Ruby, I’m sorry!” Yang gasped, taking a halting step forward. “I’m—I’m so sorry, I was stupid, I should’ve—I should’ve known better, I just, I don’t even know what happened—it’s all my fault—”
“I really don’t want to talk about it right now.”
Ruby’s voice was quiet and afraid, and Yang snapped her mouth shut fast enough to hurt.
“I can’t think,” she went on, tilting her head slowly from side to side as if trying to shake loose thoughts. “Everything’s too much…”
She looked up, where some of the Nevermores flying ahead had noticed the now-vulnerable Colosseum and were circling over its open top, watching the scene inside with piercing red eyes but also wary of meeting the same fate as the first Nevermore to attack.
“Oh, no,” she whispered, her grip on Lunar Enforcer tightening.
“Yang, give me your scroll,” Weiss whispered.
Penny’s radar informed her of movement behind them. The collection of students who had jumped into the arena were approaching the center as a group, Team JNPR amongst them. A collection of students who now knew exactly what Penny Pallas and Ruby Karyatis were.
Suddenly, Penny could not stand up fast enough, scrambling to get her legs under her, helped by the hands of Yang and Weiss. And then she was upright, hugging herself with both arms and resisting the urge to run away. Another part of her wanted to activate logic-only mode right now so she felt less scared of everything, but she could not do that either—because that would make her appear emotionless, and Penny could not appear emotionless right now, not in front of all her peers whose only reference for sentient robots were the evil emotionless ones in movies.
There were so many sets of familiar eyes staring at her with newfound shock. People who Penny had called friends all semester long. People who she was not sure would want to call her friend anymore. What were they thinking? What were they feeling? Her biological-sensing systems were inoperative; she did not even have those to offer a clue as to what was rushing through their minds.
A rocket locker crashed into the ground a few meters away, making everyone in the vicinity jump except for Ruby, who didn’t appear startled in the slightest, and Weiss, who had started walking towards the locker even before it touched down. It was her locker, Penny realized, as Weiss tossed Yang’s scroll (with which she’d called the locker) back to her, entered the keycode, and withdrew Myrtenaster from inside. Then she spun around and walked back to Penny with deliberate purpose, stopping beside her and putting an arm over her shoulder. With her other arm, she aimed the gleaming tip of Myrtenaster at the students arrayed before them, the weapon never wavering.
“If any of you have an issue with my partner, who I have known in totality for months and whom I trust with my life, then you have an issue with me.” Weiss’s tone was perilously sharp, only matching the moments of her most foul moods, but her scowl was directed at everyone except Penny. For Penny, Weiss had a warm, comforting arm which stayed wrapped around her with a pressure which made her feel far safer.
Yang’s voice, moving closer to Ruby, joined Weiss’s declaration. “And if anyone’s got a problem with my baby sister, who is just as human as anyone else here and has a big bright soul and wants to help people, then you’re gonna have to take it up with me,” she snarled, transforming her gauntlets to combat mode with a glare that could’ve been aimed at the greater world.
There was no response, and all of Penny’s thoughts remained on navigating the immensely complex question of what demeanor she should be putting forth to her peers right now. I should appear brave, but not too brave. It would be detrimental to appear as I have no fear. But too much fear might draw accusations of fakery. I should not appear too friendly right now, because that might trigger the uncanny valley effect, but I cannot appear too closed-off, lest I make the others think I do not care about them. I—
“That’s right!” snapped a new voice—Nora, stepping forward as her own rocket locker crashed to the ground beside her. She grabbed Magnhild without looking and trotted over to Weiss and Penny, stopping by Penny’s other side and giving the assembled students a glare equal to Weiss’s. “Penny’s my friend! And my trans sister!”
…Penny had thought of a pun. It was the kind of pun which tended to make someone else throw something at whoever said it. She rarely thought of puns, and even more rarely said them, but this one had immediately flashed through her language processors because she’d thought Nora was saying something entirely different at first from trans sister. And the different thing was technically more relevant to Penny, and also… it was making her smile just a little bit to think about it, so… she would be saying it, and maybe that would make everyone else a little less scared of her?
“Nora?” she said.
“Yeah, Penny?”
“I also have many transistors of my own.” She made sure to put an emphasis on the o in transistor; otherwise it would be virtually indistinguishable from what Nora had said.
Nora blinked, and then—
Someone from somewhere in the crowd—a blonde-haired Vacuan boy with an unbuttoned shirt, specifically—burst into laughter. And that seemed to be a breaking point of some sort, because the laughter spread in moments through the rest of the crowd. The degree of energy and the duration and the mood of the laughter varied from person to person, sometimes short and nervous and sometimes boisterous and long, but seeing the unambiguously good reaction spread was like watching the first rays of the morning sun touch the treetops. They weren’t laughing at Penny being a synthetic girl. They were laughing because of a joke Penny had made about being a synthetic girl.
A butterfly of hope appeared inside Penny, cautious and small and fluttering delicately inside her chest, but also bright and colorful. Actually, there was one more thing she was going to do right now. Perhaps it was not a matter of actual priority so much as personal importance, but…
Penny retracted her damaged wings with a clang of metal which made her wince, and shrugged off her fake jetpack, letting it drop to the ground. Then she deployed her wings again, showing them to the world exactly as they were instead of hiding them behind a tiresome layer of disguise. At the very least, she would never have to wear that again.
“Well.” Coco spoke in a dazed tone, pushing her sunglasses up the bridge of her nose. She stood the closest to Penny out of anyone in the crowd, and her voice was easily heard over the collective laughter trailing off. “That explains where your wings went at the dance.”
Penny was not entirely sure what to think of that, but Coco was not accusing Penny of being about to go on a murderous rampage, which allowed her prediction algorithms to discard a great number of worst-case scenarios.
“Oh,” came another voice from Penny’s left, fainter and even more amazed. “You’re her. The Moondancer.”
Weiss took an uncertain step forward. “...What’s that supposed to mean?” She sounded as if she didn’t know whether to interpret that as derogatory or not.
It was an upper-year student who spoke, and she was rubbing her eyes frantically. When she lowered her hands, she blinked at Penny, and then a wild smile spread across her face. “I knew it! I knew the Moondancer wasn’t just a myth! I knew I really saw her! I mean, I saw you! But I could never get anyone to believe me, and I never saw you again! I mean. Until now.”
“What?” Weiss said, completely lost. She hadn’t lowered Myrtenaster.
“Weiss, she is referring to an urban legend I accidentally started while living in hiding at Beacon.” Penny was feeling slightly embarrassed, but… not embarrassed in a bad way? Was good embarrassed possible? Was that a real emotion she was feeling? “I went flying at nighttime when I wouldn’t be seen, and I thought I could detect any potential witnesses with my instruments and evade their notice. On occasion, I was wrong.”
That set off another round of fascinated murmurs amongst the upper-year students. Penny hadn’t realized this many people knew about the legend.
However, the moment of levity could not last long, and it was the piercing shriek of a Grimm which brought them all crashing back to sobering reality as an especially daring Griffon dove out of the sky towards them—
Only for the blast of a heavy sniper rifle to split the air, the Griffon’s head exploding in midair before it crashed to the ground, dead but still too close for comfort.
Ruby lowered sniper-mode Lunar Enforcer, a wisp of smoke trailing from the barrel as she walked past Penny, Weiss, and Yang on still-unsteady feet, facing everyone else. She very pointedly did not look at Penny as she passed by her.
Now Ruby had the undivided attention of the other students, who watched her with an apprehensiveness and a wariness that hadn’t been there when their attention was focused on Penny.
“I’m not Penny. I can’t make you see I’m a normal student with normal eyes, because I’m really, really not,” Ruby said in a voice which was much less shaky. “But I promise I was raised to be a protector of everyone! I promise I don’t wanna hurt anyone! And I’m gonna do exactly—”
“But you killed your teammate?!” someone from the crowd yelled.
Ruby froze, and took a half-step back as something different swept through the crowd. “W-what?” She backed up further, bumping into Penny, but this time she didn’t react to their proximity. “Ciel? What? What happened?”
And that was when Penny realized, Ruby had never seen Ciel’s death. She didn’t know. She had to come to Ruby’s defense. Her prediction algorithms warned her that it was entirely possible that she hadn’t built up enough trust with her peers for them to trust her defense of Ruby, and that could lead to the loss of all the communal trust that Penny had just earned—leaving her in the same situation as Ruby—
Penny noted the concern and discarded it, as logic offered its own conclusion. Better to be ostracized with Ruby, than to stay quiet for my own safety and deny her any chance at her own safety.
“It was not Ruby’s fault!” she said in the direction the voice had come from. She had pinpointed exactly who had spoken, in fact, but she feared that talking directly to who had spoken might seem too combative or unnatural. “She was angry at Ciel for what Atlas has done to her, but she did not try to kill Ciel!”
Ruby looked at Penny, her mouth falling open as she stood in place, notably not retreating from Penny.
“We all saw it,” Weiss said, her voice even stronger than Penny’s. “She knocked Ciel away from her fight, and the last of Ciel’s Aura absorbed that impact. What actually killed her was a lava geyser of fatal timing.”
Ruby swayed on her feet. “…Ciel’s dead?”
Penny wanted to reach out and take Ruby’s arm, offer her some comfort somehow, but she was afraid that any contact would only make Ruby react with more anger.
“And given how everything else about tonight seems like it was engineered to cause maximum panic? I think that Ciel was killed by someone, but it wasn’t Ruby,” Weiss said. Then she tilted Myrtenaster toward the crowd again. “And let me remind you all, my promise of protection extends to her, too.”
Without warning, Ruby’s eyes erupted again, disintegrating a trio of Griffons that’d dared to dive into the Colosseum. There was only a silence as the other students gaped at the disintegrating trails left in midair by Ruby’s takedown, but a silence was better than the rising doubt which had come before.
“I’m really sorry to, um, change the subject like this, but—” Ruby gestured at the sky. “Grimm are overrunning the city and the school, and the cruisers can only defend one place, and they’re not gonna pick one academy over an entire city, no matter how important Beacon is, so I really need to go save the school! Which I can do! I promise!” She wavered, started to look at Penny, and then snapped her gaze back to the crowd even though their attention was clearly making her frantic. “Nobody even needs to come with me! I can take out all the Grimm myself! I’m supposed—”
“No.” Penny couldn’t stay silent. “Ruby, you can’t do this alone. I’m coming with you.”
Ruby’s breath hitched, but she found a way to answer, even if her words sounded like they were on the verge of coming apart. “But, you’re out of Aura, Penny, you’ll get hurt—”
“You are, too!”
“It doesn’t matter for me!”
“You will be hurt, too!”
“I don’t need Aura to use my eyes!”
“I do not need Aura to be impervious to the teeth of a Beowolf!”
“Oh, now you can’t be convinced to run away?! The one time when it would actually keep you safe?!”
Penny reeled back, clutching her hands to her chest. “Ruby—”
“Or is this because you’d rather die than be like me?” Ruby snapped, fresh tears gathering in her eyes. “Well, don’t! I’ll probably die tonight, so you won’t have to worry about me poisoning your life ever again!”
“Girls! Girls!” Weiss shouted, waving her arms wildly. “Could you put your self-sacrificial streaks aside for one moment and recognize that no one in this arena is letting either of you go down there alone?!”
Punctuating Weiss’s words, the thud of rocket lockers hitting the floor sounded all around them, and students with full Aura reserves not already exhausted by a grueling fight nodded grimly to Ruby and Penny as they retrieved their weapons.
Ruby’s eyes widened as she took in the sight of the other students preparing themselves for battle. She mouthed something to herself—not her usual mantra about good soldiers following order, but the words Penny had said to Ruby days ago: Strength in numbers.
“You were raised to be a protector, Ruby,” Weiss said, rotating the Dust barrels on Myrtenaster as she checked the levels. “But the rest of us raised ourselves to be protectors. And that’s what we’re all going to be tonight.”
Requisitioning one of the airships evacuating the Colosseum was easy. The pilot of the nearest ship took one look at the regiment of heavily armed students, led by the freak-of-nature Grimm-blasting girl he’d just learned about from the broadcast, and he was ready to go wherever they wanted, even towards the swarm of Grimm rampaging through Beacon.
The hard part, for Ruby, was the actual ride down to the campus, no matter how short it was. She could feel everyone staring at her, wondering about her. Wondering about Ruby as much as she was wondering about herself. She’d missed the entire broadcast—she’d only swam back to consciousness during the aftermath when a Nevermore was diving into the Colosseum, but the hasty explanation Yang gave as they boarded the ship told her all she needed to know. The entire world knew about Project Moonrise now. It should’ve been a huge load off Ruby’s shoulders, because now everyone knew and now she didn’t have to hide.
But Ruby still felt like her life was actively falling apart in every way as she kept discovering over and over how she was a failure at everything. It was almost a relief to be charging into the most important battle of her life. It made everything easy. She didn’t have to think about being useless, about being nothing, about broken weapon broken family broken everything, about wanting to turn her weapon on herself, because there were people right in front of her who needed her help and that was easy, and she didn’t have to think about Ciel being dead, and she didn’t have to think about how she hadn’t even realized what’d happened to Ciel until someone yelled an accusation at her, and she didn’t have to think about how it was her fault even though Penny and Yang and Weiss kept telling her it wasn’t, and she didn’t have to think about what happened after tonight. The only thing that mattered in her miserable life right now was saving lives and she didn’t have to think about—about—
think about something else think about something else think about something else I don’t want to think about Penny or Yang or family or friends or fate or future or love or purpose right now no matter how much it squeezes my thoughts like a Beowolf clamping its jaws around my brain
Ruby was trying her best not to look in Penny’s direction. But that meant looking at the rest of the ship. At the people who might think Ruby was one of the things they were supposed to be fighting. Because the broadcast had made Ruby out to be some half-Grimm creature, and that was what hurt more than any truth being revealed. She wanted to be a protector of everyone in this ship, not an enemy! She didn’t want people to fear her! She wanted to bring relief and joy with her presence, not… whatever was in the half-glances snuck her way when the other students thought she wasn’t looking. The only ones who weren’t doing the kinda-hidden-fear thing were Yang and Weiss, and… Penny.
And now Ruby was back to thinking about Penny.
Penny, who had seen Ruby turning Lunar Enforcer on herself and had stopped her even after how awful Ruby had been to her.
Ruby didn’t understand. Especially not when Penny had said I would rather die than be like you just before, and clearly meant every word of it. Why would she try to keep Ruby alive? Just… just to prove conclusively to Ruby how different and wrong Ruby was?
“Blake’s not answering her scroll,” Yang said suddenly. “Weiss, you don’t have any idea why she decided not to go to the tournament?”
Weiss shrugged helplessly. “She told me she had some things to take care of, and… I wish I’d been in a state of mind which would’ve allowed me to pay more attention to that.”
Yang made a pained noise and leaned-slash-collapsed forward, burying her face in her hands. “Blake, where are you?” she mumbled.
An explosion sounded somewhere in the distance, making everyone in the ship tense up. Followed by the realization gradually settling in that they could do nothing about that, wherever it’d happened.
“I can’t just leave her alone out there, wherever she is,” Yang said without looking up. “But I can’t—I can’t leave you here, Ruby—”
Ruby blinked at Yang. “What? I’ll be fine with everyone else around, you should go find your partner!”
“But—but Ruby, you’re—you’re hurt, because of me, and it’s all my fault, and I have to make it up—”
Ruby stared uncomprehendingly at Yang. Why did she think this was her fault? It was all Ruby’s fault for being useless! “Are you the one who hit your head? I don’t feel pain, remember!”
And she didn’t. There was definitely some things wrong with her body, and there was a nearly-overwhelming dizziness that wasn’t going away, but Ruby wasn’t in pain right now. Except for the emotional pain that exploded whenever she thought about Penny, but that didn’t count.
“But you’re—”
Yang was cut off by the airship juddering as it touched down, the doors springing open almost immediately to reveal what could only be called a battlefield. A collection of students and Atlesian soldiers desperately trying to hold back the flood of Grimm pouring into Beacon. Most of the school grounds had already been given up to the Grimm, the defenders choosing to consolidate themselves in one small area near the CCT where the evacuations were unfolding. It was a smart move, given how overwhelmingly outnumbered they were, but it was entirely defensive. Ruby’s eyes could do more than defense.
She stood up, fought through another wave of dizziness, and checked her ammo stores. As the closest person to the door, she would be the first one out of the airship, and the first into battle.
“Don’t worry.” Ruby couldn’t muster a smile for Yang—all she could do was a salute as she readied herself. She wished she still believed what she was about to say. She wished she’d never found out how false it was.
“This is what I was born to do.”
Notes:
Next week, Chapter 64: Born To Die
(I've known that was going to be the title of an end-of-V3 chapter, and that it would be paired with this chapter's closing line, since before I'd written a SINGLE chapter for War Machines!)
Chapter 64: Born To Die
Notes:
Content warning for this chapter (click this text to reveal):
Adam, some minor blood, death
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
After Ruby, Penny was the second person out of the airship. Her prediction algorithms spat out ominous readings as she processed the sight of Grimm swarming across Beacon in a never-ending tide of destruction, running rampant through the campus with little resistance.
“How is this possible?” she whispered to Weiss, who seemed stuck in an everlasting daze as she loaded Myrtenaster without taking her eyes off their surroundings. “I have never seen so many Grimm in one place in my entire life.”
Or her previous one, for that matter, her memory informed her moments later. She wasn’t sure how she knew that, but she did. Only the tunnel under Mountain Glenn came anywhere close to matching this level of Grimm, but that had almost as much to do with the tight, enclosed space with nowhere to go as it did with sheer numbers. But here… it was as if the tunnel had spilled out, everywhere, multiple tunnels full of Grimm emptied out onto Beacon’s campus. And that was to say nothing of the flood of Grimm flying overhead, ignoring Beacon in favor of attacking the city itself.
“I’m not going to think about numbers.” Weiss loaded one final clip into her rapier and spun it with a flick of her fingers. “Because they’ve only ever signaled the end of things for me.”
With that declaration, a glyph appeared under her feet, propelling her away from Penny and towards the too-thin line of soldiers defending the evacuation zone.
“Penny.”
Yang took Weiss’s place beside Penny, clacking her gauntlets together without ever taking her eyes off Ruby ahead of them. “When you were frozen back there—if something like that ever happens again, if you’re alive but you don’t have a way of telling us—you have my unconditional permission to use your Semblance to get into my head and tell me you’re okay. Now and forever. I promise.”
Penny sent her a concerned look. “I do not think you should promise something like that forever, Yang.”
“I don’t care!” The sudden, urgent yelp in Yang’s voice startled her. “Knowing you’re okay matters way more than anything about me!”
And before Penny could protest that statement with any one of two hundred and fifty-two different arguments, Yang leapt into the fray.
The sudden arrival of a ship filled with mostly-fresh Huntresses had given a reprieve to the overtaxed defenders and a boost of spirits to the evacuees—a cheer rose from the huddled civilians waiting for the next aircraft as a flood of colorful Semblances and weapons tore into the Grimm. In the brief margin for error afforded by that moment, Penny stood alone in the center of the evacuation zone, suddenly unsure of where to go. Would—would the civilians here even want her defending them? Or would they believe she was going to hurt them? What if they tried to run away from her and right into the clutches of the Grimm she was trying to protect them from? Or would they sneer at her and outright refuse her protection?
Ruby was also standing apart from everyone else, surveying the area as she held Lunar Enforcer at the ready. She still showed some hints of unsteadiness on her feet, but with vitals sensors offline Penny had no way of determining her actual physical state. Whatever it was, it seemed to be inhibiting her from using her eyes… unless she was waiting for the right moment…?
There was a ship on Penny’s radar. There was nothing strange about that—a constant stream of ships were approaching and departing the evacuation zone, all of them visible on her radar. But this particular ship had a vastly larger radar signature, and her radar would’ve alerted to its presence far sooner if not for the makeshift fleet surrounding it in the sky.
Penny turned and found an Atlesian cruiser descending rapidly towards the evacuation zone, and with it came a fresh wave of relief, mirrored by another round of cheers from the evacuees as they recognized more help arriving, military help touching down beside the defenders and drowning out the cacophony of the Grimm with the roar of the cruiser’s engines.
Wait.
There was an Atlesian cruiser landing in front of Penny—that much was obvious. But there were also two Atlesian cruisers still hovering above the city in the distance, waging an aerial battle with the storm of Grimm assaulting the city.
Three cruisers. There only should have been two.
She took a step towards Ruby, intending to ask what was going on, and that was when Ruby inhaled sharply.
“That’s the Pandora!” she said to no one in particular; Penny was the only one close enough to hear her. “It shouldn’t be here! What’s it doing—”
An array of loading doors opened in synchrony with a hiss of pneumatics, revealing a regiment of fully active Atlesian Knights, all of which should’ve been sent back to Atlas days ago. Their faceplates glowed their usual calm white as they slowly surveyed the field of battle, raising their rifles—
In a fraction of a second, Penny recognized that the projected path of the Knights’ rifle shots were not aimed at the Grimm. Her prediction algorithms screamed DANGER, and before any human or Faunus in the vicinity could react, Penny was leaping forwards and throwing herself in front of an unsuspecting civilian—
Just as she landed between the Knights and two civilians, a rain of bullets clattered off Penny’s midsection and her wings with a frenzied pinging. But the sound of the shots bouncing off her metal was more than drowned out by the agonized screams of other civilians who had no one to protect them as the Knights’ bullets ripped into the crowd, and the barrage wasn’t stopping.
Penny didn’t move as bullets kept pinging off her backside and her wings, standing protectively over the two people she was shielding. She was out of Aura, but she still had a protective layer of armor that no ordinary bullets would pierce. And there was no point in hiding her secret anymore.
The two civilians she was shielding were a father and a daughter. The father had dropped into a crouch as soon as the Knights had opened fire, pulling his daughter close to him and moving to shield her with his backside. His back was to Penny, but the daughter, who couldn’t have been older than seven or eight years, was peering at Penny through the crook of her father’s elbow with wide, terrified eyes. They must’ve come from the festival grounds, because the girl had her face painted with cartoon characters, paint through which copious tear tracks ran.
Chaos anew descended on the evacuation point as the Huntresses and Atlesian soldiers suddenly had to divide their attention between the Grimm and the rogue machines, and it seemed that the Atlesian soldiers weren’t safe in the slightest from the Knights, either—quite a few of them had fallen to the Knights’ first salvo.
Out of the corners of her vision, Penny could see people lying on the ground, fresh pools of blood spreading around them, and she forced her vision back to the two people whose protection she was most directly responsible for at this moment. “Do you have an active Aura?” she said to the father in a tone which she hoped was the right synthesis of urgency and care and would not make these two think she was an evil killer robot here to crush them to shreds.
She received a shake of the head in response.
“I am going to unlock it for you,” she said. “You will be able to use it to shield yourself and your daughter long enough to reach one of the ships.”
Another nod.
Penny reached out, and she could not ignore how the father tensed when she did so. But he made no other move as she set a hand on his shoulder and began to chant the same mantra Ruby had once told her, visualizing the soul which pulsed beneath his skin.
“...I release your soul, and by my shoulder protect thee.”
As the final words of the recitation left her mouth, a flash of light enveloped the three of them. When it cleared, to Penny’s surprise she was looking at not one but two glows of Aura. An electric blue which undulated over the father’s skin, and an even brighter green quite similar to Penny’s which danced around the daughter he was still clutching tightly.
“You are going to be okay.” Penny pointed to the nearest airship. “I promise.”
The father’s eyes flicked between her and the Knights and the airship, and then he swallowed and nodded, rising to his feet. “Thank you,” he said, his voice thick with emotion. Then, just as his body tensed to break into a run—
“Watch out for lightning!” the girl in his arms piped up with the utmost seriousness.
The father let out a surprised bark of laughter, and then he was hurrying away, throwing one last grateful look at Penny over his shoulder as bullets bounced harmlessly off his now-active Aura. Penny turned away to face the fight, but she kept a radar track on them, and just as she plunged Luminous Electra into the snout of a charging Boarbatusk, her radar confirmed that the two had reached the relative safety of an airship.
She wished she felt some sort of relief at knowing she’d just saved two lives, but all she could focus on now was how many bodies were laying on the ground, how many people had already been killed by Grimm and by robots—no, by Atlesian Knights.
A new defensive line was forming to fight off the Knights as the defenders once again found themselves stretched too thin—
Ruby. Where was Ruby?! She was out of Aura, she’d been in the line of fire when the Knights attacked—Penny looked around wildly, and moments later found Ruby nearby, crouched behind a stone fountain barely tall enough to protect her, hyperventilating.
She dove behind the fountain and noted with relief no visual sign Ruby was hurt. Before she could say anything, a new sound reached the battlefield: a heavy, rhythmic thudding. But not the kind of rhythm that a Grimm could generate. A computerized rhythm.
Penny and Ruby peered over the rim of the fountain simultaneously, and were greeted with the sight of fully equipped Paladins marching out of the depths of the cruiser, their pristine armor gleaming malevolently in the moonlight, their machine guns already spinning up and aimed at their already overtaxed lines.
Ruby looked at Penny with wide, confused eyes, and she twitched a little when their gazes met, but that was the only reticence she displayed before she began talking in a near-wail. “What’s going on?!” She was clutching Lunar Enforcer to her chest as if it was her shark plushie. “They’re—those are our weapons! Why are they… why are they attacking us?! This isn’t supposed to happen! How? How?”
The roar of airship engines set the ground underneath them vibrating, nearby pebbles rattling as the Pandora lifted off, having deposited every single weapon it carried onto the battlefield. Ruby watched it pass slowly overhead towards an unknown destination before continuing in a voice which was quieter but no less desperate. “I can’t fight the Grimm now, Penny! I still don’t have any Aura and my eyes won’t stop Knights or bullets!”
Penny stood up, abandoning her cover and transforming Luminous Electra to its full size, the blade taller than her yet wielded in her hands as easily as a dagger.
“I am very glad you are not fighting alone, then,” she said to Ruby, leveling her inhumanly large sword at the Paladins arrayed before her. They were still bringing their weapons systems online, but there was almost no time before they would be ready to unleash a wave of destruction that no Huntress in the vicinity could match.
Except for Penny Pallas. Once upon a time, she had been built to be a weapon just like these things, after all.
It was a scene which could’ve been pulled straight from the reel of a movie about a robot-wrought apocalypse. Hulking weapons of mass destruction which could shred almost anything in their path, towering over prey who were powerless to stop them. However, unlike those stories, there was one war machine which stood in their path. A war machine with a heart and a soul, a war machine who liked watching raindrops sliding down the window and playing board games and making friends, a war machine who wanted to help and protect others more than anything else in the world.
Penny felt an obligation to fight these things. An emotional duty. As a mechanical girl formerly of Atlas, she had to atone for all the blood these Atlesian machines had just spilled and would continue trying to spill.
She had no idea why they had turned against the people they were supposed to be protecting, and without access to her Semblance, she had no way of finding answers. That left her with only one option: to fight the things which she had been built to imitate.
Penny set all systems to combat priority, narrowed her eyes and her focus, and charged into battle.
She had to prove to everyone that she was not like these things.
“She’s mine.”
Blake didn’t know if it was comforting or terrifying that it wasn’t just Adam, but an entire White Fang airship which had interrupted Cinder’s killing blow. Adam was merely the vanguard jumping down from the open bay doors to intervene as the airship hovered low above the roof.
Blake recognized the masks, the shapes behind them. Verdant. Nimbus. Nightshade. Shale. Ollie. Yuma. Trifa. And more.
And no sign of Ilia.
Cinder raised an eyebrow, eyeing the airship as a fireball spun slowly between her fingers, but said nothing.
“I’m collecting what I’m due for my cooperation,” Adam said, spitting out the word cooperation as if it was Blake’s name.
Blake didn’t know if she wanted Cinder to deliver the mercy kill right now, or be taken away by Adam who perhaps… wanted her alive.
Where was Ilia? Why was everyone else going along with Adam even as the terrifyingly immense scale of his allies’ plans became apparent? What had happened?
Maybe it was naive of her to ask where Ilia was when there could only be one answer: another one dead because of herself. Another stain of blood on her hands. Another defiant heart, lost because they believed in Blake Belladonna far more than they ever should’ve.
“I promised you would receive all that you deserve,” Cinder said, and her heel rapped once to signal her stepping aside, leaving nothing standing in Adam’s way. There was nothing in her which suggested any curiosity or trepidation about what the White Fang would do with the girl at her feet.
Ilia… Blake couldn’t stop the tears which slid out of her eyes even as she squeezed them shut until it hurt. She didn’t even have a chance to curl in on herself for a half-second’s grieving for her last friend in the Fang before a crushingly tight hand was on her elbow, yanking her mostly upright and dragging her towards the roar of the airship’s engines.
Opening her exhausted eyes again took almost too much effort to muster, but she managed it just before she was thrown unceremoniously onto the airship’s floor. She raised herself up onto her elbows and found blank masks which stared down at her. What emotions were boiling behind them? What was she to the rest of the Fang?
Something else clattered against the airship floor beside Blake: Gambol Shroud, tossed there by Adam as he stepped aboard, slowly stroking his own scabbard as he stared ceaselessly at Blake. Unfortunately, even with his face hidden by a mask just like everyone else on the airship, Blake knew exactly what emotions lurked in those hidden eyes.
And then, as the airship’s engines pitched up, sending them into a sharp turn, Blake found Ilia.
Bound and gagged in the corner of the airship, her eyes full of horror as they flicked between Blake and Adam. She was fighting fruitlessly against her bindings, but as soon as she caught Blake’s eyes she began to struggle even harder. To no avail.
Ever so briefly, the terror Blake was drowning in was neutralized by an overwhelming relief that Ilia was alive. That knowledge was far more important than anything which would happen to herself tonight.
Adam ignored Ilia’s frenzied attempts to break free as he crouched down beside Blake, pressing the tip of his scabbard into her cheekbone with enough pressure to leave a bruise.
“It wasn’t enough for you to cleave my heart in two, was it?” he hissed. “You hated me so much you had to try and steal everything from me. My people. My cause.” He indicated Ilia with a jerk of his head as he went on. “But of course, there was only one fool actually swayed by your traitorous plotting.” And with that, he shoved Blake’s head to one side, forcing her gaze to the view outside the airship as it trundled slowly across campus. Beacon was under attack from every direction, the airship barely dodging flocks of flying Grimm which only grew thicker with every passing minute as endless gunfire shook the air. It was an onslaught so severe, she didn’t know how even Beacon Academy in all its splendor and strength could withstand it.
Blake met Adam’s eyes, finding them through the slits in his mask. “Whatever you think I wanted to steal from you, it’s nothing compared to what you’ve already taken from the Faunus,” she spat, knowing full well that would draw a retaliation.
It did. The back of Adam’s hand smacked into her cheek with stinging force, and Blake’s head was knocked into the floor of the airship with an impact which hurt as much as the blow did.
Ilia made a noise of rage audible through her gag. Behind Adam, Verdant shifted uncomfortably, and Blake wanted to scream at him, how can you stand by and let this happen? How is anyone here alright with what he’s doing?
…Maybe this was just what the rest of the Fang wanted, too. Maybe there had never been a chance of Blake convincing them to repudiate Adam. Maybe that reconciliation in Mountain Glenn had been a lie all along, a way to throw her off the path and let them finish their plans in peace. Maybe Blake really was a failure in every aspect of her life.
“Now you’ll see exactly what your selfishness has wrought,” Adam said with an unmistakable tinge of satisfaction. “Every moment of it. Every building that falls. Every soul snuffed out.”
Blake’s scroll, still tucked into her pocket, began to vibrate sharply against her thigh.
Cinder paid no attention to the White Fang bullhead as it flew away. It was of no importance what happened with the Faunus tonight; the only thing which mattered to her was stoking the chaos already swallowing up the academy.
And it was delicious. But the time to fully savor it would come later; for now there were still pieces to finish moving into place.
She turned to find Emerald, Mercury, and Neo waiting on the rooftop behind her, having finally arrived from the Colosseum. Good.
She handed the scroll to Mercury, turning over control of the broadcast to him—the camera on her scroll was the live feed now, showing the entire world the true instability of Ozpin’s regime as his academy crumbled. To Neo, she said: “Get to the Atlesian cruiser. But once you’ve taken it over and set your associate free, I want you back here with me, immediately. You’re far more useful to me down here, and I’m sure Roman can handle piloting a ship by himself.”
For some reason, Neo rolled her eyes at that, but she nodded in assent, before shattering her image and disappearing.
“Emerald, stay with me,” Cinder said, turning her attention back to the battlefield. It was almost time for the next step of her plan. And for that, Emerald was very much necessary.
Penny wished she had access to her Semblance.
Regardless, she walked into battle, making no effort to conceal herself from the Paladins ahead. As she passed a bloodied festivalgoer cowering on the ground, she heard a scared gasp and then a sound of confusion, but she diverted no processing resources to deciphering the response. She was a Huntress; her job was to protect everyone, no matter what they thought of her.
Six Paladins loomed ahead.
She could not hope to match the strength of one Paladin in a blow-for-blow fight, let alone multiple, but with her significantly smaller size, much faster speeds, and vastly more agile body, she could outmaneuver each and every one of these weapons, turning their own bulk and strength against them.
The square face of the nearest Paladin swung to meet her, its attention captured at last. Penny greeted it by leaping forward and driving Luminous Electra into one of its glowing photoreceptors (she wondered, how mechanically similar to her own photoreceptors?), and then yanking it out in time to dodge the flying steel limb which was immediately sent her way. She turned the dodge into a leap which used the Paladin’s arm as a springboard, soaring straight up into the air above the enormous weapon.
Time slowed down as she committed every spare processing cycle, at the expense of rapidly increased battery drain, to calculating the best attack vector.
At the moment that she reached the apex of her jump, the light of the full moon was directly behind her. Turning in midair to face her target and bringing Luminous Electra to bear for the next strike, Penny spotted her own shadow in the silvery moonbeams cast onto the Paladin’s dorsal armor.
The Paladin, not quite fast enough in tracking her, was blindsided with a swing from Luminous Electra which bit into a joint in its upper body, sending out a shower of sparks on impact as its operating lights flashed rapidly. But Penny knew Paladins came with basic damage control capabilities (something she knew because Ruby had excitedly explained it to her once), and so she was ready when the Paladin shook off the damage and the sparking ceased almost immediately. But that wasn’t a repair, just a circuit being entirely shut down, which meant one function had just been removed, even if she wasn’t sure what she’d just disabled.
Penny slid down the the weapon’s back and landed on the ground in a crouch, coming face-to-face with the barrel of a machine gun. She leapt away, bullets pinging off her skin as the Paladin’s machine gun followed, the chatter of spent shell casings filling the air. She let herself be the easy target, because every gun pointed at her was a gun not pointed at someone who was considerably more vulnerable! And every bullet which bounced off her built-in armor was a bullet spent on something that wouldn’t be killed by the shot!
She darted towards the next closest Paladin, which pulled the first Paladin’s line of fire in the same direction, and now Penny had the attention of two Paladins, because the second one of course swiveled away from its squishier targets to confront whatever was unloading a machine gun onto it.
Idly, she wondered, what kind of error message does a Paladin get when it realizes it’s being shot at by another Paladin? And then she dismissed the thought, because she could not waste processing power right now.
At the same time, both Paladins swung enormous battering ram-like arms towards Penny from opposite directions. She rolled out of the way, and as she did so, she pushed hard on one flying arm, altering its course just enough to set it on a collision course with the arm coming from the opposite direction with equal force.
A vicious clang shook the battlefield as both Paladins absorbed a hit through the arm which neither one was meant to absorb easily, sending them both reeling.
Penny sprinted towards the first Paladin, reasoning that it was better to concentrate damage on individual enemies rather than spread it out amongst a greater number—to reduce the actual numbers she faced. Her prediction algorithms were quite confident that one Paladin at 100 percent capability was still less dangerous than two Paladins at 50 percent capability.
Then, as she ran, she felt something underfoot lifting her up, pushing her forward at high speed.
Weiss’s glyphs.
Penny didn’t have the time to send her partner a look of gratefulness, but she logged a silent thank you as she flew into the reeling Paladin at a speed far beyond what she would’ve achieved alone. Glyph-boosted, she slammed into her target, landing the blow far above its center of gravity. An enemy exponentially heavier than her, toppled by simple physics.
This was a position the Paladin could recover from, but as long as it was pinned down, Penny had an open shot.
She leapt, raising Luminous Electra over her head and then slashing down in a two-handed swing at the maximum force her body could physically generate, letting out a scream of… of… of something as she sliced through the Paladin’s leg joint where it met the rest of its chassis.
However, as she reared back for a second swing on the other leg, she realized she’d misidentified the weapon attached to one of the Paladin’s arms—this wasn’t a machine gun. It was a laser.
How had she realized this? Well, she found herself staring at a muzzle glowing white-hot, and she barely had enough time to dodge the torrent of concentrated light which erupted from the weapon, a laser not too dissimilar from the laser she’d seen fired from her own swords (Floating Array) in the Amity broadcast, except the Paladin’s laser was bright white instead of green, and didn’t have any swords involved. It genuinely appeared like it could’ve bisected her.
But dodging the laser was also a critical error on Penny’s part, because with no time to calculate the optimal move, she’d chosen the direction of her evasive jump at random. Unfortunately, as she turned in midair, she realized she’d chosen a jump path that would take her directly into the firing line of another Paladin—a Paladin wielding an electric boltgun.
Quite possibly the last weapon Penny wanted to face right now. And that boltgun was currently crackling viciously and spitting blue light, signaling that it was about to fire.
She acted immediately and slammed Luminous Electra into the ground, arresting all her momentum and essentially stopping in midair, at the cost of receiving a barrage of overload warnings from her shoulder servos. The bolt of electricity sailed just ahead of her, missing her by just centimeters.
She landed, redirected a giant metal fist thrown by another Paladin into the ground, and then used the punching Paladin’s new center of gravity to force it into a somersault. The somersault shoved it directly into the still-active laser of the Paladin on the ground, and suddenly that Paladin was missing its arm.
In the ensuing confusion, she slipped between flailing limbs and struck an immobilizing blow to the laser-wielding Paladin’s remaining leg, sending up a shower of sparks which cascaded down her hair and danced through her vision.
“We can handle that one!” came a shout from behind her; she turned to see Yatsuhashi from Team CFVY charging towards the downed Paladin.
Penny gave him a single nod—his own oversized sword was more than capable of cutting through the legless Paladin’s remaining limbs and disabling it entirely—and charged back into the fray as the remaining Paladins regrouped.
Five Paladins left.
Mercury blinked, lowering his scroll slightly as he realized the battle taking place between Coin Purse and the Paladins was taking a strange turn, in the form of the big scary Atlesian machines being dismantled.
Mmmmmaybe this wasn’t something he should be putting on the feed, considering the Paladins were supposed to be on an unstoppable rampage of murdering innocents for all the world to see, and right now there was no rampage at all.
But. For the world watching this, they’d all probably be just as scared of Pallas, who was laying waste to what was supposed to be the best weaponry in the world. It would be showing everyone just how scary the world’s secrets could really be. Hell, Mercury the battle-hardened and soulless killing machine, was unsettled by Pallas, after all, so all the soft people in the world had to be too, right?
Although... Mercury knew he was unsettled by Pallas for entirely different reasons from the rest of the world. Those reasons being, when he looked at that walking shell of metal that'd chosen the form of a girl and become something more than just a machine, he saw a perfect representation of the nightmare that Mercury Black had been running from all his life.
He was supposed to see that Pallas was just an empty shell with nothing that could be called a soul inside. Except that Mercury knew exactly what an empty shell with no soul inside would look like, and Pallas wasn't that. However, Mercury Black very much was.
So with his scroll pointed at Pallas, there was plenty of time for his thoughts to stray towards the question of what exactly separated Penny Pallas from Mercury Black. Plenty of time for the answer to that question to circle around him like an interstellar meteor in a dangerously proximate orbit with Remnant, the shadow passing over Mercury (and only Mercury) and promising annihilation if he ever looked directly at what was casting the shadow.
Keep recording, or point the camera some other place? It was a decision Mercury would have to make solo, because Cinder had already fucked off with Emerald to go get the Fall Maiden.
In the end, he chose to keep recording with an annoyed shrug. There was still plenty of chaos and destruction in front of him right now, and chaos was all they needed tonight, regardless of the source.
Caught up in trying to keep his head from going to places he'd promised himself he would never go because there was nothing there that would ever save him (he was beyond saving), Mercury failed to notice the pair of eyes watching him from the shadows. Waiting.
“Be ready,” Cinder said to Emerald, her eyes trained firmly on Ozpin’s office atop the CCT.
She waited in silence for a moment more, listening to the violent cacophony which echoed all throughout campus from every direction. Finally, she nodded, and spoke—much more to herself than to Emerald.
“It’s time.”
Ozpin stood at the windows of his office, staring out at the forces of darkness overrunning the academy and the kingdom. Overrunning the peace that had been forged through too much blood and too much smoke eighty years ago.
He was at a loss for what to do next. His aid was needed everywhere. And Salem’s agents had yet to reveal their presence. In that sense, the true battle had not even begun. Because for Salem, it was not the kingdom or the academy which were at stake—it was the Relic. And possibly the Maiden, depending on whether or not Salem’s lieutenants had actually stolen the powers or not. But he had to operate under the assumption that the powers were still within Amber and not yet stolen. There could not be even the slightest risk of such power falling into her hands.
There was only one relief amidst this nightmare: Penny was alive. He could see her below on the grounds, fighting the Paladins with a bravery that didn’t seem possible so soon after the… incident in the Colosseum.
Sooner or later, he would have to enter the field of battle to defend his school. And when he did so, he would only be able to hope he was not straying directly into his enemy’s trap.
A sudden beeping from the desk drew all his attention in an instant; he whirled and found an alarm flashing on his computer, warning him of—
No.
Ozpin could not delay any longer. The time had come to make his move.
Weiss unleashed a flurry of glyphs, flinging a throng of Grimm into a nearby wall hard enough to eliminate most of them on impact. The ones which didn’t immediately burst into dust were left dazed enough for Weiss to finish them off with a few well-placed jabs of Myrtenaster.
Beacon had become a war zone. Actually, could it even be called that? The genuine battle was only being waged in one part of campus, where a collection of students fought in a defensive perimeter near the CCT, guarding not just the tower but the continuing evacuations. And it was just students fighting, because by now every Atlesian soldier that’d initially been part of the defense was either heavily wounded or dead. The rest of the academy’s grounds weren’t a battle so much as the setpiece for a pandemonium of Grimm and rogue Knights and fires burning unfettered and small, irregular bursts of fighting. There was too much panic, too much suffering, too many people hurting everywhere for any number of students to help them all. All Weiss and her peers could do was defend this one pocket of campus, keeping it clear enough for the airships to land, and safe enough for any civilians who could reach them on their own. And there were no reinforcements coming from the city, which was under its own assault.
With her next heartbeat, Weiss looked once again to the sky over Vale, where a furious battle was unfolding between the two Atlesian cruisers and the hurricane of aerial Grimm attacking the city.
A childhood in Atlas had made the sight of cruisers in the sky a familiar one, and even if Weiss could never return to Atlas, she was clinging to the security she reflexively felt by seeing them in the sky. It felt like—as long as they were still flying, there was a chance.
But taking her eyes off her own battle for even just a second was a dangerous gamble, and Weiss remembered that far too late as a growl erupted from behind her—
The growl cut off abruptly. Weiss turned, her rapier belatedly raised, just in time to see a Beowolf skewered against the wall, a familiar bronze spear protruding from its chest as it dissolved.
The wielder appeared at Weiss’s side a moment later. Pyrrha yanked the spear out of the wall as the Beowolf dissolved, before throwing Weiss a concerned glance. “You okay?”
Weiss spun Myrtenaster’s barrel, checking her Dust levels. “As much as I can be right now.”
By pure necessity, the residual awkwardness still existing between Weiss and Pyrrha had evaporated entirely. Occasionally tonight they’d found themselves fighting side-by-side, and neither girl batted an eye about it. They were Huntresses, and they had a job to do. Any history between them could be dealt with later.
“Alpha Ursa, dead ahead,” Pyrrha said, raising Akoúo̱. The two of them backed away towards the rest of the defenders as an Alpha Ursa charged towards them. However, before Weiss or Pyrrha could suggest a plan, a hail of bullets disintegrated the Ursa’s face.
They glanced to one side to see Coco nodding to them both before she swung her minigun around to face yet another Grimm. Weiss would never understand how that girl could so fluidly wield something which might’ve passed for an antiaircraft weapon.
“Rejoining my team,” Pyrrha said with a nod to Team JNPR, and then she was gone, leaving Weiss to consider where she was most needed at that exact moment. Her team was far more spread out—Blake’s whereabouts still entirely unknown, Yang holding the line against the Grimm, and Penny…
Penny was fighting the rogue Atlesian Paladins with an intensity that Weiss had never seen in her before. She was unflinchingly at the center of the frenetic, whirlwind takedown of the latest and greatest in Atlesian firepower, and yet she wasn’t beating the Paladins with strength. She was beating them by moving in ways they couldn’t move, hitting them in places they couldn’t easily defend, and maneuvering the giant mechs into their own damaging crossfire. In one moment, she’d be running up a mech’s limb, striking at its faceplate with Luminous Electra, and then in the next moment she’d be sliding down its back, scoring another strike on the way off, already onto another target before it could catch up with her. She danced back and forth between them, sometimes running literal circles around them. Just the sight of it sent goosebumps running up and down Weiss’s arms.
Luminous Electra flashed between the massive robots in its full zweihander mode, taking off limbs and sending weapons flying, sometimes providing leverage against their weight. She was using her body to absorb bullets with a frequency which frightened Weiss. Yes, she knew full well Penny was made of very durable metal, but… surely even metal had a breaking point?
Her onslaught had attracted all the Paladins’ attention to her, and her alone. And in turn, Penny seemed to be inviting them to face her, making no effort to retreat or regroup. In fact, Weiss would almost say… Penny was treating this fight personally.
Although, considering what Weiss had seen in that horrid broadcast, maybe it was glaringly obvious that this was painfully personal for Penny. The absolute vitriol that’d been spat to the world as objective truth… Weiss still stood by her promise: If anyone tried treating her mechanical partner as less than a person, they would have an abrupt meeting with the business end of her rapier.
For some reason, Penny hadn’t retracted her wings, even though she’d mentioned the lightning had disabled her flight mode. Perhaps they were stuck? Or… possibly, Penny just liked having her wings out, and felt no need to hide them now that her secret was revealed. Weiss would not quibble with that.
Every few seconds, strange glints would appear on Penny’s form, and they could appear anywhere—on her arms, her legs, Weiss even noticed a single flash on her cheek, but they were mostly on her torso, front and back. It took her longer than it should’ve to realize what she was seeing: glimpses of Penny’s metal, made visible by the Paladins’ bullets, which could pierce her clothes and her skin but not what was underneath.
Weiss wondered if Penny was aware that it was showing. She wondered if there was even anything she could do about it.
The evacuation point was still crowded with civilians; a steady stream kept trickling in from all over campus. Sometimes they came wounded, sometimes they were huddled in terrified groups, sometimes they were accompanied by other students brave enough to venture into the uncontrolled chaos in search of survivors, and sometimes they came alone, shaking and splattered with blood and unable to form words.
It was those ones who came alone that Weiss knew had survived only by sheer luck, by a pouncing Grimm simply choosing to sink its teeth into someone else’s neck. The evacuation ships were coming with a lower frequency, too, and she’d overheard a snatch of conversation between a pilot and one of the professors explaining that the stations nearest to Beacon were too crowded by now to take anyone else, forcing the pilots to fly further in both directions. Longer flights meant a greater chance of being knocked out of the sky by Grimm. Ships full of people.
Everything was deteriorating.
Weiss selected her next move: she’d resume providing backup for Penny against the Paladins. She’d been doing the same earlier, until she was pulled away to help repel a particularly stubborn push from the Grimm. But now she would return to doing her duty as a partner. Even if Penny was confident she could weather a destructive hail of gunfire for hours on end, Weiss would not let her put that to the test any more than she absolutely had to.
However, she’d only taken a single step forward when a distant flash of light in the sky caught the corner of her vision. Weiss’s eyes snapped to the anomaly immediately, her heart thudding apprehensively.
One of the Atlesian cruisers above Vale had just burst into flames, and as Weiss watched, powerless, the cruiser listed to one side and began to sink towards the city, smaller explosions blooming all over its hull in wicked glints.
And… why was the other cruiser shooting at it?! Even from this distance, there was no mistake—a continuous volley of bright lasers fired by one Atlesian cruiser was ripping into the second ship even as it sank, engulfed in flames.
Weiss could only watch as the Atlesian cruiser fell faster and faster until it disappeared behind the buildings of Vale’s downtown. But it disappeared only for a moment, because immediately afterward, an enormous fireball rose from what was unmistakably the crash site.
She felt rooted to the spot. She didn’t understand anything. Had Winter been on that ship? Was Winter on the ship still flying? Or was Winter fighting on the ground? Had Weiss just watched her only true family die?
“WEISS!”
The shout came from Penny, just as something carrying a great deal of force slammed into Weiss and scooped her up, and for a moment Weiss thought she was in Penny’s arms. Until her vision cleared enough for her to recognize the trail of rainbows left behind by her rescuer.
“Careful, that Paladin almost got ya!” Neon said as she set Weiss down some distance away from where she’d collapsed. Then she beamed away in another burst of rainbow light.
Penny appeared at Weiss’s side an instant later. “Weiss?” She was all concern when it should’ve been the other way around because she’d been through far more hardship than Weiss ever had—
“I’m alright,” she said, raising Myrtenaster to eye level and pressing the hilt to the bridge of her nose. She closed her eyes, trying to catch her breath at least a little.“Just afraid that there won’t be anywhere left to defend by the time this night is over.”
Penny had to delay her worry for what was happening elsewhere, relegating it to a later priority so she could refocus on the Paladins. Even after the interruption to check on Weiss, attracting their attention again was quite easy. Her previous takedown of one had made the other five quite interested in her, the world’s finest in automated firepower turning in unison to stare her down. Just her. Exactly the way she wanted.
Penny did not know what particular atrocities the Paladins and Knights were being made to carry out, but they meant to hurt people, and anything which stood in the way of that directive would be registered as a threat to be eliminated. She wanted these enemies to recognize that the little freckled girl approaching was the largest current threat to their continued function. She stalked forward in a pose which would make it obvious to the Paladins’ rudimentary machine-learning software that she, more than anyone else around her, was the threat to their mission which needed to be dealt with first.
She calculated a strategy and ninety-two contingencies as she held Luminous Electra to one side, her blade ready and waiting for her next choice. Aside from the machine guns every Paladin wielded, they had an assortment of heavy weapons equipped elsewhere which varied from chassis to chassis. One particular armament immediately registered as a threat to a higher degree than anything else: the electric boltgun. Thankfully, the boltgun was wielded by only a single opponent. Unthankfully, that particular Paladin was the closest to her.
Penny temporarily solved that issue by breaking into a sprint and sliding between the two massive legs just as the boltgun’s muzzle began to glow a dangerous blue. As she passed underneath, she shoved at one of the legs, throwing the immense weight above off-balance. Then she was clear, and nose-to-nose with the barrel of two machine guns and a rocket launcher. She made a split-second decision to jump forward and grab the rocket launcher. With both arms she pushed up on the Paladin’s limb she’d just latched onto, and suddenly the rocket which exploded out of the arm-mounted launcher wasn’t on a collision course with Penny’s face, but whistling over her head and exploding against the boltgun-armed Paladin, flinging it forwards with a concussive wave.
But before Penny could press her advantage on the newly-downed Paladin, the one she’d just grabbed swung its arm further upward into a windmilling motion, yanking Penny off the ground and into a flying semicircle which would end in a faceful of pavement.
But it wasn’t holding onto Penny. Penny was holding onto it. Which meant, calculating the release just right, she could let go, twist, and—she was flying through the air sword-first like a missile towards a Paladin further away, entirely thanks to the centrifugal force of her makeshift launcher, which had essentially just flung a Penny-shaped spear at its own ally.
Penny’s non-rocket aerial journey came to an abrupt end when Luminous Electra buried itself into an enormous mechanical shoulder joint with enough force to punch through the armor covering it. This Paladin swung its arm wildly, too, trying to shake her off, but all it succeeded in doing was worsening the damage to its own joint. A snarl of broken, sparking wires jutted out from the break. Penny, already hanging somewhat precariously by her still-embedded sword, barely had the space to avoid another dangerous electric shock. Although, after surviving a point-blank blast of lightning, this one felt somewhat less intimidating.
Then Penny realized, if she’d broken through a wiring harness, then maybe, given an uncontrolled electrical input…
One of the students defending the school had a lightning gun. It was that goggle-wearing boy from Haven, who Penny had been mildly afraid of ever since discovering his weapon of choice. Ruby had formed a small friendship with him over their mutual love of goggles as a fashion choice and a combat utility. Neptune, that was his name. As the Paladin swiveled around in a desperate attempt at shaking Penny off, she identified the distinct blue hair she was looking for.
“Neptune!” Penny shouted in his direction, taking the Haven student entirely by surprise. She jumped away from the Paladin, leaving Luminous still embedded in its shoulder as she pointed to it. “Please hit my sword with your lightning!”
Neptune appeared mystified by that request, but all the same he nodded and raised his gun. He took a few steps closer, lowered his head to the gunsight, and fired. It was an excellent shot. A crackling bolt of electricity engulfed Luminous’s circuit-board-patterned blade and arced into the exposed wiring harness which it was stuck in.
The resulting electrical overload closed a solenoid which under normal circumstances would only close at an input from the central processor. Abruptly, the circuit which governed the Paladin’s machine gun was completed, overloaded, and welded in place, and suddenly it was unleashing an involuntary hail of bullets upon its fellow Paladins.
Take THAT! Penny thought, grabbing hold of Luminous Electra again (safely; the hilt had a rubber insulating grip which did not conduct electricity) and yanking it out. The overloaded arm was immobile now, and to redirect its uncontrolled gunfire, the Paladin had to swivel at the hip joint. Which only made it easier for Penny to wedge Luminous back into the broken joint and maneuver the arm with the machine gun to keep it aimed at the other three currently standing upright. At least, until the machine gun sputtered and died from some combination of damage, overheating, and overloading.
With the gun disabled, there was no reason to let the damaged, immobile arm stay attached to its Paladin anymore. The joint was weak enough that Penny could separate it from the body with a forceful kick. Which she did.
The Paladin was trying to shove Penny off its shoulder with its remaining arm, but the massive mech simply wasn’t designed to reach across its own body with such a tight tolerance. All it could do was flail helplessly in Penny’s general direction as the other three standing Paladins, now riddled with surface damage from the hijacked machine gun, charged in.
One was outfitted with a cannon firing razor-sharp disks of Hardlight Dust, and only through a quick application of high-speed vision could Penny bring Luminous Electra up to block the first cutting disk which sped towards her. It clanged off her blade and flew off into the night—ooh, that still carried a great deal of power after the ricochet, perhaps she could use that?
Penny leapt off her perch, running a series of calculations in midair as another Hardlight disk whistled by her, and landed with Luminous held at just the right angle to deflect the next disk which rocketed towards her, a turquoise blur clanging off her blade. Suddenly, the projectile was on an entirely new trajectory, a trajectory which ended in the center of another Paladin.
The Hardlight disk lodged itself in an armor plate, and when it dissolved a few seconds later, Penny realized it had entirely punctured the armor plate, revealing—was that a battery cell she could see underneath?
A side process reviewed the footage as she focused her main processes on dodging another swing, and came to the conclusion that yes, that was a battery cell she’d just exposed, highly explosive when damaged—
But before she could figure out a way to get close enough to hit it, a high-caliber round streaked by overhead and slammed home into the gap in the Paladin’s armor. The effect was immediate. The batteries exploded as one in a burst of light and smoke, blowing open the entire front of the Paladin and flinging mecha guts everywhere as it fell backwards. When it hit the ground, its operating lights dimmed, flickered, and then went out entirely. It did not even twitch.
Four Paladins left.
Penny blinked. That shot had been an even higher caliber than what the Paladins were using. A sniper shot? Ruby?
She glanced over her shoulder, and found not Ruby but a different sniper, the beanie-wearing girl from Shade named May. She was lowering her rifle, a wisp of smoke still emanating from the barrel, and when she noticed Penny looking, she offered a thumbs-up and a shout: “Sorry for stealing your kill!”
Penny hoped a small wave of thanks would suffice, because immediately all her attention was taken up by dodging another series of dismembering swings. As she backed away from the two most intact mechs, she noticed an opening, both literal and figurative. The Paladin whose arm she’d just kicked off had a gaping window to its inner circuitry in the place where there had once been an armored joint until Penny’s forceful disassembly.
She rolled sideways and ran towards her new target, ignoring the bullets which pinged off her body in four different places as she pushed power into her leg servos for an extra-high jump and drove her sword into the Paladin’s exposed vulnerability.
A CRUNGTCHGCH, and the Paladin’s operating lights immediately going dark without so much as a flicker told Penny her strike had landed.
Three Paladins destroyed. Three left. One of the three left was already missing an arm. Halfway there.
She could do this.
In the vault deep below Beacon Academy, Ozpin ran across the dim hall towards Amber’s deathbed, his footsteps and his rapid breathing the only sounds which carried through the musty air.
But as he drew near Amber, the most immediate and fatalistic portion of his panic melted away. He could see the faint glow which still lit her pod, and a few steps later he was close enough to hear the humming of the backup generator.
When Ozpin had received the alert in his office that the power to the vault had been cut, he’d assumed the worst. The very circuit which the vault’s power drew from was a closely guarded secret, entirely physically separate from Beacon’s power grid and accessible only to Ozpin and his closest confidantes. But the infiltrators had found some way through the mesh of security, even after the steps taken to bolster cybersecurity in the aftermath of the CCT attack. And the infiltrators had cut the exact power source which was keeping Amber alive, keeping her stasis pod running as it maintained heart rate and body temperature and hydration and oxygen levels and a thousand other things which were no longer in Amber’s control.
Of course, there was a backup generator designed to activate automatically in the case of power loss, an even more isolated power source than the vault’s built-in electrical engineering. There were three generators, in fact. But Ozpin had come to the vault immediately, because he had to check himself, had to check on the chance that the perpetrators had somehow already infiltrated the vault or that the backup generators had failed, or a thousand other catastrophic outcomes.
But none of them had come true, and Amber’s heart still beat.
Ozpin came to a stop before her. She looked no different from any of his recent visits. Faded scars, a stilled face, a chest which barely rose and fell with automatic breaths. And a mournful air, which was perhaps nothing more than the projection of his own thoughts.
He considered his next move. Whether he should return to the surface, or simply wait here. Or…
Or perhaps he had led the infiltrators directly to their target.
Whether it was thousands of years of experience that allowed him to recognize what was about to happen, or some latent magic ability which he was barely aware of himself, or some infinitesimal sign brushing up against his senses, what happened next was that Ozpin whipped his cane up and out to one side, and knocked away an arrow at the exact moment when it was sailing by him. If he had not done so, the arrow would have pierced the stasis pod and killed Amber instantly.
Ozpin turned around slowly, his grip on Long Memory tightening.
In the shadows which cloaked the other end of the hall, a figure watched Ozpin, lowering the bow which had just fired its arrow. She would have been nearly invisible to him, if not for the two flames which ringed her eyes.
With that, Ozpin faced a horrifying truth. He had turned Amber’s death into an unnaturally prolonged affair for nothing. He had forced her soul to linger for months, intentionally and knowingly preventing her from a peaceful passing into the afterlife, for nothing. Given the presence of a willing participant, he would have grafted Amber’s soul onto another’s without any knowledge of what would follow and without Amber’s consent, and it would not have even saved the Maiden powers from Salem’s hands. It would have been for nothing.
The Fall Maiden was right in front of him, and Ozpin was endlessly grateful that Blake Belladonna had refused his offering. It had been a false offering.
Now he was a failure greater than even Salem. The God of Light had sent him to help Salem learn respect for the sanctity of life and death. Not only had Ozpin failed in that task—he had become Salem’s partner in disrespecting the forces of life and death. What else could he call what he’d done to Amber besides the gravest of insults to life and the soul? He had denied Amber peace. Just as Salem had denied him peace.
Perhaps this was the failure by which he would remember this lifetime.
“You already stole Autumn’s power,” Ozpin said to Cinder Fall. “Why bother coming back to kill her?”
The frenzied light cast on her face by the Maiden flames allowed him to see the coldly amused smile which played over her face.
And then, from behind him, the sound of shattering glass.
Ozpin’s eyes widened. Cinder had not moved; she still held her bow lazily at her side, watching him. And yet—
He heard a gasp from a voice he recognized, also behind him. Despite the sheer danger of taking away any attention from his foe, he turned his back on Cinder, and found an arrow exactly like the first piercing the stasis pod. And Amber.
The gasp had indeed come from Amber; her eyes were wide open, although he could see no sign of recognition in them—just a wild, unfocused pain and terror. As much as his attention was drawn to whatever he could find in her face, it was even more powerfully drawn to the twin answers for a long-held question:
Two Maiden flames wrapped around Amber’s eyes, blazing just as brightly as Fall’s.
However, almost immediately, the Maiden flames disappeared from Amber’s eyes, and her body crumpled around the arrow which had landed in the center of her chest.
Ozpin knew there was nothing more he could do for her. He wanted to grieve, to mourn, to remember, but he had no time.
He turned back to Cinder, who appeared content to savor his dismay instead of attacking immediately.
Now he understood that he’d come to the wrong conclusion a moment ago. He wasn’t facing the Fall Maiden, but rather—
“You are the one who murdered the Summer Maiden, then,” he said, fighting to keep his voice even as he sent a faint pulse of magic into the ground, discovering that there was a third person who stood behind Cinder and was completely invisible to his sight. An illusory Semblance was at play here. His senses could not be trusted without the aid of magic.
A glow like the midday sun in the Vacuo desert appeared around Cinder, flooding the vault with a glaring light which erased all shadow and she rose slowly into the air.
“My first attack on the Fall Maiden may have been interrupted, but you are nothing if not predictable, Ozpin. You and your lackeys ran to stash away your other Maidens after my attack, and in doing so, you told me exactly where the Summer Maiden was. Just as your insistence on clinging to hoarded power was your undoing with Summer, it will be your arrogance that is your undoing with Fall.”
But even as Cinder spoke, Ozpin recognized her expression as one of anticipation, not triumph. He wondered, could it be possible—
Several more tortured seconds ticked by, in which anticipation melted into disbelief, and then all at once it was rage.
“WHAT?!”
A hot, dry blast of air rushed through the vault, pulling the moisture from Ozpin’s eyes and forcing him to blink. He hardly cared; it was his relief that he was almost choking on now. Relief, tempered with a dread that’d become too familiar in recent weeks.
“WHERE IS IT?!?” Cinder growled. She was glowing almost too bright for Ozpin to look directly at. “WHERE DID YOU HIDE THE FALL MAIDEN’S POWER, YOU DEMENTED OLD MAN?!”
“Those are questions I cannot answer,” Ozpin said, raising his cane and taking a slow breath of scorching air. “Perhaps you might have better luck asking yourself who Amber would choose.”
Months ago
Amber could have given up in that moment. In the clutches of her enemies, forced onto her knees, a gaping wound in her back, pain incarnate swallowing up her face and burning everything it touched, feeling as if her entire body was nothing but a seam bursting open, she could have let the life slip out of her body, and no one would have faulted her.
And in another world where Amber had found no friends at Beacon, her fight would have ended there. In another world where there had been no kindred soul asking her are you okay? in a secret alcove, Amber’s fight would have ended there. But in this world, Amber had someone left in her thoughts to hold defiantly onto. Someone whose memory could still bring a warm feeling of comfort even in her last moments.
A friend.
Amber looked up into the confident smile of the assassin who was peeling away a layer of her soul, and with the memory of a friend like her, she reached for the last spark of strength she had.
The Fall Maiden powers erupted around both of Amber’s eyes, sending an explosion of energy and light through the Grimm matter binding her to the assassin, and the tentacles of darkness were vaporized in a flash. As Amber toppled forward, she felt a comforting warmth deep inside which told her the assassins had stolen none of her powers, that she had succeeded in holding onto everything. Because she had the memory of a girl to draw strength from.
And as the world slipped away from Amber, she thought of Penny.
Present day
In one second, Penny was standing over a newly destroyed Paladin, preparing to face the remaining three lumbering towards her, and then in the next second, she was somewhere else entirely.
Penny had the vaguest sense of standing atop the ground, and yet when she looked down, she could not see anything solid which she was standing on. But she could not label this as floating in midair, either, because her gyrometers were not registering any actual movement.
…Was there even such a thing as midair in this place, for that matter? Depth and distance did not seem to be things which existed here. Wherever here was. Her radar returned a helpless shrug, and given how uniformly featureless this white void was, there was nothing to set visual measurement by. She was just… existing here. Even her chronometer was confused about whether or not passage of time was a concept that existed in this place.
She wondered if she was experiencing some sort of full-system glitch, some complete shutdown of sensors which was leaving her inside the equivalent of an error message for her consciousness matrix. However, a familiar voice from behind Penny shattered any thought of this being an electrical issue.
“Hey. You made it.”
Penny whirled around, and chose to ignore the question of how movement was possible when there didn’t be anything to push against, because far more important things demanded her attention.
“Amber…” she whispered. It was not the start of a greater sentence, just an instinctual utterance of her friend’s name.
Amber was still as scarred and pale as she had been in the vault, but her eyes were fully open and alert as she stood on her own two feet, gazing at Penny with an expression of deep sadness and exhaustion. And yet, she was also giving Penny a small smile which felt very real.
“I guess there really only was one way to be free,” she said, surveying their surroundings. Then she gave Penny a shy wave. “So, welcome to my secret.”
“I—I know it already.” Penny felt a fresh flood of shame for having violated Amber’s privacy, even if it was entirely necessary. “I learned about you and the Maidens from Headmaster Ozpin, because he believed it was in the interest of my own safety to know. I am sorry.”
“It’s okay,” Amber said. “It’s totally okay. I know… when I left, I would’ve told you, if you’d asked.”
The space between them was only a few paces, and Penny closed that distance, wrapping Amber in a tight hug, a Ruby-quality hug. Amber responded in turn, and even if Penny understood that this would truly be the last time they ever met, she felt a wave of happiness at getting to hug her first friend again. One last time.
“I… I would like to show you my secret as well,” she said. It was the same urge she’d felt when she told her team, the same urge she’d felt when she’d told Ruby. She wanted her friends to know her.
Amber stiffened. “You’re sure?”
Penny nodded, stepped back, and deployed her wings.
She did not expect the void around her to also change. The featureless void became a gently swirling dome of bright green blinking ones and zeroes, the exact same color as her Aura. Penny even recognized some of the lines of code from her own code, programming for the workings of her Aura generator.
Amber gasped.
And then Penny looked down at herself and realized it wasn’t just the void that’d changed in appearance; her own appearance had, too. Bright green lines pulsed underneath her skin in patterns of circuitry from her fingertips to her shoes, mimicking what was under her skin, and the outline of her Aura generator glowed the brightest of all as if there were no armor panels between it and her skin. All this, illuminating her from the inside, making even clearer what might’ve been guessed from the wings.
“Thank you for being the first friend of the first synthetic girl in the world,” she said.
Amber’s eyes were wide, but Penny saw no sign of fear or derision in them. Instead, she tilted her head, studying Penny, and smiled. “I’m really happy I got to know before the end, Penny. It’s nice to meet you for real.”
Penny smiled back, and hoped that this moment could last just a little longer.
But Amber glanced around at their surroundings (or lack thereof), crossing her arms. “So, um, you probably know what’s about to happen, then?”
Penny nodded.
“I’m so sorry.” Amber took a step forward, holding out her hands. “I wish I wasn’t doing this to you. But I—I couldn’t let the power go to her.”
“It is okay. I understand.” Penny accepted Amber’s hands, squeezing her increasingly cold palms tightly.
Amber’s hands lit up in an ethereal glow, the color of her Aura, and then Penny’s hands were glowing too, with her green Aura.
“Goodbye, Penny,” Amber said. Her form began to fade away into the void. “I’m glad I could be part of your fairytale.”
Penny was jolted back into existence as a new warmth settled over her like a fireplace being lit at the beginning of a long night. Something flickered energetically in her chest, and rose up past her collarbone and into her throat and through the center of her head until it felt as if it was fighting to get out from behind her photoreceptors. Instinctively, she squeezed her eyes shut, trying to hold in whatever wanted to escape, until she realized what was happening. And then she welcomed it.
She opened her eyes, and from inside herself, two shimmering green flames took flight. The fire somehow covered her vision and yet obscured nothing at all, not even to her sensors.
Another wave of sensations engulfed Penny, joining the warmth—walking through the Emerald Forest amidst the swish-kssh of fallen leaves crinkling and crunching. The deep bright red of an apple hanging from the gnarled branch of a tree hidden deep in the forest, ready to be picked and savored. A faint tingling smell of wood smoke which made Penny think home and Beacon and warmth.
Warmth.
It surrounded Penny, as a thought and a feeling and a concept, warmth as a force holding back a deep chill that would only grow deeper in the coming months. Warmth, which remained even as the days grew shorter and the sunshine weakened. Warmth, a protector amidst the drastic change of seasons.
She was floating in the air.
Flames poured from the rocket thrusters of her still-deployed wings, but not the green flames she recognized. Orange plumes of flame blazed from each of the four thrusters, wild and crackling and somehow keeping her no-longer-broken wings aloft.
A brisk wind churned around her in a near-tornado, whipping up her hair and clothes and leaves that had been lying on the cobblestones below. The warmth of something waking up inside of her was almost overwhelming. Her fingertips brushed against something immense, as if she was laying her fingers upon the surface of another world. A different kind of power joining the electricity which already charged her soul.
“Thank you, Amber,” Penny whispered.
But there was no time to mourn, or to come to terms with the magic dancing through her wires, because the battle still raged around her. The Paladins were circling underneath Penny, the Grimm paid no notice to her, and the battle at large had not slowed in the least. Even in the chaos, Penny’s teammates found pause to watch her, confusion and worry and awe in Weiss and Yang’s faces. And Ruby, her eyes wide and her mouth hanging open, was staring at Penny with what had to be recognition.
Penny Pallas, the Fall Maiden, lowered herself to the ground on instinct, landing beside the destroyed Paladin in which Luminous Electra’s sword was still impaled. Heat and light danced around her, the flames that ringed her eyes casting a glow into the night.
She yanked Luminous out with a screech of metal as the Paladin slumped and then collapsed entirely. Odd tangles of wire and hoses had caught onto a few deep battle scores in her sword, and it was also wet with bright green coolant and darker, thicker lubricant, both of which fell from the blade’s edge in irregular drips.
Once upon a time, the original Pallas The Warrior, who had lived a life undeniably historical and yet also enchantingly mythological, had daubed a smear of red paint under each eye every morning before she walked through the gates of the city which she defended from the Grimm alone. History or legend told that she’d done it to strike fear into the Grimm. To warn them she would bathe in their own blood, all she needed was a single glance.
Penny reached down and ran her thumb through the green coolant still dripping from Luminous Electra. Then, with two careful swipes of that thumb, she left a stripe of green under both eyes, two warnings written in a different kind of blood.
The Atlesian monsters she was fighting did not feel fear or any kind of emotion, and it was most likely that their limited data processing would assign no significance to the streaks of green on Penny’s cheeks. However, Penny Pallas had chosen her surname for a reason, and she was choosing this homage to Pallas for a similar reason. To remind herself of something she was coming dangerously close to forgetting tonight: She was a warrior. She chose to protect people. She would protect people to the last cycle of her processors, to the final pulse of her Aura generator, to the last joule of electricity in her body. Because she wanted to.
It didn’t matter what she’d been born to do or what she’d been built to do. This was what she was choosing to do.
Notes:
Well. I feel like I should apologize a little for how much I obfuscated the Summer Maiden situation. I promise I wasn’t trying to be like “ha ha! gotcha!” to anyone reading. But I wanted the fate of the Fall Maiden powers to be a mystery, and I felt that letting readers put together the pieces before now about Cinder being the Summer Maiden would’ve dissolved most of the mystery. As it turned out, this mystery needed some pretty big red herrings. And as for why I chose Cinder as the Summer Maiden in the first place:
When I set out to write War Machines, I faced one very big problem: I didn’t know a single thing about the Summer Maiden. If I wanted to write anything about her, I would’ve had to create a plot-critical OC, and I don’t like doing that. And because my ultimate goal with this story is a full-story resolution, I have to include the Summer Maiden somehow. So, there was really only one solution I saw: Make the Summer Maiden someone else, but for an in-universe reason. And that’s how we got Summer Maiden Cinder Fall.
Whoever the canon Summer Maiden is, she’s dead in this story. Killed by Cinder pivoting Maiden targets after a completely failed attack on Amber and basically finding Summer the same way that canon Cinder found the Winter Maiden in Volume 7. And the reason that Cinder targeted Summer at all was because she didn’t have a burning magical hunger for the other half of a Fall Maiden power which would’ve given her a singleminded goal. And the reason why Cinder didn’t get half of Fall’s magic in the first place is that Amber had the memory of a friend to draw strength on. And the reason Amber had that friend was because Penny came to Beacon, and the reason Penny came to Beacon was because Ruby ending up in Atlas (after Salem decided to kidnap her) was what made Pietro realize that what he was doing with Penny was fucked up, leading to the decision to Penny escaping. So I've made a direct thread from Summer Maiden Cinder Fall to the original change which kicked off this canon divergence AU! Can you tell that I love making all the changes in my canon divergence traceable back to the one single initiating change?
Oh, and shoutout to Vo1d_Cat for being the first person to notice Cinder had both eye flames instead of just one, all the way back on Chapter 38.
Next week, Chapter 65: Bloody Evolution
Chapter 65: Bloody Evolution
Notes:
Content warnings for this chapter (click this text to reveal):
Blood, death, abuse, continued psychological breakdown
And on a lighter note!
Fanart for the previous chapter! Fanart for the previous chapter!!! From my friend the one and only DesiB717, who you should be following on Tumblr. I'm thanking her from the bottom of my heart!
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
“YEAH!”
With one hand, Roman Torchwick pumped a victorious fist, and with the other hand he aimed a proudly raised middle finger through the viewport at the Atlesian cruiser he’d just shot out of the sky.
Immediately, he yanked the steering yoke to the right, pulling his own hijacked cruiser around and setting a course that led straight to Beacon Academy.
“That’s what you get for making me rot in prison!” he crowed as the other Atlesian cruiser went down in flames. “I’ve hung out in coffins with more space than your stupid jail cells! Well, guess what, now you’re getting a taste of your own comfort!”
He gave the control panel one more celebratory punch, spun away from the viewport, and noticed Neo staring at him as she finished wiping blood off the point of Hush. With one finger, she drew the outline of a coffin in the air and gave him a look of pointed disbelief.
Torchwick shrugged. “Hey, I’ve come across a few opportunities to sit in a coffin over my life, and a man gets curious. Don’t tell me you wouldn’t try and see what it’s like if you had the chance!” When the only reply to that was an extremely unimpressed look, he went on. “You wouldn’t believe how comfy those things are! Why do they put so much padding in there for somebody that’s never gonna feel it?”
Neo made an exaggerated chomping motion.
“Hey, if anyone’s the vampire here, it’s you with your freaky sleep habits!”
Immediately, Torchwick saw a gleam in Neo’s eyes that he didn’t like one bit, and he hastily reconsidered his statement. “Neo, swear on my last cent, if you start biting me—”
He received a smarmy smirk in response which offered zero reassurance.
“I’m serious. I will drive a stake through your heart. And drown you in minced garlic for good measure.” He shook his head, poked hopefully at a random blinking button beside him, and huffed in annoyance when nothing happened. “You flew solo for a few months and your brain got all scrambled. How can you ever live without me?”
Neo reached up onto her tiptoes to flick the rim of his bowler hat, but there was no real ire in the gesture.
“Hey, watch it. They don’t make these hats anymore.” He turned back to the viewport, squinted through it at the land ahead, and nodded in satisfaction. “Okay, get ready. We’re gonna be above the Junior Huntress Daycare Center in a few minutes, and I’ve got a giant score to settle with those stupid kids who got me thrown in jail. You’re gonna have to show me how to drop the bombs, because I barely know how to steer this thing, let alone make it carpet-bomb some snot-nosed kids into oblivion. Unless Little Miss Matchstick wants you somewhere else?”
Neo rolled her eyes, flicked her hand dismissively in the general direction of Beacon, and then gave Torchwick a gentle kick in the shins. Not nearly hard enough to hurt, just a way of showing affection.
There was no lost love between the duo and Cinder, because they both knew perfectly well that Neo could’ve broken Torchwick out of prison anytime if not for Cinder explicitly forbidding a breakout. They all knew it was punishment for his failure at the docks.
“Oh, you actually want to spend time with me? You must’ve really lost it while I was gone,” Torchwick said with a grin. He dropped into the captain’s chair (which thankfully did not have any coat-ruining or hat-ruining bloodstains on it, unlike most of the rest of the cockpit) and folded his hands behind his head, kicking a leg up to rest it on a control panel. “You know, lien for lien, I think this ship is the biggest heist we’ve ever pulled off…?”
As it turned out, the captain’s chair was just roomy enough for Neo to squeeze in beside Torchwick, which she did, ignoring his protests that he was being suffocated. She leaned her head against him and closed her eyes, letting out a slow, content breath. A small, happy smile spread across her face which no one except Torchwick was allowed to see.
“…Yeah, I sure did miss you too,” Torchwick said quietly. “It’s good to be back.” He glanced at the array of instruments and readouts blinking at him, and then reached for the throttle, slowing the ship’s advance to a crawl. He could wait a little while longer before sending the Baby Huntresses to kingdom come.
Unfortunately, the universe had other ideas.
This was the most relaxed Neo had been in months. She would be free from Cinder Fall and her domineering ways after tonight, and she had Roman back at her side. Sure, they were helping burn down their own home turf to seal the deal with Cinder’s gang, but it was what they’d had to do to survive. After all, Cinder had made it acutely clear that Vale would fall with or without the help of its number-one and number-two ne’er-do-wells. And given a choice between joining the winning side, or keeping their heads down and hoping they wouldn’t be collateral damage…
Roman liked to say, there were some bets he just didn’t take. He also liked to say, “You gotta keep evolving, or the rest of the world’s gonna evolve ahead of you.”
So, they’d have to get used to a little change of scenery. It wouldn’t be too much trouble, since they did have a newly acquired Atlesian cruiser of their own to roam around the world in.
A name change was probably in order for the ship, though. The AKN Endurance sounded so stuffy, after all, and this ship certainly did not belong to the Atlesian Kingdom Navy now. Neo much preferred something along the lines of the NEO Grand Larceny. Or the NEO Stabby Stab Stab.
Suddenly, a violent hiss of static filled the cruiser’s bridge. Neo didn’t react, assuming it was some sort of emergency military broadcast that could be ignored, until—
“Hello? Hello? Is this damned thing on?”
Neo sat bolt upright, her eyes flying open. She recognized that voice. That was Cinder’s annoying mustachioed colleague that Neo had delivered the Pandora to after hijacking it. She would’ve liked to go the rest of her life without hearing his oily voice again.
“Ah, it is working. Finally,” Cinder’s colleague said with a snort of satisfaction. “You wouldn’t believe how long I’ve been trying to get the microphone working while you two were yapping away.”
He was already a man who set Neo on edge, but there was something else in his voice. Something which… if this was an ordinary business deal with elements of the Vale underworld, it was the kind of tone that would make Neo start a fight to get the jump on whoever was trying to get a jump on her.
Limited in her options by the current situation, she settled for rising to her feet, drawing Hush, and picking a security camera in the corner to glare at.
Roman followed Neo’s lead, rising warily to his feet. Melodic Cudgel leaned against a nearby dashboard, just out of his reach for now. “Hey, pal, I don’t know who you are, but my colleague doesn’t like your tone, so if you’re trying to build a working relationship, we’re not off to a great start here.”
“Oh, don’t mind me,” the Cinder affiliate said as something clicked faintly in the background. “I’m just the messenger. I’ve got something here your boss asked me to pass along to you. And I was only informed that there’d be one sucker here, but whatever, it doesn’t make a difference to me.”
Without warning, nearly every light in the bridge went out—every button, every gauge, every screen, every indicator bulb, even the ceiling lights. At the same instant, the sound of metal shifting and clanging crashed over the bridge, and a thick metal shade slammed down over every viewport, erasing any light which still filtered in from the chaotic night outside. Now, the only light Neo and Roman had was the stark red glare of the emergency lights scattered across the walls, which threw her face and Roman’s into deep, bloody shadow.
“The fuck…?” Roman muttered, turning in a circle.
Neo was already at the exit, trying the handle and finding that even though the door wasn’t locked and the handle itself moved, the entire door was impossibly stuck in place, as if it’d been welded to the ground and walls. Not even an Aura-enhanced shove made it budge the tiniest bit.
A flash of light from the corner of her eye pulled her attention back to the front of the bridge, where a holographic image had just appeared, projected from one of the control boards. It was Cinder.
“Roman Torchwick,” Cinder said in a silky-smooth tone, the ghostly eyes of her hologram staring right through Neo. “I must thank you for ensuring my control of the skies would be complete tonight. Now, please enjoy your reward for the complete failure of your duty to me and the insufferable hindrance to my cause that you’ve been ever since you got yourself captured by a gaggle of overzealous children. A torch shouldn’t burn for too long unattended, after all—it should always be extinguished.”
The image of Cinder disappeared, but the bridge stayed dark, the viewports still sealed off and the emergency lights still casting their macabre pallor over everything.
Roman finally picked up Melodic Cudgel, smacking its bend deliberately into his palm. “Neo,” he said slowly. “I’ve got a bad feeling about this.”
Neo turned on her scroll flashlight and pointed it at her face just to make sure that Roman could see the no shit? expression she was making.
And that was when the Endurance exploded.
Penny looked at the Paladins, and with the unfamiliar power crackling inside her, she spoke angrily.
“You will not hurt anyone else!”
Flames spun into existence around her, catching torrents of wind which appeared from calm air, and one, two, three tornadoes of fire took form. The columns of flame rotated around her so closely that they should’ve scorched her skin, and yet she was completely unscathed. Then, with a flick of her hand, she sent them flying at her targets, one fiery whirlwind for each Paladin.
The firestorms swept all three off their feet, blackening their shining armor wherever it came into contact. Penny barely understood how she was doing this. Of course there was no code, no protocol for this within her body. It was pure instinct, her hands moving along paths which already felt well-traveled. She would’ve called it muscle memory if this happened to an organic being.
Penny brought the three tornadoes to a stop, each of them hovering over a Paladin struck prone. She funneled the fire down, turning it from a wide storm to a sharp, focused dagger which she pushed into the armor plates of the Paladins. They could withstand such an attack, but Penny wasn’t trying to destroy them with fire alone. She was softening one small spot on each of the armor plates, turning it malleable. Heating the armor until it was easily pierced. Normally, that would require a prohibitive amount of Fire Dust, but now she had a magical wellspring of unlimited fire.
Magic. Penny had magic now. It felt so very strange to think about.
When Penny saw metal glowing red-hot and losing its shape, she let the flames die out and leapt forward with Luminous Electra, driving her sword through the now-superheated frontal armor of a Paladin and through some extremely vital electronic systems which laid beneath.
At the same moment, movement came from Penny’s right—not from the Paladins, but from Weiss, recognizing the tactic and leaping forward on a glyph and driving Myrtenaster into the red-hot weak spot on the second Paladin. And then there was Pyrrha, following just behind her and stabbing the third Paladin with a two-handed strike of Miló.
Three sets of operating lights dimmed and then went out entirely as the enormous Atlesian weapons froze.
Zero Paladins left.
But there was no time to celebrate, and already Penny was pulling Luminous Electra out of her defeated foe and turning to scan the rest of the battle. And the first thing she saw was—
Professor Carmel?
There was no mistaking the aged professor, holding a line that no less than eight students had been struggling to defend earlier, blasting through any Grimm that came near with her twin pistols. A Vacuo-style cowboy hat sat perched atop her head and flapping with every gunshot. And there were quite a lot of gunshots, because Carmel was running through ammunition at an astonishing rate. The way she reloaded was unlike anyone else Penny had ever met, all fluidity and rhythm and her hands flashing back and forth between her bandoliers and her pistols, somehow managing to keep firing one pistol through another pistol’s entire reloading sequence. It was almost juggling, the way she would toss one gun in the air for just long enough to slam a fresh cartridge into the other, and then catch the airborne gun without missing a beat. And Penny had yet to see Carmel pull a trigger with an empty chamber—she seemed to always know exactly when a pistol would run out.
Penny marveled. Perhaps she should have taken more notice of Carmel being quite literally one of the most experienced Huntresses in existence.
However, she could not focus on one person for long. The rest of the fight demanded her attention, but as Penny kept scanning, something became clear.
There were no more Knights standing—she’d noticed Pyrrha using her Semblance to dispatch them with ease—which meant, there was no more rogue Atlesian technology. Which meant the only enemies left to fight were Grimm. Which meant, Ruby.
And at the same moment Penny registered the thought, a flash of silver light exploded out from the fountain where she’d left Ruby. This burst was closer to what Ruby had done in Mountain Glenn, an all-encompassing light that washed over Penny and Weiss and Yang and everyone else in the vicinity, a world engulfed in pure silver for a few moments, a strange quiet falling over all.
When the silver faded away, Ruby was no longer hiding behind cover, Professor Carmel was lowering her pistols in bewilderment, and every Grimm in sight had either disappeared or turned to stone.
There was still a distant cacophony, reminding everyone of the danger running rampant everywhere else on campus, but for the first time since the beginning of the fight, a ripple of hope was spreading visibly through the evacuees. An amazed murmur followed Ruby as she walked towards Professor Carmel.
It was Ruby’s approach that shook Carmel out of her bewilderment. She holstered both pistols and, using her booming professor voice which easily carried through a lecture hall, she barked out, “I need to talk to everyone who can still fight!”
As every student still standing gathered around Professor Carmel under the shadow of the CCT, Yang came to a stop beside Penny and Weiss and bent over, resting her hands on her knees and trying to catch her breath. As soon as she wasn’t moving, a crushing soreness dropped over every part of her body. Had her heart ever beat this fast in her life?
She was low on Aura. She needed to find Blake. She needed to find her partner. She needed to make sure Ruby was safe. She needed to stay with her sister no matter what. She needed to keep her team safe. She needed to defend the school. If she didn’t go looking for Blake, she was a failure. If she left Ruby behind, she was a failure. If other people died under her protection because she was too worried about Blake and Ruby, she was a failure.
Yang needed to do everything. Be everything. She needed to not be a failure to everyone she loved. She had to prove herself worthy of their love. She had to do something. For Yang Xiao Long, the only thing worse than doing something wrong was doing nothing.
Ruby was near them, but she was staring straight ahead at Professor Carmel. Although Yang wasn’t sure if Ruby was trying to avoid seeing them, or trying to avoid seeing everyone else staring at her.
She was trying to work up the courage to say something to Ruby when Professor Carmel began speaking.
“Alright,” Carmel said, her hands on her hips as she surveyed them. “Sitrep. This is the only part of the school not overrun by Grimm, and their numbers are still getting stronger. I’m seeing Grimm I didn’t even think lived in this part of the continent. There’s no help coming from the city anytime soon. The power’s out all over campus. It’s getting too dangerous for the evac ships to fly. The longer we all stay here, the higher the chance we’re left stranded. My assessment two minutes ago was that we would have to abandon the academy.”
She paused, pulled out a pistol, and shot at something in the sky over everyone’s heads. The pained squawk of a Griffon answered the gunshot a moment later, followed by the thump of a carcass hitting the ground. And then her eyes settled on Ruby. “But now… Miss Karyatis, how much can you do that?”
No one needed any clarification on what Carmel meant when she said that.
“Forever,” Ruby said, and the way she said it scared Yang. Ruby sounded like she genuinely believed she had no limits. And Yang wanted to scream at her, you’re my baby sister, you’re a human being, you’ve got limits just like everyone else on this planet, even Penny has limits—
“Well, then.” Carmel exhaled hard, pushed the brim of her cowboy hat back, and shook her head. “I’m not used to having a real-life deus ex machina, you know that?”
“Don’t call her that,” Yang said, more reflexively than anything else. But she couldn’t really bring herself to regret it. Weiss shot her a look, but said nothing.
Carmel blinked at Yang for a few seconds before some sort of understanding dawned over her face, and she nodded. “Right. My apologies, Miss Karyatis. You’re a person, and I will treat you as such.”
“It’s fine? I don’t even know what a des-es-whatever is?”
Carmel made a brief face which Yang could only describe as the I have failed as a teacher variety. She’d seen Dad do that exact expression sometimes.
“Regardless, we cannot overextend ourselves. We’ve got a good foothold, but it’s still just a foothold. All we need to do is hold it with what we’ve got and Miss Karyatis’s eyes, until we can get reinforcements from the city. And then we’ll take back the school. Any objections?”
Ruby raised her hand.
“Miss Karyatis, if you’re about to suggest you can take back the entire school by yourself, I strongly suggest you don’t try that,” Carmel said. “You’re just one person. The smartest place for you is right here, with the students and the evacuees. The land’s not what needs to be defended right now. It’s the people.”
Ruby lowered her hand, a cowed expression on her face.
Carmel gave her a sympathetic look. She put a hand on Ruby’s shoulder—she was standing just close enough to do that—and spoke in a much friendlier, less businesslike tone. “I’m not going to pretend I didn’t see the broadcast, Miss Karyatis. But you’re still the same curious and excited student I’ve known for several months, and that’s all I need you to be. I’m not asking you to win a war. I’m just asking you to help, like any other student here. That’s all.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Ruby said quietly. She looked away, in the process meeting Yang’s eyes again. But they didn’t skid off her like every time before this night. Instead, Ruby stared at her sister, tears beginning to shine in her eyes.
Yang squeezed her fingernails into the palm of her hand as deep as she could. She wanted to help Ruby. But she didn’t know what she could do that wouldn’t just break everything more. Maybe the solution was for Yang to never say anything ever again, because it was her fault for thinking she could get her sister back, she’d been so stupid—
“Well, that’s everything I’ve got to say.” Carmel racked a pistol and nodded to the makeshift battalion. “I’m going to sweep the campus and look for stragglers. All I ask from the rest of you is that you hold the line.”
The Grimm were already starting to surge back, prowling in the distance and hungrily eyeing the concentration of people. Carmel glanced at them, holstered her pistol, and gave the group a longer, more contemplative look.
“Students, you may remember me as a loud old lady with a lot of opinions on movies, but I lived during the Great War. I remember what it feels like when the sky is falling. And I remember what came after, even though it usually didn’t feel like there would be an after. I promise you all, this night will have an after, too. We will persevere.”
FLASH.
Another blast of Ruby’s silver eyes lit up the night, vaporizing a pair of Nevermores that swept down from the sky.
Penny watched Professor Carmel’s form disappear around the corner of a building, and wished as hard as she could for a safe return. Now, in the strange lull of battle as Ruby eliminated any Grimm which strayed near, she had time to run a systemwide diagnostic.
There were several alerts which seemed to be related to the appearance of the Maiden powers, and Penny dismissed them with the thought that accounting for the existence of magic in her bodily programming would be a very interesting exercise.
Magic.
She was still struggling to comprehend it. It did not seem as if she had enough processing power to fully parse the concept. Maybe she would never reach a complete understanding. Maybe that was just an inherent property of magic, to be something which could never be fully understood.
Penny held out a hand, turning the palm upward at her eye level. She thought of warmth, and a small flame appeared in her hand.
FLASH.
The burst of light was Ruby’s silver, not Penny’s newfound flames, annihilating another wave of Grimm.
“Penny?”
Penny knew Yang and Weiss and Team JNPR were nearby, the group of friends standing together in a tense, confused silence, and she had no fear of showing this magic to them. So she turned to them, and let them look directly into the wings of green fire around her eyes.
Weiss was the first to ask. “How are you doing that?”
“It was a gift.” Penny cupped her hands, looking down into the flame which was now nestled in there. Amber was dead. Penny did not yet have time to grieve her. “From a friend.”
Recognition appeared in Yang and Weiss’s eyes. They knew exactly which friend Penny was referring to—or at least as much as they could know about Amber with the limited information she’d told them.
“Your secret friend,” Yang said. “She’s—this magic fire came from her, Penny?”
“Yes,” Penny said. She summoned another fireball to her hand and stared down into it, as if there was an answer to be found within. “Her name was Amber, and she was very nice, and she liked to play chess even if she was not very good at it, and she wanted to study history at an academy in Mistral someday, and she wanted to be free. And she had magical powers which she did not ask for.”
“I’m sorry,” Weiss said, a response that had to be more reflexive than anything else for how fast it came. “Penny, I… I’m sorry that we never got to make her acquaintance, but… how? How did she have this?” She gestured emphatically at the green flames ringing Penny’s eyes. “And how did she give it to you?”
“Students.”
They all jumped at the sound of Oobleck’s voice beside them. Even Penny, because she had not been paying attention to her radar.
“Please know that if you venture any further into this field of questioning, you will find yourselves approaching a point of no return. And once past that threshold, you will find yourselves in more danger than any of you can imagine.”
Then, as those words sank in, he turned a scrutinizing gaze on Penny, and sighed. “Except for you, Miss Pallas, because possessing these powers means you are already beyond that point.”
“The headmaster already explained the Maidens to me,” Penny said. “He believed I might be the last one in Amber’s thoughts.”
And Ozpin had been correct, as the Maiden flames continuously reminded her. Amber was dead, and the last thing she’d ever done was give a remnant of her soul to Penny.
The thoroughly unsurprised nod she received in reply from Oobleck told her that he’d guessed as much.
“If it puts Penny in danger, we want to know it too,” Yang said before Penny could say anything else. “No matter how dangerous.” And that statement was answered with emphatic nods of agreement from everyone else.
Oobleck looked back and forth between them all, and sighed even more deeply. “Your father and uncle can explain it far better than I can, Miss Xiao Long. Ask one or both of them to tell you about Salem. And please, until they have told you, do not ask anyone else about that name. Do not speak it. Her reach extends to the most unexpected of places.”
Salem…
Penny exchanged more worried looks with her friends, wondering what kind of person was behind a name like that, something which sounded like it’d been cut from a very old fairytale. The Queen whose will was mentioned in the—in the—in the CCT incident, was that Salem?
But even with all that pressing down on her, there was one question which she wanted to know the answer to far more desperately than anything else.
“Doctor, do you know if Professor Ozpin is alright?” she asked. She had not seen him at all this evening. Was he okay? Most of the professors had gone to defend the city on his orders, but by all accounts he’d stayed at the school. Except there had been no sign of him.
A gust of wind blew into Oobleck’s face, pushing his hair to peculiar angles. He gave Penny a searching look, and then, in an unreadable tone, said: “Do I presume correctly when I say you are the Fall Maiden, Miss Pallas?”
Penny nodded.
“Then…” Oobleck’s face crumpled, and her emotional analysis systems gleaned what the answer would be without a single word spoken. “The Headmaster promised that he would defend Autumn’s power with his life, and I have no choice but to believe he did exactly that.”
Oh.
Penny took a step back, every servo in her body tightening. The man who had given her a home and a sanctuary without question or reservation was dead. If Ozpin was dead, then she was not safe anywhere.
“I am so sorry, Miss Pallas.” There was nothing else he could say; he bowed his head, and then he was continuing on towards the final, still-filling evacuation ship.
Who could kill Ozpin? He was so knowledgeable, and he always seemed two steps ahead of everyone else, and he could do things that no one else could, and… and…
“Her name was Amber?”
Weiss’s voice yanked Penny out of what otherwise would’ve been a long spiral of grief.
“Yes,” she said with a stiff nod. “I cannot wait to tell you all about my friendship with her, now that her secrets are no longer dangerous.”
“You knew she could do… That?” Weiss gestured at the flames.
“Not until the very end.”
“Is it hurting you?” Yang said.
“No. It is…” Penny almost chose the word magic, but settled on something safer. “Comforting.”
To emphasize her point, she let the flame go out, took Yang’s hands, and tried to push the warmth the Maiden’s power carried into Yang’s arms. The way one might channel their Aura into something outside their body.
Yang gasped.
“How’s this happening?” she said, staring at Penny’s hands in wonderment. “You’re… you’re making me feel safer. It feels like I’m sitting by the fireplace back home with my dad and Zwei, and…” She pulled her hands back, shaking her head. “Sorry. If—if I didn’t let go, I was gonna start crying.”
FLASH. FLASH. FLASH.
Another roving herd of Grimm gone, destroyed by Ruby.
Penny wanted to ask why Yang was so determined not to cry, but she didn’t get the chance.
“As long as you’re safe, we can talk about this later.” Yang’s tone returned to its previous level of urgency. “Do you have any Aura back yet? Can you use your Semblance on Blake’s scroll to find it? And maybe that’ll tell us where she is?”
Penny’s Aura sensors were offline, but she didn’t need them to know her Aura was still entirely depleted. She shook her head.
Yang’s face crumpled with disappointment. “Damn it.”
FLASH.
“I wish I had my Semblance right now,” Penny said, casting a hopeless look at their surroundings. “It would solve so many problems.”
She could find Blake. She could bring down the compromised Atlesian cruiser. She could bring down the other compromised Atlesian cruiser, even if she had no idea where the Pandora actually was right now. She could’ve stopped the Paladins and the Knights far sooner. Maybe she could even use her Semblance on the Grimm to introduce confusion to their ranks. There was so much she could do, if not for making a stupid mistake and flying into a lightning storm—
When a green glow appeared over Penny’s vision, she assumed it was the Maiden flames. Until she realized the flames had been there already. So what—
…Her Aura was back?
Penny’s body was unmistakably glowing all over with her Aura, but she didn’t understand why or how, unless it was simply one of the greatest coincidences in history—
“Jaune?” Pyrrha said, her mouth falling open. “What’s going on?”
What did Jaune have to do with this, except that he was standing… behind her…
Penny turned and found Jaune holding his hand up a few centimeters from Penny, staring at it in just as much shock as everyone else. His hand was glowing yellow, as if he’d activated his own Aura, but what would that have to do with Penny’s Aura?
She watched the shimmering glow, and an inference dawned on her.
“Are you… transferring your Aura level to me?” That should not have been possible, but by all accounts that was exactly what was happening.
“I’m not sure,” Jaune said, blinking rapidly at his hand. “I was just thinking about how much Aura I have, and how wasted it is on me, and I was wishing I could just give you some of my Aura…”
Penny had many questions, all of which could wait because having Aura meant she could use her Semblance again.
She activated Ghost, and focused on the idea of Blake’s scroll, just jumping into it—
INPUT DETECTED: BLAKE’S SCROLL
Location, she thought into the sudden darkness, and immediately received a ping. Good. That meant Blake’s scroll was at least still on, and while she could’ve dropped it somewhere, it was a reason for hope.
The location was all Penny needed, and she jumped back into her own body immediately. “The dining hall!” she said. “Blake’s scroll is in the dining hall!”
Yang froze. Her eyes flicked between the direction of the dining hall and the direction of Ruby, who was at the other end of the evacuation zone, in the exact opposite direction from the dining hall. And then she closed her eyes. “Penny, keep Ruby safe for me. Please.”
FLASH.
“I will. I promise.” Even if Penny hurt all over every time she thought of the things Ruby had said to her this evening, the promise came naturally to her, because she still wanted to help Ruby more than anything.
“We’ll go with you—” Weiss said, only for Yang to cut her off.
“It’s better if I go alone. The same reason why Carmel went out solo—less people, less chance of getting noticed by Grimm during a rescue.” She nodded, cocked her gauntlets, and sprinted off towards the dining hall. And, hopefully, towards Blake.
Blake’s scroll vibrated against her leg yet again.
The White Fang airship had come to rest atop a building, just far enough from the action to keep them out of immediate danger, but far too close for Blake to see the disaster crashing down upon the school in horrifying detail. The dining hall was on fire. Team BSYP’s own dormitory building had a massive crater in one side. An explosion echoed from somewhere out of sight.
She’d been tied up at some point during the flight, but with no Aura left, she’d been powerless to resist even before her hands were tied behind her back. But the balled-up rag stuffed in her mouth had robbed her of the ability to refute anything Adam said. Above her, he watched the invasion with a sickeningly casual air, his arms crossed as he leaned against the airship frame.
“You know, once upon a time I thought you would’ve loved seeing a sight like this,” Adam said, as idly as if he was commenting on the Menagerie heat. “What happened to that loyal, devoted girl who I gave my heart to? The girl who would’ve slit her throat before betraying her people, her cause, her love?” He leaned closer, his words growing as quiet and deadly as the hiss of a snake.
“I think that girl was a lie, Blake. I think you’ve always wanted, deep down, to be nothing more than a pet to the humans. You’d give up your freedom to have them smile at you and pat you on the head and call you one of the good ones. You’d stab us all in the back if that would earn you a facade of approval from the people who hate us. You’d have the White Fang signing petitions and sending bland letters to politicians for the rest of time while nothing ever changes. You’d lecture us all on nonviolence and then wag a finger when more of us kept dying, saying we should’ve been nicer. Why else would you run away to a Huntress Academy? Why else would you fight the White Fang all over Vale? Why else would you try to foil us at every step of the way? Why else would you accuse ME of having lost my way?”
Blake shook her head madly. That wasn’t her. That wasn’t what she’d do. But what if he was right—How did Adam always make Blake doubt everything she’d ever believed about herself with just a few words? Why could he make her feel as if she was the villain just by saying things she knew were shadows of the truth? Why did it feel like the rest of the world would only ever believe him and not her? Why did she feel like her mind and body were still his to toy with? Why? Why? Why couldn’t she ever escape him?
Unable to speak, the most Blake could do was shake her head and growl at him. She wouldn’t cry. She wouldn’t give him the fucking satisfaction. She’d choke herself to death on the rag in her mouth before she let him see tears on her face.
“Where’s Trifa?” Adam said to the other White Fang behind him.
“Keeping watch on the ground,” came a reply.
Adam nodded curtly, and then his attention was all on her again.
“But it ends tonight. The White Fang will be free,” Adam said. “Of you.”
Blake stared at the distant fires all around campus growing larger with no one to extinguish them. There was no doubt now. She was going to die. No more running. No more failing. No more living in fear. No more living at all.
Her scroll vibrated again.
Jaune pulled his hand back, and the glow of his Aura disappeared. Penny’s Aura stopped shimmering visibly, but she could still feel it pulsing within herself, not fully restored, but no longer depleted.
“I don’t think I was giving you my Aura,” Jaune said. “I think I was just… boosting yours? Amplifying it? Because it’s not like I’ve lost most of my Aura now… Which means…”
“You’ve just found your Semblance,” Pyrrha said to Jaune, her tone full of wonder.
“Does this mean I can heal people?” Jaune glanced towards the makeshift medical tent doing what it could for wounded evacuees without much in the way of first aid supplies. “It must!”
Penny was truly happy for Jaune, but she really needed to finish checking her diagnostic. As Team JNPR began talking excitedly amongst themselves about the discovery, Penny went back to her internal systems. Aside from everything she already knew, there were several new warnings—
Hang on.
Penny stared at the sky, stared for several more seconds to confirm the initial impression, and then tapped Weiss on the shoulder. “Weiss?”
Weiss turned to her immediately. “Yes?”
“Can you tell me, are my instruments malfunctioning, or is that Atlesian cruiser actually approaching the school at a high rate of speed?”
“What?” Weiss turned, squinted at the sky, and squawked in alarm, which caught Team JNPR’s attention. “It is!”
“TAKE COVER!” Jaune screamed, and everyone in the evacuation zone heard that. By this point in the night, even if it was clear something had gone very wrong, no one could afford to assume something flying the Atlesian colors was friendly, regardless of why.
The cruiser which was sailing towards Beacon from high above clearly wasn’t trying to make a landing; Penny’s first assumption was that they were being bombed.
But as the cruiser sailed into optimal bombing range, nothing happened. It just continued on at the same speed, without so much as a sign that anyone was even piloting it. And as it passed overhead without even slowing, Penny came to the conclusion that the controls were unattended.
As it began to recede from view, she turned to her friends. “Should I try—”
BOOM.
Neo floated slowly back to consciousness. Her memory returned no more quickly—grabbing Roman, using her Aura to shield him, the flaming remnants of the airship crashing, something slamming into her head—
“Neo! Neo! Damn it, Neo, wake up! I’m not letting you go out like this!”
Neo’s body was still having trouble cooperating, but she managed to push her eyes open to find Roman’s face hovering above her.
“Oh, thank fuck.” Roman breathed an immense sigh of relief.
The rest of the world came into focus around Neo. She was trapped under a snarl of wreckage, with a twisted steel beam pinning her legs down and preventing her from moving any of them. In what she supposed had to be called a stroke of luck, she was not trapped in a part of the wreckage which was actively on fire.
Neo’s arms were free, and she mimed checking her pulse at Roman to make it clear how much of a dimwit he’d been just now, if he’d actually thought she was dead and didn’t bother to check for a heartbeat.
“Oh, I knew you were alive! I’m more worried about how we’re stranded in a place that’s crawling with Grimm and trigger-happy teenagers that desperately want to kill us! We need to get moving!”
Okay, fair. Good to know Roman hadn’t hit his head in the crash. But Neo was out of Aura, and Roman still hadn’t gained any back, which probably meant they would not be getting moving anytime soon.
She turned her head, surveying what slice of their surroundings that she could see through the scattered wreckage. The cruiser had crashed out in the open, and there was a flood of Grimm between them and the nearest buildings. The Grimm were staying away from the wreck thanks to the still-burning fires, but it would only be a matter of time before they became bold enough to venture inside. Especially when they could sense two agitated humans trapped in there.
She strained against the wreckage, and shook her head. Roman got the message.
“Ugh. I already tried moving it, but I’ve got nothing. I was hoping you’d have some Aura left to push it off…?” At Neo’s answering shake of her head, Roman grimaced and whacked Melodic Cudgel against a piece of metal, producing a loud clang. He eyed the Grimm prowling closer and closer, and then in a much quieter voice, he said, “We may be fucked.”
At least she hadn’t lost Hush—it was just out of her reach, stabbed into a metal panel and standing almost perfectly upright, waiting for her to pick it up again. Although it wouldn’t do a lot of good even in her hands, as long as she was trapped here.
Neo met Roman’s eyes, and then jerked her head towards the open air. She hoped he understood it as a suggestion to get help instead of thinking she was telling him to save himself.
Roman raised his eyebrows very high at her, and then sat down beside her, tossing his cane from one hand to the other. “What good is getting help right now? Do we have any friends left?” he muttered. “Or allies? Or even just people who won’t shoot us on sight?”
Neo shrugged. It was pretty clear Roman had fallen out of favor with Cinder, and maybe Cinder was still interested in keeping Neo around, but as far as Neo was concerned, Cinder was her enemy too, now. And having Cinder Fall as an enemy was bad news of the worst kind for both of them. It probably meant having a target on their backs for the rest of their lives.
…Although, it could be pretty short lives. Especially given where they’d crashed—
Something hit Neo like a lost bet hitting Roman: There was one person at Beacon Academy who might be able to help the two of them. Someone who might want to help two criminals. Someone who had once told Neo that she would always be there to help if she ever needed it.
Penny Pallas. Whose scroll number Neo had saved in her scroll.
Neo elbowed Roman to get his attention and made the most ridiculously exaggerated smile her facial muscles could contort into, and mimed waving around a sword.
Even without an illusion to make herself clear, Roman understood her immediately.
“...Carrot-Top? Pallas? You’re joking, right?”
Neo shook her head.
“Okay, but didn’t she just die? Like, on TV?”
Neo shook her head again. Just before sneaking out of Amity with Emerald, she’d seen Penny getting up and hugging her teammates. Definitely alive.
“And she’ll want to help us? After, uh, all that?”
That… was trickier. She was just hoping that Penny was as much the forgiving sort as she seemed. But it wasn’t as if they had anything left to lose by trying.
Neo shrugged.
“Okay, sure. Why not. Tonight’s already weird enough.”
She nodded and tried to reach into her pocket for her scroll, only to realize she was in too awkward of a position to maneuver her hand in there.
“Here, I’ll get it—” Roman nudged her arm away and gently pulled her scroll from her pocket, only to curse quietly. He held the scroll up for Neo to see.
Broken. It was cracked and bent in three places, and although the screen was technically working, it was only flickering between various indecipherable black-and-white geometric shapes. No chance of doing anything with it.
“Guess I’m checking the bodies in the wreckage,” Roman said grimly. “Here’s hoping one of them has a scroll that didn’t get broken in the crash.”
Neo flicked her eyes to the Grimm, which had very sharp teeth that could instantly kill a Roman Torchwick that was out of Aura and ammo.
“Don’t worry about it. I’ll watch them, make sure they don’t get too close to you.”
That wasn’t what she’d been trying to say with the look, actually, but what other option did Roman have? Their only chance of both of them getting out of here required him to endanger himself. So she nodded in assent, and then Roman was clambering over the wreckage, disappearing from Neo’s sight.
FLASH.
Ruby felt sick.
Why? There were probably ten million different reasons, and somehow getting punched into the side of a mountain and knocked out probably wasn’t the biggest one.
No, it was because even after the strain of the last few days, she’d never felt more like a coward. This was the most dangerous fight of her life, and for the whole thing, she’d been hiding.
At least getting some Aura healing from Jaune helped with the injury problem.
She’d had to watch innocent civilians die right in front of her and she couldn’t do anything to stop it, she couldn’t even try, because she was frozen. With no Aura… all it would take was one stray bullet from a Knight, one wayward blast from a Paladin, and the best chance of saving Beacon Academy from destruction would be dead. And maybe she could be cloned, but a clone couldn’t be made in time to save Beacon tonight. The savior would be Ruby, or no one.
Once upon a time, Ruby had learned simple strategic doctrine which said that Project Moonrise was a thousand times more valuable than a random civilian, which meant that risking her life to save one person went against everything Ruby had trained to do.
Bullshit. All of it. All of her training was worthless. None of that had prepared Ruby for a situation where someone was dying right in front of her, bleeding out from a bullet wound, looking at her helplessly, while she looked back just as helplessly even though she wanted more than anything to run over and help because she was supposed to help people.
It hurt. It hurt worse than anything else in her entire life. It made her feel like even more of a failure.
At least I’m finally helping, she thought. I’m finally being useful.
FLASH.
A pack of Grimm, gone before they’d even realized whose path they were standing in. Ruby’s path, which led away from the evacuation zone, would take her to the wreck of the AKN Endurance. She was carving a path through the Grimm to the crash site. But it’d probably be more accurate to call it a debris field, given how much of the ship had broken up in midair during its fiery explosion. Still, if there were any friendly survivors, she’d rescue them. That would be useful.
Still, searching the wreckage hadn’t even been Ruby’s idea. It had been Penny’s.
“The wreckage should be visible beyond this dormitory,” Penny said. The Maiden flames around her eyes cast an ethereal green tinge on the night.
Ruby had seen flames like those. On Fria’s eyes, bright blue flame. She’d always believed it was part of Fria’s elemental Semblance, but after learning Fria was a Maiden, and then seeing those same flames on Penny, green just like her Aura… That moment when Penny threw her head back and rose skyward on wings suddenly imbued with magic, that was when Ruby figured out what a Maiden looked like. It was easy to figure out when she’d already known one for years and years.
Penny was a Maiden. Ruby’s head was feeling like it would explode just like the Endurance if too many more things happened tonight.
After the midair explosion, a hasty meeting amongst the students determined that the best people to search the wreckage would be Ruby and Penny. But Ruby knew all too well that even if Penny had been sent out alone, she would’ve gone to the wreck all the same. Without so much as blinking. Because… Because… Because Penny was brave.
Ruby couldn’t stop thinking about Penny’s fight against the Paladins. Penny, who did what Ruby couldn’t do and faced down an army of giant battle robots with no Aura, before she’d become a Maiden. It was one of the bravest things Ruby had ever seen.
All while Ruby hid behind a fountain and hoped she didn’t get shot.
At least Ruby’s eyes still worked. That was the one good thing she could still do, protect Beacon and keep Penny’s home safe for her. And Jaune had given her Aura back and healed her injuries, so she wasn’t operating with zero room for error now, and she wasn’t nearly as dizzy anymore, either.
And with the return of clarity came deep and biting and all-consuming regret. All the things she’d screamed at Penny in hatred a few hours ago felt like the vilest, deadliest poison leaking into her body from her mouth down. Penny wasn’t a coward or a traitor or an enemy or a failure or anything else Ruby had yelled at her! And Penny being a deserter just didn’t matter anymore. It couldn’t matter. How could it matter when Penny had been the one who fought the Paladins while Ruby hid away like a rat in a sewer? If anyone between them was a failure, it was Ruby.
How could Ruby have ever been mad at Penny for escaping Atlas? She’d become a far better protector than Ruby would ever be, and Ruby who stayed in Atlas had been turned into something worse than death.
“I am happy I fled because staying there would have made me like YOU! And I would rather DIE than be like you!”
Of course Ruby was worse than death. She was living through the proof.
Ruby was going to say sorry. She was going to do whatever she had to, to make it up to Penny. But… what would it take to say sorry to her? Because… because, everything she’d said, she’d hurt Penny so, so bad. And this was the kind of thing that sorry wouldn’t be enough for. But then what would be enough?
Whatever it was, Ruby would do it. She’d do anything.
They could hear the crackle of flames now—and the howls of Grimm circling the wreckage. Ruby tightened her grip on Lunar Enforcer, getting ready to deploy her eyes again. This was the most she’d ever used them in one night.
They began to see signs of the crash even before they’d rounded the last corner. The side of the dormitory, pockmarked with holes and scorch marks and small fires where explosion debris had hit. Ruby silently thanked their luck for the airship not being over the evacuation zone when it blew up. And when the full wreck came into view, pieces of metal scattered all over the courtyard and fires burning everywhere and the twisted hull of the ship lying in three big pieces half-buried in the ground… Ruby didn’t see how anyone could’ve survived this.
She fixed her gaze on the Grimm, and thought of Penny smiling at her after a kiss.
FLASH.
No more Grimm.
“The wreckage is scrambling my radar returns,” Penny said. “I cannot detect anyone or anything. Be careful.”
Penny had a lot of bullet holes in her clothing. The hood of her hoodie was attached by only a few threads. And in most of the places where the bullets had hit her, bits of metal shone through. Ruby thought that was pretty. She hoped everyone else who’d seen it would think so, too.
Ruby nodded, and followed Penny at a distance as she started carefully moving aside large pieces of debris, looking for signs of life. Penny had said her life-sign detecting systems were inoperative, so the only thing she could do was look really hard. Ruby stayed near the edge of the debris field, Lunar Enforcer held at the ready in its sniper mode. Standing guard was probably the only way to make herself useful to Penny right about now.
Ruby was telling herself she’d put all of her sadness and anger and despair in a little box in the back of her head, and she’d open that box once this battle was over, because she didn’t have time to clog up her head with feelings which wouldn’t help her save the school.
After sweeping the scope of her sniper rifle across the landscape several times and seeing nothing, she turned back to Penny. “Find any—”
The question died on her lips as new fear seized her.
Penny was currently occupied with lifting up a piece of the ship twice as tall as her and peering into a partially crumpled doorway revealed when the other piece was moved out of the way. Which meant that she had no way to notice Roman Torchwick crawling out of cover just a few meters away from her.
An ambush.
An ambush a threat Penny’s gonna get hurt I can’t let her get hurt again she’s been hurt too many times because of me I can’t let her get hurt again I can’t fail her this time I can’t I can’t I can’t threat threat THREAT
“Get AWAY from her!” Ruby screamed at Torchwick, putting Lunar Enforcer’s scope to her eye in an instant and pulling the trigger on pure reflex.
BLAM.
The shot rang out across the courtyard, and Penny jumped back in surprise, dropping the metal with a thunderous clang. Penny spun around, dropping into a defensive position when she noticed Torchwick. As for Torchwick himself…
He stared down at the bright red stain spreading across the center of his coat, and coughed once weakly before crumpling to the ground.
Ruby blinked, lowering her rifle. He… didn’t have his Aura up?
Oh. Oh, no. It wasn’t that. Right now… Torchwick didn’t have any Aura.
Ruby hadn’t shot an enemy. She’d shot a defenseless person.
She sprinted closer as Penny dropped to her knees beside Torchwick, applying pressure with mechanical strength to his wound as she said, “Stay calm, please, we can help you—”
Ruby joined Penny, feeling horrifically useless, as Torchwick took a gurgling breath.
“Well, Neo… wasn’t expecting the gods to come collecting their dues so soon…” Torchwick mumbled out, his eyes roving somewhere between the two girls.
His gaze went still. Along with the rest of his body.
“Oh,” Penny said, so quietly Ruby almost didn’t hear it. Her hands didn’t leave the wound.
Ruby began to shake on her feet, panic-shedding Semblance dust, and for once she wasn’t terrified by the sight of rose petals being shed along with the silver, because there were much worse things rampaging through her head right now.
She had killed a defenseless person.
Torchwick’s cane weapon was still clipped to his belt. It hadn’t been in his hands when she’d pulled the trigger. She saw that. She’d just acted on reflex, and… what was wrong with her? What was wrong with her?
“I’m sorry,” Ruby said to his unmoving face. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry! I’m…” She stopped, shaking even harder. There was no point in apologizing, was there? It couldn’t undo the bullet.
“What… what was he doing?” she said, trying to make any sense of it at all.
“I do not know,” Penny said. After a long pause, she finally pulled her hands away from Torchwick’s body, staring at the blood now staining them. “I didn’t know he was there until you shot him.”
Ruby stared. Was this the first time she’d ever killed someone? The first time she’d ever pulled the trigger on a shot that had ended another person’s life? All the other times she’d fought people, it was to subdue, not to extinguish. To capture. To neutralize. But not to kill. Never to kill. She’d seen plenty of dead bodies. But… she was pretty sure this was the first dead body she’d ever seen that was because of her.
And Ciel was dead because of her too, but no matter how awful that made her feel, she’d never actually seen it happen. With Torchwick, Ruby had seen him and put him in Lunar Enforcer’s sights and pulled the trigger with her own finger and watched the bullet hit home and watched the blood spread across his chest and listened to his final breath and…
And it shouldn’t even have happened, because he’d already been neutralized. Even if he was trying to cause trouble without Aura, Ruby could’ve shot him in a non-lethal area! Just to easily subdue him! But no. She’d aimed for the chest because it was the natural target her instincts told her to aim for.
Instincts. Atlas instincts. Instincts that were useless.
Ruby had seen plenty of dead bodies before. But this one was her victim. A victim of everything wrong with Ruby Karyatis, maybe supposed to be Ruby Rose, maybe supposed to be Ruby Xiao Long, maybe supposed to be anything but Ruby Karyatis, and never supposed to be Moonrise.
How could she even trust herself to pull a trigger anymore, after this? After any of tonight?
Penny reached for Torchwick’s bowler hat, taking care to avoid touching him directly as she pulled it down over his face, obscuring it from the rest of the world.
“Perhaps he was trying to ask for help,” she said, which only made Ruby feel even worse.
Ruby backed away, stowing Lunar Enforcer and trying not to panic. “I—I didn’t know, that he was defenseless, I thought his Aura was up, I thought he was gonna hurt you, I—he—I, what do I do now? What do I do?”
Penny was still looking down at her hands. Suddenly, she summoned two balls of flame, and let them engulf her hands. When the fire disappeared a few seconds later, her skin was unburnt and the bloodstains were gone.
She stood up, and gave Torchwick one last incomprehensible look before she turned to Ruby. “We keep fighting. For all the lives that we can still save tonight.”
Still trapped in the wreckage of the Atlesian cruiser and still out of Aura and still very much alive, no matter how much she wished she wasn’t, Neopolitan was helpless to do anything except stare at Roman’s dead body and tremble with horror.
Roman was dead.
There had been just enough of a view through a gap in the metal for Neo to watch her worst nightmare unfold while being entirely powerless to stop it. The moment played over and over again in her head without mercy.
Roman was dead.
Penny Pallas, searching the wreckage for survivors and offering a beacon of hope. Her attack dog girlfriend milling around further back, not really paying attention and Neo not really caring about her presence. And then Roman appearing, apparently having spotted Penny. And then Ruby Karyatis turning, seeing him before he could say a word to Penny, and shrieking “GET AWAY FROM HER!” and—and—and—
Roman was dead.
Neo wanted to die.
Roman was dead.
Neo knew exactly who had killed him.
Roman was dead.
Neo was going to murder Ruby Karyatis.
Roman was dead.
Neo was broken.
As soon as she regained her Aura—Aura that she wished she could give Roman, she didn’t need any of it more than she needed him—she would escape the wreck, find Hush, and then she would kill Ruby Karyatis. It didn’t matter how, it didn’t matter where, it didn’t matter when. Nothing mattered. Nothing except killing that… that… that thing that’d killed Roman.
Roman was dead.
Neo was going to spend the rest of her life avenging the hole that’d been shot into not just Roman’s heart, but her own.
Roman was dead, and someday Ruby would be too, and someday Neo would be too, and only then would anything be right with the world ever again.
Neo was still trembling violently, so hard that her bones might’ve rattled themselves out of their sockets, but it was no longer with horror. Now she was shaking all over with rage.
The walk back to the evacuation zone was silent.
A weapon. This was what being a weapon got Ruby. No, that wasn’t right. This was what wanting to be a weapon got Ruby. Because it wasn’t just bad for someone to be a weapon, it was impossible.
Tonight, there was Atlesian Knights, unthinking weapons that were turned against the people they were supposed to be protecting. And there was Ruby Karyatis, a girl who didn’t think enough and wanted to be a weapon, hurting everyone around her as she got more and more desperate to be a weapon even as it became more and more impossible.
The Grimm were still staying far away. Maybe they were scared off by the presence of a silver-eyed warrior. If Ruby could ever be called a warrior again.
Wanting to be a weapon hurt other people, not just Ruby.
Blake, the ex-White Fang who had a hundred reasons to be afraid of Atlas, was afraid of Ruby because she wanted to be an Atlesian weapon. Yang found a sister she thought was dead, and then got her heart broken by that sister, because Ruby wanted to be a weapon so bad she instinctively hated being related to a failure, because a weapon couldn’t be a failure. Weiss had a choice between the life she’d been raised to live and the life that made her happy, just like how Ruby had that choice, and it was so much harder for Weiss to make the right choice when she saw Ruby picking the wrong choice, all because Ruby wanted to be a weapon. And Ciel was dead because Ruby had tried so hard to be a weapon that her no-longer-partner had become collateral damage in the worst way, so caught up in her own storm that she’d barely considered who else would be swept up in it until too late. And Torchwick, who Ruby had instinctively categorized as an enemy weapon to be neutralized because if she wanted to be a weapon then surely enemies were also weapons without a chance of being something else, except Torchwick wasn’t a weapon, he was defenseless and his weapon wasn’t in his hands and he might’ve been trying to ask for help…
And then there was Penny. Ruby wanting to be a weapon had hurt Penny worse than anyone else had ever hurt her, bad enough to do forever emotional damage and nearly get Penny killed.
She didn’t want to hurt people.
“I’m sorry!” she blurted out.
Penny whirled to face Ruby, her eyes wide. “What?”
Ruby’s grip on Lunar Enforcer slipped, and she nearly dropped it. She didn’t know what to say next. She didn’t have any words. She could barely think.
“I’m sorry about—about everything! Everything I yelled at you! I… I… I don’t mean it anymore, and I wish I hadn’t meant it when I said it, and I’m never gonna mean it ever again! I’m sorry!”
Penny nodded slowly. “You’re sorry…” she repeated, the words rolling out of her mouth as if she was having to test them out. “Ruby?”
“Yeah?”
Penny was folding and unfolding her hands, and suddenly she looked scared. Not angry like in Amity, scared. Like Ruby was as dangerous as anything else in the school tonight.
“Ruby, are you only sorry because I have finally proven that I am enough of a weapon for you?” On the word weapon, her Maiden eye flames appeared again, like magical emphasis.
Ruby wasn’t really sure what happened next, but suddenly she was staggering backwards, her legs barely listening to what she wanted them to do. She stared at Penny, trying not to let her world collapse entirely. “I… no,” she gasped. “Never, no, I don’t want you to be anything else except what you are—”
The conversation with Blake from several days ago loomed fresh and judgmental in Ruby’s mind.
“Ruby Karyatis, if you do ever start looking at Penny like she’s nothing but a slab of meat to be devoured, or a piece of metal to be hammered uncaringly into whatever shape you want…”
Oh gods, Blake would hate her. Blake would be disgusted with her. Blake would never want Ruby near her team ever again. Blake would murder Ruby before she let Team RSPBY come into existence now, and she’d be completely justified in doing so. She’d failed Penny. She’d failed Blake. She’d failed her team. How could they want her anymore?
Penny’s Maiden flames disappeared. She shook out the dust and ash that’d collected in her hair while wading through the wreckage. She took another step in the direction of the evacuation zone, only to stop short. “Ruby, as long as you think it is okay to treat yourself like a weapon, then how can I truly believe you do not also want me to be treated like a weapon?”
Ruby felt like she’d been hit in the face. She would’ve rather been hit in the face, actually. That would’ve hurt less. The only response she could muster was a gurgling not far off from the noise Torchwick had made after being shot, and then there was no stopping herself from crying in the middle of the apocalypse while she shook her head, trying to tell Penny, I don’t want to be a weapon anymore. Trying to say, I’ll never be a weapon. Trying to say, I'll never see you as a weapon. Trying to say, I’ll die before I start wanting to be a weapon again. That’s how you want it, right? I’ll be dead, like how I deserve?
But none of those words escaped her throat, because they all got buried by the worst noises she’d ever made, and she couldn’t see anything through the tears in her eyes.
Ruby was nothing. Her entire life had been for nothing. The impossible dream of the perfect weapon, years and years of chasing something that could never exist. It was too late for her to be an Ordinary Teenage Girl. Nothing about her was normal. She was broken everywhere and everything, forever. She’d already ruined her chance at family and friends and love, several thousand times over. She didn’t deserve to be with Penny. She didn’t deserve anything.
Penny was saying things, but Ruby couldn’t understand any of it. She just wanted it all to stop, she just wanted to stop hurting, she just wanted to get away—
And that was exactly what Ruby did. She activated her Semblance and blasted away, pushing herself to speeds only reserved for the worst battles, not caring where she ended up or what happened to her. She only knew that she would never come back, and no one would miss her.
Notes:
Please vote for Penny Polendina in the finals of the Penny Of All Time Poll!
You can vote for her by clicking here.Next week, Chapter 66: Tremor
Chapter 66: Tremor
Notes:
Content warnings for this chapter (click this text to reveal):
Blood, death, in-depth discussions of abuse
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
James Ironwood dodged under the swipe of a an Alpha Beowolf before shoving Due Process into its chest and blasting a hole clean through. When he pulled himself upright amidst a cloud of dissolving Grimm matter, he found the vicinity clear. He turned to the crowd of civilians that had been pinned down by this particular squad of Grimm, and pointed deeper into the city where what remained of his forces were establishing a safe zone.
“Get to safety! Follow the path set by the flares!” he shouted, indicating the bright blooms of light from sticks of Fire Dust laid along the road to mark evacuation routes.
As the civilians hurried away, he couldn’t help but notice how many of them were shooting him looks that were suspicious, angry, confused, or downright afraid of him.
He didn’t blame them. Tonight had brought Atlas to the lowest point in its history. The world had a thousand reasons to treat him and his kingdom as villains after tonight. Most of those reasons were burning themselves into Ironwood’s memory, too.
James Ironwood had seen one of his own cruisers shoot down the other. And then, minutes later, he’d watched that cruiser explode. He’d heard the panicked transmissions from his men at Beacon which flooded his comms, his soldiers reporting that Atlesian machines had appeared and opened unrelenting fire on civilians and soldiers alike. And over those same comms, Ironwood had heard the screams of his soldiers as they were cut down mid-sentence by gunfire from the things that were supposed to be protecting them.
“General—”
He had been powerless to stop the loss of his cruisers. He had been powerless to stop the massacre of soldiers and civilians at Beacon. He had been powerless to stop the broadcast which laid bare the things Atlas had done to Ruby and Penny, under his direction. He had been powerless to stop the complete understanding that there would never be a victory which could justify Project Moonrise and Project Battle Angel. Could anything he’d done in his life be called a victory?
“Sir?”
He’d believed with Ruby and Penny that he was doing the best thing for the survival of the world. Tonight, he was still fighting for everyone’s survival. But what kind of fight for survival could there be after tonight?
Dust was a finite resource. The SDC mines were deep and rich, but there were no other deposits like those anywhere else in the world. At some date in the future, the last crystal of Dust would be mined. And then humanity would lose its greatest weapon against the Grimm.
For so long, he’d operated under the assumption that defeating Salem would also mean the end of the Grimm threat. He’d believed that he was helping usher humanity into a golden age where they could prosper and bloom across the planet without fear of destruction, and he’d thought his Semblance was a guiding light towards this glory. But… there would be no golden age for humanity. Mettle did not show any truth. The bastions of civilizations that they’d built for themselves would eventually collapse, and humanity would fall back into the savage, obscure darkness they had crawled out of.
“General Ironwood, are you alright?”
And perhaps he was standing at the high-water mark. Eighty years of unprecedented reign over the Grimm, coming to an end in a night of violence which would turn the rest of the world against Atlas, dividing humanity’s strength irreparably at the exact moment when they most needed unity.
…Was there any point in fighting on when the catastrophes ahead felt so terribly preordained?
“Sir!”
No. No. James Ironwood could be called many things—a failure, a dictator, a manipulator, a villain—but he was a soldier, and when faced with the inevitability of a lost battle, the best soldiers knew when to surrender or when to keep fighting.
And tonight, James Ironwood would not surrender.
“General, if you cannot perform your duty, protocol dictates that I take your place atop the chain of command.”
At the exact moment Ironwood reached that conclusion, he realized that he’d been effectively ignoring Winter Schnee for a length of time which bordered on shameful.
“My apologies, Lieutenant,” he said, banishing all fatalism for the moment. “I was lost in thought.”
Schnee squinted at him, her hand still resting on the hilt of her sword. “Do I need to judge your fitness for duty, sir?”
“Negative.” Ironwood holstered Due Process and folded his arms behind his back, adopting the comforting staunchness of a military pose. “Was the evacuation of the contested sectors successful, Lieutenant?”
Relief flashed across Winter’s face as Ironwood picked up where they’d left off with their plans, and the rest of her concern disappeared as she pulled out her scroll, bringing up a holographic projection of the city. “As successful as it could be, sir. We’ve pulled back to a line along this thoroughfare—” She indicated a street on the map. “But I don’t believe it can be defensible for long. I think if we run a controlled demolition on this highway overpass further back, we can turn it into a barricaded position that’d be far easier to hold. Permission to call in the demo squad, sir?”
“Permission granted. They’re on the other side of the city; can that line be held until they arrive?”
“I will personally ensure—”
Winter stopped mid-sentence, her eyes widening at something behind Ironwood, and then in a blur of motion she’d drawn her sword and dropped into a defensive posture. “Sir! Behind you!”
Ironwood spun, his hand going to Due Process—and stopped, as he realized who was holding him at bladepoint.
“Taiyang,” he said as Ruby’s father stared him down with a cold scowl. There was a faint (but not fresh) smell of alcohol on his breath. There was also a gray corgi at his feet that was growling at Ironwood with equal disdain.
“James,” Taiyang said, the claws of his tekkō-kagi gleaming in the moonlight. The claws, mounted to bracers which were wrapped tightly around each hand, gave the appearance of blades springing from the skin between his fingers.
“Huntsman, what—” Schnee started to say, only for Ironwood to raise a hand, halting her.
“Stand down, Lieutenant.”
“Sir—”
“You’re dismissed, Lieutenant Schnee.”
He brokered no argument with his tone, and to his relief, Winter picked up on that. As she departed with a faint “Understood, sir,” Taiyang’s eyes never left Ironwood.
When Winter’s footsteps had disappeared from earshot, Ironwood spoke. “I will never exert any influence on Ruby again, Taiyang. You have my promise.”
“I know,” Taiyang said. He never moved his tekkō-kagi from where the razor-sharp tips were just inches from Ironwood’s nose. “That’s not going to stop me from hating you for the rest of my life.”
“I understand.”
“But I also know we’re going to be in the fight of our lives for a long while. And as much as I want you dead, I want Salem dead more.”
Ironwood kept himself motionless and mute, and activated Mettle for the sole purpose of blocking out thoughts of how Taiyang could never attain that kill.
“Because for all you fucked up Ruby’s life, Salem was still the one who stole my baby from her crib in my house in the first place. And she’s still a bigger problem for the world than you, somehow. So to put her in a grave, it’ll take everything we’ve got.” With a smooth click, the claws of his tekkō-kagi retracted, and Taiyang lowered his arms. “So, no. I won’t kill you yet, James. As long as you’re a damn good enemy of my enemy.”
In that moment, James felt a respect like never before for Ozpin and his ability to keep poisonous truths inside his mind, where the only person they could corrode was himself.
In the vault beneath Beacon, the most ferocious battle yet of the night raged between the Summer Maiden and the ancient wizard, two beings of immense power.
The emergency lights powered by the backup generator had long since been destroyed, leaving the underground bunker to be lit only by flashes of flame and magic. The bursts of light appeared irregularly, chaotically, clashing with one another, but every burst turned the vault bright as day for an instant before plunging it back into complete darkness. Neither opponent needed light for the fight they waged, though. The magic which thrummed within both of them was more than enough to guide their attacks and shield themselves. The vault itself was expansive, perhaps even cavernous, but as barrages of fireballs and beams of light flew back and forth, it became claustrophobic, almost suffocating. Far too small to contain the explosive battle taking place within.
Emerald was no longer in the vault. Once Ozpin had realized the presence of an illusory Semblance and used magic to counteract it, Cinder had ceased to see Emerald’s presence in the fight as an asset, and so she’d ordered Emerald back to the surface with the air of shooing away a fly.
“Do not fool yourself into thinking that snatching the Fall Maiden’s power from my hands is a victory of any sort,” Cinder growled as she rose into the air, a tower of white-hot flame swirling around her. “With the power of one Maiden or two, you will burn at my hands, Ozpin.”
Ozpin, gathering a sphere of magic around him to shield himself from the coming attack, did not offer a reply. The heat of Cinder’s flames grew so intense that the crossbeams and buttresses which held up the vault’s ceiling groaned and began to buckle. She hovered between him and the exit. Any escape would require defeating her. His shield was as strong as it could be with the magic he had left.
“I’m sorry, Penny,” Ozpin whispered, before flying at Cinder and into a storm of fire.
The Battle of Beacon was… not going the way Blake had expected it to. Which was a good thing, actually, because she’d expected the worst. She’d expected the worst, right up until an enormous flash of silver lit up the campus.
“What?” Adam said, and Blake took a twinge of satisfaction from the genuine bewilderment in his voice. “What was that?”
Blake knew exactly what that was. So did Ilia. And a good number of the other White Fang here. It felt good, knowing something he didn’t for once. Ruby had survived. And if Ruby had survived, then maybe Penny had…?
Blake kept her eyes fixed on the direction that Ruby’s eye-blast had come from, near the CCT. None of them had a view of the action from here, but Blake watched, and waited for another flash. That light was perhaps her only concrete sign that people were still fighting, that there was still hope.
No one had replied to Adam’s question of what was going on. Not even the Fang members who’d been in the tunnel at Mountain Glenn.
And another flash came. And then another, and another.
By the fifth flash, a change had come over the Grimm. They moved more slowly and cautiously, sniffing uneasily in the direction of Ruby’s flashes and visibly recoiling every time a new blast lit up the campus. Some of their ardor had left them, and now instead of running rampant they were slinking through shadows. The school was still very much overwhelmed, but now the invading hordes didn’t seem as eager to run headlong through anything in their path. And the evacuation ships she could see in the distance were flying back and forth between the school and Vale much faster than before Ruby had appeared.
Blake hated what Atlas had done to Ruby, but for this moment, she was going to let herself be grateful for Ruby. Not for Atlas. For Ruby, the girl who was standing in the heart of the most intense battle fought since the Great War and laying waste to Grimm. Ruby, who had saved a tunnel full of White Fang with her eyes before choosing to let them walk free without a fight. Ruby, who had left her weapon behind to attend a meeting with Ilia because she was curious. Ruby, who was choosing to defy her captors and live her own life free from their demands. The Ruby who had fallen in love with one of the gentlest souls Blake had ever known. Ruby, the girl who, at her core, wanted to help people.
Blake would probably be executed by Adam in a few minutes, but at the very least, her last memories would be of watching a girl doing her best to help.
“Blake? BLAKE?”
Adam lifted his head, listening intently. Blake’s blood ran cold. Yang.
“BLAAAAAAKE? BLAAAAAAAKE?”
Yang’s voice was closer now. Blake being able to hear it at all meant Yang was in danger, but now she sounded as if she was beside the building. And as the sound of running footsteps smacking off the asphalt reached her ears, she realized that was exactly what was happening.
Keep running, Yang, please, Blake begged silently. Keep looking somewhere else. Don’t stop here.
But the footfalls stopped almost directly underneath her. As if Yang somehow knew where she was.
“BLAKE? BLAKE?” The shouts were followed by a gunshot from Ember Celica—no, a flare, Blake realized, as she saw a bright red light shoot into the sky from where Yang stood.
“This is who you chose as a partner over me?” Adam said quietly in a tone of immense disgust and smugness. “A floozy who thinks a loud weapon and a boatload of hair products can make her a Huntress? An airhead who reacts to danger by running around in circles like a headless chicken?”
Yang wasn’t shouting anymore. Blake could imagine her looking around wildly, an expression of immense worry overtaking her as no reply came to her shouts. Blake heard quieter, scuffing footsteps—Yang turning in a circle, probably. Not moving on. Scanning the area. What would it take for her to move on, out of danger, before—
“You will see exactly how foolish your choice of allies was,” Adam said. His voice carried a deadly promise that sent a familiar old chill of dread down Blake’s spine.
However, instead of leaping off the roof, he went in the direction of the airship, disappearing from her vision for a few moments. It wasn’t until he returned that Blake understood what he intended to do.
“Since you already stole my sword, I thought I’d return the favor,” he said, drawing Blake’s katana from the sheath of Gambol Shroud and waving her blade just inches from her face. “And what better way to break in my new sword than using it to avenge the loss of my old one?”
Blake tried to scream against the rag still stuffed in her mouth, to warn Yang, but the most she could produce were muffled sounds that had no chance of reaching Yang below amidst all the other noise. Her second thought was that she could roll off the roof and at least warn Yang with the sound of her own body hitting the ground, but Adam stood between her and the edge of the roof.
He tossed Gambol’s sheath away, and it clattered away somewhere on the roof behind Blake. “Shroud and Blush,” he said, unclipping his scabbard-rifle from his belt. “Poetic justice.” With that, he began firing Blush directly into Gambol Shroud, making no effort to mask the noise.
By itself, the deep red glow of Adam’s Semblance was enough to make Blake’s stomach churn, but seeing Moonslice turning her own weapon fluorescent… She nearly retched.
There was no way Yang hadn’t noticed the gunshots by now, because Adam just kept firing them, unloading a full clip into Gambol Shroud. Enough for a fully charged Moonslice attack.
Blake’s attention was held hostage by what was about to happen, but there was still one corner of her mind wondering, How is no one else trying to stop this? How is this not too far for everyone else here? But there was nothing. Not even anyone speaking up to voice a mild discomfort. Just Ilia, growling against her gag and thrashing so wildly that Blake was afraid she’d hurt herself.
The sounds of Yang from below had stopped at the first gunshot. Now Adam was turning in her direction, sliding Gambol Shroud’s blade into his own sheath at just the right angle to make the blade scrape loudly against the hilt that it hadn’t been made for. And then—
Two gunshots which were more explosions than gunfire, and Yang burst over the edge of the roof, her hair in flames and an expression of pure rage in her face as she flew towards Adam, a fist reared back for an almighty punch as Adam lowered himself and prepared to—
A burst of gunfire hit Yang from the side, and Blake had never been so happy to see her partner being shot at. Yang was thrown sideways by the barrage which came from the White Fang, and that change in momentum was enough to knock her out of the way of Adam’s lunging strike.
He pulled himself back just before he would’ve unleashed Moonslice, but even though he hadn’t wasted it, now Yang was on level ground with him, her two feet stable on the roof as she dropped into a stance, fists up and ready to unload on Adam. She had a fighting chance.
Yang’s Semblance-red eyes landed on Blake, and then they were glowing even redder as she locked her gaze back on Adam. “You’re dead.”
“Back off,” Adam snapped at the other Fang members. “You’re just slowing me down. This girl is mine.”
With that, he stalked past Blake without so much as a backwards glance down at her, but it had to be intentional that he drew Gambol Shroud from his sheath at that moment.
There was a shuffling sound coming from behind Blake that she couldn’t identify, but just then was when Yang recognized Blake’s blade in Adam’s hand, and her eyes widened, and Blake forgot all about whatever was going on elsewhere as Yang screamed with rage and closed the distance on Adam with bared teeth.
Adam let her offensive push him back, blocking her jabs with Blake’s katana, and it was all Blake needed to see for fear to overwhelm her all over again. He had too much control of the fight. Yang was going to lose if she didn’t change something.
The next exchange of gauntlet and blade was so close to Blake that she could feel the wind from Adam’s swing and a drop of Yang’s sweat landing on her cheek. She was close enough to see what was about to happen before anyone else could. She saw Yang, punching just a little too far over her legs, and getting pushed off-balance by Adam, and as she stumbled past him, Adam raising Gambol Shroud, his hair glowing bright red—
Thwip.
Sometimes, the world moved in strange ways.
A month could pass quicker than a minute. Like Blake’s first month after leaving Adam, when she barely left the room Tukson had given her above his bookstore and she read forty-one books, none of which she remembered a single word of.
A second could rival a century. Like the one second that it had taken for Blake to slash through the train coupling, when her arm had moved so slowly that she swore she could feel the individual molecules of air passing over her skin, when she’d been sure that Adam would turn around and notice what she was doing before she could finish her swing.
A minute could be just a minute, every second of it pulsing warmly, comfortingly in Blake’s head like an extra heartbeat. A minute of Yang falling asleep on Blake’s shoulder, a minute of listening to Penny and Weiss debate fashion, a minute of playing ping-pong in the basement of the Xiao Long household, a minute of a Team BSYP ice cream parlor outing, minutes of just existing and breathing and being happy.
Nothing could move and nothing could move and nothing could move and then everything could move and then the next day it would be back to nothing.
Not only was Blake deep inside that everything as Beacon burned and the White Fang surrounded her and she watched Adam’s sword fly towards Yang, this one second was another century of everything managing to jam itself into an everything.
Thwip.
With dizzying sharpness, Blake watched a familiar electro-whip lash through the air, spitting out golden crackles of electricity into the night as it wrapped itself around Adam’s legs and pulled.
It wasn’t enough to stop his swing, as Blake’s katana continued on a course through the air. It wasn’t enough to stop Moonslice, as Adam had already begun to unleash it. But the electro-whip was enough to change where Adam’s swing went. Suddenly, with legs pulled out from under him, the full might of his Semblance was directed straight down.
At least, until Yang’s blow landed. Somehow, as her momentum was pulling her away from Adam, as she had to twist just to see him, Yang delivered an off-balance punch to Adam’s side with her trailing arm.
It wasn’t a hard punch. It might not have even left a bruise. But it connected with Adam’s ribcage, and pushed his newly-unbalanced body sideways, folding his weapon arm up as his body was pushed into it. With one tug and one small punch in one second, the path of Adam’s swing had been turned entirely around.
The world around Blake and Yang turned blood-red, and Adam unleashed his Semblance on himself as he landed on Blake’s sword.
Adam’s Aura shattered, and he screamed in pain. Gambol Shroud went spinning away from him. A shockwave passed over Blake, Yang hit the ground a few meters away and rolled back into a standing position, Adam went entirely still, and the world returned to something resembling the usual passage of time. A hundred more things stacked up on Blake’s increasingly overtaxed sanity. There was another flash of Ruby’s silver eyes, further away.
She felt her ropes loosen and then fall away as someone pulled them off her arms with surprising gentleness. Verdant and Nimbus and Yuma were approaching Adam, their weapons raised. And Adam wasn’t moving. Yang was getting to her feet, unharmed but wildly confused. Someone reached down and pulled the rag from her mouth, and Blake recognized Ilia’s hand.
Blinking hard and spitting out the taste of rough fibers, she scrambled up. There was Ilia, unrestrained and Lightning Lash in hand. Which she was still leveling at Adam while watching Blake with deep worry.
Blake opened her mouth, fully intent on saying something pertinent and relevant to the situation. Her tongue missed the message, though, and an abortive sob was what came out.
…Screw it. She could give up all pretense of being calm and collected for just a minute. It wasn’t like anyone here would judge her for having a miniature breakdown after this.
Blake turned and jumped into a hug with Yang, one which Yang must’ve been expecting, given how little she moved when she caught Blake.
“Hey. Hey, I’ve got you,” she said as Blake buried her fingers in her partner’s hair and sobbed. “Everybody here’s got you. I think?”
Blake snorted in the middle of an inhalation for another round of crying—a truly hideous sound that she would’ve been fine with never making audible again. “I think that’s a safe assumption.”
She let herself cry until she felt like she was running out of tears, and the others let her do that without a word, without an intervention. She could hear the White Fang gathered behind, seemingly waiting for her. For something from her. She didn’t know what she could offer them.
Blake didn’t want this hug to end.
But the rest of the world demanded her attention. So, when she could breathe mostly normally again, she pulled away and started rubbing circulation back into her aching arms as she simply asked, “How? How?” to the group at large.
She was expecting Ilia to answer, but instead it was Verdant.
“I’m sorry. This shouldn’t have happened,” he said. He’d kept his chainsaw stowed on his back, choosing to hold Adam at gunpoint with a ‘borrowed’ Atlesian rifle, and his finger was poised over the trigger. “But Adam caught Ilia outside the camp today, and that blew up our whole plan to take him down. He had Ilia hostage, we had no element of surprise, and he had a million reasons to never trust us again, so… this was the only thing left.”
“The only thing,” Blake repeated dubiously, crossing her arms. Adam was still lying on the ground, not moving, and even as she saw a pool of blood growing underneath him, she still had trouble letting herself look away from him because what if he gets up, he always comes back stronger—
“Blake. We had to do it before it was too late,” Nimbus said. “Because once tonight’s over, the rest of the world blames the Fang and starts cracking down on us, and then we’re all closing ranks and holding our tongue on infighting because there’s bigger problems with the rest of the world, and you know who would ride that all the way to the top?” She indicated Adam with a swish of her fox tail.
Blake had a horrible suspicion that she was right.
“We knew all his attention would be on looking for you at Beacon,” Nimbus went on. “And, well, we were right, this was the only time he’s turned his back on the rest of us since he caught Ilia. The only time he’s let his guard down and given us an actual opening.”
“We were trying to do this in a way that wouldn’t get anyone else killed. Especially not Ilia. We didn’t think he’d find you at the worst possible time,” Verdant added. “I promise, Blake.”
Blake was… tired. All over again, somehow. Maybe this was the adrenaline petering out. The rest of the White Fang had come to stand with them, and there was most definitely no one trying to kill her.
Yang reappeared in her peripheral vision. Blake hadn’t even realized she’d left, but she’d gone somewhere not far—
“Hey,” Yang said, holding out Gambol Shroud’s katana and sheath to her, the blade and the rectangular sheath simply resting on her upturned palms, not grasped in her fingers. “You, um, dropped these.”
Inexplicably, Blake felt frozen as she stared down at her own weapon. That was blood on the katana. Adam’s blood. The katana which he’d taken from her and used as his own weapon, tried to kill Yang with it—
And failed. The only person Adam had killed with Blake’s weapon was himself.
Blake took a deep breath, met Yang’s eyes with a grateful look, and accepted back the halves of her weapon. She slid her katana back into her sheath, and they merged as smoothly as ever, a motion that came as easy as breathing. Gambol Shroud was her own, and no one else’s.
“Ilia?” she asked. It was a hundred different questions in one.
“Ugh. I hurt all over, but I believe them.” Ilia tossed her electro-whip from one hand to the other. “I didn’t know about this plan until Nightshade was cutting my ropes a minute ago, but Adam literally never gave anyone else a chance to talk to me. That fucker knew he’d caught an assassination attempt in the making when he found me being extremely not dead. We didn’t have much choice.”
“Okay.” Blake closed her eyes. There was still a school to save. There were still people dying. Cinder was still out there somewhere. Too much going on to slow down. “I’m going to go help with the evacuation. What about you all?”
Ilia and Verdant and the others exchanged looks, followed by nods. And then every White Fang present was looking directly at Blake, and Ilia was holding out something to Blake.
A White Fang mask.
Oh, no. Oh, no. If this was what Blake thought it was, it was a terrible idea that she could never—
“When I said you should come back to the White Fang, I was serious,” Ilia said, gazing at Blake with trust and reverence. “Blake, we want you to lead the Vale branch of the White Fang.”
A wave of assenting nods passed through the rest of the group. All leading lights in the Vale Branch. The exact people who were qualified and empowered to make this decision. And they were choosing her.
Blake was already shaking her head, trying to figure out how she’d misled them into thinking she was a good choice. “I can’t,” she said. “I… I’ve failed too much already. We wouldn’t be in this mess if I hadn’t—”
“Failed?” Ilia shook her head. “Blake, without you, we’d be throwing ourselves into a meat grinder.”
Suddenly, a new voice joined the conversation, faint and uneven but making Blake stiffen all the same, because… Adam was speaking.
“You’re… serious?” he said in between shallow gasps for breath, staring up at the White Fang surrounding him. His mask had fallen off, and for the first time in over a year, Blake was looking at his unadorned face.
“You’re… really going to let that traitor play leader for you?” His eyes kept losing their focus, wandering back and forth, and the pool of blood underneath him was only growing bigger.
Yang stepped closer to Blake, putting an arm around her shoulders and glowering down at Adam. Not saying anything, just being a presence of support beside her. She was grateful for it.
“After how much she’s set us back?” He coughed, and for a moment it seemed as if he’d lost his voice, but then he went on, weaker. “She’s… She butchered me… She’s going to lead you all to ruin…”
“No.” Verdant stepped forward. “Adam, I trusted you with my life, but you were leading us to ruin. And you nearly did, if not for the girl who refused to be silenced by you.” He backed away from Adam, and came to stand next to Blake, crossing his arms and nodding decisively. “My trust lies with Blake now. Our trust.”
Adam’s eyes widened as a chorus of agreement followed those words. He was struggling to keep his head raised by now. He twisted his neck enough to meet Blake’s eyes.
In his stunned eyes, Blake didn’t see a monster or a creature of hatred, or even a victory for herself. She only saw a tragedy. A dying boy who’d once been just as righteous as her. A person who had long ago meant everything to her. Disbelief, fear, and pain was all she could see as his lips moved almost imperceptibly, trying and failing to say anything else.
When Adam Taurus’s body went limp in a pool of his own blood leaking from a self-inflicted wound, Blake Belladonna felt no sense of triumph. Just a deep, aching sadness for someone she had once fought alongside for the Faunus.
Ilia was the first to approach Adam’s body. She reached down, felt for a pulse at his wrist, then his neck, and shook her head. “Dead.”
In the aftermath, no one spoke. Masks were taken off; heads were bowed; and the only sounds were the distant battles and the howls of Grimm that were growing bolder again. Blake held onto Yang as tightly as she could, and Yang did likewise.
She had nearly died. She’d accepted that she was going to die, and now she was alive, and Yang was safe, and the White Fang didn’t think she was a traitor to their kind, and… and she felt despicable for feeling any kind of joy while Beacon and the city still burned. But this, at least, felt as if Blake had just survived her own personal war.
Ilia was giving Blake a small, familiar smile, just like one Blake remembered from years ago, a smile they’d share when they would meet up late at night to go fishing together on Menagerie.
“I missed you, Blake,” Ilia said. “It hurt to think about how I was supposed to hate you after you left, and… I’m so happy I don’t have to anymore.”
“Thank you.” Blake could barely manage to get the words out. “I… Thank you for not hating me, Ilia.”
“Of course.” She tilted her head. “I couldn’t hate someone I want to be a leader, after all.”
Oh. That was still an unsettled affair. Blake was wondering, was this an offer made out of pity? Were they feeling so bad about how Adam treated her that they were giving her this in hopes it would make her feel better? She took a step back, Gambol Shroud suddenly feeling heavier in her arms. “I left, and if I hadn’t left, maybe Adam wouldn’t have started doing all this…”
“Stayed, while he kept on hurting you?” Ilia’s voice suddenly had a razor-sharp edge. “Blake, we all owe you an apology. We didn’t realize what was happening right in front of us.”
Verdant was shaking his head at Adam’s body. “I don’t know if I just… never looked hard enough, or if I was too busy convincing myself to ignore the signs because I thought of him like a brother. But the kinship I felt is gone. Not after seeing how he treated you tonight and knowing that was just the culmination of years.”
Blake nodded once, acknowledging Verdant and Ilia’s words, and hoped the nod was small and quick enough to convey she didn’t want to dwell on it right now. The apologies weren’t doing anything to convince her that this offer of leadership wasn’t a pity thing.
“We’re not asking you to lead the entire Fang,” Nimbus said. “Sienna’s still in charge, of course. This is just the Vale branch. But there’s still a reason we want you. Whatever started tonight, whoever Adam worked with, this isn’t going to be the end of it. Like it or not, we’re tangled up in it because that’s where Adam’s left us.” She swept her hand out, indicating the greater campus with the barrel of her rifle. “If this is what the unknown enemy can do to Beacon Academy… Our survival as a movement is at stake. And you know more about this shadow conflict than any of us do.”
Oh.
Blake’s grip on Yang tightened. Nimbus was right. Blake knew about Maidens, and secretive forces fighting for control of the world, and she knew some of the principle players in the conflict. She knew about a war that most of the world was unaware of. Including the Fang. A war that had no qualms about using the White Fang as cannon fodder.
She… understood.
“We trust you, more than anyone else, to see us through this storm,” Ilia said.
Maybe the world was falling apart tonight, but one small corner of it was putting itself back together around Blake in a way that made sense. And she was playing a part in rebuilding that corner.
For the first time in too long, Blake Belladonna believed in herself.
“I really think you should do it,” Yang whispered. “I think you’d be great at it… Although, guess I may be a little, um, biased.”
Blake gave her a short, quiet laugh and a radiant smile, and then turned to the White Fang. Her White Fang.
She accepted the mask which Ilia was still holding out, and carefully strapped it to her face. She turned to Yang, and found her sporting a deep blush just like the last time she’d seen Blake in a White Fang mask.
Blake leaned forward and touched her forehead to Yang’s, savoring the warmth of her partner’s skin. Then she faced the people she now led. Led. The thought sent a not-unwelcome shiver down her spine. A shiver which might better be referred to as a convulsion of hope.
“I accept your offer,” she said. “If it’s what you want, then I will be the new leader of the Vale branch to the best of my ability.”
A small cheer went up. The quiet reaction wasn’t for lack of enthusiasm. Far from it. Rather, it was because everyone here knew that this moment was only the beginning of a long conflict, one which would go far beyond tonight and unfold in ways that none of them could yet comprehend, not even Blake.
And that was when the ground started to shake.
In the forests which bordered Beacon Academy on three sides, the repurposed AKN Pandora laid dormant in a clearing of its own making, its landing gear deployed amidst the splintered trees which had broken under the weight of the hull as it touched down. It had remained there since deploying the reprogrammed Knights and Paladins to the school’s campus, but suddenly its operating lights flickered back on. With a mighty roar, the Pandora’s engines spooled up once more, and it rose into the air, its nose turning slowly towards Beacon’s campus. It was still low enough in the air that it knocked down another swath of trees, mature oaks shoved aside.
Miles away in the open ocean, Arthur Watts sat up in his captain’s chair as he noticed a surge of data flashing across one of the many screens built into his yacht. Confusion quickly morphed into annoyance as he realized what was happening, and he reached for a keyboard.
“Oh, no you don’t,” he muttered, typing in a row of commands. “I told you to stay put. You’re far too valuable to risk losing tonight.”
Higher above the forest now, the Pandora’s engines warbled and sputtered suddenly. The cruiser pitched back and forth in the air, as if caught in an invisible gale that was tossing it around like a stray leaf. But then the engines glowed hotter and brighter, inexorably propelling the ship back towards Beacon.
Cinder Fall slipped out a side entrance of the CCT, riding the wings of victory. Emerald followed her out, shaking off the daze of being knocked unconscious.
Ozpin was dead. The Fall Maiden was, at the very least, out of his faction’s direct control. Its power had been likely dumped into some unsuspecting girl in a backwater village somewhere, and with the rest of the world thrown into disarray, it would be child’s play for Cinder to find the new Maiden before any of the headmasters did. It was not the most desirable of outcomes, but the beauty of tonight was that victory could come in countless forms for her, and none at all for Ozpin’s side. The rest of—
Cinder came to a stop in the shadows of a building, and frowned. The collection of Huntress students outside the CCT seemed… surprisingly calm. Too calm.
The destroyed husks of Paladins and Knights were scattered across the courtyard, but they were just machines. Far more pressing an issue: where were the Grimm?
These students should have been desperately trying to fend off an unstoppable tide, not directing an orderly evacuation onto airships as they were right before Cinder’s eyes.
“Emerald,” Cinder said slowly, in nothing less than absolute and complete control of her tone and her outer emotional state. “Where is Mercury?”
“He’s not answering his scroll.”
“Well.” Cinder tilted her head back, inspecting the building they’d arrived beside. It was the building where they’d left Mercury when going to lure away Ozpin. “Let’s see what your partner has to say.”
The sight which greeted them on the rooftop, however, was one that left her momentarily taken aback.
Mercury was enveloped in a cocoon of sticky white filament keeping him trapped from the neck down. His mouth had been gagged with more of the filament, and another band of it was pulled tightly over his eyes, meaning that the only thing he could do was flop madly back and forth and make muffled noises. The marks on the roof around him suggested he’d been trying similar things for some time, to no avail.
“Mercury?” Emerald said in a near-shout. “What happened?”
Mercury, recognizing Emerald’s voice, began to thrash even harder. It wasn’t until Cinder got closer that she realized this filament had a suspicious resemblance to a spiderweb. Mercury still had Aura, so instead of trying to cut through the webbing, which she knew would be a useless task, she burned it all off with a blast of fire.
“The White Fang!” Mercury yelped as soon as his mouth was free, spitting out a mouthful of webs amidst gagging, hacking coughs. “The White Fang’s turned on us! I got ambushed by one of them, the spider Faunus! She took my broadcast scroll!”
“What?” Cinder spun, immediately looking for any sign of the traitors. But her attention was immediately arrested by a different sight which was even more acutely enraging.
A flash of silver light, originating from a different part of campus far away enough that Cinder couldn’t directly see what caused it. However, she knew instantly what that was.
“Karyatis is alive?” she growled, a wreath of flame briefly flickering all around her form. “How did that thing survive?!”
“The tin can did, too,” Mercury added, rising to his feet and scrubbing away a few strands still sticking stubbornly to his face. “It just started—”
Smack.
Mercury reeled from the blow, a red mark blooming on his cheek as he gaped at Cinder in disbelief.
“Keep quiet.” Cinder’s eyes were fixed on the place where Karyatis’s silver blast had come from. “I’ve seen everything I need to know.”
Mercury went silent, throwing a glare at Cinder and ignoring the worried look Emerald shot at him.
“The next move is to neutralize Karyatis immediately,” Cinder snapped. “That little brat could upend all our plans.”
Upend all of Cinder’s rightfully crafted plans, with nothing more than a gift that the spoiled Atlesian toy had done nothing to earn.
“What was the last thing you saw?” Cinder said to Mercury without looking at him.
“Pallas was fighting the Paladins. She took down three of them, and that’s when I got ambushed. Got blindfolded. Had no idea what was happening until you showed up. I guess she took down the rest of them.”
Cinder nodded curtly. It had been a foolish mistake on their part to trust Ilia Amitola when she’d come to Cinder and Emerald and Mercury telling them that she wanted their support in overthrowing Adam Taurus. The choice had seemed obvious to the team at the time; Amitola had given the appearance of being far shrewder and more useful than Taurus. And far more tolerable, for that matter.
But, as it turned out, it had been a deception which fooled them all. In retrospect, Amitola’s requests and arrangements for the coup were arranged not just to turn on Taurus, but to turn on her as well. Asking to let the rest of the White Fang forces hold back from attacking Beacon until after Taurus was killed—it was also a perfect guise to prevent the White Fang from taking part in the invasion at all. Asking Cinder to stay away from Taurus to ensure the coup went smoothly—a perfect way to ensure she wouldn’t be able to intervene. And they’d all been fooled. Taurus, the narrow-minded oaf he was, had probably never seen the assassination coming.
Cinder closed her eyes and breathed a gust of scorching-hot air out through her nose, almost hot enough to ignite the surrounding air itself.
“Traitors. They have overestimated their own importance. Fatally. They will burn later,” she said. “But Karyatis is the first objective. We—”
Boom.
Cinder tilted her head, listening to the distant tremor which was powerful enough to reverberate through the building underfoot.
BOOM.
Another tremor, this one powerful enough to set gravel on the roof rattling like a skeleton’s teeth chattering. Now Cinder smiled, all her momentary instability draining away as the path to total victory became clear again. She turned to look at the horizon in the direction of Mountain Glenn, understanding exactly what was causing these escalating quakes.
BOOM.
In the mountains from which the doomed settlement had taken its name, a previously solid rock face began to split open in an enormous jagged chasm. From deep within the fissure, a massive, glowing red eye appeared.
Ruby had succeeded in hiding. She was sitting with her knees pulled up to her chest and her head buried in her arms in the corner of a half-destroyed building without the slightest idea of where she was, and no one was coming for her. Which was fine. She was just going to sit here until… until…
That was when she felt the first tremor.
Her first thought was a Megoliath, or several Megoliaths, but as it hit again, harder, and then even harder, it didn’t feel like a Megoliath to Ruby at all. This tremor didn’t have a rhythm like footsteps. And when the next one shook the ground so powerfully that she stumbled, she knew this was something beyond a Megoliath.
Ruby wiped the wetness away from her eyes with the back of her sleeve and looked up. She didn’t try to brace herself against the next quake, which felt like the entire campus had been picked up and dropped back down. In the aftermath of the latest tremor, an enormous rumbling sound filled the air, so loud and so close that it could’ve been mistaken for a thunderstorm overhead, except there was no lightning and no rainclouds. Just a sound like an entire mountain collapsing.
Ruby could see out one gaping side of the building to the distance where the dark profile of the peaks that ringed Mountain Glenn were just barely visible over the trees.
Adrenaline kicked in with a mixture of awe and horror as the distant mountain range shifted, in a way that should’ve been impossible for something that big to do, and then something enormous and dark rose into the air above.
Ruby hadn’t been looking at a mountain; she’d been looking at a Grimm.
A massive winged form circled higher and higher in the sky above Mountain Glenn before banking into a turn which made its gigantic wingspan apparent to Ruby. To be so easily spotted from this distance, it had to be bigger than an Atlesian cruiser.
A Wyvern. This wasn’t a one-in-a-century-Grimm like the kind that the Colossus in Argus had been built to fight. No, this was a once-per-millennium Grimm, the kind that took an entire world to fight. Vale didn’t have the entire world. Vale didn’t even have a Colossus. The closest thing the kingdom had right now was… Ruby. As broken as she was, she was still the best hope.
Which wasn’t much hope.
Ruby swallowed hard, wondering when she’d last eaten, or even just drank some water. She forced herself upright and reached for Lunar Enforcer, her eyes fixed on the Wyvern as it flew closer to the school and its form dominated more and more of the sky. She had to face it. There was no one else in the kingdom with a hope of killing it.
And maybe the Wyvern was thinking the same thing, because as the winged monster closed in on the school, its red eyes seemed to be trained directly on Ruby, staring into her soul.
Ruby was gone. Penny could find no trace of her. Somewhere along the way, the trail left by her Semblance had disappeared completely, leaving Penny flying hopelessly back and forth, frantically scanning for any sign of her from the sky. But it wasn’t enough; almost none of her instruments which could help her find Ruby were active, leaving her relying on a radar hopelessly muddled by the ruins below, and photoreceptors that could only see so much. Conditions on campus were worsening again, the Grimm starting to press in everywhere.
Ruby, where ARE you? Please, please, please don’t hurt yourself, please, I could never live with myself if you did—
Penny hadn’t felt the tremors shaking the ground, but she did notice the screech which shook the air around her, the soundwave so powerful that it extinguished the flames still burning in her rockets. She nearly tumbled out of the sky entirely, only saving herself by re-summoning the Maiden powers a few meters before the ground.
Penny landed upright, and froze as she saw the Grimm of mythical size approaching the school.
…Ruby was in a self-sacrificial state of mind. Or, it would be better described as a self-destructive one. Penny was almost certain that Ruby would try to fight the Wyvern. Maybe—maybe Ruby was even hoping that she’d lose—
But just as Penny took off again, ready to save Ruby from herself, something else caught her attention. She almost didn’t see it amidst the frenzy of internal preparations for facing the Wyvern, but the sleek gray ship hovering low over the forest was just large enough to trigger a latent notification in her consciousness, and then Penny had to look—
It was the Pandora. Penny had almost forgotten that it was still active. She’d never bothered to track its departure after it deployed the rogue machines. Her memory only contained the vague impression of seeing it lift off again and disappear somewhere as Penny had fought the Paladins.
But the last Atlesian cruiser still flying in Vale was back, and it was approaching Beacon from the north. The exact opposite direction from the Wyvern.
With a hijacked, fully operational Atlesian cruiser and a Grimm of mythical size approaching the school from different sides, Penny realized with a dull horror that if there was going to be any hope of the school surviving the night, she would have to fight the cruiser herself, leaving Ruby to face the Wyvern alone.
If Ruby was fighting either of these, she’d be fighting the Wyvern. There was no choice but to divide and conquer.
Penny rotated to face it fully, still trying to reconcile any part of her morals with leaving Ruby behind—
But she had her Semblance. She could take control of the airship and fly it into battle against the Wyvern. She could come to Ruby’s defense with something far greater than what Penny could offer just by herself. A heavily armed Atlesian cruiser would be very good at being a diversion which would allow Ruby to use her eyes unfettered.
Penny set her jaw and flared her wing rockets, flying off towards the slowly-moving Atlesian cruiser which had just crested the last of the forest.
She could only hope she would arrive in time.
It was a strange experience, adjusting to using her flight mode with Maiden power-propulsion instead of Dust-electric-powered rocket propulsion. Instead of flight commands running through her processors, the flight commands were running through her… soul. And her soul had a good sense for the flight parameters of her mechanical body. Which she supposed made sense, since her soul had lived in this body for a great deal of time. So she would accept gratefully that it was working, even if she wasn’t entirely sure how beyond ‘magic.’ She was doing her best not to think about it in too much depth, because that seemed like an excellent way to inadvertently neutralize the instincts and fall out of the sky.
Regardless, she did not fall out of the sky as the Pandora loomed dead-ahead, the immense cruiser dwarfing Penny in the sky and making her feel vaguely insectoid in size.
She expected some sort of antiaircraft barrage as she approached, but the airship remained non-confrontational. In fact… the closer Penny flew and the more she observed it, the more its flight path seemed… odd.
The cruiser was bobbing jerkily as it flew, the navigation fins at its rear wavering between opposite directional inputs. The way it was moving… it was as if there were two people fighting for control of the airship. But who? And more importantly, who in this fight did she want to win?
She dove towards the airship, and still its guns remained silent. The complete lack of firing at Penny made her feel bold enough to buzz the cruiser’s bridge and see exactly who was inside.
The bridge was empty.
Penny’s confusion grew. She circled back for a second pass around the bridge, and yes, multiple lines of sight confirmed it was one hundred percent devoid of people apparent on the photovisual spectrum.
Hm. Could she just… board the ship? Was there even anyone inside to stop her?
She pulled up a blueprint from internal memory and located a nearby hatch that would let her access a corridor to the bridge. Then, slowing to a hover alongside the correct spot on the hull, it was a simple matter of activating Ghost— INPUT DETECTED: HATCH 9V EGRESS WHEEL —flying inside, and closing the door behind her with extreme caution.
No alarms active inside the ship. No one in the halls, either. But… there were signs of a fight.
Not a recent fight, though. Penny spotted completely dried bloodstains on the walls and floors, and also found long gouges in the paint, revealing bare metal underneath which had been exposed for long enough to oxidize. The ship itself was quiet; the only sounds were the creaks and groans of metal under tension and compression as the hull shifted under the forces brought on by the chaotic maneuvers. And also Penny’s own footfalls as she traversed the deserted passage, her radar on high alert.
Eventually, she arrived at the bridge, where there was another trace of an earlier conflict, perhaps the most blatant one yet. The door to the bridge had been forced open; the metal was twisted and dented and the rubber gaskets which were supposed to seal it had been torn away. Where the rubber was broken, its insides were already flaking, and Penny knew this flaking was something which could not have developed in less than several days.
What had happened on this ship?
Pressing an ear to the door, Penny detected no sounds of life, and a radar sweep taken through a gap in the bent doorframe showed no presence of anything beyond typical furnishings and electronics. So, rather anticlimactically, she pushed open the door and entered the bridge.
The ship rolled ferociously to one side as she entered, and the first thing she noticed was the ship’s controls moving of their own accord. Someone was operating the ship remotely. Then, watching the controls stubbornly push the ship into a list towards the opposite direction, she amended that to two someones operating the ship remotely.
Still, if she had no idea who she wanted to win the battle for the controls, Ghost could override both of these people fighting for control. Without further strategizing, Penny activated her Semblance again—this time on the entire ship instead of just a door lock.
INPUT DETECTED: PANDORA
Just like at the dance when she’d Semblanced into the Pandora, the cruiser sprung up around her in a three-dimensional model, and she was floating in space inside it as a ball of Aura-green light. She turned in a slow circle, inspecting the ship, and immediately found the reason why it was being piloted with no one aboard.
Ghost showed a dark-brown strand snaking away from the cruiser’s bridge, vanishing in the distance to somewhere unknown. So someone had rigged this to be operated remotely. However, that still left the question of who, because who could modify an Atlesian cruiser to be piloted by remote control?! It was a task so vastly complicated that even Penny wasn’t sure if she was capable of completing it.
…But then where was the other person fighting for control of the cruiser? Ghost only showed one remote-control signal, so then how…?
Friend?
If Penny was in her own body at the moment when she heard a voice which was not her own, she would’ve jumped and quite possibly hit the ceiling due to inadvertently activating her flight mode. Even using Ghost, she still jumped. Except that instead of a jump, her shock threw the cruiser into a sharp lurch.
“Hello?” she said, once she’d steered the airship back upright. “Hello?”
That had been a voice. Someone else’s voice, vaguely feminine, coming from… from… She could not pinpoint an exact location. It’d just sounded as if it was from all over her Semblance’s landscape.
Friend?
There it was again, and Penny still could not pinpoint the origin. Her urgency growing, she deactivated Ghost, and back in her own body, she called out to the empty bridge, “Hello? Hello?”
No response. Penny was one hundred percent sure she had detected distress in the tone, but without any idea of how this voice was speaking to her, she had no way of helping them—
She forced herself to take a deep, cooling breath and pull down internal temperatures, the range of which had been more volatile ever since the lightning strike.
“If you need a friend, I will be your friend,” she said to the deserted bridge. She could never have given a different answer.
The only answer she received was silence, and then—
There was still no reply, but all of Penny’s attention was abruptly stolen by a new sound from elsewhere. It was an immense rumbling, not from within the ship itself, but from somewhere outside and distant while still being loud enough to make the floor vibrate under her feet. It sounded like something collapsing. Something very large.
Penny froze. If that sound was what she deduced it was, then… She needed to return to the fight. She desperately hoped she was wrong about what kind of collapse would’ve needed to occur to produce that noise—what kind of thing would’ve gone horribly wrong.
It could mean so many things. It could mean that Ruby was losing her battle, that the others were losing their battle, that the Wyvern—
Suddenly, every light in the bridge died, leaving Penny illuminated only by what moonlight filtered through the windows. At the same moment, the engines stopped running.
The ship was already low to the ground, and as a result Penny barely had time to look through the viewports and see the ship’s nose dipping towards the ground on a crash course. She just managed to brace herself for impact against a railing before the massive craft plowed into the ground, shuddering to a violent halt. The ship had been moving slowly enough that the crash-landing was not devastating, but it was only through Penny’s mechanical strength that she kept herself from being flung into the viewports.
Penny gathered her balance, doubled-checked her gyroscopes, and surveyed the bridge once more. It was devoid of any kind of activity. But the voice she’d heard was unforgettable, that one-word question rattling around endlessly in her processors. Someone had needed a friend. Someone had needed help. Penny wished she could provide that help, but… something was wrong with the battle. Her other friends needed her help right now. She would have to return later to help this person. Whoever they were. Wherever they were. However they needed help.
Penny turned to exit the bridge. With the ship now crashed, her plan to fly it into battle with Ghost had evaporated. All she could do was return to the fray and hope it wasn’t too late.
“I will be back to help you,” she said aloud, her words resonating off metal and glass and Hardlight Dust. She had no idea where to direct these words. She hoped they would be heard. “I promise.”
There was no reply.
At that moment
“Finally. If you were going to be that difficult, that was how it had to be.” Watts slammed the laptop shut that he’d been using to control the Pandora and shoved it aside with a disgusted snort. “I’ll have to do it the hard way, and pull you out of the wreck once the dust settles, before Atlas can get their miserable mitts on you. But at least you won’t be going anywhere now.”
He leaned back in his captain’s chair and sighed deeply. Oh, well. A little inconvenience was still well worth the bother. This was still the avatar of his future revenge, after all.
From shadows, Cinder watched Karyatis prepare to face the Wyvern Grimm alone on open ground, Emerald and Mercury by her side and waiting for the order to strike. Her confidence returned tenfold with every beat of the massive creature’s wings as her vision narrowed to just the Grimm and the oblivious Atlesian beast waiting to challenge it.
Karyatis had no idea what awaited it. Cinder knew exactly what her path to victory would be.
Notes:
The commenter VeryStrangeIndividual predicted that Taiyang would try to kill Ironwood during the Fall, and while for Future Story Reasons I wasn’t going to actually have the two of them fight, that prediction in the comments made me realize I needed to at least show a confrontation of some sort between Taiyang and Ironwood. So that’s how the first scene of this chapter came into existence. Thanks for the inspiration! Even if there was no actual fight, the confrontation felt very necessary to me!
Next week, Chapter 67: The Pillars Collapse In Shame
Chapter 67: The Pillars Collapse In Shame
Notes:
Content warning for this chapter (click this text to reveal):
Death, violence, severe injury, blood, dehumanization
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
The Wyvern’s flight slowed as it approached Beacon, and Ruby almost could’ve called it majestic, the way its wings flapped in nearly slow motion, effortlessly keeping it aloft and propelling it towards Ruby at a languorous speed. It seemed like the massive Grimm was taunting Ruby with its lazy approach. And maybe it was taunting her, because it was an apex predator, and its primal instincts told it to challenge the greatest threat to its newly claimed territory. And, flying directly towards her, the Wyvern recognized the silver-eyed warrior as its greatest threat.
Ruby tracked its approach, and tried to nail down all her thoughts. Nothing else mattered right now except defeating this one Grimm. And once this night was over…
Then what?
Maybe killing the Grimm and saving the school would earn her the right to exist again. Maybe she could find some way to build off of a pair of silver irises, because there was nothing else with which she might identify herself. She just wanted to be useful! She just wanted to fit somewhere! She just wanted to be enough!
Ruby set her feet and took a deep breath as moonlight glinted off the Wyvern’s claws, and then it dove at her with a deafening shriek, its mouth wide open and big enough to swallow Ruby up as she gathered magic in her eyes—
WHAM.
Something slammed into Ruby from behind, throwing her facefirst into the ground and making her Aura flicker violently. She barely had time to wonder, what— before her world exploded into fire. Fire, so strong that Ruby could feel it as a warmth cascading over her, and there was no comfort in this rare warmth, because Ruby knew it really actually meant burning to death if she didn’t move—
She burst into her Semblance and streaked away, intent on retreating far enough to get a read on her attackers and regroup. But instead, a few meters into her flight, a wall of howling wind materialized out of nowhere and carried her away like she’d run straight into a hurricane’s eyewall.
Ruby was powerless to do anything as an overwhelming force of nature prevented her from recombining by unraveling her into a discombobulated trail of silver dust, the sudden storm too powerful even for the incredible speeds her Semblance could reach.
The world melted into a blur, stretching Ruby’s consciousness to its limits as the gale scattered her through the air, turning her into an intangible mess of glimmering particles which had lost all shape and direction. She couldn’t pull herself together, and she had no idea what was going on except that suddenly there was fire, there was fire, the storm had turned into a firestorm, a wickedly blazing circle pushing the wind faster and faster as flames licked at every particle of her.
Ruby had to get out of here. Her Aura wouldn’t last under this onslaught of wind and fire. She had to escape before her Aura broke and she was burned alive, before the school lost its best hope. She narrowed her wavering focus on her Semblance to just thoughts of escape escape escape it doesn’t matter where just get out—
Ruby gasped for breath, suddenly on her own two feet again. She wasn’t sure if she’d actually managed to break free and propel herself to safety, or if her attackers had just dropped the storm to unleash a different attack. But what mattered was that Ruby was back in one definite piece again, no longer engulfed by all-consuming flames, and she still had fight left in her. She faced… an empty battlefield.
Empty?
“Who are you?!” she spat into the darkness, glancing around wildly. Nothing.
“Stop being a coward and show yourselves!” she screamed.
Still nothing, not even a taunt. Wait, where was the Wyvern—
Ruby heard a whistle of rushing air from behind, and although she still wasn’t ready for this attack, she managed to whirl around just as the Wyvern swooped down on her, intent on scooping her up in its gaping maw and slamming its jaws shut around her, either swallowing her whole or tearing her in half with its jagged teeth which were taller than Ruby.
But thanks to the half-second warning Ruby had, there was just enough time for her to shove Lunar Enforcer between the Wyvern’s jaws—not in an attempt to wound it, but to jam its mouth open before it could bite down on her. The blades at either end of Lunar Enforcer were suddenly wedged into the narrow gaps between the Wyvern’s fangs, leaving just enough of an opening between the monstrous teeth for Ruby to hold fast to her weapon, unharmed.
Another deafening screech from deep inside the Wyvern thundered over Ruby, and she was so close to the sound’s source that the soundwaves flung her braid back and nearly shook her grip loose. But she clung to Lunar Enforcer, the weapon sitting almost perfectly vertical in single-staff dual-blade mode between the beast’s jaws, still holding them open even as the Wyvern took a sharp skyward turn.
The ground fell away with dizzying quickness, leaving Ruby’s legs dangling over a perilous drop as she stared into the oily blackness which laid within the Wyvern’s mouth. Its insides roiled and shifted just like the rain of Grimm goop sliding off its wings. She’d never seen anything like it, not in all her missions throughout Solitas.
But being pulled into the sky was exactly what Ruby wanted. So high up in the air, she didn’t have to worry about her elusive attackers interrupting her eyeblast preparations.
She swung to one side, making direct eye contact with the red eye which was bigger than her own head and glowed like the cone of a volcano just before an eruption. Sometimes, Grimm were scared just by the sight of Ruby’s silver eyes. Like they had some sort of primal instinct coded into them which told them they were seeing their end. Even big ones, like the Megoliath in the tunnel in Mountain Glenn, could turn and run at the sight.
But the Wyvern didn’t seem bothered in the slightest by the sight of pure silver death. Instead, it glared right back, the bright-yet-empty red sphere meeting Ruby’s without a flinch or a flicker.
It didn’t matter.
“You’re not gonna hurt a single person tonight ‘cause I’m gonna turn you into chicken feed,” Ruby growled at the giant Grimm as her eyes grew brighter and she thought of Penny—
Penny, who she’d hurt so much tonight and failed so much, Penny who’d almost died because of her, did she deserve to think about Penny right now was that unfair what if Penny didn’t want her to think about her—
No. Ruby ground her teeth against one another, and called up the first happy memory of Penny she could think of. Sitting in their secret garden together and watching the fireflies buzzing around them, and then leaning closer and closer with gazes of mutual adoration, and their lips meeting.
FLASH.
The Wyvern’s jaws went still, and Ruby’s turbulent ride abruptly became a calm one. When the silver light faded away, the malevolent light glaring at Ruby had been replaced by nothing but dull gray stone. Soundlessly, the now-petrified monster began its long fall back to Remnant.
Ruby let out a long breath she hadn’t realized she was holding in.
Mission accomplished.
CRACK.
Suddenly, a spiderweb of cracks was propagating across the stone head, and at the epicenter a massive rift was opening up—through which the same bright, hateful eye was locked onto Ruby like nothing had even happened.
Ruby barely had enough time to shriek, “WHAT?” before the stone head exploded in a shower of rock reduced to just gravel. The Wyvern’s head broke free, lashing back and forth with wild abandon, and moments later the rest of it followed suit in a violent convulsion which made its rock shell look like nothing more than dry, brittle wood. Rock which Ruby had always believed to be unbreakable.
For the briefest of moments, the square of sky which Ruby and the Wyvern occupied was turned into a little shattered moon of its own much closer to Remnant, the winged beast curling into a crescent shape as it tried to shake Ruby loose while fragments of rock and dust rained down all around them, cast in ghostly white by the actual moon above.
Ruby had never seen a Grimm break free of its petrification. Ruby had never even known that a Grimm could survive a petrification at all.
The Wyvern resumed its ascent, angling its head skyward as a fresh blast of wind from its wings buffeted Ruby. The monster didn’t even seem hurt.
Ruby’s magic wasn’t absolute. Grimm could survive it. And if Grimm could survive it… could Salem?
A grinding, screeching noise filled Ruby’s ears, and she didn’t understand what was causing it until she felt Lunar Enforcer slip in her hands—just a little, thankfully. The Wyvern was biting down on her weapon with all the force in its jaw, trying to snap it in half so it could get at the puny human trapped in its teeth, and Ruby wasn’t sure if her war scythe, as perfectly designed and painstakingly assembled as it was, had the strength to hold back the tons and tons of crushing force. Even the perfect weapon could only take so much.
Ruby wondered, had Summer Rose gone to Salem, thinking that she could defeat the Queen of the Grimm with silver eyes just as Ruby had been raised to believe? Had Summer Rose discovered that Salem could survive the silver eyes, just as Ruby was now learning that this Grimm could?
With an abrupt and gruesome metallic crunch, a mechashift component somewhere inside Lunar Enforcer succumbed to the immense pressure of the Wyvern’s jaws and gave way. The upper blade of Ruby’s weapon bent in a way which had never been intended—rotating and twisting to one side until, halfway between design modes, the blade jammed on some other displaced internal part, leaving it stuck on a peculiar hooked appearance which pointed the razor-sharp point back at Ruby, instead of at the enemy as intended.
Suddenly, Lunar Enforcer looked much more like a farmer’s scythe than a war scythe.
But somehow, Ruby’s weapon didn’t fail entirely. Even in its new, broken form it stayed wedged between the jaws, the metal which Ruby’s soul had resonated with in battle so many times somehow managing to hold back the Wyvern’s teeth and keep her alive beyond any reasonable hope.
Still, Ruby’s knuckles were starting to turn alarming colors from the continued death grip. She couldn’t hold onto Lunar Enforcer forever. And the monster’s continuing attempts to shake her off weren’t making it any easier. With her Semblance, any fall could be broken, but to activate her Semblance here and risk getting swept back up in another firestorm spawned by the still-unseen enemy as soon as she got near the ground again? She couldn’t. There was nothing she could do except hang on.
Maybe Ruby was turning out exactly like Summer Rose after all. Maybe she wasn’t the failed daughter of another failure. Maybe mother and daughter were just… never destined to win, not even if they were perfect.
However, it was then that the Wyvern grew tired of failing to chew its prey to a pulp, and chose a different route. It folded its wings back and dove towards the school.
Ruby, being flung around and trying to figure out a way to get Lunar Enforcer out of the Wyvern’s mouth without getting bitten in half (She needed her weapon, she couldn’t just leave it), didn’t notice where the massive Grimm was headed until she saw the new shadow fall across its maw.
Blake stared at the enormous draconic Grimm for probably too long, and then turned to the people who were once again her friends and allies.
She worried, for all the declarations made by Ilia and Verdant and Nimbus and others, that she would be a terrible leader for the White Fang.
“I’m not going to order any of you to stay,” she said to her comrades. “This is a fight you didn’t ask to be part of. This place might be like a home to me, but for the rest of you, it’s a symbol of subjugation. The other students might not even want your help. And at this point in the night, they might just shoot first and ask questions later, honestly.”
She watched the others exchanging contemplative glances. “But I’m staying.” She nodded towards the bullhead. “So, if you want to take the airship and go, I’ll find you all later.” She paused. “Hopefully.”
“You’re out of Aura,” Ilia said, as if she hadn’t kept on fighting at the front line in the train tunnel after running out of Aura.
Blake rechecked the ammo level on Gambol Shroud and racked its pistol. “That I am.” She was looking down at her weapon, but she could feel the stares directed at her.
“I can’t believe Adam ever had the gall to call you a coward,” Ilia said.
“I can’t believe I had the gall to believe him,” Verdant muttered.
This moment kept oscillating wildly between a dream and a nightmare for Blake. It was at its most dreamlike when she heard her sisters and brothers of the White Fang saying things like that, things that would’ve felt laughably wishful just weeks ago. However, every time she remembered the blood on her katana, every time she glimpsed the bloody corpse lying just meters away, it was a nightmare.
No one had given Blake an answer yet. She was wondering if they thought they had no choice but to follow her into battle. Should… should she order them to leave her? No. That would be dictatorial of her. That would make her no better than Adam. And she was so, so terrified of turning out just like Adam, of leading the Fang to the same fate he’d nearly led them to. She was like him, wasn’t she? Wasn’t that why she’d ever loved him in the first place, because she was just as murderous as him and the only difference between them was that he was more honest about it—
A nudge at her elbow interrupted her spiral of self-hatred before she lost herself completely in it, and it took a moment for her to realize who had done it.
“Hey. None of that,” Yang said. “You’re doing the best anyone could.”
Blake gave her a baffled look, all thoughts about herself and the Fang and Adam completely forgotten. “How did you know…?”
“You get a certain look on your face when you’re getting all self-defeating, and your ears go flat. I’ve seen you do it enough times this semester to recognize the signs.”
Blake really couldn’t think of a response to that which would do justice to the depth of her feelings for her partner in that moment. She was saved from saying something woefully inadequate by Ilia.
“I’m staying with you,” Ilia said. “It would be pretty dumb of me to just abandon you after everything that’s happened tonight, no matter what kind of fight this is.”
“Seconded.”
“Thirded.”
A chorus of agreements rippled through the rest of the Fang. Blake found herself at a complete loss for words, relief flooding her so acutely that she nearly collapsed.
But then, the roof groaned ominously under them, reminding Blake that they were very much standing atop a burning building.
“We can take the airship anyways,” Verdant said. “We still need a ride outta here, all of us.”
Boarding the ship and grabbing onto the handhold, Blake ended up with Yang on one side of her and Ilia on the other. It was the safest she’d felt in a long, long time.
Even so, she couldn’t tear her gaze away from Adam’s body as they took off. One more reminder that he was actually gone, that he wouldn’t ever try to hurt her or anyone she cared about ever again.
The thrust generated by the bullhead’s takeoff was too much strain for the weakened building. Moments after they rose into the air, the entirety of the roof caved in, falling into the inferno consuming the dining hall. Anything still on it went down with the collapse, and so as they flew away, Blake watched Adam’s body plunge into the flames, disappearing from her sight.
Blake turned away and held onto Yang as close as she could.
SCREEEEEE
As Weiss’s world collapsed around her, the rest of her team disappeared.
First, it was Blake, gone missing before the cataclysm had even started. Then it was Yang, sprinting away to try and find her partner. Then it was Penny and Ruby, running off together to search the wreckage of the crashed cruiser. And there was no telling what had happened to Winter, whether she had been on one of those cruisers or if she was still in the city—
Weiss scanned the horizon, once again finding no sign of the faces she was searching for with an ever-increasing worry. The fighting had been in a lull for several minutes now, but she still felt as if she was trying to catch her breath. And she was still leaning heavily on Myrtenaster to stay upright, and she was seriously in doubt about whether she’d have enough strength to raise it again.
And with each passing second in which the rest of her team did not return, it became likelier in Weiss’s mind that she had lost all of her family. She had no evidence with which to refute those terrifying thoughts.
SCREEEEEE
It was impossible not to notice the worried looks that Team JNPR was shooting her way—and especially not the ones sent by Pyrrha. Weiss wanted to tell them, Please stop worrying about me. There are far more important things happening which you should devote your attention to. My mental state is not an emergency.
But another side of her—Weiss genuinely wasn’t sure if it was her basest emotions or her rationality—argued that there was nothing wrong with the concern from her friends, because it was the only thing holding her psyche together by now. That side argued that there wasn’t anything better for Pyrrha or any of Team JNPR to devote their attention to at this particular moment, because of how little there was for the defenders to do. The evacuation was complete, after all.
Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say there was no one left to evacuate. If there were civilians still alive and hiding in some corner of campus, their rescue would have to wait for the morning, or whenever reinforcements arrived. The only ones who remained were the students, worn down by a fight that had lasted far longer than any clock would tell. And yet, they were still the defenders, because there was no one else.
SCREEEEEE
And as had been made clear by the appearance of the largest Grimm that Weiss had ever seen, the defenders’ task was far from over.
Facing possible annihilation in the form of a winged silhouette which seemed big enough to swallow the school in one gulp, the only reaction Weiss could summon was a numbed dismay which likely wasn’t remotely appropriate for the situation.
She was just… tired. So much of her life had already fallen apart irreversibly, to the point that if the Wyvern swallowed Weiss tonight… it would only be a rubber stamp of officiality atop an already-filled-out, already-finalized death certificate.
For the moment, there was nothing anyone present could do. They had nothing which would even put a scratch on the Wyvern’s bone-plate armor from this range, and the two girls who their chances hinged on were still absent. But even amidst an atmosphere of such exhaustion and fear, even with that monstrosity approaching, there was still hope which resonated through them all because of those two girls who had done so much to turn the tide. Even if Weiss was ready to believe the worst, there was still a quiet corner of her which hoped for Penny and Ruby to deliver one more fairytale miracle.
…And now the Wyvern was diving towards a section of campus.
Weiss couldn’t think of anyone more likely to be targeted by the Wyvern than Penny and Ruby, the two most powerful students on campus. So watching the Wyvern’s attention suddenly focused… Weiss could allow herself to hope this meant Penny and Ruby were still fighting.
She watched the Wyvern soar back into the sky, and then her own inference was answered when a distant flash lit up the sky in a now-familiar silver supernova, and the last member left of Team RSPBY instinctively knew what it was.
The massive shadowy form of the Wyvern in the night sky went entirely still.
“Gods above and below,” Weiss breathed to no one in particular, a look of amazement and relief falling over her all at the same time. Ruby had done it. She’d done it.
She felt an immense weight lifting off her shoulders as the Wyvern began to fall out of the sky, but even while it washed over her, she realized there was still no sign of Penny.
Suddenly, an ominous crack split the night and silenced the defenders’ rising cheers.
Weiss made a small, confused noise, and there was no mistaking the sight of the Wyvern breaking free, shaking showers of rock off its wings like rainfall.
“How?” Pyrrha whispered from where she was standing nearby. “It… it shouldn’t… It can’t—”
But as they all watched, the Wyvern, alive and unhindered, twisted into a dive towards the school. Towards them.
Weiss tightened her grip on Myrtenaster as the massive Grimm hurtled closer, at first seeming to be on a collision course with the ground on which the defenders of Beacon were gathered. However, it quickly became apparent that it wasn’t aiming at them. It was aiming at—
“The CCT!” Weiss screamed.
The Wyvern, its enormous form moving impossibly fast through the air, rammed the CCT tower halfway up. Just before impact, Weiss caught sight of Ruby, dangling from the beast’s mouth by the grip of her weapon. And then she was lost amidst the avalanche of rubble as the Wyvern crashed through the CCT, obliterating the enormous monument to civilization and progress in seconds.
There was nothing graceful about the fall of the Cross-Continental Transmit System’s transmissions tower. It crumbled in a cloud of dust and debris, leaving behind a ragged stump of metal and concrete which barely rose above the buttresses holding the remnant upright.
The Wyvern flew on without a trace of damage and circled back in the direction it’d come from, paying no attention to the group of students frozen in shock.
The link between kingdoms. The symbol of international harmony and unity. The tower which had been designed to stand for millennia. Gone. Just a haze of particulate in the air turning Weiss’s vision smoky and blurred.
Weiss had also lost sight of Ruby, and the Wyvern was already too far away to tell if she was still clinging to its jaws, or if she’d lost her grip after bearing the full force of the impact and landed somewhere in the rubble of the tower.
“That settles it! Students, this is now a mandatory evacuation!” Oobleck barked out.
Oobleck and Port’s orders mostly washed over her—a safe zone in the city, the forces there would be better prepared to fight the Wyvern—and almost none of it reached her conscious thought as she tracked the Wyvern dipping again out of sight, rising up again and then sweeping into a tight turn—one which brought it onto a collision course with—
With them.
And with everyone’s attention on the professors, Weiss was the first to notice.
“INCOMING!” she screamed, smashing through octaves previously reserved only for concerts as she slammed Myrtenaster into the ground and brought up an enormous summoning glyph in front of her—a move she’d practiced over the last few days with her team in the lull between Mountain Glenn and the tournament. And now, the payoff would be—
Weiss stared at the summoning glyph as the destroyed fuselage of a bullhead rose out. The biggest summon she’d ever brought into being.
On that first morning of initiation, if someone had told Weiss that she would someday be relieved to see the Geist-possessed airship wreckage they’d fought that morning, she would’ve thought the suggestion just as insane as Penny’s idea to fly Weiss over the forest on one functioning wing.
And yet, Penny had carried Weiss into the sky all those months ago, and now Weiss was raising the glowing white form of the first enemy Team BSYP had ever defeated, a summon big enough to shield the last remaining evacuation airship from the Wyvern’s path of destruction and make sure the last evacuees could escape.
Even as Weiss braced herself for the confrontation, she couldn’t help a faint surge of disbelief. Since when could she summon this? How? She hadn’t slain the Geist—Penny had! And Winter had made it clear that only the enemies a Schnee defeated could become a summon. But—
But Weiss had helped with the defeat. It was her first step in learning to work with the people she now couldn’t imagine not fighting alongside.
…Maybe Weiss’s summons weren’t limited by what the rest of her family had done with them.
However, as thrilling a thought as it was, all that was wiped from her mind as the Wyvern closed in, and the Geist summon opened fire with the two massive miniguns attached to its wing-arms.
The Wyvern screeched as the barrage of aircraft-grade gunfire caught it square in the face, and suddenly all its attention was diverted to the giant glowing foe standing in its way. It banked into a turn at the last moment and collided with the Geist summon, flinging it backwards and making it flicker violently.
Weiss retreated towards the airship, clutching Myrtenaster tightly. The summon was little more than an acute irritation to the enormous Grimm, but Weiss didn’t need to win—she just needed to distract it for long enough for the ship to take off.
The Wyvern had the Geist summon pinned under its clawed legs as it reared its head back and opened its jaws wide, about to bite it in half—only for the Geist to drive one of its wings directly into the Wyvern’s throat, drawing another roar of pain which rattled Weiss’s eardrums.
She was almost to the ship now, and her summon was still intact but flickering violently as it grappled with the much larger Grimm. Their struggle was destructive enough to flatten the campus which they fought in, the Wyvern demolishing a dormitory with a single enraged sweep of its tail and the Geist’s wildly swinging machine-gun fire chewing through lampposts, trees, statues, and anything else that wasn’t already flattened.
The roar of engines and a sudden blast of thrust at Weiss’s back abruptly reminded her that she needed to get on the ship now.
She turned, putting her back to the Geist and the Wyvern, and sprinted towards the heavily-loaded airship lifting slowly into the air, turning away from Beacon and pointing its nose towards what refuge there could be in the city still under assault. Doctor Oobleck was standing at the edge of the bay door, holding out a hand meant for Weiss to grab onto, and behind him she could see Team JNPR watching her with intense worry. But even as the airship rose faster, Weiss wasn’t worried. Her glyphs could carry her the last bit of distance to the ship—
Weiss stumbled.
—To the evacuation ship, without any of her teammates, whose whereabouts were still entirely unknown.
Weiss stopped.
She couldn’t evacuate. She still had Aura left, and she’d made a promise to Penny, to be the finest partner anyone could ask for.
She met Oobleck’s eyes from afar, driving the point of Myrtenaster into the ground, and watched as his disbelief was replaced by a grim understanding.
Weiss watched the airship rising into the Grimm-dimmed night with a feeling of dreadful finality. Without the Schnee name, without her grandfather’s company, the only things she had left were her friends and the integrity of her word. If she fled Beacon without knowing what had happened to her teammates, she would lose both.
Except, then, there was a flash of movement beside Oobleck as he was pushed aside by a familiar cascade of deep red hair, and then Pyrrha Nikos was soaring through the air towards her.
Weiss’s mouth fell open.
As Pyrrha always did, she landed effortlessly on one knee. Then she raised her head, gave Weiss a small smile, and said, “I saw a Huntress in need.”
On its own merit, Pyrrha electing to stay would be an honor deeper than Weiss ever thought she deserved. But then Jaune, Nora, and Ren plunged out of the airship’s side just before it cleared the cliffs, barely making it to solid ground. Jaune almost didn’t stick the landing, his feet teetering on the very edge of the cliff, but Pyrrha caught him with a quick application of her Semblance which pulled him onto safe ground by his armor.
Weiss was on the verge of crying as Team JNPR gathered around her. And then Pyrrha spoke again.
“You couldn’t leave behind your teammates,” she said. “We couldn’t leave behind our friend.”
Weiss didn’t reply. Instead, she straightened, holstered Myrtenaster, and strode towards Pyrrha.
Pyrrha had enough time to say, “Weiss…?” before Weiss summoned a small glyph underneath herself, lifting her up to exactly eye level with Pyrrha. And then she leaned forward, cupping Pyrrha’s cheeks in her hands, and kissed her squarely on the lips.
Pyrrha’s eyes widened just before their lips made contact, and then Weiss heard Miló and Akoúo̱ falling out of her grasp and hitting the ground with a deafening clatter. Pyrrha’s arms were held out from her body at an angle, as if she was unsure what to do with them.
It was transcendent. Weiss felt, just for a moment, that she was actually shining like a knight in armor from her storybooks. This was how the happy endings in those fairytales had made her feel as a child.
However, they still had a battle to fight, and so Weiss pulled away and let the glyph underneath her disappear as Pyrrha’s mouth fell open slightly. She was blushing, and from how aflame Weiss’s cheeks felt, she had no doubt she was the same way.
“Thank you,” Weiss said, her voice wavering to a degree that might’ve felt embarrassing several weeks ago. “Thank you for showing me how to burn down a pedestal.”
Pyrrha blinked slowly at Weiss, her fingers going to her lips as if to confirm that the kiss had really happened. Then she took a deep breath, using her Semblance to summon her weapons back and clenching her fingers around them. “We really should talk about this more later, once everything’s okay, but… Thank you, Weiss, for showing me that it’s never too late to try being something else.”
The two girls could’ve stared at one another for much longer, if not for Nora slamming the hilt of Magnhild into the pavement, producing a sharp thunk which shook them out of their stupor.
Nora jerked a thumb over her shoulder. “Yo, I really really hate to break up this moment, but I think we gotta move?!”
One glance at her summon told Weiss they needed to find cover now. The Geist, now transparent instead of solid white, had lost one of its wings, and with each lash of the Wyvern’s tail against its body, the glow grew fainter.
“The woods!” Jaune said, indicating the exact opposite direction Weiss had been planning to go. But before she could object, he added, “There’s an exhaust vent for the underground steam tunnels we can get through, and that’ll get us to the other side of campus.”
Weiss had several questions as they broke into a run, especially after the rest of Jaune’s team nodded like this information was far from a surprise, but that would have to wait for another day. For now—
They were halfway to the treeline when the Geist summon dissolved, and the Wyvern pawed at the ground, unleashing a triumphant, deafening roar which made them all shudder from the sheer power which rolled through air on nothing but sound waves. Enormous glowing eyes turned to stare directly at Weiss and Team JNPR. The roar was replaced by a quieter, but more intent growl which seemed to make something deep within Weiss’s bones vibrate. The new call was all but a declaration—of you’re next.
At least, until something bright sailed through the air and exploded against the Wyvern’s backside, something which none of them had fired. The Wyvern turned its head in an entirely different direction, growling louder at—
At an unmarked bullhead flying out of the maze of wrecked buildings. Leaning out the ship’s side, wielding a grenade launcher as her ponytail swung in the wind, was… someone? It was still too far away for Weiss to know who exactly was inside, actually. Then, as she squinted at the bullhead which was now banking into a circle around the Wyvern, there was a sudden yell from beside them.
“Don’t shoot them! Don’t—”
Weiss, primed to expect catastrophe at every turn by this point, had Myrtenaster halfway into a vicious glyph-aided thrust at whatever was happening now when she recognized Yang.
And Blake.
Weiss’s mouth fell open as her missing teammates sprinted towards her. Blake had scorch marks on her clothes, and a bruise was forming on her cheek, and Yang looked even more tired than when she’d left, and was that BLOOD on Blake’s katana, but they were alive, and they were mostly unhurt, and that was enough for Weiss.
“They’re with us! They’re with us now!” Yang was yelling, waving while pointing at the still-circling airship. Weiss had no idea what she was trying to do, and honestly, that mattered less right now than seeing her teammates alive as Weiss slammed into her and Blake at the same time, and wrapped them both up in the tightest hug she could manage, an embrace which undoubtedly approached Penny levels of hugging.
“You’re okay,” Weiss said in an embarrassingly relieved tone. It was an embarrassment which she buried by savoring the warmth of her still-alive teammates against her.
“Somehow,” Blake said.
“Not somehow,” Yang said immediately. “Because of you, Blake.”
Blake went silent, but Weiss was hugging her tightly enough that she could feel Blake’s heartbeat shamelessly speeding up. (And Penny could detect things like that all the time. That really was a superpower, Weiss decided.)
“What in the name of the gods happened?” she asked, without budging from her hug.
“Wait.” Yang managed to extricate herself from the hug, anxiously scanning their surroundings. “Where’s Ruby? And Penny?”
“Missing.”
Yang, all animation and frantic energy moments ago, suddenly appeared on the verge of collapse, her pupils shrinking to tiny dots. She started to stammer something terrified and quiet and so unlike herself that it frightened Weiss to hear that tone from Yang.
But then Blake was softly placing her hands on Yang’s shoulder and resting her forehead against Yang’s. “Hey,” she murmured. “You already told me we’re going to be okay. Now it’s my turn to tell you. Penny and Ruby are going to be okay.”
Yang let out a weak laugh, her capacity for speech returning. “I guess it would make me a real jerk if I didn’t practice what I teach, huh?”
“You wouldn’t be a jerk. Just very silly.”
“But what if…” One of Yang’s hands clutched at Blake; the other crept towards Weiss seemingly of its own will. “What if we can’t find them? What if… what if they never come back? Just like Raven, just like Mom, just like…”
“I can’t promise anything, Yang. But I have faith in those two. They never stop trying, no matter how bad it gets. They’d fight until the end. We’re going to find our teammates.”
“And it will be far easier to find them with an airship,” Weiss said, nodding to the bullhead still buzzing the Wyvern from a daringly close range as its occupants, whoever they were, continued their bombardment.
Blake raised her head, as if being reminded of something very important.
“Where’d you get it?” Jaune said. “I thought all the school bullheads got taken for evacuation?”
Blake’s ears went on an interesting journey, and then she started to say, “Well, it’s actually not—” Only to be cut off by the bullhead executing a fast landing which was only moderately controlled, skidding to a halt between them and the Wyvern. The bay door facing the students was closed, but they could all see the torrent of heavy arms fire pouring out the airship’s opposite side, just enough to keep the Wyvern momentarily at bay.
“They’re on our side!” Blake got out, just before the door facing Weiss swung open.
Weiss immediately understood why Yang and Blake had been so urgently telling them these were allies. A shipful of uniformed, armed, and armored White Fang tended not to make a favorable first impression otherwise.
“Whoa-ho!” Verdant yelled over his shoulder, mostly occupied with wielding a machine gun longer than he was tall. It spat bullet casings so quickly they created their own kind of cacophony which could be heard over the engines and the Wyvern.
Weiss recognized almost everyone in the ship from Mountain Glenn. And Blake’s friend, Ilia, was the next one to address them as she frantically reloaded her grenade launcher. “Get on, we’re getting you all the fuck out of here!”
Fortunately, there was no confusion about whether these were allies or enemies. Even if Team JNPR had no idea of everything going on with the White Fang, they had eyes. They could see the Fang was fighting to defend them.
“We can’t!” Yang had to scream to make herself heard, but the desperation in her voice told Weiss that she would be screaming even if they were alone in the library at the stroke of midnight. “Ruby and Penny are still out there somewhere!”
At that moment, the Wyvern went strangely still and cocked its head, as if listening to a command from somewhere else. Then, shaking off the bombardment as a dog would shake itself dry, it spread its wings and took to the air.
But the Wyvern didn’t attack them. Instead, it turned with midair agility that should’ve been impossible for something that large, the beat of its wings churning up a wind powerful enough to make the bullhead rock back and forth even at a distance. The suddenly confused defenders were left watching, helpless to stop the Grimm while also wondering (with more than a little dread) what could’ve possibly taken its attention.
Moments ago
As soon as Penny emerged from the Pandora, back in the cool night air, she found the source of the immense rumbling from moments ago.
The CCT had fallen.
Penny stood frozen, her processors struggling to comprehend the sight. In theory, it should have been a simple fact to enter into memory, but it was… it was… Penny kept getting stuck on the equally simple thought of that wasn’t supposed to happen. The CCT was a fact of life. Seeing its form towering over the school and the kingdom was as familiar as seeing the sun crossing the sky. Now there was nothing except a cloud of dust and the twisted ruins of the tower’s base. Global communications, ended… for how long? How long would it take to rebuild this? Would it be possible to rebuild?
…And now that the CCT had fallen, there was a corner of Penny’s circuits which felt as if the sun would not rise tomorrow.
But just as quickly as the thought had come to her, another one appeared, a reminder from elsewhere in her memory. What Professor Carmel had said earlier.
“I promise you all, this night will have an after , too.”
“There will be an after,” Penny whispered to herself. “There will always be an after.”
She reassigned her despair to a lower processing priority, joining a traffic jam of other negative emotions which she simply could not afford to process right now. There was still too much to do. People who still needed help. People—
Penny stopped as visual analysis picked up something at the corner of her sightline which her consciousness had missed. She turned towards the source, and her servos nearly misfired as she recognized the small figure collapsed at the base of a tree, dueling pistols still clutched in her hands.
“Professor Carmel!” Penny cried out, breaking into a run.
With terrifying slowness, Carmel lifted her head at the sound, finding her. Penny skidded to a halt beside the professor and knelt down, wishing her biological monitoring systems weren’t inactive so she could have any idea of what was wrong. She couldn’t find any signs of blood or external injury, and—
Carmel met Penny’s eyes. Her caramel-brown eyes were dull and glassy, and her breath was coming in short, fading wheezes. But even amidst that, she smiled when she saw Penny.
“Miss Pallas. You’re alive.”
“Are you able to be moved?” Penny said, her hands hovering uncertainly over Carmel’s midsection. “I can carry you to the evacuation zone, and—”
Carmel cut her off with a small shake of her head which was almost nothing more than a twitch. “I’m afraid I’m beyond help now.” A feeble coughing fit interrupted her, but she pushed through and went on with a new rasp in her voice. “It wasn’t a Grimm that did me in. I knew from the start that tonight might be too much for this old body. And it was.”
Penny understood the meaning immediately. “Professor…”
Carmel shifted her arms, placing her pistols on the ground beside her in an orderly arrangement. She barely had the strength to move them. She patted both hilts one more time and made a quiet, satisfied noise before meeting Penny’s eyes once more. “If it’s not too much trouble, can you keep a lady company while she finishes dying?”
“Of course.” Penny lifted Carmel’s increasingly clammy hands, clasping them between her own. By touch, she could still feel Carmel’s pulse on her wrist, beating erratically and too slow.
“Thank you.” Carmel trailed off in a wheeze, which turned into a chuckle, which turned into another cough. “It’s the rarest thing a Huntress can die of. Old age.”
Penny had read about the stories of many Huntresses, fictional and real. None of the stories ever talked about the ones who died of old age. It was always the ones who died heroically in battle, the ones who sacrificed themselves to save another life, the ones who never saw death coming. But in this moment, Penny’s entire body ached just as badly for Professor Carmel as it had for any of these valorous deaths she’d read about. She couldn’t stop herself from quivering as she held onto Carmel’s hand like she was the one who needed comfort right now, not Carmel.
“Out of everyone in my graduating class at Shade, it’s me, Antonia Carmel, who’s the only one to receive that honor. I’d call it a strange artistic choice if I was teaching a class.”
A Grimm howled nearby, too close for comfort. But Penny never looked away from Professor Carmel.
“Miss Pallas,” Carmel said. By now, it seemed to require deliberate action on her part to form each syllable she spoke. “When I told you I could not find a story about a robot girl with a happy ending, I was wrong.”
Penny leaned closer, unable to ignore the labored heartbeat which was by now barely noticeable in her sensors.
“I found one,” Carmel said, her grip on Penny’s hands tightening so precipitously that her arms shook with the effort. “You, Penny.”
Another Grimm howled, this one close enough to register on Penny’s radar, but she ignored it.
“I may not know how or where your story ends, but I know you will craft a happy ending for yourself. I have never believed anything more strongly.”
Carmel’s grip slackened, but her smile remained, and her eyes stayed focused on Penny.
“I can’t wait to see what story you write.”
The exhalation which had carried those words did not turn into another breath. Carmel’s chest, which had labored through rise and fall, rise and fall, rise and fall, was now frozen in place. Lifeless.
Penny waited on the edge of some desperate irrational hope for the next beat of the pulse in her hands, but it never came. Carmel’s body went limp against the tree, her head lolling to one side. Her hands would’ve fallen out of Penny’s grasp, if not for how tightly Penny was still squeezing them.
For several seconds, Penny could not move or speak or think or sense, and it was not due to any mechanical or electrical or coding fault.
What eventually did shake her out of her stupor was the roar of a Grimm, not a howl, as her radar screamed at her that she was under attack from a charging monster.
She did not even turn to look at it. Instead, she summoned the Maiden powers, flames erupting from her eyes which made the metal rims of Carmel’s glasses shimmer wildly. An arc of much more massive flames spread out behind her, temporarily shielding her and Carmel from harm. She distantly heard a pained yelp as the Grimm collided with the flames, which were somehow substantial enough to prevent it from passing through.
With her photoreceptors still trained on Carmel, she threw the summoned arc of flame at the Grimm with a devastating spin, like a sawblade throttled up to full speed and then launched. The Grimm’s yelps abruptly cut off.
Penny brought the arc of flame back to her, ready to shield against more attacks, but none came. Her radar informed her that the other Grimm which had been prowling towards her had abruptly retreated out of detection range.
Only then did Penny glance over her shoulder at the solid arc of flames hovering at her back, positioned with perfect symmetry.
Just like Floating Array.
What was Floating Array?
Penny let the flames disappear from the air, but not from her eyes. She reached forward and repositioned Carmel’s head so it was resting more upright against the tree, and then carefully pulled down the brim of her cowboy hat until it covered her eyes, and suddenly the professor appeared as if she’d just sat down in a quiet corner of campus for a quick nap. It was all too easy to imagine Carmel rousing herself, yawning noisily and stretching in the oddest ways before pulling herself back upright with shocking nimbleness. Penny had seen that exact scene play out once, when she’d been walking with her team across campus during the last truly hot day of summer.
She could almost convince herself that was what she was seeing, if not for how impossibly still Carmel was.
Penny stood up. “I am sorry,” she said. “Even… even if it was time for you to go, no matter what, I wish your end could have been a more comforting one than this. I wish I could have made your ending a happier one.”
The autumn wind whispered comfort, comfort to her, and she flared the Maiden powers instinctively, unsure of what they would even do. But following some impulse which laid deep within her processors, a warmth swirled out of nowhere, bringing with it a stream of bright fallen leaves in every color. The wind wrapped around Carmel’s body with the utmost gentleness, depositing the leaves around her in a precise ring before dissipating. Leaves which matched the color of Amber’s hair and her Aura, and the color of Penny’s hair, and the color of Ruby’s Aura and her weapon.
It was an unfairly impermanent memorial, but it was all Penny had time for. And she believed—she would have to believe—that Carmel would appreciate the storybook remembrance, a magical wind bringing a bed of leaves for her final resting place.
The Wyvern, previously circling the school from above, had disappeared. But Penny could detect the sounds of a furious battle from the evacuation zone, which could only mean that was where she was needed most, and where she would find the Wyvern. To turn away from Professor Carmel and resume her journey back to the evacuation zone was a feat which required more strength than stopping a blow from a full-grown Ursa.
Ruby’s Aura didn’t break when the Wyvern used her as the tip of a battering ram powerful enough to take down the CCT. Her Aura didn’t break when an avalanche of debris from the tower crashed over her in midair. It didn’t break when the Wyvern finally shook Lunar Enforcer loose from where the weapon was lodged in its mouth, flinging Ruby almost straight down into the ground.
And then the Wyvern just seemed to… lose interest in her. It circled once, twice above her as she shakily pulled herself out of the crater she’d landed in. And then it flew off with a deafening screech, steering back towards the school without so much as a glance in her direction.
Ruby stumbled up the steep edges of the crater and kicked aside pulverized asphalt to get over the rim, and then back on level ground, there was still nothing. As she spun around, trying to find her still-hidden attackers, a terror filled her which had only grown deeper with each moment since her silver eyes had failed to work on a Grimm. What was she now? Just a scared girl with a broken weapon trying to fight an enemy she couldn’t even see?
And that was when Ruby’s Aura broke from a single shot hitting her in the chest, a flash of red all over fading away into nothing, leaving her in a place she’d never been before: out of Aura and losing a fight.
She still couldn’t see anyone or even anything, not even a muzzle flash where the shot had come from, and her panic was overwhelming her now, her breaths coming too fast and too short to actually get any air in her lungs and it was making her dizzy and she couldn’t stop but if she didn’t stop she’d pass out and then she’d be even more useless and she couldn’t be useless—
“Where are you?!” she screamed into the night, her voice crackling into nothingness. “WHERE?”
She received her answer when her vision burst into a wall of fire which appeared from thin air. And through the flames, a glint of metal flying towards her face—
SLASH.
Ruby screamed. Not because of pain, but because she knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that she’d just lost her left eye.
“What a pathetic little thing you are.”
The voice had come from somewhere in front of Ruby, way closer than should’ve been possible for how empty her surroundings had been just a minute ago, but whatever was being said to her was the last thing in her head right now. All she could think about was her eye her eye her eye her eye her eye HER EYE HER EYE HER EYE HER EYE
“Such arrogance.”
Half of her vision was just… gone. When she pressed a hand to the left side of her face, it came away slippery and—and—she couldn’t feel the cut itself, she couldn’t see—
her eye her eye her eye her eye her eye her eye her eye no no no no no please no it can’t be gone
“Atlas was lucky enough to have the dregs of someone else’s dirty work fall into their laps. And yet they had the gall to parade you around as a triumph of their own making.”
Ruby was on the ground. She wasn’t sure how she’d gotten there. And her weapon wasn’t in her hands anymore. She didn’t know where it went. And her hair had fallen into her face and plastered itself there in the blood and sweat, obscuring the remaining half of her vision and making it nearly impossible to see anything, not even the calm, sneering voice that was coming from right in front of her.
“Coddled and spoiled, your every whim tended to. Always given the best in weapons and training. Given medals for your valor and your courage, as if those are things that something like you could even understand.”
Ruby was scrambling wildly without even knowing where she was going—she was just flailing blindly on the ground, hoping that she’d find her weapon by pure chance, or—or—
“And the so-called greatest kingdom did all that, for… this.”
Ruby’s hands hit something. She recognized the grip of Lunar Enforcer immediately, but when she closed her fingers around the now-dented metal and tried to shift it back to heavy rifle mode, the mechashift components ground loudly against one another, and refused to move any further.
“This mutt which was never even theirs . And this was the best which they could do with their stolen toy. All bark and no bite, crumpling at the first real sign of adversity that it’s ever encountered, howling like a lapdog that’s lost its master.”
The voice was coming closer, close enough for Ruby to hear footsteps. On reflex, she threw herself around to face the speaker and pulled one of Lunar Enforcer’s triggers.
The sound which echoed across the courtyard was not the familiar blam of her weapon’s gunshots. Instead, it was a crack-BOOM which made the world shake violently and caused a vicious ringing to erupt in her ears.
Her weapon had misfired. The explosion knocked loose the hair stuck to Ruby’s face, and now she could see out of her remaining eye, and the first thing she saw was Lunar Enforcer lying broken in her hands, the far end of the barrel reduced to a twisted, warped piece of metal with a hole blown in it. Mechashift components that never should’ve been visible hung loosely in the open air.
Her ears were still ringing. If the explosion had happened a little further down the barrel, closer to Ruby, it might’ve killed her.
That thought was immediately chased away as the shadow of Ruby’s attacker fell over her, blocking out the moonlight. Ruby barely had the strength to raise her head.
“C-Cinder,” she gasped to the face which she could now only see with one eye. She tried her best not to let her voice crack, but she couldn’t help it. She was staring down someone who’d disarmed her and put her at her mercy in the blink of an eye, and… Ruby had never fought someone like this, where she’d lost the fight before it ever even started, and it… it terrified her.
Cinder Fall let out a short, light laugh as she stood over Ruby, one orange flame swirling in her hand and two more of the same color swirling around her eyes.
“You recognize me. So the names and faces of your opponents aren’t entirely beyond your level of intelligence.”
Ruby shoved herself away, clutching Lunar Enforcer as close to her as she could, even in its broken state. She never took her eye off Cinder. She was looking at a Maiden. Her eye flames looked just like the ones Fria had. A real, actual Maiden with magic powers, magic that made Ruby’s own magic look like nothing more than a sparkler fizzling out.
But as soon as she moved, an invisible force closed around her from every direction, yanking her up into the air in a viselike grip. Hanging from nothing and unable to move anything, all Ruby could do was gasp for breath and watch through one eye as Cinder walked slowly towards her. Even with the fire she was wreathed in, her smirk was colder than anything in the world.
If this was what a Maiden could do… Ruby’s tournament fight against Cinder had meant less than nothing, and all she’d accomplished was giving an enemy a good look at her fighting style.
Cinder’s hand, still wielding a fireball, came towards Ruby’s face. Ruby made a strangled noise, every muscle in her neck flexing uselessly as she tried to push herself away from the flames.
And then, just before her cheek would’ve been scorched, the fireball disappeared. But that was hardly a comfort when that same hand grabbed her chin and tilted her face upward, forcing a silver eye to meet two gold ones.
“Please,” Ruby choked out, her last good eye roving wildly, trying to look anywhere but at those burning eyes. “Please, don’t, please—”
“Oh, I won’t be taking your other eye,” Cinder said, her grip tightening on Ruby’s chin until she could actually feel the fingernails digging into skin, definitely hard enough to draw more blood. She was inspecting Ruby’s face as if it was a slab of meat. “The Doctor said that you’ll still work just fine with only one eye, but no less.”
“The… what…?” Ruby trailed off as a new fear slammed into her, one so incomprehensible she didn’t even have words for it. “Doctor?”
Cinder’s smirk only deepened. “You don’t know a single thing about yourself, Project Argentum.”
That name again. That name which was supposed to be a secret dead and buried and forgotten forever, not whispered to Ruby like it was the exact thing she was supposed to be right now and nothing else.
She tried to snap back with something brave and confident, like Penny would know how to do, something like my name is Ruby, but the only thing which actually came out of her mouth was a whimper.
Argentum. The scientist who’d stolen Ruby, that was the name he’d labeled her with when he was doing… things… things… It scared her. It scared her so much. It made her feel like… like she was something bad. Because they’d never known what that doctor had been planning to do with her, so… so… she could’ve been meant to be…
It was the last thing in the world she wanted to think about. But Cinder was fueling those thoughts with every word she said. There was no escape from a certain kind of knowledge which made Ruby want to die more than ever.
“You were never Atlas’s exalted warrior. As much as they craved a perfect weapon that would be smart enough to always win yet obedient enough to bend to their every whim, as much as they wanted something to force their greed and avarice upon the rest of the world, as much as they wanted something which would serve as a sacred exhortation of their self-righteous belief that Atlas was made to rule the world, as much as they wanted a weapon that would be better than the rest to stroke their own egos… You were never any of those things. You were never the things that you’ve always convinced yourself of. And you never will be.” Cinder’s eyes were glittering with satisfaction. “You are nothing but a weapon.”
“No,” Ruby mumbled. “Never… Never gonna be…”
Argentum was a name which sat deep deep deep in the darkest corners of Ruby’s memory, something that she couldn’t actually remember consciously—but her instincts remembered the name. Her body remembered. Her body remembered Argentum and experiment number number number and darkness and a thousand other things she couldn’t put real words to. It was just a word that felt like… Fear. Pure, raw fear boiling to life inside her.
Cinder reached down and seized the husk of Lunar Enforcer, ripping it out of Ruby’s hands and hurling it away without a second glance. “You already are. You are a weapon of Salem.”
Ruby’s lips froze in the middle of another denial. The clatter of Lunar Enforcer landing hard on the ground echoed endlessly in her ears.
“That is your purpose. That was what you were meant to be before Atlas stumbled upon you and stashed you away in a gilded kennel for their own petty desires.”
Her worst nightmare. Worse than everything else. A weapon in the wrong hands. A weapon meant to do the last thing she ever wanted to do—hurt people.
“You were a weapon made to burn Atlas to the ground. You were made to tear it out of the sky and bury it under the ice. You were made to turn the place where it stands into something desolate and devoid of all life. You were made to erase its legacy and leave it forgotten for all eternity.”
“No!” Ruby yelped, louder than anything she’d managed in minutes and yet not loud enough. “I’m not a weapon! I’m not hers! I’m Ruby! I want to help people! I’ve always wanted that!”
For the briefest of moments, Cinder’s entire body twitched, and then she was leaning forwards, the flames around her eyes intensifying as the smirk was replaced by a ferocious scowl.
“When have you ever helped a single person in your entire miserable existence, you stupid whelp?” she snarled, her teeth so close that she could’ve bitten out Ruby’s other eye. “All you’ve ever done is make life easier for those Atlesian pigs!”
Flames sprang up all around them, licking at Ruby’s feet as she barely hung out of reach of the inferno.
“They lounge up there in the sky, safe and sound in their glittering mansions where their ornamental fountains are cleaner than most faucets and they can heat rooms that haven’t seen a footprint in a decade and they can eat so much food that they think STARVATION is something to be done for BEAUTY! And you think these people, so rich and powerful, need HELP? All you’ve ever done is clear away the obstacles in Atlas’s path so those insatiable leeches can spread their plague of ego and arrogance across the world and consume everything!”
The fire faded away, and with it went some of Cinder’s anger, even if her grip on Ruby’s face never lessened. “If you had ever paid a single shred of attention to the people under your feet, then maybe you would’ve realized that you have done nothing which could be called help.”
By the end of that rant, all trace of anger was gone from her voice, and whatever nerve Ruby had hit, it was hidden again.
The Wyvern was back. Circling overhead, flapping its wings back and forth, like it was… anticipating something. Cinder looked up, tracking its path for a few seconds, and when she met Ruby’s eyes again, the cold smirk was back.
“Don’t worry, little lost hound. I’ll take you back to what you were always meant to be.”
The world wobbled around Ruby, lights and colors blurring together as the entire core of her being, or what was left of it, tried to thrash wildly, fight back against Cinder somehow, fight back against the horrible awful terrible wrong bad no please no please no thing she was promising. But Cinder’s magic held fast, and for all Ruby’s effort, she remained as still as a doll.
The Wyvern swooped low, and a wave of black liquid rolled off its wings, dark and oily just like the inside of its mouth. The liquid landed in the crater where Ruby had been thrown down just before, and where the liquid landed, it barely splashed before going still. It settled much too quickly. Almost like… some sort of heated-up putty, instead of the liquid it’d been when it’d unmistakably dripped off the giant creature.
And now Ruby found herself staring at a pool of black liquid filling the crater. A pool that was plenty big enough to fit her, and deep enough to drown her.
She didn’t have the energy left to scream. All she could do was whine quietly, helplessly, as Cinder grabbed her by the neck and carried her towards the pool.
Its surface was impossibly calm and mirror-like, reflecting a perfect image of the moon in the sky above. The moonlight which shone off the featureless black surface was so bright, landing so squarely in Ruby’s eyes and so magnified that she was forced to squint against it as she was taken closer and closer. Another whimper escaped her lips.
“Don’t be afraid,” Cinder purred. “You’ll finally be what you’ve always wanted to be. A perfect weapon.”
Notes:
Next week, Chapter 68: Hell Or High Water
Chapter 68: Hell or High Water
Notes:
Content warning for this chapter (click this text to reveal):
Self-destructive behavior, suicidal tendencies, blood, body horror, autonomy issues, self-hatred, panic attack
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Penny could hear the sounds of a furious battle from the evacuation zone long before she was in visual range. But then, as she flew closer, the discordance trailed off rapidly, and then she saw the Wyvern rising into the air, taking a path—
Directly towards Penny. There was nowhere for her to land and hide, nothing nearby that would offer a distraction, just her and the Wyvern flying towards each other from opposite points. Penny’s only hope was how much lower to the ground she was—maybe the Wyvern wouldn’t even notice her as it passed overhead…?
And then, one girl closer to the ground and one beast closer to the moon, they crossed paths, nothing but a long fall between them.
Penny rolled over in midair to follow the enormous shape as it blotted out the moon and cast a deep shadow over her. It was so enormous that even with the separation between them, she was caught in its wake, her wings juddering as she tried to stay stable.
In that half-second’s near-intersection, the Wyvern tilted its head just enough for a glowing red eye to stare directly into Penny’s photoreceptors. Noticing her. Assessing her.
She had never seen a more intelligent look in a Grimm’s eyes.
And then the Wyvern was continuing on with a powerful flap of its wings, their eyes parting and leaving Penny to realize, the Wyvern had no interest in attacking her at the moment. A Grimm so powerful that it didn’t even see a Huntress as something worth engaging.
However, seconds later, the Wyvern was redesignated to one of the lowest current processing priorities as Penny flipped back upright, took a shortcut through the remnants of a burning building, and found something far more important coming into view through the smoke: Her friends.
Yang and Blake and Weiss and Team JNPR, and she wasn’t sure if she could classify any of the White Fang as friends yet, but they were allies, and they were all alive, and that was enough for her to be overjoyed even as she noted one acute absence from their number—Ruby.
Her friends had already been watching the Wyvern’s departure, and so they noticed Penny almost immediately after she noticed them.
“Penny!” came the intermingled cries of Weiss, Blake, and Yang. They were sprinting towards her before she could reply.
Blake was the first one to reach her as she landed, but something made her stop dead, staring at Penny with a kind of fear Penny had never seen before.
“Penny…” Blake whispered. “You’re a Maiden?”
Penny had been about to hug her, but now she pulled back, her processors jumping. “You know about the Maidens?”
“The Headmaster wanted me to be the next Fall Maiden—” Blake started to say, which invited a thousand new and urgent questions, but Yang interrupted.
“Can we please talk about the magic stuff after we’ve found Ruby?!” she said, panting for breath.
Penny was all too glad for the chance to discuss something they still had actual power to change, instead of devoting more processing to thinking about how Amber was dead and how it felt like Penny’s fault—
“Can you do a search from the air?” Yang said, her voice saturated with desperation and terror.
Penny considered it. But she had already tried an aerial search looking for Ruby just minutes ago before the Wyvern and the Pandora appeared, and it had been entirely useless.
“None of my biological sensors are functional, and any repairs would take hours…” Penny checked what sensing systems did remain operational. “I am still capable of scanning visually and with radar, but…”
Blake picked up on what Penny was getting at before she’d even said it. “Ruby could be in a building, or in the woods, or anywhere you can’t see from the air. Or she might not even be in Beacon anymore.”
“And there’s an even larger problem with an aerial search,” Weiss said. She pointed skyward, to the Wyvern which had returned to circling the school. “You’ll be isolated. And alone. A perfect target for that creature.”
“A search from the ground with only radar and visual capability would be even less effective…” Penny trailed off, trying to calculate what chance she had of being ignored by the Wyvern like before. It did not seem like something which could be counted on. Then again, it was a risk she was perfectly willing to take.
Yang swallowed. “There’s—there’s got to be another way, isn’t there? Isn’t there something—”
There is something else, Penny’s logic core said tentatively. Penny had the sensation that this part of her was currently treading gingerly on unstable ground. There is something which would allow you to pinpoint Ruby’s location and physical state without moving.
Penny’s prediction algorithms provided the rest of the answer for her, going to a line of thinking that Penny could not, would not consciously, deliberately approach.
Her Semblance.
Penny took a halting step back, as if she could somehow retreat from herself. Her friends could not fail to notice the fear suddenly blooming in her expression.
“Penny, what—what’s wrong?” Yang said, all of her worry which had been for Ruby just a moment ago now suddenly directed toward Penny. “You look like you’ve seen a—”
Logic knew Penny could use Ghost on Ruby to see through her eyes and triangulate her exact position. Penny’s conscious thoughts knew that this would be using Ghost on Ruby without her consent. Entering Ruby’s consciousness against her will. Intentionally compromising Ruby’s AUTONOMY.
She couldn’t. She couldn’t. She could not even speak the idea out loud, because even that was too great an evil. The only avenue Penny had was to perform an aerial search, no matter how dangerous and inefficient it was. Penny could just take off to search for Ruby right now. The others, while concerned for her wellbeing in the air, couldn’t physically stop her from flying, and what did it matter if Penny risked her life? She could fight the Wyvern, couldn’t she? She had the Maiden powers, and surely that put her on an equally powerful footing with the largest and most powerful Grimm she had ever seen? And if Penny did die at the hands of the winged beast, then that would be an acceptable punishment for even daring to consider using her Semblance to violate someone’s autonomy.
Penny fired her rockets, fully intent on going skyward regardless of the danger, and that was when something else happened.
EMOTIONAL PROCESSING DEACTIVATED
The others could not stop Penny from achieving flight, but Penny could stop herself from achieving flight. And, temporarily relieved from the overwhelming frenzy of self-destructive emotions and impulses, that was exactly what she was doing right now as she shut off her rockets.
“Oh,” Weiss said as Penny touched down. She must have recognized the change in Penny’s demeanor, because she added, “Logic-only mode is active?”
Penny nodded in reply. However, logic-only mode respected the agency of Penny’s emotions. Logic would not actually use Ghost in logic-only mode, because Penny’s systems, Logic included, were in agreement that she would only use her Semblance when every system was united in agreement on its usage. Still, there was something else Penny could do to convince her emotions that this was the best course of action.
“I can use my Semblance to safely locate Ruby,” Penny said. “Please convince my emotions-enabled self that this would be the best choice.” Now that she had made this option known to her friends, it was safe to reactivate emotional processing.
As soon as Penny’s emotional processing came back online, she almost collapsed under the flood of self-recrimination and disgust and terror, because she could not she could not do something that would make her the worst living thing on the planet, this would make her less than a person—
“No!” she said, the answer a sheer reflex. “ I cannot! My logic core is wrong! I promised I would never do that! I promised! I promised I wouldn’t, come hell or high water! I—I—how could I even think about that, after—after—after I was invaded—”
A distant memory jumped the priority levels, and suddenly Penny was remembering in horrible detail the ordeal in the tower, cowering on her knees and clutching at her head as she was overwhelmed by the terrifying feeling of the virus, something else unwanted entering her and robbing her of all safety and, and, and the creeping feeling of something wrong wrongness wrong wrong why was it in her why couldn’t she make it stop what was wrong with her wrong wrong wrong—
“Penny? Penny?”
She was jolted back to her actual stream of consciousness by Blake’s worried voice, strangely muffled. She didn’t realize she’d activated her Maiden powers until she opened her eyes—when had she closed them?—and saw she was clutching herself at the center of a rapidly forming miniature tornado which had sucked up all the dust and dirt in the vicinity as it swirled around her, forming a turbulent, hazy barrier between herself and the outside world.
She dropped the windstorm immediately upon realizing what she was doing, and Yang rushed over and buried her in a hug before the wind had settled.
“You’re okay,” she whispered. “Deep breaths. There’s no virus. You’re safe.”
“But…” Penny trailed off as her terror found a new dimension—the rest of the world. What would everyone else think of her, if they knew she could take control of other people? They would be scared, they would be horrified, and they would have every right to think so. “But, I cannot use my Semblance on Ruby, because that would mean I am as evil as a virus—”
“You wouldn’t be doing it to hurt her!” Yang said. “The virus didn’t care about you, but you care about Ruby more than anyone else in the world! You’re not trying to make her do something she doesn’t want to do! You’re trying to help her, rescue her!”
Penny closed her eyes. She had never been more unsure of anything in her life. How could she choose between breaking a promise that she would rather die than break, or possibly leaving her beloved to die?
I would rather DIE than be like you, Penny had screamed at Ruby so close to now. And words had never felt more corrosive in her memory, because now she was going to violate Ruby’s autonomy, and if she violated it, no matter how noble the reason, then that meant Penny deserved to die, because Ruby’s life had been burdened by countless violations of her autonomy already, and becoming one more violation for Ruby would be worse than death.
“Please,” Yang whispered, her voice ragged. “Please, Penny… I can’t lose her again.”
Penny looked up, once again considering an aerial search regardless of whether or not her friends approved. But it could take so long, and they had so little time, and every second could be the difference between life and death for Ruby…
Then Yang, still clinging to Penny tightly, noticed her looking up, and her voice turned into a mix between a sob and a wail. “But I can’t lose you either! Please, Penny. If that dragon knocked you out of the sky and killed you, I’d never forgive myself!”
“We won’t let you risk yourself any more than you already have tonight!” Weiss said, and then she was joining Yang in holding onto Penny, and then Blake was there, all of Team BSYP holding Penny close and refusing to let her endanger herself.
Another memory appeared at the front of Penny’s registry, one from long ago. From the night Penny had discovered her Semblance, when Ruby had let her test Ghost on her.
“There’s no one else I’d trust more to let inside me.”
Ruby had said it so clearly, so earnestly. And the memory of Ruby’s words would have to be enough. Penny would never forgive herself, and if Ruby was willing to bestow any scrap of forgiveness after this, that would be an immense mercy for Penny. And it would still be more forgiveness than Penny would ever give herself.
If Ruby hated her for the rest of her life, Penny would understand.
“I…” Penny looked at each of her teammates. “I would understand, if you would not want to be teammates with me after—”
“NO.”
The vociferousness and the unity of Weiss, Blake, and Yang’s rebuttals startled Penny to her core. They… They meant it. They still wanted Penny, even after this.
Penny closed her eyes.
Even if this saved Ruby from certain death, it would still be an unthinkable, unredeemable act. Because success would mean that Ruby had been right months ago in the tower when they were first discovering her Semblance. It would mean Penny could do good things if she used Ghost on other people. It would mean that there was incentive for her to attack others’ autonomy. If she used this successfully, then she would never again be able to dismiss the thought that doing something so horrifying could be worth it.
“I’m sorry, Ruby,” Penny whispered. She activated her Semblance.
INPUT DETECTED: RUBY
Ruby couldn’t ever remember seeing Grimm like this, so… liquid. Pure liquid. Could she even call it one Grimm when it just looked like… like what Grimm were made from? Like it was just waiting for something to give it a shape. Ready to swallow up whatever was thrown into it and make it disappear forever. It didn’t feel like something that should exist.
So then why did she feel the most horrible sense of familiarity as she was carried closer and closer to that deadly pool? Why did seeing the moonlight shimmering pristinely on the surface give Ruby the deepest sense of dread beyond anything that any Grimm, even the Wyvern, had ever made her feel? Why did she want to run far, far away and hide in the darkest corners of the planet just so she’d never have to see that… that.. goop ever again? Why was the name Argentum pounding louder and louder in her head, even louder than the ringing in her ears that’d been going on ceaselessly since Lunar Enforcer blew up in her hands?
Why was she seeing flashes of a cold, fluorescent light that was far harsher than moonlight but wasn’t actually there at all? Why was she hearing the click of a pen and the methodical tapping of a keyboard? Why were her breaths coming way too fast all of a sudden? Why did it feel like there were more restraints, bigger ones, trapping her than just Cinder’s hand around her neck? Why was she… why was she remembering the times she’d dreamed of darkness, a darkness just like this one which wasn’t peaceful at all like she’d thought and a darkness that swallowed her up swallowed her up drowning drowning drowning drowning drowning no no no no—
She was shivering wildly, hyperventilating and her vision was going fuzzy around the edges not getting enough air she couldn’t move couldn’t talk couldn’t anything she wasn’t anything anymore—
What if… what if she just… gave up?
She’d just lost half of the only thing that still made her useful. Half of the only reason why her friends would ever want to be near her again. She was a failure in everything and to everyone. Why even try anymore, if she just kept breaking everything, including herself?
This was how some fairytales ended. With a divine punishment provided by way of a cruel twist on someone’s wishes. This was what Ruby deserved as punishment. After spending all her life wanting to be a weapon and breaking everything as a result, she was getting what she’d always wanted, and it was her worst nightmare.
It was the end of Ruby’s story.
Suddenly, Ruby felt a sensation she recognized from months ago. The sensation of someone standing directly behind her, watching over her, and yet somehow closer than behind her, so close it was as if someone was… inside her head…
“Penny…” Ruby mumbled. Even just saying her name took an immense effort. She wanted to say more—she wanted to say help and please and I’m sorry and I’m sorry and I’m sorry and I’m nothing but before she could force her mouth back into movement, the presence in her head disappeared.
Penny had left.
At the sound of Ruby’s voice, Cinder came to a stop just before the pool of Grimm goop and yanked Ruby up to eye-level, the Maiden flames erupting from her eyes once again. “Why do you think she would come for you?” she hissed. “As brainwashed as Pallas was, she still had the dignity of believing she broke free from her chains. But you? You will always be a slave, and a weak one. Why would Penny ever defile what pride she has by coming to the aid of a thing that has only ever let its captors mold it into their obedient pet?!”
The word pet shook loose another memory that was buried deeper in Ruby’s brain than she’d ever searched. She remembered—could it even be called a memory? It was so hazy, so vague that it almost could’ve been a daydream.
She remembered an inhumanly pale hand stroking her ears possessively, except the hand was stroking the top of her head and her ears weren’t on the top of her head so why did she remember her ears being stroked like they were on top of her head like a dog’s and there had been a low growling sound but she didn’t remember where the growling had come from, it just sounded like it’d come from everywhere like maybe the growling was coming from… herself.
Although it didn’t make a difference in Cinder’s grip, Ruby went limp. She wouldn’t fight anymore. There was no point.
It felt so much nicer than she would’ve ever expected, to just stop trying. Finally giving up felt… good.
At least it was over.
At least she would finally belong somewhere.
Penny’s eyes flew open.
Ruby was alive.
Ruby was hurt.
Ruby’s field of vision had been cut in half, which could only mean—
“I know where she is,” she said, and launched herself forwards, her rockets roaring to life. Her friends didn’t try to stop her, because Penny could not have made the urgency in her voice any clearer.
She’d visually confirmed everything needed to triangulate Ruby’s exact location—the pattern of the cobblestones, the buildings and other landmarks in the background, the ambient noise—she knew where Ruby was, she knew how long it would take to get there, and she knew Ruby was in mortal danger.
She also knew that she’d broken her most sacred promise. And worse, it had been for good reason. Meaning that someone could theoretically defend her decision. She would’ve felt better if there was no excusing this to the rest of the world, because then there would be no chance this would ever happen again.
But in reality, there was a chance, and even more chance that Penny could be convinced to do it. And then maybe someday she would be no better than a virus—
Think about that later. Rescue Ruby now. Priorities locked in.
Penny flew as low to the ground as possible, the hem of her battle-worn dress skimming the cobblestones, and paid careful attention to the Wyvern’s radar signature as it continued circling above. But if it knew she was there, it still showed no interest in her—in fact, it was diving towards an entirely different section of the school.
Wait.
Penny, tracking the Wyvern’s path, realized its target several seconds before impact, but there was nothing she could’ve done, not even with an hour’s notice. The massive Grimm slammed headlong into Beacon Academy’s tallest remaining spire. In comparison to the massive breadth of the CCT, this tower was spindly, and offered as much resistance to the Wyvern’s sheer momentum as a signpost did to a steamroller.
Penny stared in horror, almost losing her flight path entirely. That tower…
That was her tower. Her workshop. Her home.
Suddenly, her entire existence felt paradoxical. She felt as if she was cemented to the ground, and yet she was still flying. Every inch of her skin felt bitterly cold, even though all temperature sensors reported normal readings. Her processors were suddenly at full capacity, but her mind was… blank. All she could do was stare at the space where something used to be.
Her laser engraving of the Tale of Pallas the Warrior. Her printed photographs of her team and Team JNPR and Ruby and other friends. Her posters and drawings and decorations that she’d collected over the years. Her paintings that she’d made with Ruby—every single one of them had been kept in her workshop. All gone.
Beacon had been the one place in the world where she could be safe. And now it was disintegrating before her photoreceptors. Turning into a billowing dust cloud rising over a land in flames.
The tools she’d crafted specifically for repairing herself and fabricating replacement parts. The stores of raw specialty materials which many of her parts were composed of. Her Dust supplies and her charging equipment. All gone.
For Penny, there was nowhere left in the world which was safe.
It seemed that the universe was taking immediate action to punish her as she deserved, for what she’d done to Ruby. But knowing it was a deserved punishment did nothing to stem Penny’s despair and grief.
She no longer felt as if there was a place for her in this world.
And then, somehow, all thoughts of the collapse of her life were wiped from Penny’s mind, except that was not a miracle, because—Ruby.
Ruby.
Ruby.
Penny could see Ruby.
And…
Penny had already known Ruby was not okay. She’d known from the moment that using Ghost on Ruby had returned only half the field of vision a human was supposed to have. Penny had prepared herself for finding horrific injuries. But even so… Ruby had been ravaged.
In a fraction of a second, Penny gathered every single bit of processing power not currently devoted to keeping herself alive and turned it towards rescuing Ruby. In another fraction of a second, she’d calculated the exact time until contact with Ruby and/or Cinder—who was holding Ruby aloft by the neck over a pool of unidentified Grimm matter and snarling things at her which her language processors did not have the resources to parse. In another fraction of a second, she’d counted every other possible threat in the vicinity—two, in the form of Emerald and Mercury standing back from the scene and watching. In another fraction of a second, her prediction algorithms warned that Cinder would be alerted to her presence by the sound of her rockets before Penny could get close enough to intervene. And if Cinder were alerted to her presence, then…
Penny did not know why Cinder wanted to drown Ruby in a pool of liquid Grimm matter. But she was very, very sure that Cinder was about to just that, and—
Do something NOW, or she drowns Ruby before you can save her, predictions warned.
Penny’s eyes landed on the Wyvern.
She had used her Semblance on a Grimm exactly once, and she had agreed to never try it again because the result had been catastrophic.
…Except, tonight was already catastrophic.
Mid-flight, Penny locked every directional input to keep her flying in a continuous line, and activated Ghost, focusing on the Wyvern.
NO NO NO NO NO NO HURTS STOP STOP STOP STOP STOP HURTS DESTROY DESTROY DESTROY HURTS OBLITERATE OBLITERATE SMOTHER EXTINGUISH ERADICATE HURTS STOP—
Just like when she’d used Ghost on the Beowolf, Penny was abruptly thrown back to her own body, the world spinning dizzily around her as the earthshaking screams of the Wyvern echoed across the courtyard.
She reoriented herself just in time to see what she’d hoped for: Cinder’s head whipping around to find the Wyvern thrashing wildly in midair, its screeches of agony so powerful that Penny’s audioreceptors glitched out.
As Cinder watched the Wyvern’s crazed path through the air, baffled, she had no chance of seeing Penny rocketing towards her from the exact opposite direction. And Emerald and Mercury had no chance of stopping her.
She slammed into Cinder at full speed, and at the same moment, she screamed, “Get AWAY from her!”
Cinder was entirely blindsided, the force of impact knocking Ruby out of her grip and flinging them both backwards. Penny summoned a tornado to sweep up Ruby before she hit the ground, but then there was a torturously long moment in which Penny had to throttle down her rockets to avoid slamming into Ruby at high speed when she caught her, leaving her to handle what felt like a month’s worth of data in the space of seconds as Ruby’s limp form tumbled towards her and she held out her arms—
A wall of fire slammed into Penny’s side, too powerful and too sudden for her to avoid being thrown sideways and losing all flight control. Then, in the next processing cycle, she registered two imminent emergencies: Ruby was still falling towards the ground too fast, no longer being slowed by the Maiden-powered wind. And Penny was spinning straight down into the pool of Grimm matter.
In another processing cycle, Penny still had no directional sense, no way to pull herself out of the spin before impact unless she let up all concentration on Ruby. But she couldn’t let Ruby hit the ground, not when she was so badly hurt already—
In another processing cycle, Penny realized there was no time left to decide.
In another processing cycle, she reached for the Maiden powers, and summoned another whirlwind around Ruby.
In another processing cycle, she saw Ruby landing softly, her landing cushioned by the autumn wind, and that was the last thing Penny saw before she plunged into the Grimm pool.
When she went under, there was nothing.
Nothing to see amidst pure darkness, nothing to hear, nothing to feel except every external sensor going dark immediately, along with a a tsunami of alarms sweeping over her before she’d even hit the solid ground at the pool’s bottom. Alarms warning her of damage to her body everywhere, something burning away at every part of her that touched the outside world—and the signals from every single one of her touch sensors were dissolving into a cascade of incomprehensible glitches and then her touch sensors weren’t functioning at all—
It was only because of overload protection that Penny was stopped from feeling what would’ve undoubtedly been a wave of unbearable, excruciating pain under the barrage of alarms. Her radar could not detect anything; as if she had been encased in something solid. The liquid seemed to be fighting against her every move, hissing wildly all around her like a rattlesnake repelling an invader from its den. She had never felt a heavier weight on her limbs; it felt like the world itself was trying to pulverize her and the universe wanted her annihilated—there was nothing but darkness eternal and endless, and there was no escape—
All that, in the space of the instant before she hit the bottom. The jarring impact with something solid, something that wasn’t pure liquefied destruction, was the jolt Penny needed to recalibrate, to remember she could still move and think and operate no matter how much it felt like she was drowning.
She did not need to breathe. Her body was, for the moment, resisting destruction. She could barely move under the weight pressing down on her shoulders, her back, her arms, her head, but Penny had more than her body. She had Amber’s gift.
She thought of hugging Amber and hugging Ruby, and she thought of all the warmth those memories brought, and as she called on the autumn powers she tried to pour all of that warmth into her body, into every limb and servo and circuit and wire. And slowly, Penny stood up with something coursing through her circuits, one arm reaching out, fumbling blindly for something, anything to hold onto—
Her hand found a different sort of resistance, one that felt solid like the ground under her feet, and Penny had her way out.
When Ruby was thrown from Cinder’s grasp, she landed at the perfect angle to watch Penny’s fall into the Grimm pool. There was no splash, just Penny being silently engulfed with terrifying quickness, and then with impossible quickness the surface of the pool was as smooth as it’d ever been. There was no sign of the disturbance. No sign that Penny had ever been there.
“PENNY!”
It was useless for Ruby to scream. She did it anyway, because there was nothing else left in the world to do. She barely had the strength to keep her head upright, and to get closer she had to resort to pulling herself forward along the ground, moving her arms and legs with excruciating difficulty.
She couldn’t summon a second cry. Were the labored contractions of her muscles stealing away all the remaining breath in her exhausted body? Or could she just not breathe anymore?
Ruby stopped at the crater’s edge, her eye raking desperately over every square inch of the surface, but there was nothing to see except her own bloody soot-covered broken reflection atop the infinitely opaque liquid. She could see in perfect detail the long bloody cut across her face, and she couldn’t see anything of Penny.
She thought of diving in after Penny. But she could barely move; how would she be able to lift Penny out of that? If Penny couldn’t pull herself out, as became clearer with every passing microsecond, then how would Ruby, broken and useless and out of Aura and without an eye and weaponless and powerless, ever be able to rescue her?
Ruby gasped, shuddered, and gasped again, not sure if she was breathing or choking. Why was Penny the one drowning right now and not Ruby? Why was Penny being punished for Ruby’s failures? Why had—why had Penny come for her at all? Why had Penny bothered with rescuing her? WHY?
This was all Ruby’s fault this was all Ruby’s fault ALL HER FAULT ALL HER FAULT
Cinder was standing upright a short distance away, perfectly unharmed, and the look on her face told Ruby that for once, this was something she hadn’t expected, not even a little bit. She was frozen in place, staring at the Grimm pool with an expression like glass shattering, and the Maiden flames had disappeared from around her eyes. She looked like she’d forgotten all about punishing Ruby.
Ruby was shaking uncontrollably, her thoughts racing out of control. Penny was only here because she’d thought Ruby was still something worth saving. Ruby had… Ruby had tricked Penny somehow, if she still couldn’t see the truth of what Ruby was by now. That was the only thing that made sense. All of tonight was Ruby’s fault, and somehow she’d still managed to trick Penny. Without even realizing it.
The Wyvern was somehow still aloft even as it contorted itself into unnatural shapes amidst its aberrant flight, its howls of pain piercing the silence.
Ruby really was pathetic. All she was good for was getting other people hurt. Like in Amity when she’d screamed at Penny, or when she’d broken Yang’s heart in the team’s room, or when she’d flung Ciel into a lava plume, or when she’d shot Torchwick, or—or—or everything!
Ruby was a monster.
Ruby looked up, and found that Cinder’s gaze had shifted to her. But she was still frozen in place, not doing anything except staring at the scene in disbelief. And the longer Ruby met Cinder’s eyes, the more it seemed like Cinder wasn’t looking at her at all.
Finally, Ruby found her voice. What was left of it, at least.
“Throw me in.”
Cinder jerked like she’d been dealt an electric shock, and there was nothing hateful in her tone when she said, “What?”
“Please. Throw me in.” Ruby was begging without shame. “At least I’ll be suffering alongside her. Then she won’t be alone! Nothing else is gonna make this any less unfair!”
Cinder did not move. She looked like she suddenly couldn’t take her eyes off Ruby. She looked… surprised. Actually, genuinely, fully surprised from head to toe. Ruby didn’t know how that made her feel, and by now she didn’t—
And that was when a hand emerged from the pool.
Ruby’s heart thumped wildly.
This time, there was a splash. Droplets of black liquid were flung all over the place, hissing and evaporating against the cracked pavement as a shining metal hand fumbled at the edge of the pool before it found purchase on the crater’s rim. Ruby was close enough that she could see and hear servos in the hand straining to move.
Ruby couldn’t tell if the Wyvern’s pained cries were actually getting quieter, or if she was just losing the ability to pay attention to the rest of the world.
The arm attached to the hand was next to crest the surface, more strange glimmers of reflected light dancing in Ruby’s vision. And at the same moment, she thought she saw miniature tongues of fire dancing up and down the hand and the arm, giving off a glow incredibly outsized for how small the flames were. The fire was doing something, although she had no idea what. It took her several more seconds before she realized—the flames moved like an electrical current arcing up and down, and crackled just like one.
And then slowly, like an iceberg calving off a glacier but in reverse, a shape followed the hand and the arm out of the goop.
“Penny…?” Ruby whispered.
No one present moved, except for the shape of a person that was laboriously rising out of the pool. the Grimm matter clinging ominously everywhere before giving away begrudgingly and splashing back into place in the pool, like the Grimm matter itself was trying to hold anything which fell into it captive.
As the Grimm matter continued sloughing away, the figure became more and more defined, until one final, massive burst of flame burned away what remained of the Grimm goop all at once. And then Ruby was looking at Penny.
She could only be Penny, undoubtedly Penny Pallas, poised on one knee at the edge of the crater and taking up Luminous Electra from where it laid after being knocked out of her hands. Ruby never doubted for a second that the girl who emerged was Penny, because immediately Penny looked back at Ruby and opened her eyes, and her irises were just as brilliant green as they’d always been, full of focus and concern and determination. Those were Penny’s eyes, and no one else’s.
Ruby’s mind went blank with relief. Penny was okay.
But Penny hadn’t escaped the Grimm matter unscathed, and it was perfectly obvious what damage had been done.
All of Penny’s synthetic skin had been dissolved by the Grimm matter. Now the layer of her body which was her armor plating was visible all over every inch of her surface—except for the top of her head, where her carbon-polymer nanoweave hair still remained completely intact, fluttering around her face. The corrosive liquid, even in such a short exposure, had destroyed almost everything above her metal. She glimmered endlessly in the moonlight all over, like a ghost in the night. But Penny’s armor plating was still intact everywhere, and as far as Ruby could tell, the damage didn’t go any deeper.
Penny was okay. Actually okay.
Cinder was still frozen, and Emerald and Mercury were looking to her for guidance and receiving nothing.
“Penny…” Ruby murmured. She hadn’t meant to say it out loud, but Penny heard it and turned completely away from Cinder without hesitation.
Somehow, Ruby couldn’t bring herself to be worried about Penny leaving her back open to attack. Not when Cinder was rooted to the spot, watching Ruby and Penny with a neverending disbelief.
“You… you came back for me? Even after I hurt you? Even after I broke everything? Even after I killed people?” Ruby’s voice was so raw it was almost unintelligible, but Penny understood.
“Of course.” As she spoke, the metal which made up her face moved and shifted in gentle waves that were familiar to Ruby from so many moments in Penny’s workshop. The thousands of little hemispheres that made up her equivalent of facial muscles caught the light and reflected it in thousands of different directions like a silver kaleidoscope, and the sight was so beautiful that it could’ve lulled Ruby to sleep.
Then the Maiden flames erupted around Penny’s eyes again, turning that kaleidoscope to something even more joyful, turning her face to a green supernova that reminded Ruby of the deep, bright greens that abounded in their secret garden on the roof.
“I will always come back for you, Ruby,” Penny said to Ruby under the vibrant lights which she sent cascading over both of them. “No matter what.”
It was almost too painful for Penny to look at the wound that now dominated Ruby’s face. Whatever blade had dealt the blow, it had taken a diagonal path which started at her forehead and cut across her left eye, her nose, and her opposite cheek. The wound took the same path as Penny’s own facial wound which she’d received months ago in Team RSPBY’s fight against Adam.
The injury felt like nothing but Penny’s fault, and Penny’s own current injury felt insignificant in comparison, not when she could replace her synthetic skin and repair her sensors and restore her rockets while Ruby’s cut was not one that could be repaired in a workshop. Not even the best doctor in the world could save her eye.
But as powerful as the urge to blame herself for everything wrong was, Penny still had so much else which took priority. She had no idea what Ruby’s tomorrow would look like or what part she could play in it, but all that mattered right now was ensuring there was a tomorrow for Ruby.
Penny could still sense Cinder on her radar behind her, and even if she was still caught in a deep stupor, Penny would have to fight her soon. She hardly expected they’d be able to make an escape otherwise. And Ruby needed medical attention, immediately. And she needed to just… get Ruby away from that pitch-black Grimm pool, because Ruby was still kneeling at the crater’s edge, close enough that Penny was afraid a disembodied Grimm claw might spring up from its depths and snatch Ruby away.
But first, Cinder.
Penny had not opened her eyes until she was facing Ruby, and so when she turned back to Cinder with her eyes open and the green wings of fire on full display, it was the first time that Cinder had seen her as the Fall Maiden. It was also the first time Penny had seen Cinder as the Summer Maiden.
Almost immediately, their eyes met even with a sizable distance between them. A miniature eternity unfolded as the Summer Maiden and the Fall Maiden fully understood who the other was for the first time. Neither girl’s gaze wavered, green Maiden flames staring into their orange counterparts. Penny would not move from where she stood, directly between Cinder and Ruby. The Wyvern was gone now, and she had no idea what’d happened to it.
There was a noticeable difference between the two girls’ flames, something that Penny processed almost immediately. The flames around Cinder’s eyes were vicious and towering, heaving unsteadily like the tip of a bonfire snapping at the night. The flames around Penny’s eyes were smaller, more consistent in their size, much more like what might be seen crackling away in a hearth.
Penny wondered if something had happened to time which rendered her chronometer obsolete. She would stand here forever if she had to, protecting her beloved from malice and destruction with everything in her being.
But then, in a widening of Cinder’s eyes which was at first subtle and then the furthest thing from subtle, time unfroze and Cinder finally began to move again.
Cinder’s expression, at first angry, transformed into a truly unprecedented emotion that left Penny’s emotional analysis system at a complete loss. Words such as shock and anger and hurt did nothing to describe the something which thundered across Cinder’s face, twisting it into a rictus of itself as flames burst out of the cobblestones in a haphazard ring around her feet—no, not just flames, that was lava oozing out of the ground—
“TRAITOR!” Cinder roared, spittle flying from her mouth. “THIEF! COWARD! THAT POWER BELONGS TO ME!”
Her body was wreathed in flames which cast an incandescent glow over every part of her. It was so bright that Cinder’s form began to pixelate in Penny’s vision, overloading individual nodes within her photoreceptors. With the reduced resolution, it appeared as if Cinder’s corporeal body was turning into nothing but fire. Penny had to put a hand up to shield her eyes from the most direct light just to prevent damage, while Cinder’s voice echoed through the air again, vibrating with fury:
“YOU STOLE WHAT IS MINE!”
And then she launched herself at Penny.
Penny cried out. Not because she was afraid of being hurt, but because she was afraid she wouldn’t be able to protect Ruby. But as the cry left her mouth, her radar detected Ruby shifting behind her, and a moment later, an unintelligible but plainly desperate sound escaped Ruby as she unleashed a flash of silver on Cinder.
The blast was significantly smaller and dimmer than the other times Ruby had used her eyes. But it carried just far enough to envelop Cinder before she reached Penny.
A scream of pain broke the night, and through the silver Penny saw Cinder’s outline abruptly fall to the ground. The silver cleared a moment later, and Penny found herself staring at a suddenly defeated Cinder Fall, who was sprawled limply and twitching violently like she’d been given a lethal electric shock, awful tortured noises escaping her. Her hair had fallen over her face, preventing Penny from seeing whatever emotions were running through Cinder’s expression.
But Emerald and Mercury were still at the periphery of the scene, just starting to raise their weapons as they stared at the fallen form of their leader, and Penny used that opening to summon another blast of wind which picked them both up, and carried them a long, long way out of view to somewhere in the forest. It would take at least a minute for the duo to return, and that was all the time Penny needed.
She took three steps forward, closing the remaining distance. Ruby was safe behind her, still kneeling uncomfortably close to the pool but safe. Cinder didn’t respond to Penny’s footsteps. Even with no Aura sensors operational, Penny was ninety-nine-point-three percent sure Cinder’s Aura was down. She was truly defenseless.
Penny, raising Luminous Electra over Cinder and given a chance to finish her for good, hesitated.
She had never intentionally killed someone before. But Cinder Fall was too powerful to be taken prisoner—even with Aura-binding cuffs she would have full access to her Maiden powers, meaning that no prison could hold Cinder. Pragmatically, she was too dangerous to be kept alive. And yet—and yet—
Something was pinging wildly from somewhere in her memory, but trying to trace the ping just led her in digital circles. But it was something about that ping which made her hesitate, kept the blade of Luminous Electra from falling. There was so much about Cinder which she was still desperately curious about.
She’d never drawn fatal blood on the wickedly sharp edge of her blade. She knew difficult actions like this were part of being a Huntress and a protector, but…
Penny didn’t understand Cinder. She didn’t want to kill someone she didn’t understand.
Ruby’s shape on Penny’s radar shifted. Penny lowered the priority of her radar to pull away processing resources, too ensnared in the puzzle of Cinder Fall to devote more than cursory thought to why Ruby was getting closer.
And then Penny’s prediction algorithms screamed in a way that they’d never done before. The message blasted across her consciousness with a blaring immediacy that only compared to the alarms she’d heard when she was fighting for her own body in the CCT, in an entirely different era. The warning:
SHE’S NOT GETTING CLOSER TO YOU SHE’S GETTING CLOSER TO WHAT’S BEHIND YOU—
“I will always come back for you, Ruby. No matter what.”
As soon as Penny had said those words, all of Ruby’s relief was obliterated, plunging her back into acute guilt. Penny didn’t deserve to risk herself over and over again just for Ruby! It didn’t make any sense! Why would Penny do that when Ruby was so obviously, painfully beyond redemption?! Cinder had a better chance of making up for all her wrongdoings than Ruby! Anyone did! So why did Penny sound like she would never stop throwing herself in danger for Ruby?!
Penny was facing Cinder right now, preparing for another fight for no reason except to defend Ruby, and that was nothing but glaring proof of exactly how dead-set she was on dying for Ruby.
No, Ruby thought desperately in the agonizing staredown between Maidens that followed. No, Penny, don’t try to fight her just to protect me, y ou’ve already been hurt too much because of me…
It’s all my fault…
When Cinder charged at Penny, Ruby acted on sheer instinct. She didn’t even understand why she felt the silver-eyed power welling up inside her when there wasn’t a Grimm in sight; she just let it burst out of her with Penny in the center of her vision who she needed to protect. Even as it made her almost too dizzy to keep herself upright.
It was far, far from the best eyeblast she’d ever unleashed, especially with just one eye, but when she could see again, Cinder was down, and she wasn’t getting back up.
Ruby bypassed any desire to know how or why and skidded right over any feelings of relief, sinking right back into the guilt she was drowning in. The only way she could make sense of Penny’s continued belief in her was… was if Ruby had tricked Penny. Ruby must’ve tricked Penny so badly that nothing Ruby did would ever stop Penny from putting herself in danger.
How had she tricked her? With… with everything. Ruby Karyatis had never been real. Ruby Karyatis had always been a lie. All those past months of knowing Penny, this collection of misplaced cells wearing an Atlesian uniform had been a ticking timebomb luring in Penny with sweet words and happy smiles and excitement and lies about being synthetic—because Ruby wasn’t actually synthetic, that had been a lie she’d been telling Penny the entire time they knew each other, and even if Ruby hadn’t known the truth, it had still been a falsehood that made Penny care about Ruby when it wasn’t ever true. And who knew how much residual importance Ruby had in Penny’s mind because of that fake synthetic-to-synthetic connection?! Feelings had a weird habit of clinging to people’s minds, Ruby’s included, and why would Penny be any different? Maybe that feeling of you’re like me was clinging to Penny’s mind even though it was fake. How long would it take for Penny to unravel all of the lies Ruby had told her so she could stop caring about Ruby?! Months? Years? And—and, taking that long, Penny would probably die from all the risks she was taking for Ruby’s sake, before she realized the truth about Ruby…
Ruby was a monster.
Penny was standing over Cinder like she was the bigger threat and not Ruby.
Ruby needed to make Penny see that she was a monster. She needed Penny to see the truth of what she was. If she couldn’t, then Penny would just keep on getting hurt because of Ruby, over and over again.
Ruby couldn’t just stop this all right now and end herself, either. Because Penny would stop her just like in Amity. She would stop her over and over again, because Ruby had tricked her, no matter how many times Ruby tried doing this. And Ruby couldn’t change that. Penny was too strong. Penny wouldn’t let her die. Which meant, the only way Ruby could die was by Penny’s hand.
And for Penny to kill her, Ruby had to erase all the lies she’d piled up. She had to erase anything that might remind Penny of the things that had never been true about Ruby Karyatis Rose. She had to make Penny see something that undeniably had to be killed.
The Grimm pool loomed in Ruby’s vision. The more she looked at it, the more she remembered another Grimm pool from a much older time. She remembered a hissing sound that felt like it was blanketing her mind, and she remembered something swallowing her up, and she remembered a growling that could’ve only come from her own mouth, and…
She remembered the words my loyal Hound.
Ruby wasn’t a loyal hound. But she was a creature of destruction, one that wasn’t even in control of itself anymore. All she was capable of anymore was lashing out at the entire world like a rabid dog.
Rabid dogs get put down.
Ruby could finally remember who said that, long ago in the time before Atlas found her. It had been the same voice as the one who called Ruby’s scroll in Amity to tell her the truth about Penny. The one who somehow knew all about Ruby’s past.
And that voice, whoever it was, they were right. Ruby needed to be put down. Before she hurt anyone else.
Hound.
Rabid dog.
Rabid dogs get put down.
I would rather die than be like you, Penny had screamed at Ruby. That meant she already believed on some level that Ruby was better off dead. All Ruby had to do was become something with a face so horrible and awful and evil that it would make Penny see the rest of the truth, the whole truth of what Ruby was, and leave her with no choice but to kill Ruby, no matter what she thought about the Ruby from the past.
Ruby didn’t know what the Grimm matter would do to her. But she knew it would be enough. Enough to destroy herself once and for all. This wasn’t about being a weapon. It was about everything finally being over.
Maybe this would hurt, because she’d seen what it did to Penny. But maybe it wouldn’t hurt, because she didn’t feel pain. And that was just another reason she was wrong, wasn’t it? She couldn’t feel pain like everyone else in this world was supposed to. Like a monster. She was just putting a face on the monster she’d always been.
Ruby looked up at Penny, whose back was still to her.
She took in the sight of the most beautiful girl in the world one final time, who she would forever owe a thousand apologies to. If Penny was strong enough to keep her alive, then she would be strong enough to kill Ruby when she had to.
Ruby knew she would.
She hoped she would.
Now you have to kill me. Please. You’re the only one who can do it.
The Grimm pool was an inky mirror. Ruby fixed her eye on the dark reflection of a failed girl in the pristine surface, and surrendered herself.
“RUBY!”
The darkness embraced her like a long-awaited welcome.
“RUBY!” Penny screamed, but no matter how loud she screamed or how many processing resources she devoted to lunging forward or how many components of her body all acted towards the singular movement, she was too late to stop Ruby from throwing herself forward and being swallowed up by the Grimm matter.
All thoughts which might be devoted to Penny’s surroundings vanished, and suddenly the existence of Cinder and Mercury and Emerald could not have been more insignificant as she fired her rockets and flew straight for the pool. Her synthetic skin was already gone, so Penny had even less reservations about plunging back in after Ruby.
This time, she was prepared to ignore the fresh wave of alarms and the immense disorientation, but even with greater focus she was still just flailing through complete darkness in search of Ruby. Was there something about this Grimm pool which distorted spacetime and made it much larger than it appeared, or was it just so suffocatingly dense and destructive that the smallest of movements required effort like an expedition into an abyss?
Her chronometers could not encompass the period which followed without knowing where Ruby was, or what was happening to her, or—or—
Finally, finally Penny’s hands landed on something solid and soft that felt like a person, and she instinctively grasped tightly, pulling whatever she’d taken hold of towards herself, hoping that she would still recognize Ruby.
With her arms occupied, she reached for Amber’s gift again, and hoped it would be enough to power her wings and lift them both out of here.
A deep roar rocked the nonexistent world they were wrapped in, and for a moment, her rockets did nothing but strain uselessly against an immense force sucking them both down.
Penny tucked Ruby to her chest without even seeing her, holding her close enough to feel her pulse through what touch sensors remained active, and the fact that Ruby had a pulse at all was its own ecstatic realization, one which made it far easier to remember everything she loved, everything she was still fighting for—
Her rockets roared loud enough to move the planet, and they broke the surface. The Grimm matter did not yield them easily, but as soon as the black of the pool was replaced by the black of the sky, Penny knew they would escape.
And they did.
She never stopped flying, leaving Cinder Fall to an uncertain fate and carrying Ruby away on a trail of orange flames. She was not even sure where she was going. Her only intent was to put as much distance between her and the Grimm pool as she could.
Then, in midair, she fully processed the sight of Ruby in her arms, and her rockets sputtered, making them drop sharply for a moment before she regained control, staring at Ruby in horror.
The Grimm matter was… clinging to Ruby. Not dripping off like a liquid should’ve, but clinging with a gruesome stickiness all over, and not just that—it was shaping itself around her. Flowing over the contours of her body and leaving in its trail the shape of… of… something else.
“Ruby!” she said frantically, realizing that something far worse than injury was happening.
The Grimm matter overflowed Penny’s fingers and arms where she held Ruby, and once again she heard the hissing of something potent as it came into contact with bare metal, her synthetic skin already having been burned away, but she would never let go. “Ruby, you have to use your eyes, please—”
Ruby stirred in her arms.
Penny tensed. Most of Ruby’s face was obscured by Grimm matter settling over her features like a broken mask, making any expression impossible to parse, but when her uncovered eye fluttered open, the silver iris stood out to Penny like the first star in the night sky as it immediately focused on her and stayed there. The gaze spoke of intensity. What kind of intensity, Penny could not yet say.
“Ruby, can you use your eyes for me?” Penny said, staring directly into the silver. She could see one of Ruby’s hands where it was draped limply over her stomach, and her fingers were rapidly disappearing under jagged claws knitting themselves into existence around them, made of Grimm bone and gleaming in the moonlight.
“Please. Please! For both of us!”
Ruby twitched. There was a crunch which sounded… frighteningly biological. And Penny’s bio-activity sensors may have been inactive, but through her touch sensors she could feel Ruby’s pulse growing weaker.
“Ruby!”
Grimm bone was appearing everywhere, not just Ruby’s hands, sprouting from the Grimm matter with terrifying quickness, and that was when Penny heard a growl rumbling somewhere deep in Ruby’s throat.
“RUBY!”
Ruby’s other eyelid snapped open, and in the place where a silver eye had used to be was something glowing a deep blood-red.
Blake stared after the point in the distance where Penny had disappeared beyond the collapsed, smoldering remains of a building. The afterimage of two bright green flames, the exact color of Penny’s Aura, was seared into her mind.
Penny was a Maiden. Blake’s teammate was now in possession of a magical power that other people would kill for. A power that other people would stop at nothing to snatch away.
She thought of Cinder overwhelming her with endless flames in a moment which already felt years old, and wondered if there could be any hope of stopping Cinder, even with their combined strength.
She tried to concentrate on anything besides despair by bandaging a cut on her forearm she’d received when Adam had kicked her out of the bullhead. But her thoughts inevitably wandered back to the heartbreak she felt for Penny, whose first friend had been within shouting distance the entire time she was missing. But with no way for Penny to know. Until the truth was revealed in abrupt, horrific fashion.
Suddenly, a noise unlike anything Blake had ever perceived slammed into them with the force of a tidal wave, a harsh and uneven screech which seemed to come from everywhere.
She—and everyone else—traced the source immediately. The Wyvern was flinging itself around in the sky like it was under attack from something, except there was nothing. Just a riot of shadows and embers twisting in the sky.
With two hands firmly placed over her Faunus ears, Blake stared at the winged Grimm and tried to make sense of its behavior. It wasn’t her that put the pieces together, though—it was Weiss.
“Isn’t that… Isn’t that what happened when Penny tried to use her Semblance on that Beowolf in Mountain Glenn?” Weiss said, furrowing her brow.
And that triggered a cascade of memories from what felt like eons ago, of another Grimm that’d suddenly become fatally self-destructive. To see it on this scale, though, in the form of a thrashing, shrieking Wyvern that could destroy a kingdom…
For the first time ever, Blake found herself wondering, was it possible to feel bad for a Grimm? She knew perfectly well that they were soulless creatures of destruction which had no will, just an unexplainable and unquenchable need to hurt people. They were the one thing that humans and Faunus could universally find common ground on fighting. The Wyvern was actively destroying the school and causing untold deaths. So why did Blake feel like something was terribly wrong as she watched the beast’s throes?
But then, something changed. The Wyvern’s frenzied struggle with itself slowed, and it began to move in a mostly controlled manner again, beating its wings madly as it… it… flew away from Blake. Away from Beacon. Abandoning the carnage and destruction that it’d sowed all night long. And it showed no sign of slowing, not even as its form grew fainter and fainter within the smoke which covered every part of Beacon by now.
There was nothing they could do, and nothing they wanted to do. Blake tried not to think about how a Grimm this enormous might try to destroy itself, if the endpoint of this meltdown was the same as the Beowolf’s. Instead, she tried to concentrate on this being irrefutable proof that Penny was still out there, still fighting, still doing something.
They waited. A Grimm howled somewhere. And they waited. And then—
And then Blake heard something. Her Faunus hearing let her pick it up before almost anyone else, but it wasn’t the familiar sound of rockets she was hoping for.
It was… footsteps.
Blake drew Gambol Shroud before Yang had even heard anything, but she trusted her partner’s senses, and cocked Ember Celica. Moments later, she was glad she did.
Slow, uneven, heavy footsteps reached Yang’s ears, their echo arriving far ahead of whoever was making the sound. None of them could see anything through air which was too hazy with dust from the tower’s collapse and smoke from the endless fires.
The others followed Blake and Yang’s lead, a chorus of safeties being clicked off as they realized this was an arrival none of them were expecting. Yang strained to see through the haze, trying to make out the shape of whatever was approaching. Aside from the sound of footsteps, the night had gone deathly quiet. Even the Grimm had ceased to make noise. Yang had the weirdest sensation that even the dust was about to stop swirling through the air.
And then a wail cut through the night, startlingly close.
Yang’s heart thumped wildly, adrenaline flooding her veins, and she automatically dropped into a ready stance even though there was still nothing to actually see. But that was Ruby’s voice. She would’ve known it anywhere. And Ruby sounded… she didn’t just sound pained in the way a wail would cause. She sounded like something had broken.
The wail was abruptly cut off by a much louder growl, one that made Yang gasp as she as she abruptly remembered a Grimm in the woods years and years ago, biting off her flesh arm and sounding just like that. She kept her arms up even as her prosthetic began to shake in a way she couldn’t hope to control.
“RUBY!” Yang screamed, edging closer to Blake and trying to pour every bit of her soul into her lungs in hopes of getting her sister’s attention. “Where are you?!”
The growl cut off abruptly, and there was nothing more.
“Ruby. Please. Just, please, say something!” Yang checked the rest of her allies, hoping any of them could see something she couldn’t, but everyone was just as mystified and afraid as she was.
“I can’t lose you again!” she screamed into the night.
“Yang.”
Yang froze.
It was Ruby’s voice, and it wasn’t Ruby’s voice. It sounded garbled, crackly, like a bad connection breaking up or someone speaking through a layer of mud, and it carried a hiss that made the hairs on the back of her neck stand straight up.
A shape appeared in the haze. And Yang could only call it a shape because if it was a person, something was horribly wrong. It already looked too tall to be Ruby even before she was close enough for Yang to fully see her. The footsteps were just getting louder, and Yang could hear something crunching and scraping with every step.
“...Ruby?” she said much more quietly, much more scared, suddenly lost in the void between the world she knew and the world her senses were showing her.
And then Yang’s baby sister, or what had once been Yang’s baby sister, came into view.
A ragged noise like a wounded animal spilled out of Yang, and she collapsed to her knees as she watched Ruby emerge from a campus turned to ashes just as Ruby had been turned to something else—
Ruby was a Grimm.
Yang’s lower half lurched, and she only avoided emptying the contents of her stomach all over the pavement because there was literally nothing in there to empty. But even with nothing left, her body was still trapped in convulsive motions for what felt like an eternity. When she focused again, she was looking into the eyes of a nightmare.
The upper half of Ruby’s face was covered by a Grimm bone plate which wrapped around her eyes and rested atop a shivering, undulating black liquid. The bone and the fluid was interrupted only by scattered patches of deathly pale skin and Ruby’s eyes—one silver and one somehow red—which glared out from deep within the liquid shadows drowning her face.
The ever-shifting Grimm liquid continuously caught the moonlight and reflected it in new ways, making it appear as if tears were streaming down her baby sister’s cheeks.
“Ruby…” Yang reached out jerkily, a sob leaving her like it’d been building for years. She couldn’t tell if it was her own terrified breathing she was hearing, or everyone else’s.
A set of canine fangs far too large for a human mouth curled out and over Ruby’s blackened lips, glinting as her maw snapped open and closed. Her hair swayed in a wild mane behind her, the familiar reddish-black color marred by streaks of pure white. And the hair was twitching of its own accord, entirely independent of the rest of the body’s movements, as if the Grimm liquid that mostly coated Ruby had managed to even saturate her hair. Atop her head, two pointed canine ears now emerged.
Ruby’s legs were bending the wrong way, now turned digitigrade, and ending in a set of armored paws that left deep scratches in the ground with every unbalanced step she took towards Yang. More bony armor covered her limbs, bleached white that couldn’t have been starker against the deep black fluid which rippled underneath and gave the extra mass and length to Ruby’s body to make her tower at least a foot over Pyrrha, the tallest member of their group. But above the knees and below the neck, Ruby’s shape was nearly the same as a human’s, just… larger.
She moved in a hunched stance, Grimmlike clawed hands snatching at empty air while silver and red eyes roamed between everyone. She was also twitching all over, and it could be any given body part that shook at random, like a fleabitten dog. There was something dripping from her fangs, and Yang had no way to tell if it was more of the strange dark liquid that flowed over her form, or just… blood.
It wasn’t a Chill. It was something worse. Something not even the writers of the most gruesome fairytales could’ve dreamed up. It should’ve been unrecognizable to Yang. It should’ve been impossible to tell there was a person hidden inside that Grimm. But… Yang could tell on sight.
Ruby stopped, baring her teeth at the group as a loud hiss escaped her mouth. She shook her head violently, and then blood-red and silver eyes met Yang, and stayed fixed on her.
Yang still hadn’t gotten back up. She was rooted to the spot, her knees welded to the ground as she stared up at Ruby as if she was the god she worshipped delivering the most unkind judgment possible upon her. Tears fell from her eyes faster than she ever would’ve thought possible. And everyone but Yang kept their weapons trained on her.
“Yang…”
There was never any doubt in Yang’s mind that this was Ruby, but for everyone else—Blake and Weiss and Team JNPR and the White Fang who remembered Ruby from Mountain Glenn—all confusion about who they were facing vanished as Ruby’s voice hissed and stuttered and whined out from the jaws of the beast. Twisted and warped but still Ruby’s voice.
Yang knew that was her baby sister trapped in there right there somewhere under a malevolent entity that’d taken her hostage in her own body. She could see all the little traces of Ruby that not even the horrendous Grimm liquid could drown. Traces of Ruby that Yang was sure nothing could drown. Yang could see her sister and Yang was going to save her.
Or die trying.
Notes:
I hope I made it clear enough in my descriptions that Ruby's Hound design is different from the canon Hound design. The difference is partly because of her history of being experimented on, and partly because she was pulled out of the goop mid-transformation.
Next week, Chapter 69: Drowning
Chapter 69: Drowning
Notes:
Well, happy chapter 69, I guess? Any "haha funny number chapter" joke I could make beyond that just feels immensely inappropriate given the subject matter.
Content warning for this chapter (click this text to reveal):
Self-destructive behavior, suicidal actions and attempts, begging someone for a mercy kill, blood, body horror, autonomy issues, self-hatred, attack on bodily autonomy. Basically, This entire chapter is a suicide attempt. Please be aware of that before reading this.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Moments ago
I’m sorry.
I’m sorry.
I’m sorry.
Penny’s senses recalibrated, and she found herself lying in a crater inside a half-collapsed dormitory—but exactly which dormitory this was, it was impossible to say by this point.
Ruby, why?
She was crying even before she was aware of it, or rather doing the closest to crying that she was capable of. Which was to shake soundlessly and as involuntary whimpering noises fell from her lips. She did not want to get up. Even though she knew that if she did not move—
“Penny…”
The whining, growling, panting voice of Ruby (but not Ruby) echoed off the debris, bouncing into Penny’s audioreceptors from every direction.
Why did you do this, Ruby?
Penny desperately did not want to look up. She had to look up.
When she did, something inside her short-circuited.
Ruby—except not Ruby—stood there in the mouth of the gaping hole made in the building where she’d hurled Penny through, her form silhouetted by the full moon rising in the sky directly behind her. Her hair had somehow come loose from its braid, waving freely as a black mass that blotted out the sky behind her. The moonlight threw her face into such deep shadow that without adjusting her photoreceptors, all Penny could see of Ruby’s face was one very faint silver iris and one painfully incandescent red eye glaring at her.
“Kill… The… Monster…”
Ruby-not-Ruby’s voice was distorted, and Penny wasn’t sure if the distortion came from the endless echo or from the Grimm matter that was clogging up Ruby’s mouth and throat and nose—
“Kill. The. Monster.” There was another series of gruesome crunches, and Ruby’s ankles bent in a way they were never supposed to as the Grimm material surrounding them elongated and flattened, like a piece of taffy being pulled apart. Then, she stalked into the remains of the building. Towards Penny.
“Kill The Monster Kill The Monster Kill The Monster Kill The Monster Kill—”
Ruby-not-Ruby’s voice was quickening, her words starting to run together like they were melting. Luminous Electra had come jarred loose from her grip sometime in the crash-landing; now it was lying beside Penny, but within reach. Instinctively, her hand went for it, closing her fingers around the hilt and lifting it across her body to shield herself.
Or, trying to shield herself. Because, no matter how physically sound her limbs were, Penny suddenly could not find the strength needed to wield Luminous Electra properly. All she could do was hold her blade with inexplicably convulsing arms as she stared into Ruby’s eyes framed by her hair fluttering wildly around her face in an untameable, tangled mess. There was Grimm matter dripping off the strands at their tips.
Actually, no. Penny knew exactly why she was struggling to raise Luminous Electra. It was because everything about this action felt like it went against every single bit of data in her code. There was no protocol, no subroutine in her body which could prepare for the scenario of fighting for my life against Ruby who is being puppeted by a Grimm.
“KilltheMonsterKilltheMonsterKilltheMonsterKilltheMonsterKilltheMonster—”
Ruby was close enough now that if Luminous Electra were at its full length, it would be pressing into Ruby’s—not skin, but the surface of the… the goop.
Penny was still almost flat on her back, and Ruby was crouching down in front of her, perched on the tips of her… paws.
“KilltheMonsterKILLTHEMONSTERKILLTHEMONSTERKILLTHEMONSTERKILL—”
Penny tried to quell her spiking core temperatures amidst the increasingly frenzied, frantic voice that was all but overwhelming her now, and came to a silent resolution. If Ruby wanted to kill Penny, that was okay. After all, it was exactly what she deserved.
“Ruby,” Penny whispered, because she could think of nothing else to say. “I am so sorry…”
Being torn to shreds by those wickedly gleaming claws would be a better fate for Penny, than having to live with the fact that she’d just broken the most important promise of her life and it had been all for nothing.
A promise to never use her Semblance on someone without their permission, a promise made especially because of Ruby and what Ruby needed to hear, a promise Penny had once told herself she would rather die than break… Broken. For nothing.
Nothing.
Penny couldn’t save Ruby. Not even when Penny became something terrible, something she’d promised she would never be. And now she was worse than a computer virus, and Ruby was—was—Ruby was—
“KILLKILLKILLKILL NOW NOW NOW NOW—”
By now, Ruby’s voice was an agonizing, bestial screech that had barely any connection to a human’s voice. And of course Ruby saw Penny as a monster. This was Penny’s fault, after all! It had to be. She had broken the rule she was never supposed to break, and the universe was punishing her by taking away the autonomy of the girl she loved more than anything. And Penny had to live with this cruel lesson on respecting autonomy.
If there was no way to free Ruby from this, she wished there was at least some way to join Ruby in being taken over by an outside force, some way to make it so that she was suffering just as much as Ruby. She would’ve invited the CCT virus back into her body at this moment, if such a thing was possible. At least they would be suffering alongside one another. It would be the only thing that could bring any semblance of fairness to this situation.
Whatever objections her logic core might be giving in this moment, she could not hear them. She felt a thousand miles away from every other part of her body.
Ruby growled, and clambered up onto Penny, pushing Luminous Electra out of the way and forcing Penny down until her back was pressing into something which would not budge. Whatever the Grimm material was, it had made Ruby significantly more massive, and Penny found herself struggling to move even with her robotic strength. Although… how much of that weakness was because of all the damage today had wrought on her body? Or because of how much she hated herself right now?
Ruby’s claws scrabbled all over the bare metal of Penny’s body as she pulled herself forward, until the Grimm-bone mask which was now grafted to her face was staring down directly into Penny’s eyes, the silver iris unfocused and the red Grimm eye roving over Penny’s face. Somehow, the Grimm liquid covering Ruby had reached a more stable state, because now it barely hissed wherever it came in contact with Penny as Ruby pinned her down.
For a moment, there was no sound except Ruby’s frenzied panting and the helpless whirring of Penny’s internals and the squishing of the Grimm liquid, and then Ruby leaned sideways, pressing herself against Luminous Electra in a way that felt eerily reminiscent of their bladelock in Amity Arena when she’d done just the same—except, now, Ruby-not-Ruby wasn’t pushing her face into Penny’s sword—she was pushing her neck into it, and she was pushing herself into the cutting edge of the blade—
Horror dawned on Penny as she processed the sight of her blade just starting to sink into the Grimm liquid that made up Ruby’s neck, cleaving a furrow like she was cutting through something solid.
“MONSTERMONSTERMONSTERKILLKILLKILL—”
“NO!” Penny yanked away Luminous Electra, slamming it into the ground beside her and resolving to never lift it again. She had just reached a terrible realization of who Ruby was referring to each time she growled the word monster. It wasn’t Penny.
“Kill Ruby now!” Ruby snapped, the Grimm liquid on her body swirling agitatedly, making every part of her shimmer eerily. She leaned even closer to Penny’s face, until her eyes were just inches apart from Penny’s photoreceptors. Her breath steamed furiously in the cold night air. “Kill Ruby now now now NOW NOW NOW!”
The red Grimm eye was pulsing slowly. Not just in luminosity, but physically pulsing in and out, expanding and contracting in a drawn-out rhythm, like a very slow heartbeat. In direct contrast, Ruby’s remaining silver eye was heartbreakingly flat, all of its shine eroded away. In every memory Penny held of Ruby before tonight, her silver had always appeared vibrantly, ethereally liquid. But now all of that fluidity was gone, leaving deadened rings that looked like they were on the verge of rusting. As if the eye had been sucked dry by the Grimm fluid quivering and lapping ceaselessly at the iris’s edges, perpetually on the verge of drowning it.
When Penny refused to move, Ruby continued in a marginally less rushed growl, her voice falling just a little
“Ruby hurt you! Ruby hurt you! Ruby hurt you hurt you hurt you hurt you hurt you—” Her voice stuttered over the next words, sounding for a moment much nearer to the voice Penny was intimately familiar with. “Ruby said Penny was a w-w-weapon. Ruby was wrong Ruby was wrong Ruby was wrong RUBY WAS WRONG Penny isn’t a weapon Penny will never be a weapon never never never NEVERNEVERNEVER.”
For just a moment, the Grimm liquid receded from Ruby’s silver eye, allowing Penny to see the white marred with thin black veins surrounding her iris. Both of Ruby’s eyes seemed like they were seeing nothing at all, and also like they were seeing every aspect and detail of Penny, all at once.
Ruby’s head twitched violently, causing loose strands of hair to fall over her eyes like a ragged curtain. “Ruby is wrong. Wrong wrong wrong wrongwrongwrongWRONGWRONGWRONGWRONG—”
Abruptly, one clawed hand shot out, and Ruby’s wingspan being larger than Penny’s meant there was no way for her to keep Luminous Electra out of Ruby’s reach. In the cycle of a processor, Ruby-not-Ruby’s claws were in a vise-grip on Luminous’s hilt, the bony protrusions clamping down over Penny’s fingers and trapping the sword in both of their hands.
“Ruby is a monster! Ruby has to die!”
“No. No!” Penny shook her head wildly. Try as she might, she could not pry Luminous Electra out of Ruby’s grip. The Grimm liquid had given her immense strength which Penny could barely match. “You are not a monster, Ruby! Even if you look like this, I know you are not a Grimm!” She raised her other hand to push the hair out of Ruby’s face so she could look into her eyes again—that eye contact felt more important than a great many other things right now. She tried to ignore how the Grimm liquid clung to her tarnished metal fingers with something that could almost be called desperation before it slipped back into the morass covering Ruby. “You've got a heart, and a soul; I can feel it!”
“Wrong!” Ruby shook her head over and over again wildly, sending drops of Grimm liquid flying, and batted away Penny’s hand. “Wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong WRONGWRONGWRONG!”
Then suddenly, the voice which emerged from the fanged mouth was not Ruby’s. Instead, it was a perfect recreation of Penny’s voice. Specifically, Penny’s voice, loud and angry, saying words that Penny said hours ago which she wished she could take back more than anything.
“I would rather DIE than be like you!”
Penny gasped, and the sheer guilt and pain she felt from hearing her own hurtful words sent a temporary electrical disruption throughout her body—a disruption which lasted just long enough for Ruby to yank Luminous Electra back towards her neck. But Penny regained control of herself just before the blade would’ve struck its target, and then they were in another stalemate, Penny being strong enough to stay the blade but not strong enough to pull it away. All she could do was hold Luminous Electra in place, and shake violently from the horror of knowing what her words had done to Ruby.
“Penny was right. Ruby is a monster.” Ruby’s voice was once again Ruby’s voice—or at least as much as it could be while she was drowning in her own body. “Ruby was always a monster. Ruby was always a monster monster monster MONSTER inside. Now Ruby is a monster monster monster MONSTER outside too.” The word monster seemed like a parasite living in her mouth—once spoken, it had to recur in her mouth in several rapid echoes before she could stumble to the next word.
And then Ruby tried to yank her neck towards Luminous Electra, but Penny’s prediction algorithms had anticipated that. Her free arm was ready, shooting out to hook around Ruby’s neck and hold her close, keeping her alive for just a little longer.
“No more tricking Penny! No more tricking anyone!”
One of Penny’s arms was protecting Ruby from her weapon, and the other arm was protecting her weapon from Ruby.
“Penny kills monsters. Kill this monster. Please. Please please pleasepleasepleasePLEASEPLEASEPLEASE—” Ruby’s cracked, and crumbled into nothing but a plaintive whine. “Please!”
“Ruby…” Penny whispered, and then she could only move her mouth silently because her processors couldn’t keep up with the agony of everything—there was just… too much, and her words were far ahead of her thoughts. There was a tangle of implications and hints and meanings she had to work through before she said anything else, and her systems were already overwhelmed.
“Destroy this monster.” Ruby twitched all over. “Waiting to be gone…” She tried to push herself towards the blade again, but Penny held fast. “Gone gone gone gone forever. Waiting for it. Wanting…” Another full-body twitch, another fruitless shove towards Luminous Electra. “Drooling… Craving… Tasting…”
Those eyes, those jaws, those claws, they were filled with hunger. Acute, desperate, burning hunger, the kind of hunger that Penny had only seen in a normally-skittish wild animal that was starving to the point of being willing to attack a person to get something in its stomach. The kind of hunger that Penny had seen in exactly one other person, just hours ago in a memorial garden.
Penny finally found the words to continue.
“Ruby… You did this because you wanted to appear like how you believe you are inside? And you hoped that I would kill you, if you made yourself unrecognizable enough?” She wasn’t even sure if Ruby would comprehend her—she had no idea how much Ruby comprehended any of this—but she had to ask.
Ruby growled. Except, this wasn’t an angry growl or a warning growl. Instead… it sounded like a pleased growl. Exactly the kind of sound Cinder had made when she had been trying to convince Penny to join her. “Penny is smart. Penny understands.”
Penny felt as if every wire inside her body was unspooling, leaving her as nothing but a pile of empty circuits underneath a tangle as hopeless as Ruby’s hair. She didn’t understand.
Only one of Ruby’s arms was occupied with holding Luminous Electra, and now she lifted the other, bringing her claws up to Penny’s face. Then, sharp, glinting bones were trailing across Penny’s cheek with a delicateness she couldn’t possibly have anticipated. Ruby’s touch was so light that there was barely a scraping sound even though the claws were in direct contact with the now-entirely-exposed metal of Penny’s cheek. Her hand ghosted up and down her cheek several times with the same improbable gentleness, and finally came to a halt at her temples.
“Penny is good,” Ruby growled. “Penny deserves all the good. Good good good no bad no bad no bad no bad no Ruby no Ruby no Ruby forever.”
It was impossible for Penny to ignore how much larger the Grimm matter made Ruby’s hands, nearly the size of Penny’s head. The Grimm matter had taken the shape of thick, almost paw-like digits which were still separated enough to retain the dextrousness of a human hand, and each Grimm claw which sprouted from her fingers could’ve been a weapon all on its own. The claw which seemed to correspond to her thumb sat far lower on her hand than the other claws, so much so that it was more aligned with her wrist. She seemed capable of caving in Penny’s armored exterior with those hands. And yet, she wasn’t.
“Ruby isn’t good. Ruby isn’t worthy of Penny. Not worthy not worthy not worthy not worthyNOTWORTHY—”
“Ruby, please understand, your life is still worth living! I promise!” Penny was in the depths of despair; how could she deliver this message to her love who had surrendered her entire body to destruction, in the belief that she wasn’t—
Oh. Oh, no.
A truly awful realization slammed into Penny, harder the impact of being thrown into the ground after Ruby’s transformation. She knew exactly what had pushed Ruby over the edge.
It had been Penny’s decision to use her Semblance on Ruby. By intruding on Ruby’s autonomy—something Penny had promised she would never do to anyone, something which she had said she would rather die than do—she had made Ruby do this to herself.
Ruby heard that promise, when Penny made it. Ruby knew Penny meant every word of that promise. She’d seen how agitated and horrified Penny was at just the thought of compromising someone else’s autonomy.
Ruby had been right there in the CCT beside Penny, and she’d witnessed Penny suffering the consequences of an invasion on her own autonomy. She’d seen how awful it made Penny feel and how long afterward the struggle to recover was.
And then, after all that, Penny had used her Semblance on Ruby. How could Ruby not see it as the most spiteful insult possible to her personhood? Using Ghost on her was effectively the same as Penny telling Ruby, you are not a person. You are not deserving of the dignity that I would give even to my worst enemy. Your personhood does not matter to me.
And after that, how could Ruby do anything but believe she was a monster? After she’d been told as such through the actions of the girl who meant the world to her? Of course. Of course.
Even Penny’s logic core found this to be the most plausible sequence of events. As a result, Logic was feeling something it didn’t often feel—regret. Even if there had been little choice of what to do in the moment, neither logic nor Penny had anticipated that this would be the result of using Ghost on Ruby.
Penny’s core temperature was spiking, but something about her position was keeping her primary fans from spinning up smoothly, as if there was something lodged in them, and it produced a strange uneven scraping sound somewhere deep inside which sounded like her body doing its best to pry itself apart.
But, in a way, all this was strangely calming. Because now she knew what she would do.
“No,” Penny said. “I will not kill you, Ruby. You deserve to live. I promise with my entire battery and soul, that I will not.”
It was impossible to parse the emotions in Ruby’s face with the Grimm matter and the mask disguising so much, but Penny heard the pitch of Ruby’s breathing change abruptly, and she felt Ruby’s hands tense, and she saw the ever-dripping Grimm ears atop her head fold themselves completely flat.
“Kill…?” Ruby said. The growl was gone from her voice, and it was the most she’d sounded like herself since her fall into the liquid. “Kill? Kill? Kill? Killkillkillkillkill?”
“No.” Penny did not let her gaze waver, never looking away and taking solace in what little shades of Ruby still shone through the Grimm. “You can kill me, or destroy, or maim, or tear me to shreds. You can do whatever you want to me, but I will not hurt you in the slightest. No matter what. This is what I deserve.”
“Kill me! KILL ME! KILL ME KILL ME KILLMEKILLMEKILLMENOWNOWNOW! ” The growl was back in Ruby’s voice, frantic and demanding and a thousand other things that might have seemed threatening if—
“I love you,” Penny said.
Ruby roared.
It was a crash of thunder which shook Penny to the depths of her core, making her Aura generator pulse aberrantly for just a moment. In her consciousness, it was the loudest sound of the night. It was a sound that could’ve ripped apart the sky, if Ruby had lifted her head. But Penny did not blink even as her vision vibrated, nor did she flinch in the face of fangs poised to tear into her.
And then Ruby lunged, all the remaining space between them vanishing as her maw opened inhumanly wide, filling Penny’s vision with nothing but fangs and darkness, and—and—
Nothing. Ruby’s jaws closed around her head, fangs scrabbling and scraping against metal, but the actual strength she put into the bite was… nothing near what Penny had closed her eyes in preparation for. It was barely enough to leave scratches.
After a period of forty-nine seconds in which Penny remained still and the strength of Ruby’s bite never increased, Ruby pulled back. She tilted her head, studying Penny in a way so similar to so many other head tilts she’d done over the course of their time knowing each other. Of course, because everything about Ruby’s appearance was now wrong, the head tilt went far beyond the angle humans were capable of, accompanied by another awful crunch which didn’t seem to affect Ruby in the slightest. Ruby didn’t even seem to have heard the sound of something breaking and reforming as she stared at Penny.
“Why? Whywhywhywhywhy? Why won’t you kill me?” she whined, shrinking away.
“Why won’t you kill me?” Penny said. It hurt her on an atomic level to see Ruby backing away from her like a cornered animal afraid of being injured, but she had made her choice. She knew what she would not do to Ruby. “You are one of the most important people in my life, Moonbeam. I already hurt you immeasurably today. You would be justified in killing me. How could I ever do worse?”
A whimper slipped out of Ruby’s mouth, and then she scrambled back wildly without a single regard for what was behind her, stumbling over and through debris and never looking away from Penny. Or more specifically, Penny’s hands.
“NO! Ruby doesn’t deserve help! Penny deserves help! Ruby needs to DIE!”
“Ruby—” Penny reached forward, but the motion made Ruby twitch violently, repeatedly. The convulsions wracked her body for far longer than any time before.
“No!” Ruby backed into the remains of a wall which could not be removed, and she flung her arm behind her, reducing the obstacle to rubble in an instant. “No no no no no NONONONONONONO!”
Ruby’s shrieking denials may as well have been a denial of everything. She threw back her head, and unleashed a howl that reached to the stars.
Somehow, it was a sound which sent more fear surging through Penny’s circuits than Ruby’s deafening roar had done. This sound terrified Penny for different reasons—it was far sadder, filled with the deepest anguish, and also far more frustrated. It was the sound of a being that wanted to be finished with the world.
Penny tried to pull herself onto her feet, but it was a painfully slow process, her gyroscopes sluggish to react to the sudden motion after she’d just convinced herself that she might never move again.
And as soon as Ruby spotted Penny’s movement, she cut off her howl and ripped a twisted, jagged I-beam out of the ground. Then she reared back, easily handling it in Grimm arms before hurling the beam at Penny. Actually, not at Penny—at the wreckage of the building above Penny, triggering an avalanche.
As several tons of building materials crashed down around and on Penny in a chaotic mess that she couldn’t dodge, Ruby turned and sprinted into the night, disappearing into the smoke and the haze all too fast.
“RUBY!” Penny screamed uselessly. She had no reason to hope for a reply, but even so, when she only received silence as a response, she buckled in on herself, curling up into a small metal ball as best as she could. She didn’t want to ever move again.
Penny was left alone under the wreckage. The collapse had not physically harmed her, but she had never cared less about that.
She could not move, and it had nothing to do with the debris burying her. Her gyroscopes were entirely still, unable to activate because there was no processing power to allocate to them. Too much was devoted to the emotions which Penny was generating and feeling and deserving to be feeling and drowning in. Guilt, and despair, and self-recrimination, and hopelessness, and so many other things that made her feel as if she was even more of an irredeemable monster than Ruby.
Because she was!
It seemed like a suitable punishment for Penny that she’d lost all the synthetic skin which allowed her to blend in and be normal. Now the world would see her for exactly what she was—something that didn’t deserve to be a person.
Penny would have to move at some point. The circumstances insisted on it. There were still people who needed help. She would need time to move the debris aside and extricate herself. But she couldn’t do any of that right now. She couldn’t. She physically, literally could not. But for a few more minutes, Penny had to let herself be lost in the despair pounding all throughout her body like something hammering away at her circuits, because there was nothing else she was capable of right now.
Currently
Yang rose slowly on suddenly protesting knees, holding up her hands in what she hoped would be seen as a display of nonaggression. She never took her eyes off Ruby, and Ruby never took her eyes off her.
“Ruby. It’s okay,” she said, the most stupefying lie of today. She had no idea how it was going to get better, but she would make herself believe it somehow, for Ruby.
“Not okay…”
Even when Yang stood up, Grimm Ruby still dwarfed her. She swallowed, and tried not to let the terror show on her face anymore as she took a step forward. She tried to keep her head high, and told herself, If Ruby wants to hurt me, I’ll let her. This is all my fault.
“You’re not okay?” Yang repeated. There were a thousand different ways to interpret that, and she ended up going for the interpretation that added the most stress. “You’re… are you hurting right now?” If Ruby, the girl with no sense of pain, was hurting—
“No.” Ruby’s voice on its own would’ve been forceful, but the gravelly amplifying effect of the Grimm meant the sound waves practically bulldozed a path through Yang’s chest.
“Ruby is not okay. Ruby is a monster.”
Yang’s heart clenched and stuttered. It… it sounded like Ruby. Not just with its voice, but with what it was actually saying. What it meant, it sounded like Ruby’s worst anxieties and fears vocalized and realized.
“Ruby is a monster. Ruby is a monster. Monster monster monster—”
“No, you aren’t!” Yang interrupted fiercely, clenching her fists in determination. “Never. You’ll always be my sister! We’ll… we’ll get you out of there, I promise!”
But something about Yang’s choice of words made Ruby shake her head violently, up and down and side to side and all around, like a dog shaking water—no, NO, Yang would not make any more mental comparisons like that, because Ruby wasn’t some untameable beast! Even when she’d been swallowed up by an incomprehensible Grimm, she was still just a girl! She wasn’t a dog! She was just Ruby!
“No! No! NononononononoNO!”
And then Ruby sprang forwards, closing the last bit of distance between the sisters, but it wasn’t an attack. Even as Yang heard Blake and Weiss gasp sharply and simultaneously in expectation of something unthinkable, Yang didn’t budge an inch, or even raise her own weapons.
And her trust was borne out to be right when Ruby stopped just short of attacking her, and instead fell back on her haunches in a way that was heartbreakingly… heartbreakingly inhuman and not at all something a human should’ve been able to do.
“Monsters hurt people monsters hurt people Ruby hurt Yang today Ruby hurt Yang Ruby hurt Ruby is a monster—”
And then, her words momentarily trailing off into a frantic, unintelligible noise, she leaned forward, lowering her head and bringing it close enough that Yang could’ve reached out and brushed her fingers against the pointed ears that Ruby never had before. “Ruby is a monster Ruby is a monster MONSTERMONSTER MONSTERRUBYMONSTERRUBYHURTYANG RUBYHURT YANG—” She was nudging even closer, nosing towards—towards—
Yang’s prosthetic arm.
And suddenly, Yang understood what Ruby was trying to say, with heartbreaking clarity. She looked back at her teammates and mouthed, it’s okay, before she closed the last bit of distance between herself and the crouching form of her sister and reached out with her prosthetic arm towards Ruby’s rippling face.
Ruby’s reaction was immediate. With a piercing whine, she rubbed the side of her face against Yang’s prosthetic, shedding… something which was dark onto the metal, which evaporated instantly. “Ruby hurt Yang. Ruby’s fault Yang lost arm.”
Yang was crying freely now, and trying not to remember too much of that day in the woods when she’d gone too far searching for lost family, and ended up losing much more of herself in the desperate quest to get anything back. Ruby knew why Yang had been in those woods that day—looking for her baby sister she didn’t yet know was a sister. A fact which Ruby knew because Yang had told her herself today. Which meant it was Yang’s fault that Ruby blamed herself for this—
“You didn’t hurt me, Ruby! You never did! You were lost, and sure, I was looking for you, but that’ll never, ever mean it was your fault!”
The Grimm that had taken Yang’s arm hadn’t looked anything like Ruby did. It’d just been an ordinary Beowolf, one that was cut down into nothingness by Uncle Qrow’s scythe a few seconds after it’d sunk its teeth into Yang’s arm. It was the kind of Beowolf that Yang had killed a thousand times as a Huntress-in-training. There was only thing that Beowolf had in common with the unthinkable human-beast fusion puppeting Ruby’s body and twisting her desires. The one commonality was the growl, a growl that could’ve come from countless numbers of Grimm. But Yang didn’t know how to convince Ruby—
“Ruby isn’t a worthy sister.” Ruby growled it with such heartbreaking conviction. “Ruby said bad things to Yang. Bad bad bad bad bad evil evil EVIL EVIL BAD BAD things Ruby broke Yang’s heart Ruby broke family’s hearts Ruby broke everything Ruby bad Ruby bad Ruby BADBADBADBADBAD!”
Ruby, not worthy of being a sister to Yang? No, she was wrong, she had it backwards, Yang wasn’t worthy of being a sister to her—
“Ruby was always bad!” Ruby opened her jaws wide, so wide, far wider than a human would’ve been able to open them, and Yang found herself staring into inky black depths which easily could’ve swallowed up her head before biting it off in one vicious snap of her fangs. Yang would’ve let her do that, if it was what Ruby wanted.
Yang heard Blake whisper something behind her, but she couldn’t make it out. Too much of her attention was on Ruby, and none of it could be taken away. Yang knew everyone had their weapons raised and loaded, ready to defend against Ruby. But even though her own nerves were also on a razor’s edge, it was a very different kind of terror she found herself balanced on.
Ruby’s two clawed hands closed around Yang’s arm, the points of the Grimm bone clacking sharply against the prosthetic. With a shaky motion which would’ve been impossibly restrained and precise for any Grimm, Ruby guided it towards her open maw.
“Ruby is a monster monster monster monstermonstermonstermonster Huntresses kill monsters monstersmonstersmonstersmonsters Yang is a Huntress.”
The gauntlet attached to Yang’s prosthetic was almost entirely engulfed by Ruby’s mouth, and she wasn’t letting go. In fact, she was clutching it even harder. Staring dead into Yang’s eyes. Yang had never seen that silver iris look so dull, and she’d never seen the red eye of a Grimm look so… alive.
“Kill Ruby.”
Yang’s heart seized. She tried to yank her arm away, only to be held fast by Ruby’s grasp, which was suddenly nothing but immense strength. “No! I won’t hurt you, Ruby!”
Ruby snarled, a terribly loud sound that drew a collective flinch from everyone except Yang. “KILL THIS MONSTER! KILL THIS MONSTER KILL THIS MONSTER KILLKILLKILLKILLKILL KILL MONSTERKILLMONSTERKILLMONSTERNOWMONSTERBADBADBADRUBY BAD!” Her grip tightened so perilously that the claws produced a shrieking, scraping sound as they scratched against Yang’s prosthetic, leaving stark scores in the paint.
“I won’t. I won’t.” Yang couldn’t match the strength of a Grimm-strengthened Ruby, but she had another way out. She took an unsteady breath, and shot the ground with her other gauntlet. The abrupt force of the recoil was enough to free her from Ruby’s claws, sending her flying backwards while Ruby stumbled forwards, trying and failing to snatch her out of the air.
Yang landed on her feet. Barely. “When I said I love you just the way you are, Ruby, that included this—the—whatever happened to you! I still love you and I’m not going to hurt you no matter what you look like!”
“No!” Ruby’s voice rose to a frantic screech, and she threw herself wildly at Yang again. “Ruby was always a monster! Always empty! Emptyemptyempty! Always broken! Brokenbrokenbroken! Always bad! Badbadbad! Always wrong! Wrongwrongwrong! Ruby was born wrong! Kill Ruby! Kill Ruby!Kill Ruby!KillRuby!KillRuby!Kill! PLEASE!”
All Yang could do was jump back again as tears streamed down her face. She flipped Ember Celica’s safety back on, and she would’ve thrown her gauntlets away from her entirely if she didn’t feel like there was a chance Ruby might snatch them up and use them on herself.
“PLEASEPLEASEPLEASEPLEASEPLEASE—”
“Ruby, I know this isn’t you! I know it’s just the—the Grimm stuff putting these thoughts in your head!”
“No!” And then Ruby lunged at Yang with frightening speed, too fast for her to react, and she found herself being grasped around the torso, Ruby’s claws digging into her Aura. Yang was the closest yet to Ruby’s ever-shifting face, and the words which screamed out of her mouth felt like they were vibrating her skull. “Tonight is RUBY’S FAULT! Ruby was always hurting people! Ruby was always a Hound! Hound! Hound! HoundHoundHoundHOUND now the world knows Ruby was always a Hound kill it kill the Hound kill the Hound please now—”
Hound. Yang was trying not to let herself look any more horrified than she already was, because she knew the Ruby in there somewhere would just take it to mean that Ruby the girl horrified her sister, when that couldn’t be further from the truth. But that word… Hound… it was a single word that managed to gather up all the worst parts of the hijacked Amity broadcast and condense it all into one syllable. Hadn’t the broadcast even actually called Ruby a hound dog at one point? Or was she just imagining that because of how horribly fitting it was? She wished she couldn’t remember any of the broadcast at all.
She swallowed. “I’m not going to kill you, Ruby. You can do whatever you want to me, but I’ll die before I hurt my baby sister. I just got her back.”
Something that sounded like a muffled, choking sobbing rose from the depths of the Hound. And then, abruptly, it turned into a thunderous roar, and she hurled Yang away.
But as Yang flew through the air, her horror was suddenly tempered by something she’d just noticed, that… didn’t seem to be adding up.
She fired Ember Celica to arrest her trajectory, landed upright, and stared at Ruby as she charged at Blake.
Wait.. Was Ruby—
“Ruby betrayed Blake!” Ruby yowled at Blake, just barely missing her dodging form with a swipe of her claws. “Ruby hurt Penny! Ruby called Penny a weapon! Ruby broke her promise! Weapon! Weapon weapon weapon—”
Oh, no. Yang had a vague idea of the if-you-hurt-Penny-I-will-kill-you talk Blake had given Ruby after she and Penny became official, but—oh, gods, what Ruby had screamed at Penny in Amity, Blake didn’t know about that, and it was exactly the kind of thing she’d warned Ruby against doing—
“Don’t hurt her!” she yelled to Blake, jumping in the way of another swipe from Ruby and using her gauntlets to deflect it.
“Wasn’t planning on it, but, Yang, what she said about hurting Penny—”
“I saw it happen.” Yang bit back a sob as Weiss summoned a glyph, using it to throw Ruby back as gently as possible. “It was—it was awful, Blake, but something happened to Ruby before the fight, because she wasn’t acting in her right mind, when she said all those horrible things to Penny—”
“No, no, that’s not what I meant—we’ll deal with whatever happened later; Yang, I promise, I meant, where’s Penny right now?!”
That was a question Yang had been trying her hardest not to think about, because—
She hadn’t expected the Hound to be paying any attention to what they were saying. But Ruby made Yang’s heart stop with her next words.
“RUBY KILLED PENNY!” Ruby screeched at them.
However, before Yang could disintegrate into all the constituent molecules which had formerly assembled the body known as Yang Xiao Long, a new and distinct sound interrupted all of her despair.
Hic.
The Hound froze.
“Ruby killed Penny!”
Hic.
“RUBY KILLED PENNY! RUBY KILLED PENNY! KILLED PENNY! KILLED HER!”
HIC. HIC. HIC. HIC.
The hiccup was coming from the Hound. And the Hound seemed to realize that too, because it twitched, and let out a sound that couldn’t be called a roar, only a shriek of… something that sounded too much like frustration to be anything else.
“Oh,” Yang whispered. “Oh, Ruby…”
Of course her baby sister had subconsciously imprinted one of Penny’s habits on herself in a way that somehow managed to translate to the Grimm goop controlling her. And that strange little reflex had just happened to give Yang a very good idea of what was going on in Ruby’s besieged mind. Mainly, that Ruby desperately wanted to convince them all that she was something beyond redemption.
And yet, being puppeted by an unthinkable horror that was magnifying all her most fearful and self-destructive tendencies, Ruby Karyatis still couldn’t bring herself to actually do something that would make her the monster she was begging them to see her as.
Yang had thought she had no tears left, but right now was proving her wrong. “We’re not in danger!” she screamed to the others. “Ruby doesn’t want to hurt us!”
“But that doesn’t mean she won’t!” Verdant shouted back. He was gripping his chainsaw as tightly as he ever had, eyeing Ruby with obvious fear that, while understandable, also made Yang want to scream in frustration because that was her baby sister how could anyone be scared of her—
Unfortunately, Verdant’s voice caught Ruby’s attention. She spun to face him, her lower claws scraping against the pavement with a jarring sound as she pivoted on them. She glared at Verdant, and because her red eye was noticeably larger than her silver eye, it felt to Yang like the Grimm eye was doing most of the glaring.
Ruby stalked towards Verdant, and more words tumbled out of her maw. “Ruby is perfect Atlas soldier. Ruby is obedient Hound of Atlas. White Fang is Ruby’s enemy.”
The words were hissed out so viciously that even Yang found herself wondering for a half-second if the Grimm had brought out that worst impulse in Ruby as well—
Verdant had just started to raise his chainsaw when Blake stepped into Ruby’s path.
Blake carried a special kind of determination that only she seemed to be capable of as she placed herself directly between the Hound and the White Fang without the slightest flinch.
Her back ramrod straight and her head held high, Blake spoke directly to Ruby. “If you really want me to believe that you’re an enemy of the White Fang, then why don’t you put your money where your mouth is, and take down the brand-new leader of the Vale Branch of the White Fang while she’s standing right in front of you?”
While the Hound growled faintly and tilted its head, suddenly appearing confused in a way that felt ludicrously out of place amidst the horror, Ilia made a scared noise from further away. “Blake, no, don’t—”
Blake plucked her White Fang mask from her belt and placed it over her face. Even through the mask, Yang could see her eyes glittering.
“Don’t think of me as your friend, Ruby,” Blake said calmly. “You should see me for what I am: an armed and dangerous enemy of the state. I have orchestrated and committed acts of violence against the Kingdom of Atlas, and I will do it again.” She paused, her words hanging in the night like the smoke surrounding them. “Unless you eliminate me.”
Ruby was completely silent.
Yang knew exactly what Blake was doing. It was also what she would’ve done. She only hoped that the White Fang, who didn’t know Ruby nearly as well and were still wary of Huntresses as a whole, would understand too. And even if they didn’t yet, she had to hope they would trust what Blake was doing.
“I’m out of Aura,” Blake said, holding out her arms. Gambol Shroud remained holstered at her back. “You have a clear shot, Ruby.”
Ruby twitched, and then she backed away from Blake in a frantic scrabble and nearly tripped over herself twice, letting out a piercing whine.
“N-n-n-no,” Ruby stuttered out between full-body shivers, looking wildly between every member of the group while her hair swung frenetically behind her. “No No No nononononononono why? WHY?! WHY?! WHY?!”
“You’re not a monster,” Blake said. “You want us to think you are, but you aren’t.”
“NO!” Ruby’s voice vibrated through the base of Yang’s skull with impossibly powerful resonance. “RUBY KILLED PEOPLE! KILLED KILLED KILLED KILLED RUBY KILLED INNOCENTS! RUBY HURT EVERYONE! ALL RUBY’S FAULT! WHY DON’T YOU UNDERSTAND?! PLEASE! RUBY WANTS TO BE GONE! GONEGONEGONEGONEGONE FOREVERFOREVERFOREVERFOREVER! RUBY WANTS LIFE TO BE OVER!”
Yang took a step forward, fully intent on pouring out whatever was left of her soul and leaving it for Ruby to take. “Ruby—”
Ruby cut her off with an agonized howl that seemed to go on forever, the heartwrenching sound wrapping around Yang’s chest and constricting it into a frozen state like there was a winter wind lashing against her unprotected skin. It was pure grief, distilled and concentrated into one choking wave of noise. As if Ruby was grieving for herself.
And as Ruby howled, she received an answering chorus from all over, innumerable Grimm responding with howls of their own which combined into one deadly scream of the night itself. Yang and her teammates and JNPR and the White Fang froze in place, listening to what was essentially the sound of an apocalypse. There weren’t many people on the planet who heard that chorus and lived to tell the tale.
By the time it came to an end, Ruby had sunk to her knees again, clutching at her head and shivering.
“It hurts…”
This time, there was nothing which could stop Yang from coming to stand by Ruby’s side. And Ruby did nothing to stop her, not even when she spoke rasping words again while the liquid shifted endlessly around her form.
“It hurts. Everything hurts. Failure hurts. Head hurts. Thinking hurts. Ruby hurts. Being hurts.”
Yang was close enough now to reach out and put a hand on the Hound’s shoulder, which she did tentatively, hoping that Ruby wouldn’t interpret the tentativeness as fear. The only thing Yang was afraid of was her own inability to help her baby sister.
Yang’s Aura flared as her prosthetic hand sunk into the Grimm liquid with a squish. At first, there was a frightening lack of anything solid underneath her touch, as if there was no differentiation between where the Grimm ended and Ruby began. But finally, Yang’s metal fingers found something solid that felt like Ruby and not a Grimm, and she let out a breath she hadn’t even realized she was holding.
“Ruby. We can help you. We promise.”
Ruby’s voice came out as a muffled whine. “I’m scared of help…”
Yang’s heart leapt. That was… That was the first time Ruby had referred to herself in the first person since being engulfed, the first time Grimm-Ruby had said I instead of Ruby. That was a good thing, right? It felt like a good thing. She needed it to be a good thing.
But just as Yang was gathering her next words, Ruby stiffened.
“…Ruby?”
Ruby lowered her arms, and turned so that her bone-plated, liquid-covered face was staring directly into Yang’s eyes. She twitched again, and then there was a horrific CRUNCH.
Yang didn’t even have time to be terrified in an entirely new way before something erupted from the Grimm liquid covering Ruby’s back. It was accompanied by a series of smaller but no less nauseating crunches and cracks and snaps while Ruby convulsed wildly, and before Yang could make sense of what she was seeing, the thing that’d sprouted from Ruby’s back slammed into her face with a wet smack, and Yang was thrown back like a leaf in the wind.
By the time she could make sense of the world again, she was lying flat on her back with the uneven cobblestones pressing painfully into her at random points, and a massive pair of black-red wings slick with goo was lifting Ruby into the sky.
“RUBY!” Yang screamed, reaching out for her, an action that could only be a reflex for how useless it actually was. “RUBY! Don’t—”
Ruby’s gaze was trained on the horizon, and when a massive holding glyph from Weiss appeared under her, she broke through it with a single, violent shake of her entire body. Little dissolving shards of Weiss’s Semblance rained down on Yang’s face as she watched Ruby soar overhead, powerless to stop her sister as she flew towards—
The city.
The city under attack which wouldn’t bother to distinguish one thing which looked like a Grimm from all the other things which looked like Grimm. The city which was teeming with exhausted Huntresses at the end of their ropes and jumpy soldiers shooting at anything that moved. The city which was full of terrified people who knew nothing about Ruby Karyatis except what a broadcast full of lies and fearmongering had told them several hours ago. The city of people who would think Ruby was a monster that needed to be destroyed without bothering to look beyond the surface.
The city, which would give Ruby exactly what she was desperately looking for.
“Stop her!” Yang screamed, her voice cracking-collapsing halfway through. She didn’t have any way to slow down something in the air, except for her gauntlets, but she would NOT take the risk of shooting at Ruby, no matter how much it seemed like the Grimm matter would protect her. But then there was nothing—
Pyrrha’s shield shot through the air, Polarity-powered, and the flat side of it smacked into the Hound’s face, briefly arresting its forward momentum, and that was all Blake needed to fling Gambol Shroud into the night and wrap it around Ruby’s midsection with pinpoint accuracy. But then, with another beat of Ruby’s wings, Blake was being yanked forward, Ruby’s forward progress barely slowed.
Yang leapt forward, grabbing onto Gambol Shroud and adding her weight, which made Ruby judder in midair. It was truly disconcerting to be skidding along the ground like she was a kite trailing behind someone’s grip and not a six-foot Huntress, but Yang was not letting go even as she realized the two of them were being dragged towards the cliff—
With a flying lunge, Nora joined Blake and Yang in holding Ruby down, and then one of Weiss’s summoning glyphs appeared in the sky above and ahead of Ruby. A massive helmeted knight dropped out from inside the glyph, and simply slammed into Ruby, body-checking her with a much greater mass. And then Yang saw the glow of Pyrrha’s Semblance on the katana-end of Gambol Shroud which mercifully hadn’t been dislodged from its entanglement with Ruby by the collision, and finally, finally all of Ruby’s forward momentum was gone, leaving her caught in midair by the combined efforts of no less than five girls.
The Grimm wings which had erupted from Ruby’s back flapped mightily, generating a breeze Yang swore she could feel on her face even with so much air between them. And it was a terrible strain to hold her down, even as Weiss summoned another holding glyph under Ruby.
“Get the airship!” Blake shouted over her shoulder to Ilia. “We can’t hold her down forever! Our best bet is to follow her into the city, and—”
She stopped there, and Yang knew why. Because there was no plan beyond don’t let Ruby get away from us. What plan was there? There was nothing they’d learned in Beacon which could possibly prepare them to… to… de-Grimm-ify someone! Was it even possible!?
Yang couldn’t look behind her—she couldn’t take her eyes off Ruby—but she heard running footsteps, and then more distantly, the sound of a bullhead’s engines spooling up.
“We have to let her go!” Blake said in between heavy breaths, to the other four girls occupied with keeping Ruby in place. “On my signal!”
It felt like it went against every atom of Yang’s being to let go of Ruby, but she had just enough sense left in her brain to understand there was no other choice.
Then, she processed what Blake was asking, and realized—let go. Let go of the ribbon-wielding half of Gambol Shroud, which was not any less entangled. “Um, your weapon?” she said to Blake, jerking her head at where the ribbon flexed and twisted in a taut line that led to Ruby.
“Ruby will give it back to me.” Blake’s words were short and clipped. “Yang, are you ready?”
She was asking Yang specifically.
The sound of the bullhead was rapidly growing closer, the wind from its engines now buffeting Yang’s backside. Yang swallowed. “I am.”
“Okay. When I say go, we all let go, and run for the bullhead—”
“Wait!” Nora yelped as the line shivered, throwing them all forward a few steps. “What about Penny?”
Yang froze, and nearly lost her grip on Gambol Shroud for doing so. They had no idea where Penny was. They knew she was still alive, but no idea how hurt. Leaving Beacon to chase Ruby, would mean unequivocally leaving Penny behind. Abandoning her.
Yang couldn’t leave any of her friends behind. But she also couldn’t let her sister run away to her death.
Once again, Yang was being pulled in opposite different directions. Was this what Ruby had felt like for months, being stretched thin between two worlds? Gods, if only Yang had been there to support her every second of the way like she should’ve done as Ruby’s family—then Ruby wouldn’t have broken, because she would’ve had the support of a sister like she was supposed to, and this always always always came back to Yang being too stupid or too dense or any number of her failures, and now she had to choose somehow—
“I’ll stay behind,” Weiss said, dispelling Yang’s spiral with nothing but those three words. “I still have a promise to keep.”
Pyrrha nodded in agreement. “As will I. I have a great deal of Aura left.”
Yang knew Weiss’s Aura reserves weren’t in the best shape. Yang also knew they didn’t have any choice at this point.
“Me three,” Nora said decisively.
“We’ll try to find more help in Vale,” Blake said to Weiss and Pyrrha and Nora. “Anyone we can send to Beacon to help with the rescue, we’ll find them. I promise.”
What went unspoken among them was that there might not be anyone the city could spare. But the three girls looked no less sure as they eyed the school behind them.
Another beat of the Hound’s wings pulled them all a few more meters towards the cliffs. Yang could now hear the bullhead hovering directly behind them, waiting.
“…Alright,” Blake said finally. “When I say go…”
“GO!”
Yang and Blake and Nora let go of Gambol Shroud, and Weiss released her glyph, and the glow of Pyrrha’s Semblance disappeared from the katana, and Ruby sprang forward like she’d been shot out the barrel of a gun. By the time Yang’s mind caught up with her body, she was vaulting aboard the bullhead with Blake just behind her, while Weiss and Pyrrha and Nora were turning towards the school, and Ruby was flying further and further away.
“Nimbus, punch it!” Blake hollered to the cockpit, and the fox Faunus at the controls responded by slamming the throttle forwards. The bullhead leapt forward, and all Yang could do now was hope the engines could keep up with Ruby’s flight, and she was flying so fast, and Yang didn’t know how they’d keep up—
“WHERE IS SHE?!”
The shrill, furious words which echoed across the campus were punctuated by an enormous claw of fire rising up around the bullhead and catching it in a viselike grip, and at the same moment, something exploding on the ground directly in front of Weiss, Pyrrha, and Nora.
The ship slammed to a dead halt in midair like they’d run into an invisible wall, caught fast in a cage of fire, and anyone standing was thrown off their feet. Blake was nearly flung out of the airship entirely, saved only by Yang having the reflexes to twist mid-fall and grab onto her waist to just barely keep her half-inside the cabin. All while Ruby flew into the distance, uninterrupted.
“WHERE DID SHE GO?!”
Yang was the first one to raise her head from the chaotic tangle of limbs. She stared at the fist of flames enveloping the ship and slowly, inexorably pulling it backwards.
Cinder Fall loomed before the scattered defenders, the flames around her eyes searingly bright and one hand clenched into a blazing fist which perfectly matched the shape of the fire trapping the bullhead in place.
“What,” Yang said slowly, “The fuck.”
“You can’t go any faster?!” Verdant yelled to the cockpit, barely making himself heard over the engines which were screeching in protest as they fought a losing battle.
“We’re already at full throttle!” was Nimbus’s response.
Weiss, Pyrrha, and Nora had been thrown a long way by the explosion, and they were slow to get back to their feet, dazed and caught completely unawares by the attack. But Cinder’s attention was focused less on them, and much more on the airship which she was holding captive.
“TELL ME!” Cinder roared. Her voice, even from a distance, carried all too well to Yang’s ears.
A choked gasp left Blake’s mouth as she struggled to her feet alongside Yang, her pupils turning pinprick-small with fear.
“Penny. She wants Penny,” Blake said.
Yang threw another frantic look in Ruby’s direction, where her form was rapidly shrinking as the Hound’s wings carried her towards Vale too fast, maybe too fast for them to catch up even if they could escape right now—
“Will you take we don’t fucking know for an answer, you stupid flaming fuck?!” Yang screamed.
Cinder’s eyes narrowed. And then she began to advance on the Huntresses with slow, deliberate steps. Every one of her footsteps left imprints of molten rock in the ground. The air around her blurred with heat, turning incandescent and refracting light in strange ways which gave her a golden tinge as deep and bright as the midday sun on the summer solstice.
The rest of the White Fang was already swinging their heavy weaponry around to fire on Cinder, but when they began unloading their assault, it was horrifying ineffective. None of their bullets and grenades were making it through the wall of pure heat which surrounded Cinder, flying projectiles turning to nothing but misshapen globs of metal which dropped to the ground before they reached their target, little spurts of Dust going up in pops and crackles as they were entirely consumed by the red-hot air. And anything which was lucky enough to make it through pinged uselessly off an invisible barrier inches from Cinder’s skin, something which wasn’t Aura and showed no signs of wavering.
“You fail to understand.” Cinder’s voice came out in a hiss like steam from a fissure deep under ground, rolling over Yang like flames licking at her. “I will find Penny Pallas. The only difference you brainwashed lumps of cannon fodder will make in the final outcome is how much time I need to take back the power that is MINE.”
A brief silence ensued amongst the defenders, equal parts awe and terror as they considered there might really be no escape from Cinder’s wrath. Yang couldn’t see Ruby in the sky anymore. She had no idea if that was because the Hound was blending in with the other Grimm infesting the kingdom’s airspace, or because Ruby had landed in the city—
But then, that silence was broken by a much louder voice which came from no one inside the ship and rolled over everything and everyone like a clap of thunder.
“CINDER!”
Yang recognized that voice immediately, even if she’d never heard it at anything close to that volume before, and her heart dropped for an entirely new reason.
Penny.
Notes:
Sadly, Ruby's weakened eyeblast on Cinder from Chapter 68 did not have the same effect as the canonical V3 laserbeam she hit Cinder with.
Next week, Chapter 70: Heroes and Monsters
Chapter 70: Heroes and Monsters
Notes:
TRIPLE EDIT FOR 6/27: Next Friday. Next Friday, the chapter will be ready!
DOUBLE EDIT FOR 6/20: Still caught up in immense but good life changes, sadly. As it turns out, actually unpacking your stuff into a new apartment takes a real long time. On the bright side, things should quiet down and I should have more free time after this week, I think?
EDIT: Well, um, if you’re reading this because of a lack of Chapter 71 on/after the day when that chapter was supposed to arrive, I deeply apologize. The next chapter just genuinely isn’t ready, and I promise I really tried to get it out by the normal update day. Tbh I probably tried harder than I should’ve to have the chapter ready on time, because now I need to load a moving truck on 3 hours of sleep. It’s a really unfortunate coincidence that the chapter which needed the most work lined up with the busiest month of my life in several years. New job, new apartment, moving to a completely different area for the first time, all the associated difficulties. I’m so sorry for leaving you on this cliffhanger for longer than necessary, and I will try my best to get the chapter posted as soon as it’s finished.
Early upload today because I won't be able to do it for the rest of the day!
Content warning for this chapter (click this text to reveal):
Ruby's actions from the previous two chapters continue here, but I would say that this chapter is less intense about it than the previous two. Self-destructive behavior, suicidal actions and attempts, injury, body horror, violence, discussions of death.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Vale
Taiyang was loading a new Dust capsule into his tekkō-kagi when Zwei growled in a way that made his blood freeze.
Zwei was not a dog that growled at nothing, and currently he was sniffing furiously at the air, his eyes fixed on something Taiyang couldn’t see.
“Qrow,” Taiyang called over to his teammate. When he looked up from the Griffon he’d just impaled, Taiyang indicated Zwei with a jerk of his head.
“What is it, boy?” He snapped the Dust canister into place and bent down on a knee to scratch the top of Zwei’s head. “What do you smell?”
Zwei started to growl again, but then he cut off halfway through, his jaws clicking shut. After a few more moments of sniffing, he whined and his stance shifted, going from signaling bad threat to taking the posture he only took when he was trying to say something’s wrong.
Taiyang blinked. “What…”
Qrow joined Taiyang, watching with concern. “Never seen him switch alerts like that.”
“Neither have I.” Taiyang ran his hands through Zwei’s fur, checking for hidden injuries that might explain the strange behavior, and found nothing. “Zwei—”
Zwei broke into a ferocious fit of barking, but there was no anger in the sounds, just all the urgency he was capable of. He leapt forward, and it was only because Taiyang already had hold of him that he didn’t break free.
“Whoa, easy,” Taiyang said, lifting Zwei into the air as his barking intensified and his paws paddled madly at the air in an attempt to escape. He looked over to Qrow, who had an expression like he was thinking the same thing, that being: “We need to check this out.”
“Yeah.” Qrow cupped his hands around his mouth and called down the street. “Hey, Glynda! Can you hold steady by yourself for a few minutes?”
Goodwitch cast an acutely exasperated glare over her shoulder, but immediately softened when she saw the certainty in Taiyang and Qrow’s expressions. She flicked her riding crop at a charging Ursa, flinging it into the Grimm just behind it in order to mow the group down like an enormous game of bowling. “I’ll manage.”
No sooner had she spoken than Taiyang was putting down Zwei and taking a deep breath. “Alright. Lead the way, boy,”
Zwei broke into a dead sprint, a gray blur of purpose streaking deeper into the city without hesitation. It would’ve been tough for the two Huntsmen to keep up with him, if not for his continuous barking which led them on like an emergency beacon.
Whatever they were about to face, Taiyang could only hope they weren’t too late.
Beacon
Penny slowed to a hover a short distance from the bullhead, placing herself between Cinder and her friends and the rest of the world. Penny knew Ruby was flying towards unspeakable danger in Vale. Penny knew her friends needed to follow Ruby and save her. Penny also knew she was the only one who bore a chance of standing against Cinder.
She’d amplified her voice beyond human capabilities for the express purpose of redirecting all of Cinder’s attention away from Penny’s friends. And now, even if the airship was still ensnared by flames, even if Weiss and Pyrrha and Nora were still directly in the line of fire, even if Ruby was still alone far away somewhere with no one to help her, Cinder’s eyes were fixed squarely on Penny. Just as she’d hoped.
Penny stared right back into the eyes of a spectral being, and Cinder roared.
It was a roar which shook the ground far more powerfully than any explosion that night, more than even the fall of the CCT, and as the ground tried to toss the ruins of the school off the planet’s surface, plumes of lava erupted everywhere, as if Cinder was unleashing the end of the world through sheer will.
Her form was distorted by the air which shimmered ferociously in the vengeful heat surrounding her. She glowered at Penny through smoke and ash and newly born sprays of heaving lava, the flames around her eyes the exact color of the molten ground.
“Let my friends go!” Penny shouted, drawing Luminous Electra in its largest form and leveling it at her enemy.
There were scorch marks all across Cinder’s face, and also down her collarbone and disappearing underneath the neckline of her dress. But strangely, her clothes seemed untouched. And those scorch marks had most definitely not been there when Penny had rescued Ruby earlier. But they were there now, and they were very real, and Penny did not understand how Cinder could move and speak as if the burns weren’t there at all. She understood even less how Ruby’s eyes had given Cinder those burns.
Cinder let out a short, harsh laugh. Her words carried through the night air like a terrible curse. “What right do you have to demand anything after your betrayal?”
Penny frowned, all of her fear and worry suddenly sliding into confusion. “…Betrayal?” Was this about rejecting Cinder’s nonsensical offer to join her? How could that ever be called a betrayal? Penny hadn’t even known what Cinder was offering!
Unfortunately, her response, for all its genuine intent, was as well-received as a match to a tinderbox. Cinder’s face twisted even further, her flames’ grip on the bullhead tightening enough to draw an ominous metallic groan from the ship. “I thought you were BETTER! I thought you were something worth saving!”
Whatever Ruby’s eyes had done, Cinder’s voice had been affected too, turned much scratchier and raspier. The voice of someone dying of thirst.
“But here you are, exactly as greedy and mindless as EVERYONE ELSE inside this corrupt, two-faced institution! I should’ve known from the beginning that you’re just like the rest of them! Always hoarding as much power as you can cram into the grasp of your soft, spoiled, manicured fingers, stealing from the rest of the world! Stealing WHAT IS MINE!”
Oh, Penny realized. Cinder meant the Maiden powers. Something about that made her shiver, for reasons she did not understand the slightest. Cinder believed Penny had stolen the Fall Maiden’s power from her. The power which Penny had not asked for. The power which Amber had not asked for. It was… Unfair? That couldn’t be the right word, could it?
“What did I—how did you know me before?” Penny screamed into the night. “How? If you would please just tell me—”
“It doesn’t MATTER!” Cinder screamed right back. “I’ve seen enough to know it was just an accidental bit of charity! Because nothing that comes from Atlas could ever purposefully do one bit of good!”
The flames tightened even further around the bullhead, making it shudder dangerously in Penny’s peripheral vision. The servos in her arms and legs tensed. She had to ensure the safety of her friends. She was the one who Cinder wanted the most. No one else should be hurt because of her.
Penny clenched her fists as tightly as she could and tried not to shiver uncontrollably. If there was going to be a tomorrow, she could no longer find space for herself in it. What did she have left, besides an increasingly broken body that wouldn’t fit anywhere else, and friends who might be dragged down alongside her, because of things she still didn’t understand and had never asked for?
Penny would have to fight Cinder.
Penny was… scared. It was a terror that she didn’t have the computing power to understand or even fully process, with every available resource in her body devoted to analyzing the battlefield and trying to calculate a way to victory. But she could feel that fear all the same, deep in her consciousness matrix, and it was a fear of so many things. Not being able to protect her friends. Failing to stop Cinder. What Cinder would do afterward, if Penny couldn’t stop her. Dying.
Death.
Penny understood that it was a perfectly ordinary thing to be afraid of death. But now she was thinking about it more than she ever had in her life. Would it hurt? Would it hurt forever? What if there was an afterlife, but she wasn’t allowed in it because she was a synthetic person? What if she was sent to an afterlife for bad people because she was made differently? What if she was just alone forever? What if what if what if—
If Cinder killed her, then Penny would fail to protect the magic that Amber had trusted her with. If Cinder killed her and Penny couldn’t focus her final thoughts on someone else, then Penny’s (and Amber’s) magic would go to the woman who had killed them both. She needed to have someone else ready in her final thoughts, but how could she do that when all her processing power was taken up with fighting and surviving? Focusing her thoughts on someone else could be the difference between life and death! But she needed to have someone besides Cinder in her thoughts, in case death took her by surprise! And… and… who was she supposed to choose? How would she know if someone wanted magic? Or didn’t want it?
Penny did not want to die. Penny had to fight Cinder. Penny was terrified of death. Her logic core was frozen between the need to survive and the need to protect her friends, unsure of which one was more important, more weighted, more dire. It was as if all of tonight’s events had robbed Logic of its ability to reason through decisions and always arrive at a way forward. It was as if tonight had broken Logic.
But to Penny’s emotional processing ability, there was no other possibility besides what laid in front of her. She had to fight, no matter how scared she was. She did not have a choice.
The explosion had knocked Weiss into a daze that was difficult to extricate herself from. As she struggled to stand, even just her own name had become elusive, and she had to root around blindly in her possibly-concussed brain to remember that she was Weiss. Not Weiss Schnee. Just Weiss.
That was why Weiss initially thought her partner’s voice an auditory hallucination. And then she’d seen Penny’s approach. In the smoke and haze, the sight which heralded her arrival was unlike anything Weiss had ever seen. There was no outline of a person like Ruby’s arrival, but rather, it was green and orange flames from far away, giving off lights which refracted back in on themselves endlessly in the haze, becoming a collection of shimmering halos streaking towards Weiss.
Another wave of dizziness made Weiss’s vision blur precipitously, and when her eyesight settled again, Penny was hovering in the air just before Weiss, guarding her. And abruptly, Weiss realized why light of any kind was refracting so energetically around Penny.
Penny was bare metal. All of her synthetic skin was gone; everything that should’ve been layered on top of Penny’s metal armoring was gone except for her hair, revealing armor plating and hinges in full that Weiss had only ever seen glimpses of before. And the metal was pitted, pockmarked, tarnished, as if… as if Penny had dove into acid, and anything which wasn’t metal had been dissolved, and even then the corrosion had been strong enough to start eating away at the metal, too. Because of the uneven surfaces, Penny was a storm of glimmering reflections all over, catching every bit of light thrown at her.
With her sword in her hands, she was shielding Weiss from harm, silhouetted by the harsh brilliance of Cinder’s endless fire. Flames poured from Penny’s extended wings like an avenging angel raining down destruction.
“Penny…?” Weiss whispered. She didn’t know why it came out like a question.
Everything was distantly muted and excruciatingly loud all at the same time. There was so much noise which meant nothing to her. The hiss and rumble of fire. The roar of Penny’s rockets. The whine of the bullhead’s engines. Penny and Cinder’s voices ringing out back and forth as they exchanged words that Weiss didn’t understand.
However, there was something she did understand.
Horror percolated inside Weiss as she recognized Penny’s guarded stance, her refusal to turn away from danger, and… and the defeat. Weiss could see the sense of hopelessness saturating Penny’s posture. Weiss herself had taken that posture in the aftermath of her father’s ultimatum, when she had believed that the future had been irrefutably decided in a terribly unfair manner.
Suddenly, the rapid, seemingly pained whirring of Penny’s internals was the loudest sound in Weiss’s life.
“Penny?” Weiss said again, louder. She knew what Penny was about to try. “Please, you can’t…”
“I must, Weiss.” Penny shook her head, never looking away from Cinder. “Who else will fight her? I do not have a choice.”
Suddenly, there was a flash from somewhere just above Penny. Weiss flinched, thinking it was the first shot of an apocalyptic battle, but there was no shockwave, no impact. Just a light above Penny quickly fading to a soft glow around something golden—
Weiss blinked rapidly.
Was that… a crown?
Vale
“Artillery support incoming!”
Winter ducked and watched a shell whistle overhead and explode in the face of a charging Alpha Beowolf, obliterating it. She paused for just long enough to survey the field of battle and assess where her forces were the most overtaxed, before sprinting toward a suddenly-undermanned defensive flank which was littered with the bodies of Atlesian soldiers who had been alive and unharmed just minutes ago.
Her training had long ago dulled any emotional response she might’ve felt as she leapt over the bodies of her soldiers and took up a position at the gap in the line. Without preamble, she unleashed a flurry of holding glyphs on a group of Grimm, turning them into stationary targets which would be far easier to cut down with bullets alone.
As the remaining soldiers around her unloaded their rifles on the suddenly-vulnerable Grimm, Winter cast a look over her shoulder at the mass of civilians not far behind her. They were what made defending this particular location so important. The collection points for evacuees were supposed to be in a safe zone far behind the defensive lines drawn up by the Atlesian military and Vale’s Huntress forces, but one section of that line had collapsed with unthinkable quickness. And as the Grimm punched through deep into the safe zone, the complete and permanent communications outage meant that word had reached Winter nearly too late.
Nearly.
She’d rushed reinforcements to the scene literal seconds ahead of the Grimm incursion, and the collection point and all the civilians within were still safe, even as the military fought just meters away from the edge of the crowd. They were still holding the line.
“Good.” Winter let out a sigh of relief as the last Grimm held captive by her glyphs evaporated. There were still plenty more skirmishing with their line and prowling at the fringes of the battlefield, but their momentum had been blunted.
Then, the sound of running steps from behind made Winter tense on instinct, but it wasn’t a Grimm’s footsteps, and they were immediately followed by a crisp, trained voice.
“Lieutenant, message from the General at the frontline!”
Winter turned to face the private and returned the salute. “Report.”
The first several words of the private’s answer came out between gasps for breath. It was clear she’d been carrying messages across the city nonstop. It was impossible to exaggerate how catastrophic the collapse of the CCT had been for their forces. All their communications had been abruptly thrown back into a dark age, leaving them reliant on little-practiced secondary protocols.
“The break at the frontline has been sealed up, and the defenses are holding steady again. He wants to know if you require more reinforcements.”
Winter acknowledged the news with a nod, and allowed herself a slow exhale of relief. “Excellent. Tell him—”
“Uh, ma’am? There’s an… anomaly.”
The interruption came not from the messenger, but from another soldier behind Winter. There was a note of blatant confusion in his voice, and hearing the word anomaly yanked all of Winter’s attention toward him. What had led to tonight’s cataclysm was best described as a path of anomalies stretching back years before turning critical, and on this night Winter expected that any more anomalies would immediately spawn a new facet of disaster.
And as soon as her mind wasn’t focused on the General’s message, she realized what the soldier was trying to call her attention to before his reply broke the silence.
And the silence was precisely the problem.
“The Grimm just… ran away?”
In the time between Winter turning away from the battle to address the messenger, and the present moment, their surroundings had abruptly become devoid of Grimm.
Not yet devoid, actually—Winter turned back just in time to catch sight of the last two hostiles. It was a pair of young Beowolves behaving incomprehensibly.
They weren’t even paying attention to the Atlesian forces. Instead, their eyes were trained on one of the alleyways which led into the city square that held the collection point. Whatever the Beowolves were looking at, they were pawing at the ground frantically and backing away with their heads bowed low in what could only be a show of deference. Their ears were pinned down against their head as they whined with what sounded undeniably like fear.
And as Winter continued to watch, the slow backing away turned into a frantic scramble, claws scraping against the ground as the Grimm completely abandoned their aggressive instincts and fled the square without so much as a hungry glance at the civilians just meters away from them.
They were behaving as if they were in the presence of an apex predator, and it wasn’t the humans.
“Hold your fire,” Winter said to her forces as the Beowolves disappeared from view. Her throat was tight with the effort of keeping her voice even.
She stepped out from behind their makeshift fortifications, scanning the square. There were no Grimm in sight. No dissolving black matter which marked the remains of a slain Grimm.
Winter Schnee knew that Grimm did not retreat. Once engaged in combat, they attacked mindlessly, endlessly until either they or their targets were dead. But they had disappeared so rapidly, so without a trace, that she couldn’t recognize it as anything but a retreat. It was as if a switch had been thrown which turned the creatures’ bloodlust into an urge to flee.
Or… as if they’d been given an order.
Winter’s hand reflexively went to her ear, where her now-useless commspiece was still nestled, and she didn’t realize her mistake until she felt the tap of her fingernail hitting what was now only a piece of plastic. Then she spoke to the messenger still waiting for a reply.
“Private.” Winter’s words were directed to the messenger, but she did not move her gaze from the alleyway which the Beowolves had stared into. “Tell General Ironwood that his presence is needed here immediately.”
Several soldiers near her sucked in sudden, shocked breaths. It was quiet enough now that Winter could hear them. The only other sound was the gunfire and explosions from the front line, muffled by distance and obstruction from the buildings surrounding the square. Mere echoes faintly telling a tale of a kingdom fighting for its survival.
A crisp affirmative and rapidly fading running steps told Winter that her own order had been followed, but knowing she could expect the General at some point did nothing to dispel her festering unease. But with the nervous eyes of a large civilian crowd trained on her, she steeled every muscle in her body to prevent the unease from showing outwardly.
Last week, Winter would have found the concept of Grimm taking orders to be patently ridiculous. However, she now knew there was exactly one person in the world who could give the Grimm an order.
Winter’s grip on her sword was tight enough to split the skin on her knuckles. Still advancing, she eyed the alleyway. The Beowolves had not fled because of the Atlesian forces. They had fled because they’d seen something in that alleyway.
It was helpful in defending the civilians behind her—a ready-made chokepoint to concentrate their fire on. But now, as she approached the alley mouth and stared into the yawning darkness which awaited her, she felt as if she was the one being lured into enemy ground.
Perhaps this was the lowest of her priorities at this moment, but… the General hadn’t given Winter any actual descriptions of Salem’s physical appearance. Perhaps he had no information on how she appeared, either. Still, Winter could prepare some reasonable inferences. If she came face-to-face with the Queen of All Grimm in the coming moments, she fully expected to be greeted with a being that was an unnatural amalgamation of human shape and animalistic Grimm elements. Capable of human speech, the General had said. Winter did not know what kind of words Salem might deploy against her, but she was doing her best to steel herself in preparation for them.
Winter could almost feel the seething mass of humanity at her back, relying on her for their protection and survival. Their souls were balanced on the edge of her sword.
Between the canyonlike sides of the buildings, it was too dark to see what laid beyond the alley entrance. Winter reached for the utility pack on her belt, and drew out an emergency flare. Then she yanked the cap off, listened for the familiar hiss of ignition, and hurled the flare down the narrow passage.
Walls and windows and awnings and padlocked doors and bits of detritus on the ground were all lit up in a ghostly red light. Anywhere the light could not reach was thrown into deep shadow. Winter could see no Grimm, no people, nothing that might be some unnatural bridging of the two categories.
When she took her first steps forward into unknown territory, the silence became near-complete with startling immediacy, leaving her to contend with a space where her heartbeat was the loudest sound.
Until something else hissed out, something that seemed to carry just the right frequency to make Winter’s teeth vibrate. The sound was from some unchartable place between a growl and a hiss and a whimper, and she could almost convince herself that the sound had contained, “Winter.”
Winter froze, her eyes instinctively flicking upward to check for an attack from above. But there was nothing, and it was impossible to tell if the sound came from in above or below, or in front, or behind—only that whatever sounded like death was definitively in this alley.
She called forth a summon to watch her six. A miniaturized version of her Manticore summon sprang into existence behind her, and Winter took another step, broken glass crunching under her boot. Aside from the shivering shadows given off by the flare’s uneven red light, everything was still. The rest of the city felt impossibly distant.
The smoke which hung over the burning city reached even to the center of the alley. Winter had been breathing it all evening, and by now each breath scratched unkindly against her throat.
“Winter…”
The sound again. She had a stronger sense now that there was a voice in there somewhere, but she was no closer to deciphering whatever language was bubbling amidst an almost-wail.
Then, her Manticore summon growled warningly.
Winter spun around in a flash, the muscles in her favored arm tighter than a drum, just in time to see a shadow shifting in a way that wasn’t at all caused by the flickering of the flare’s light.
But before she could lunge forward and drive her sword into whatever was hiding in the dark, there was a crunch-snap from directly above.
Winter’s gaze snapped upward. Nothing.
Another growl. But not from her Beowolf summon. Much louder, much more feral. Not a warning growl—a challenge. Coming from the exact opposite direction.
It seemed to be everywhere. Winter was entirely unmoored.
“Good…”
It was close. It was so close that Winter could finally understand the words being hissed at her.
“Soldiers…”
Winter could feel a torrent of hot breath washing over the back of her neck. It was behind her.
“Follow…”
Winter closed her eyes and took a deep breath.
“Orders.”
Without turning, Winter deployed a push glyph on herself from the front, and at the same moment she thrust her sword behind her, so that when the glyph launched her backwards, the point of her sword was driven into whatever was there with immense force. Her blade landed home, sinking into something—
Something which was suddenly not yielding in the slightest. It was like plunging her sword into wet concrete which set before the blade was more than a quarter of the way in.
Winter expected a yelp of surprise, hoped for a roar of pain, and received silence.
She had just enough to think, have I even wounded it? before immense clawed hands wrapped around her neck and midsection and picked her up as easily as if she was made of straw, shattering her glyph in the process. The world spun around her in dizzying flashes of gleaming white and sinister red amidst a darkness engulfing her vision.
Some corner of Winter’s mind registered that the claws were gripping her with a dexterity which was disturbingly humanlike. And then air was rushing over her face, which was how Winter realized she’d been hurled down the alleyway.
Crashing off a wall and an awning prevented Winter from landing on her feet; she hit the pavement at the alley’s mouth with a flare of Aura but without her sword, which had been yanked out of her hands somewhere in midair.
A worried clamor was building in the crowd behind Winter, but as she raised her head all her attention was on the thing looming deep in the alley, a massive silhouette turned blood-red under the light thrown by the still-burning flare.
It walked like a human. It spoke like a human. It was shaped like a human. But it wasn’t human. It was a monster. One like no other.
The twitching, quivering beast was impossibly liquid, its skin undulating and morphing endlessly, and it was large enough that it barely fit between the buildings. Its claws tore out chunks of concrete from the walls and simultaneously scraped against newly-exposed rebar with grating screeches. The crumbling chunks of building which fell into the beast’s path were pulverized under paws which were even larger than its hands. Its eyes were as red as the light of the flare, but far brighter.
A tectonically resonant growl escaped the monster’s lips, sending a vibration down Winter’s spine that reached to the deepest recesses of her organs.
As it stalked towards Winter, more gruesome details became apparent. Something dark and viscous dribbled from its maw and its tongue hung loosely over its lips, not quite able to be contained underneath the fangs. Nothing about the beast seemed accurately measured or correctly aligned, as if this monster had been thrown together haphazardly, or as if someone creating it had been interrupted in their work and forced to finish the design far too quickly, leaving it half-finished.
Each step covered an impossible amount of ground, and when the next paw thudded into the pavement, Winter abruptly found her sword. It was impaled in the beast’s midsection, suspended by the same liquid which slipped fluidly around it with each movement. The liquid looked perfectly fallible, as easily pierced as water, and yet her sword was held fast by some unknown force, a rivulet of black liquid dripping down the blade like blood.
She was aware of a rising tide of panic behind her, murmurs turning into shouts. And into that rising cacophony, the monster spoke again, louder and clearer but just as gravelly and overwhelming.
“Good soldiers follow orders.”
Winter clenched her jaw. It was mocking her. Her orders were to kill the Grimm, and she was facing down something which might very well be impossible to kill by the means currently at her disposal.
“Good soldiers follow orders.”
Winter’s dominant hand grasped reflexively for a sword still buried impotently in its target.
An impulse echoed through her head: I wish more than anything that Ruby was here.
However, with that impulse came a reciprocal wave of regret and self-recrimination as her memory pierced her with the truth that it was only Winter’s fault that Ruby was hurt right now.
“Good soldiers follow orders.”
On the next step, one of the monstrous paws landed atop the flare. With a violent hiss, the flame was snuffed out, plunging the alley back into darkness.
Winter’s eyes couldn’t adjust to the abrupt lighting change immediately, leaving a perilous gap in time where she would be able to see nothing except the yawning maw of an incomprehensible darkness in front of her, and she knew.
She knew it was about to strike.
“Open fire!” Winter shouted as she used a glyph to pull herself away from the path just before a frenzied blur of black matter and white bones exploded out of the alley.
A hail of bullets answered her order, and at the same moment she called up another glyph, infusing it with Ice Dust to unleash a barrage of solid ice daggers at the thing streaking towards defenses which suddenly felt woefully inadequate—
Another shell exploded in the monster’s face, throwing it sideways. It appeared unhurt by the explosion, only disoriented, but all its momentum towards the crowd was abruptly stopped. As it struggled upright while bullets pinged ineffectually off its thick plates of Grimm armor, it turned away from Winter, and she saw an opportunity.
She sprinted towards it, and as Aura magnified her perception of everything, she saw the canine ears flick towards her, tracking her footsteps. But the monster’s attention remained squarely on the soldiers and civilians ahead, unleashing another roar that reached the stars above.
As such, it didn’t see Winter until she was sliding under its wingspan on another glyph, reaching for her sword’s hilt.
As soon as her fingers closed around the cold metal, she channeled her Aura into her hands and latched another glyph onto the sword, and she pulled.
She was rewarded with the feeling of something heavy giving way, followed by a squish of something much lighter, and then that sound was immediately drowned out by a deafening, crackling bellow.
Good. It could feel pain.
“Don’t let up!” she yelled to her forces. Another shell exploded against the monster as she slid away. With the unyielding promise of her weapon back in her hands, Winter felt whole again. The General would know what to do. All that was required of her was to hold out until he arrived. To her, there was no requirement that could be more simple. She was Winter Schnee, and she lived to fight monsters.
Never pausing, the monster sprang upright again with blinding speed and set sights on the mobile artillery bombarding it. Thankfully, this artillery was positioned to one side, away from the bulk of the civilians, and this gave Winter fresh hope as she closed in on the monster again. That hope did not abate even as the monster, now able to see the artillery fire coming, shook off three shells in quick succession.
This Grimm was unsettling, but it was still just a Grimm. And like any other, it had no strategy and no motivation except simple destruction. It could be outmaneuvered.
Each explosion against its form sent up sprays of Grimm liquid, but as Winter intercepted the monster, it seemed no more hindered in its movements. This time, she tried a different strike—a slash across its side at a seam between armor plates, not deep enough for her sword to get stuck but not shallow enough for the blow to be inconsequential.
Theoretically.
What actually happened was Winter’s sword did stay in her hands, and the monster ignored her completely, focusing on the artillery which was now within reach. As a shell exploded point-blank against its armored chest, it staggered but didn’t fall, and then it wrapped its claws around the barrel of the artillery cannon.
Something akin to horrified awe coursed through Winter as the beast raised the cannon entirely aloft by the barrel, handling a piece of machinery designed to be towed by a truck as if it was a melee weapon.
Then the Grimm twisted back to her, and in the moment before it swung said artillery cannon at Winter, she received a clearer look at its face without the shadows thrown by the emergency flare. Before becoming occupied with dodging high-velocity heavy machinery, Winter had just enough time to realize; one of the monster’s eyes actually wasn’t red. It had only been reflecting the flare’s red light.
But not enough time to identify the actual eye color, and Winter had much higher priorities than noting the particulars of its appearance. She could confirm the Grimm’s heterochromia after she’d pummeled it into submission.
The monster, apparently losing interest in its new toy after failing to smash Winter into the next kingdom, dropped the artillery cannon with a thud. It landed upright, appearing… shockingly intact, actually. She’d expected it to suffer much more damage, but perhaps…
“Check if that cannon’s still working!” Winter barked to the still-unharmed artillery operators, positioning herself between the Grimm and the civilians again. There was a significant crater in one section of its bone armor, likely from the point-blank shell, and Winter zeroed in on it as the first true weakness to appear. If they could get that plate to break… then maybe whatever was underneath would be more vulnerable than the rest.
BLAM.
The thunderous, echoing gunshot which split the night air could only have been issued from one weapon: Due Process.
Genuine relief flooded Winter as she turned to find the only man in Atlas she answered to, entering the square accompanied by reinforcements pouring in from all sides. And suddenly, the tide was turned.
As the monster stumbled from the force of the shot, Winter knew the bullet had found its mark. That damaged armor plate now had a jagged, gaping crack across its entire length, in which the remains of a high-caliber bullet were lodged. Through the fresh break, Winter could see a roiling vortex of Grimm liquid, raging and churning like the turbulence under a waterfall.
The Grimm staggered away, its movements suddenly sluggish. The shot hadn’t been fatal. But Winter sensed one soon would be. This time, when she summoned a glyph to pin the monster down, it failed to break loose immediately, and in war, seconds were what made all the difference. Another shot from Due Process slammed into the monster’s faceplate, causing its head to snap back violently in another spray of Grimm matter.
But the monster was still standing, breaking free of the glyph and stumbling towards the nearest Atlesian soldiers, flicking its strange mane of fur back and forth as it growled murderously. Its faceplate was broken now, the bleached bone cracking apart.
With a sequence of surgical flicks of her sword, Winter summoned four more glyphs—one for each limb. The monster thrashed wildly, tossing its head back and forth, but it couldn’t break free. All it could do was roar in pain under a hail of small arms fire. And under such an overwhelming barrage, it seemed like their bullets were finally inflicting damage.
Then the General’s voice cut through the cacophony.
“Hold your fire! All units, hold your fire!”
The mass of soldiers parted around him as he strode towards Winter, and she had an idea of what he wanted. She released the glyphs holding the monster stationary, and replaced it with a large pulling glyph which deposited the Grimm directly in front of her and the General.
And when Winter released the glyphs, the beast barely offered any belligerence, crashing heavily onto its side and then going entirely still except for a labored rise and fall of its midsection.
Somewhere in between the Grimm’s appearance and the present moment, the civilians had largely ceased screaming and fallen back into a calcified murmur of fear, but now they came alive again—not with terror, but with joy. Cheers rose, quiet and scattered at first and then rapidly becoming thunderous and echoing and enthusiastic as they realized the threat was defeated.
Ironwood did not holster his pistol as he joined Winter, eyeing the whimpering, shivering Grimm sprawled out before him. “Lieutenant, what’s the situation?”
Winter considered the civilians nearby, and decided not to risk any intel leaks, especially knowing there were Faunus in the crowd with enhanced hearing.
“Sir, it’s a Grimm that can speak.” She gave the General a meaningful look, and his raised eyebrows told her he understood what she was alluding to perfectly. “But from what you told me last night, I don’t believe this is actually the specific entity you were telling me about. I think it’s only an undiscovered mimic-type.”
“Hm.” The General lowered himself to one knee and prodded one of its massive legs with the end of his pistol. A squish answered the prod, and the barrel started to sink into the beast’s flesh. He blinked at this for several seconds before pulling his pistol away and standing back up with a shake of his head and a grimace. “You’re correct, Lieutenant. We may have found a new piece on the chessboard, but whatever this is, it isn’t the queen.”
A novel mix of relief and disappointment swelled within Winter.
Ironwood turned to a nearby officer. “It’s a new species of Grimm. We’ll need to document its existence. Once the city is secure, pull footage from the security cameras in the vicinity, and take witness statements. It’ll be important since this one won’t be alive much longer.”
Winter stowed her sword and folded her arms behind her back. It was a shame that Grimm died rapidly in captivity. It made researching them far more difficult. “You have the honors, sir.” She nodded to the half-dead monster. It was covering its face with its clawed hands, as if trying to conceal itself.
More importantly, the compromised armor plate on its midsection was still in plain sight, offering a path for an uncomplicated shot to its insides.
Wordlessly, Ironwood raised Due Process to deliver the finishing blow.
Except, that was when they were violently interrupted.
Beacon
The world stopped.
There was no other way Penny could describe it, even as categorically impossible as it was in every dimension of existence. Everything she could see or hear or feel, except for herself, had stopped.
Cinder was frozen in place to a degree that was impossible for any organic being to achieve, and so was the fire which surrounded her, the hundreds of tongues of flame neither growing nor shrinking. The lava flows crisscrossing Beacon’s landscape had stopped in place, and the sparks which flew from them were suspended in midair.
Penny touched down and turned in a circle, her bewilderment growing. Her logic core clicked and clacked helplessly. The first thing she looked for was her partner behind her, and finding her clarified nothing.
Weiss was a statue caught mid-sway, eyes wide and inanimate, seeing nothing as they stared directly at Penny with a face caught in immense terror. Her weight was off-balance, and trying to hold still in this position should have resulted in falling over quite quickly. But she remained balanced on feet which were precariously tilted to one side.
“Weiss?” Penny said, quietly at first and then much louder. “Weiss? Can you hear me?”
Nothing.
“…Can anyone hear me?”
With each passing second, Penny understood less than when everything had first stopped, if that was even possible. The bullhead, whose engines had previously been screaming with fruitless effort, was entirely silent, and there had been no gradual tail-off in sound. Just a complete and total stop. Far beyond their environment, she could see the stagnant lights of Vale, the stilled outlines of Grimm in the night sky. Nothing moved. There was no sound except what came from her.
And that was when Penny realized there was something on her head.
She reached up, her fingers closing carefully around an unfamiliar object, and took it off.
It was a crown.
It felt heavy enough to be made of solid gold. The jewels it was encrusted with were not Dust, or any kind of mineral structure which occurred on Remnant. She would’ve analyzed this with her spectroscope, except it was inoperative.
Penny held the crown out from her a little, turning it one way and then another. Aside from its peculiarly unique jewels and its inexplicable appearance atop her head, it seemed at first and second and third glance to be an ordinary crown. However, as she continued to hold it, she began to feel a faint, untraceable thrumming which resonated throughout the crown and into her hands, as if hinting at an immense power within.
Maybe a power immense enough to stop the world.
“How did you get here…?” Penny asked the crown, and for once Logic didn’t question the effectiveness of questioning a clearly inanimate object, because Logic already had enough issues with everything else right now, and this action barely registered on the relative scale of peculiarities right now.
“Be careful with that. If you drop it, you’ll be back in the passage of time, and I don’t believe you want that right now.”
Penny was startled enough that her rockets flared reflexively, lifting her several meters into the air, and she was saved from dropping the crown only by the grace of being a mechanical girl with fingers which remembered to stay closed even when her consciousness did not remember. She upgraded her status from bewildered to baffled, cut out her rockets immediately, and started to spin around before she’d even hit the ground. Her radar was still functioning normally as far as she knew, and it had detected nothing, so where could that voice—
She stared. Her photoreceptors reported normal functionality. Which meant she was not mistaken in what she was seeing.
It was… an entity. She could not find another word which sufficiently described the glowing blue figure floating in the air before her. If her spectrometer wasn’t broken, she was sure it would be throwing an error message as it tried to ascertain what exactly the glowing blue figure was made of. The best answer she could come up with was magic. Which was barely an answer at all.
“Who are you?” she said. “What is happening?”
“My name is Jana, but you may know me already as the Relic of Choice.”
She spoke plainly, flatly, and evenly, in a way that reminded Penny greatly of her own logic-only mode. Penny knew it was impolite to stare, but in her current dire straits and with the lives of her friends at stake, she found it tremendously difficult to adhere to etiquette.
Everything about Jana seemed to have some connection to the concept of time. In place of eyes, she had two clock faces, both which were displaying the current time—or, at least, what the time had been when the world stopped. Golden chains hung off and around her arms like the chains that would be found inside a grandmother clock, swaying gently in a nonexistent breeze. Her hair, a much darker shade of blue than the rest of her, was curly and thick and reached to her chin, bouncing slightly as she tilted her head with a scrutinizing gaze that was trained on Penny.
She was also not wearing anything which could be called clothes, but that also didn’t seem to be bothering her, so Penny would not be calling attention to it. However, that did raise the question of—
“You are not the last girl who summoned me,” Jana said, startling Penny out of her bewildered observations. “It doesn’t seem you know what’s happening.”
Of all the questions that Penny could have led with, of all the things which desperately needed to be addressed, she seized on something relatively inconsequential. “The last girl…?”
Because if this was magic, then perhaps it had come from the magic Penny already had, the magic of the Fall Maiden, and then perhaps that meant ‘the last girl’ was—
“Her name was Amber,” Jana said, and Penny went still. “Like you, she did not intend to summon me.”
Penny went to clutch the strings of her hoodie, only to realize she couldn’t do that at the moment. She settled for squeezing an elbow with her other hand, and trying to keep her grief from boiling over.
“But she did recognize the Relic.” Jana raised an arm, gesturing to the crown Penny was still holding, and as she did so, the bangles on her wrists glinted, jewels of every color sparkling in Penny’s vision. Again, some of the jewels were a crystalline color which did not occur on Remnant.
Somewhere deep inside her consciousness matrix, she was feeling something similar to when she’d first received Amber’s powers—the feeling that she was scratching the surface of a world which dwarfed the one she believed herself to exist in. She harbored no doubts that there could be a world’s worth of undiscovered magic, because Penny herself was a brand new world for a great many others.
“I know I am the Fall Maiden,” Penny said. “Amber gave the power to me. But I don’t know how I brought you here.”
Jana floated closer to Penny, crossing her arms as the wisps of smoke around her grew thicker. “Truth be told, I am not sure myself. I was not locked away in the same manner as the other relics. And the—”
No matter how rude, Penny couldn’t help the interruption. It felt desperately necessary. “What do you mean by locked away?”
Jana paused for several seconds, but thankfully didn’t seem annoyed when she replied, her voice as impassive as ever. “The crown you hold is a relic that allows you to wield one of the four forces which animate this world. The relics are hidden, and they can only be accessed by the magic of the Maidens. But each Maiden can only access one of the vaults. You, the Fall Maiden, are the only person in the world that can call forth the Relic of Choice.”
Those words carried a great deal of implications, all of which made Penny vastly more uncomfortable with the entire concept of a Maiden. It made the powers seem even more like a prison that trapped whoever held them. And Amber had known about the relics… Realizing that only sharpened Penny’s understanding of her friend’s pain and fear and hopelessness. Of course Amber felt powerless to change anything about her life, once made a Maiden.
Jana made a noise which sounded like a very distant chorus of chiming clocks. Penny wondered if the noise was meant to be a sigh. “The relics were not always kept like this. And when the old man placed them behind closed doors, he was not forthcoming about what Fall must do to summon me.”
The old man— “Do you mean Ozpin?” Penny said.
Jana nodded.
Penny frowned. Ozpin had not told her about the relics. Penny understood why Ozpin had not told her. However, that did not prevent her from feeling deeply upset.
“He seemed quite sure that his formulation would prevent me from falling into what he considered to be the wrong hands.” Jana shrugged. “I only know that every Fall Maiden I’ve met has been in desperate need of exactly what I exist to provide.”
Penny knew she had much greater priorities, but she couldn’t help the juddering and surging that shook her circuits in response to the way Jana so easily said what I exist to provide. It was as if she was offering herself to Penny. It was as if she saw herself as nothing but a tool.
In fact, the way she’d just described herself and the ease with which she said the words locked away… Penny’s certainty was rising that Jana in fact did see herself as a tool.
“What… you exist for…?”
“I can show you choice.” Jana reached up and plucked one of the clocks from her face which stood in for her eyes as if it was something she’d done a hundred times. In the place where the clock had been, there was no indentation or hint at anything deeper, just an even blue. “Amber felt trapped by her life, by her situation. She was desperate to find any sort of choice.”
Penny’s grip on her elbow tightened as she nodded.
“I helped her discover choice where she saw none.”
No choice.
Of course Penny had no choice right now. She had to fight Cinder. There was no one else. Who would stop her? Who would stop the destruction? Who—
“There it is,” Jana said, nodding as if Penny had said the thoughts aloud. “Like the others before you. I can show you what you cannot see. I stand at your service now, if you choose to use me.” She punctuated her words with a deep, slow bow.
Use me. There it was again. Jana was talking about herself as a tool, and it was frightening Penny. Not just because she would’ve been frightened by anyone seeing themselves as a tool, but also because the first time she had found someone who was neither human nor Faunus, but rather a third category of person… it was someone who didn’t seem to want to treat herself as a person! Despite so obviously being a person!
“I…” Penny took a step away from Jana, ash grinding underfoot. “I do not feel comfortable treating you like an unthinking object.”
“I assure you that this is what I was created for.”
“The particulars of your creation do not need to determine what you do,” Penny said defensively, the Maiden flames around her eyes flaring brighter. Her internal systems were reshuffling, putting themselves on alert for a fight, even if nothing in her had any idea what the fight would be with. “I want to help you.”
Jana nodded to her left. “I believe your friends are in more immediate need of help.”
Penny blinked, startled out of that line of processing by the reminder of everything else. A glance over her shoulder showed her friends still in the same positions, still in danger. And Ruby was still somewhere in the city, in need of help and a thousand other things that the word help did not do justice to.
Jana noticed the change in her demeanor. “Do you want to talk about your choice?”
Penny resolved that she would try to help Jana later, once the rest of the world was in a more stable place. That was a promise.
“…What choice could there be right now?” Penny said. “I have to fight Cinder. There is no choice.”
“There’s always a choice,” Jana said.
Neither Penny nor her logic core nor any other system understood that. But without another word, Jana tossed the now-removed clock onto the ground with clearly practiced ease. In the blink of an eye, the clock expanded to a size wide enough to fit a small airship on, becoming the ground which Penny stood on. At the same moment, their surroundings vanished, turning the world into a blank, uniform white which held no depth or scale, almost exactly like the strange void Penny had found herself in when Amber said goodbye.
“Where did they go?” Penny spun around again, finding no sign of her friends or even Cinder, just… nothing except the massive clock underfoot, and herself, and Jana. As if the world had been swept away—
“Don’t worry,” Jana said. “Everything is still as it was. I only brought us somewhere else to allow you more focus.”
“…Somewhere else?”
“Somewhere else.”
“Where?”
“Somewhere.”
“You cannot be any more specific?”
“No.”
As unsettling as it was to see her world disappear, Penny would have to make herself be satisfied with that answer.
“There are choices.” Jana waved a hand, and twelve puffs of blue smoke appeared around them, one at each number on the clock. At the same moment, the hands on the clock, longer than Penny was tall, began moving with a mammoth tick-tock which echoed in Penny’s audioreceptors. The sound seemed to come from everywhere.
“Choices that you are aware of, and choices that you might never have considered without ample time and opportunity to do so.” She nodded towards a particular column of blue smoke—the one closest to Penny, and also the column which stood at midnight on the clock. “This is one.”
The smoke blurred and swirled, and then Penny found herself looking at an image of the moment before she’d put on the crown—or rather, a moment that could come after. The image was Penny, taking a decisive step towards Cinder, the wind just beginning to rise around her as she called her Maiden powers into action. Cinder was at the edge of the image, much further away, and just beginning to take flight as well, a battle about to begin. The battle which would have to begin in real life.
Logic felt that there was nothing particularly insightful about seeing this. It was still obvious what she had to do.
“That seems to be the one you had in mind already,” Jana said, before floating onward, leaving Penny to follow her. Underfoot, the larger of the clock hands matched their pace as they came to a stop at the three o’clock position.
When Penny peered into the smoke here, she found an image of herself holding out her hands in Cinder’s direction, as if pleading with her for something.
“Or you could try to reason with her. Just earlier today, she was trying to recruit you to her side for reasons you still don’t fully understand.”
Penny blinked at Jana. “How did you know that? And how can you not know where we are right now, if you can know this?”
“Magic,” Jana said, without a single hint of mirth that Penny could detect.
“Is that all you are going to say?”
“Of the four relics, Choice holds the purview which manages to be the narrowest and the widest of them all at once.”
That was all Jana was going to say about the matter, Penny decided. So she nodded, and then considered the concept of trying to reason with Cinder. It had seemed impossible in the moment, but now, with time to think…
Why had Cinder tried to recruit her? Why had Cinder become so furious with Penny upon failing to recruit her? Most importantly of all, Penny still did not know why Cinder knew her. There had been so much in the last several hours which upended her past. Cinder was from Mistral. Penny was from Atlas. Penny was a closely kept secret. Cinder had been hiding in the shadows for years. Where had their paths crossed? Was there still some way Penny could close this gap in understanding between them…?
“Even as furious as she seems right now, perhaps you can reach her with the right combination of words,” Jana said.
Penny thought about it, her processors whirring precipitously. She did not feel confident in this option. Even while knowing she stood in a temporal diffraction, she felt as if she was running out of time.
“Are there other choices I should see?”
As a reply, Jana floated on, and when they arrived at a cloud of smoke at the six o’clock mark, Penny saw the image in the smoke long before she was standing before it. It was an image of Penny on her knees in front of Cinder, her head bowed while flames roared triumphantly around her. There was no sign of Penny’s friends anywhere, and she did not know whether that was a good sign, or a terrible one.
“You could offer a bargain. Your life, in exchange for a guarantee of your friends’ survival.”
Penny felt even less confident in this option. She looked back at Jana again. “How many choices do you have to show me, exactly?”
Jana went still, cocking her head as she studied Penny. And then there was one especially loud TICK from everywhere around them, and Jana vanished into a wisp of pale blue smoke.
“Jana?” Nothing else about the environment had changed—the same enormous clock, the same featureless white void, the same blue smoke—
Jana’s voice appeared from everywhere and nowhere, booming deeply in Penny’s audioreceptors. “We could be here for a very long time, if you desired.”
The columns of smoke grew, pressing in closer to Penny, until she was in nothing but a narrow cylinder of clear air, surrounded by opaque blue smoke on all sides which prevented her from seeing anything beyond. All she could see was the little part of the clock face directly under her, a circle that wasn’t more than a meter or two wide.
Something caught Penny’s feet and began pulling her forward, and only when she looked down did she realize a clock hand had swept her up and was carrying her on its circular journey.
An image appeared out of the smoke. This one was more three-dimensional than the ones before, and it depicted Penny in flight somewhere over what she assumed was the Emerald Forest.
“You could try to lead the fight away from the school and kingdom entirely, and venture as far as your opponent would follow.”
No sooner had the fourth image disappeared back into the smoke than another one appeared, again Penny in flight but this time flying beside the White Fang bullhead.
“You could flee alongside your friends, and try to reach the city under pursuit.”
Before this image could disappear too, Penny’s hand shot out, as if she could grab it. “Wait!”
The clock hand underneath stopped with suddenness that was jarring even to Penny, who was not easily jarred on a physical level.
Even as she regained her balance, her processors spun wildly at this possibility. She could protect her friends in their escape. There would be more help in the city. Trained Huntresses who might be able to match Cinder’s skill. Or strength in numbers. Or even just places to hide from Cinder… And Ruby would be somewhere in the city…
All the smoke cleared, and Jana reappeared beside her. “Do you see something in this choice?”
“It feels…” Penny tilted her head, considering it. Her prediction algorithms were not optimistic about the chances here. But then again, they weren’t optimistic about any of these choices. “How much time do I have left?”
“As much as you need.” The smoke continued to drift around them. “There is one more thing which I can bestow upon you, as the Relic of Choice. I can offer a glimpse at what might happen after you choose.”
Penny was still holding the crown in her hands. She stared down at it in silence, trying to understand why it existed, and why it had this power. It felt unimaginable. But this was her world now, a realm expanding far beyond the confines she’d always assumed it to have.
Maybe she should have been less surprised by this. Her own existence was starkly unprecedented.
“…Do you mean that you can show me the future?” she said finally.
“I can show you what might be the future. But only one.” Jana drifted closer. “Once I have shown you the future which could result from a particular path you choose, I cannot show you any others.”
“Oh.” Penny nodded slowly. She had questions such as why only one? and how do you show it? but she had a strong suspicion that the answer to anything in this line of questioning would be magic. And she needed to return to her friends.
Penny pointed to the image of herself fleeing with her friends. “I would like to see what happens if I choose this.”
“What might happen,” Jana said. “The slightest of changes to anything that comes after might result in a world of difference, and a thousand turns of the clock might reveal a thousand different endings. What you see is no guarantee of what might actually happen.”
She faded away, and then so did the clock face underneath them, and then Penny was seeing things unfold which looked as real as anything she’d ever seen with her own photoreceptors.
Penny saw herself turning away from Cinder, and using her Maiden powers to sweep away the flames which were keeping the bullhead chained to the ground. She saw those same wind powers, given by Amber, lifting Weiss and Pyrrha and Nora into the airship. She saw herself following the bullhead into the air, and she saw Cinder streaking after her in a blaze that lit up the night sky. She saw herself battling Cinder in midair, trying to keep her away. She saw Cinder’s focus shifting suddenly from Penny to the airship.
Penny saw Cinder unleash a torrent of flames that swallowed up the airship, and these were not flames meant to corral the airship like before. These were flames which were meant to annihilate.
Penny saw the airship carrying her battered friends plunge out of the sky with two smoking, sputtering engines too damaged to hold it aloft anymore, and she saw the terrified expressions on the faces of her friends, and she saw the alternate version of herself diving to save the airship, and then she saw a jagged, white-hot spear of molten glass plunge through her chest from behind with a horrible crunching and sparking of machinery. She saw her eyes go empty, the flames disappearing from her wings, and she saw the airship continue its plunge to the ground, ending in an abrupt explosion far below, an immediate grave for any of her friends with no Aura. And then she saw Cinder going strangely still in midair, staring at the hand which had hurled the spear that killed Penny. She saw Cinder squeeze her eyes shut and clench her hands into fists as she began shaking all over, barely keeping herself aloft while growling at nothing and clenching her jaw to what had to be a painful degree. And then she saw Cinder throw back her head and unleash a ragged, piercing shriek upon the stars, one that sounded so much like the pained howl Ruby had unleashed just before running away from Penny. The despairing shriek continued far beyond what seemed possible for organic lung capacity, and Penny only noticed the tears on Cinder’s face when they began to reflect the moonlight.
“Stop,” Penny said. She had to apply an inordinate amount of processing power to keep herself calm, even knowing none of what she was seeing was real.
The vision disappeared, and Penny was back atop the clock face, nearly tripping over her own feet as she backed away. She stopped just short of the edge of the clock, rebalancing herself just before she would’ve fallen over the edge into… into… Well, she actually couldn’t tell, but generally, falling over the edge of something was not something with positive outcomes.
“Careful. Don’t fall over,” Jana said, appearing beside her again. “I don’t know what’s down there.” And then, with a snap of her fingers, the world around them transformed back into the world that Penny knew, the clock face shrinking back down into the size of Jana’s eye. Penny found herself standing back in the place she had been standing when the crown first appeared.
“Can you… is there anything you can do to help my friends?” Penny had a likely guess for Jana’s answer.
The magical being shook her head, and then emotion filtered into her voice for the first time. Sadness.
“I’m sorry, but I cannot. I am an instrument of choice, and that is the only way in which I can interact with your world.”
Penny nodded. She did not say I understand, because she didn’t. She did not say that’s okay, because it didn’t feel like it was. But she knew there was nothing she could do about it right now. She knew there were others who needed her help sooner. Even if her concern for Jana’s wellbeing and personhood was growing ever-greater.
“Jana,” Penny said. “When Amber found you, what choices did you show her?”
Jana returned the clock to her face, and stared at Penny for several seconds. The clock chains which dangled around her shivered noticeably. Then, she said, “Some of the choices she considered involved you.”
That was all the answer which Penny needed. Perhaps she didn’t know which future Amber had seen, but she knew what Amber had chosen.
“Thank you for helping her,” Penny said.
With that, she moved in some unknown instinct and raised the crown back to her head.
When the world started again, Penny’s gaze was still on Cinder, where her future now laid. The crown had vanished as soon as it touched Penny’s head, and now there was nothing left to do except make her choice.
She reached for the one thing she had left.
“Penny!” Weiss said.
Penny dove into herself—into a particular, little-traveled part of her consciousness matrix where one great mystery still resided. The part of her which came from her father, which was nowhere in any of her blueprints and absent from her memory and her sensors. The part of her which, when she thought about it, she heard—
Not yet, Penny. That is only for the gravest of emergencies.
Penny could not conceive of anything more dire than this moment.
Are you sure?
With the expected reply from her father’s voice ringing in Penny’s mind, she took a deep, cooling breath. She thought of her friends behind her, who still had a chance to live if only they could escape from an unstoppable elemental demigoddess who defied their understanding. She thought of Ruby, alone and hurting and in desperate need of a second chance. She thought of Cinder’s fury, which could level a kingdom in a single night. She thought of Professor Carmel and Amber. She thought of canvases not yet painted and fairytale endings not yet written and stories not yet told.
“Yes,” Penny said aloud, answering her father. “I am sure.”
A pause, and then, louder than ever before, Penny heard the voice of her father:
“Your name is Penny Polendina. You are my daughter. I love you.”
Penny did not move as warmth filled her—a feeling which she’d thought not too long ago that she might never feel again. But it was here inside her, incongruous happiness bubbling in her chest as she turned those words over and over in her head, devoting a few milliseconds to nothing but repeating those three short sentences from every auditory angle.
Her memory began to ping over and over again, and a quick check told her that vast swaths of new files and new information were appearing out of memory partitions she hadn’t even known about. And with the flood of new data came new programs and protocols and subroutines that immediately began working to interface with her existing systems. The memories themselves would have to wait to be investigated, because first they would have to be indexed, and to do that would take a great deal of time and processing power, neither of which Penny could spare right now. But small things that didn’t necessarily need to be indexed were filtering through already, feelings and thoughts and reflexes and urges that brought hints of larger memories with them.
Her father loved her. Penny remembered the feeling of being loved by her father more strongly than she ever had. She was his daughter. She could feel that knowledge in her Aura generator.
Penny Pallas Polendina.
She had been right about the alliteration. It sounded right. It felt right. It was the kind of knowledge which Penny needed, something that would give comfort until the end. Whenever it came.
Click.
Cinder was still watching Penny. Waiting for her to throw herself into an ending.
Click. Click. Click. Click.
Anyone near Penny to would recognize the sound of mechashift components beginning to move. This was an unusually slow series of clicks—perhaps because it was an especially complicated mechanism, or perhaps because these components had not mechashifted in a very long time, or perhaps both.
Penny returned Cinder’s gaze, and concentrated on the flood of new telemetry data coursing through her consciousness as her programs reconfigured themselves to accommodate components she hadn’t even known she had, as her body readied for war.
She could feel exactly what was happening, and she was not afraid, because she knew this was a gift from her father. She knew she had experienced this before. Many times, in fact. She did not have to index the blast of uninvestigated new memories to feel the familiarity that was coming back. Familiarity with what exactly this last resort was.
Penny’s wings shifted and moved apart from one another like the gates of a castle opening, transitioning to a swept-wing configuration. What was normally a near-invisible opening in her back (through which her flight mode extended and retracted) became a gap wide enough for something larger to pass through. That allowed the new component from inside to emerge into open air unfettered. Only Penny and Ruby would recognize what appeared—Penny because this was a part of her, and Ruby because she’d found this hidden green box deep inside Penny long ago while helping install her taste sensors.
However, it was the furthest thing from a box now. It was unfurling slowly and steadily with a kaclick-kaclick-kaclick which echoed in her audioreceptors. Penny did not need to check her new memories to know the name of this last resort. It was brought to her mind by sheer instinct.
Floating Array.
Eight swords. Eight bright new stars floating in her consciousness. If they could even be called new; as soon as Penny registered the presence of each individual blade, every one of them felt as natural as any other part of her body. These swords were not Atlas’s weapons. They were hers. Ironwood could not command these blades to strike. No one in Atlas could. The only word that Floating Array answered to was the word of Penny.
Floating Array was transmitting so much data through their reawakened connection as they unfurled that to Penny, it felt as if the swords were chattering at her shoulders. Acquainting themselves with what had changed during their slumber, electronic pulses attuning to the rhythms of her soul and her code with a clearly practiced ease, communicating all the while in an electronic pitter-patter.
Then, Penny registered something at the center of the swords, the final component of what had been hidden within herself, and unlike everything else, it was something which Penny did not recognize. The gossamer-thin cables which connected Floating Array to her body were connected to this piece, too, but there was no familiarity behind it as it raised to Penny’s head. And then this new component came online within her consciousness, and Penny realized—it was a helmet.
A warrior’s helmet.
“A gift for you, from me,” came her father’s voice from deep inside.
The helmet was heavily armored yet painstakingly crafted and designed. A sensor array built into the back of the helmet was shaped into a metal bow, the exact shade of pink as the hair bow she wore. The separated layer of shielding which curved around either side of the helmet was painted a perfect match to her own flaming orange hair. Shaped metal just like the robot’s hair in the Tale of The Blacksmith and The Robot. And the face itself was laced with ornate bronze curls all along the edges, bronze like pennies. The helmet’s resemblance to herself seemed to serve no purpose except an aesthetic one, and that was… strangely comforting.
It was one last gift from her father amidst all the other things he had given her, to help her protect herself in a moment of greatest need. Her Aura generator was thrumming so strongly that it made her vision shake. She sent a silent affirmative to Floating Array through their connection, and only then, with her consent, did the thin-as-thread cables lower the helmet onto her head.
The helmet had magnetic connectors which anchored it to Penny’s head, and they were clearly designed to work though her synthetic skin (even if that requirement wasn’t present now). The systems which were coming online were like nothing she had ever experienced before. Suddenly, her field of vision was expanding thousandfold, angles and framerates that’d never been possible becoming available. Quite simply, the helmet’s entire face was one massive armored photoreceptor array, operating wildly beyond what visuals the human eye’s shape could offer. Suddenly, Penny could see everything, front and behind and side. She could see all her swords, green and silver and black.
This was not just a helmet. It was also a part of her. It was connected to the rest of her body through the inbuilt cable which connected it to Floating Array and therefore her internals. It was an extra set of eyes, another layer of her body, one that could be folded away and deployed like how her wings were another layer of her body which could be folded away and deployed and yet were no less connected to the rest of her.
Penny shifted into a fighting stance, feeling how Floating Array rippled in response to the movement. It was a sensation both new and old. The blades were pointed at Cinder, and that meant each glowing power symbol on the swords’ sides were facing Penny like a many-eyed being gazing at her. They reminded her strongly of Luminous Electra.
“Floating Array,” she said aloud. “It is good to know you again.”
Eight power emblem-eyes flared brighter, and energy sang through the wires that connected the swords to each other and her.
Penny raised Luminous Electra—the centerpiece of her blades, the weapon which she wielded with her own hands. Luminous was not extra. It was not being replaced. It was the ninth sword, no less important for this fight than any part of Floating Array. Even with old instincts and reflexes coursing through her, Luminous Electra was still the weapon which was the most familiar to her hands.
Penny was not afraid. Penny knew she was still free, and that she always would be. This was her body, her instruments, her components, built by her father and herself. This gift was one made with love, not belligerence. If the Kingdom of Atlas had built the Battle Angel to be the greatest weapon in history, then how could they ever stop her from spreading her wings and taking flight? How could they ever hope to control her, to stop her from taking charge of her own story?
This was Penny’s story. Not anyone else’s. If her enemies wanted the world to know her as a war machine, then Penny would be one—but only in a way her enemies did not, or could not understand—she would be a war machine for good.
If, after today, the world would only define Penny by those two words they’d heard on the broadcast, battle angel, then the world would see a winged guardian that would plunge into any fight, no matter how outmatched, in service of protecting those who had no one else left to protect them. It was what a Huntress would choose to do. It was what Penny Pallas Polendina was choosing to do.
The Battle Angel spread her wings, and metal feathers as deadly as a Nevermore’s glinted in the firelight.
“Penny, please, you can’t,” Weiss said.
“Don’t worry, Weiss.” Penny tensed her entire body, refusing to flinch under the scorching path of Cinder’s glare.
“I’m combat ready.”
Notes:
TRIPLE EDIT FOR 6/27: Next Friday. Next Friday, the chapter will be ready!
DOUBLE EDIT FOR 6/20: Still caught up in immense but good life changes, sadly. As it turns out, actually unpacking your stuff into a new apartment takes a real long time. On the bright side, things should quiet down and I should have more free time after this week, I think?
EDIT: Well, um, if you’re reading this because of a lack of Chapter 71 on/after the day when that chapter was supposed to arrive, I deeply apologize. The next chapter just genuinely isn’t ready, and I promise I really tried to get it out by the normal update day. Tbh I probably tried harder than I should’ve to have the chapter ready on time, because now I need to load a moving truck on 3 hours of sleep. It’s a really unfortunate coincidence that the chapter which needed the most work lined up with the busiest month of my life in several years. New job, new apartment, moving to a completely different area for the first time, all the associated difficulties. I’m so sorry for leaving you on this cliffhanger for longer than necessary, and I will try my best to get the chapter posted as soon as it’s finished.
Well, given how little we know about the Relic of Choice, some conjecture was required. I tried to make it fit with what we know, that being: It is hidden in a different way than the rest of the relics; it has not yet been found; we may have some idea of how it works thanks to that fairy tale about the indecisive king. And I thought it would be thematically fitting if the relic was not tied to a specific location but could be called forth from anywhere; meaning that in canon Cinder could've theoretically had access to Choice at any time but never could find it for herself. Of course, Jana is entirely an OC, but I wouldn't necessarily call her a plot-critical one, because Penny was going to arrive at this choice regardless of the personality of whoever she spoke to inside the crown.
On a different note: that closing moment and final line, my dear readers, is another scene which I have held in my mind since I first had the idea for this story.
Next week, Chapter 71: Combat Ready
Chapter 71: Combat Ready
Notes:
I said I would have the chapter ready for this Friday. And I was right!
Thank you all for being so understanding about the delay.
Content warning for this chapter (click this text to reveal):
Major character death, blood, injury, violence, attempted murder, loss of bodily autonomy (and discussions of it), self-destructive behavior, suicidal actions and attempts, injury, body horror.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
After an impossible stillness, nothing could’ve prepared Blake for the sudden explosion of movement which happened too fast for her or anyone to comprehend.
Penny rocketed towards Cinder. A blast of air swept up Weiss and Pyrrha and Nora and carried them into the bullhead. The claw of flames holding the bullhead down vanished as Penny collided with Cinder. The airship leapt into the air as the thrusters which had never stopped spinning full-tilt were finally and abruptly relieved of the burden holding them at a standstill. Anyone standing inside the ship was thrown to the floor once again.
Nimbus, having the wherewithal to be strapped into the pilot’s seat, wrestled with the controls of the suddenly bucking airship and got them onto a level flight path, still pointed away from Beacon.
This time, no matter how much it broke Blake’s heart to make this call, she knew what they needed to do. Penny had made her choice, and there was someone in the city who could only be helped by the occupants of this airship.
“Get us to Vale stat!” she yelled to Nimbus, before wincing, because somehow just raising her voice made her ankle hurt. She’d twisted it badly when Cinder stopped the airship dead, and with no Aura to heal it, it wouldn’t be getting any easier to deal with anytime soon.
Yang raised her head from the cabin floor, surveying their surroundings with wide eyes as the ship dove into a sharp turn towards the city. Then she went limp again, collapsing onto her stomach and curling up into a ball. She started to cry softly.
Without hesitation, Blake limped over to Yang, ignoring the pain in her ankle. She ended up beside Yang on her knees as she reached out and took one of Yang’s hands in her own, squeezing it tightly. At the same moment, Weiss knelt down from the other side, joining Yang in collapse with her eyes fixed on the horizon in silent horror.
Yang’s tears didn’t abate, but she did look up and meet Blake’s eyes.
“There’s—there’s so much, Blake,” Yang whispered between shallow gasps for breath. “How are we going to… to stop any of it? How can we change anything?”
“We’re going to try,” was all Blake could say in response. That was what the White Fang had been doing for so long when faced with the same question Yang was asking, only on a much larger scale.
“It’s what Penny would say,” Weiss mumbled.
A single violent sob escaped Yang, and then she struggled up to her feet, hanging onto Blake as if she’d lost all sense of her own balance. Blake knew it had nothing to do with the bullhead’s constant banking back and forth to avoid Grimm prowling the sky.
“Here.”
Blake blinked as Jaune’s voice reached her ears and the pain in her ankle abated. She looked over her shoulder to see him using his Semblance on her, his hand glowing.
“You looked like you needed it,” Jaune explained as he continued amplifying her Aura, to which she nodded in gratitude. “I guess—”
At that moment, Jaune’s Aura flickered all over before giving out with the telltale dissolving of an Aura break. “—Oh, okay.” he said, blinking at his hands. “Guess I used up all my Aura. I did heal a whole lot of people, so I probably should’ve seen that coming.”
Even though Blake felt like she could walk again, all she could think was how this meant one more Aura-less member of their group. How many did that make now? Herself, Ilia, Jaune—Yang was running low—Ren had mentioned being dangerously close to zero…
“Verdant,” Blake called across the airship, somehow keeping her voice even. “When we find Ruby, I want all our people to stay on the airship and make sure the rest of the Fang is okay.”
“You sure that’s wise?” Verdant said. “I feel like you’re gonna need all the help you can get.”
“Ruby’s looking for something that’ll kill her without a second glance,” Blake said. “And whoever she finds, something tells me they won’t spare a second glance for any White Fang, either.”
“…Can’t argue with that,” Verdant said after a thoughtful pause. “Just… Be careful, okay?”
Blake removed her White Fang mask from her belt and tossed it to Ilia. “Keep it safe,” she said with a nod. “Can’t risk having someone shoot me either, not while I’m saving my teammate.”
Ilia held the mask in her hands like it was a wounded sparrow and nodded fiercely.
“Please, please, please,” Yang mumbled to no one, her hair whipping madly in the wind. “Please. Please, just one miracle…”
Blake tried and failed to banish the thought of how much of a miracle they needed to find Ruby. As unforgettable as her Grimm-drowned form was, it was still just one Grimm in a massive city overflowing with them. Every street held someone willing and able to kill something that looked like a monster on sight.
But before Blake, Yang, and Weiss turned their full attention to scouring the skies above Vale for Ruby, they looked back in the direction of Beacon one last time, squinting into the blinding flashes of light in hopes of seeing some small hint of how their teammate was faring. However, they could not see Penny, or even her opponent, amidst the incomprehensible storm of fire and light.
Vale
As the General raised Due Process to finish off the monster at their feet, Winter’s attention shifted to the crowd still watching them. Even amidst their jubilation at the Grimm’s defeat, she could sense a marked wariness rippling continuously through the civilians, a lasting suspicion of the Atlesian commanding officers standing before them. A pang of sadness flickered in Winter’s chest, knowing that some part of their suspicion was her own fault—
—That train of thought was abruptly terminated as chaos broke loose in a way that was unmatched even by tonight’s standards. And of all the things it could’ve begun with…
A ferocious barking from somewhere behind them was the only warning, sounding aggressive enough that it made Winter, the General, and every soldier in the vicinity look to see if it was another Grimm.
Then, out of the corner of her eye, Winter registered a streak of black diving out of the night sky, too small and too fast to reveal any identifying features, and on a collision course with the General.
“SIR—!”
Winter’s warning was too late, and Ironwood’s head was still turned, which meant there was no preventing the sleek blur from slamming into the General’s weapon arm.
BLAM
The echoing gunshot, sent off-course when the General’s hand was knocked away, exploded in in the ground beside the monster, sending up a spray of asphalt. Barely a fraction of a second had passed when Winter spun to face the new threat, unleashing a glyph on whatever new Grimm was attacking—
Her glyph fizzled into nothingness, her concentration disrupted by sheer confusion in another fraction of a second, as she could finally identify the attacker as:
A crow?
Not a Grimm masquerading as a bird. A genuine member of the animal kingdom, flapping its wings furiously as it flew straight into Winter’s face.
She had no hope of reacting, not when her brain was already short-circuiting from seeing a common bird unleash a clearly targeted attack. She did not even have the time to fully form the thought of Wh— before a storm of pitch-black feathers swallowed up her vision as talons raked over her Aura and—
And then it was gone, passing overhead and disappearing into the night, leaving Winter in a stupor while shouting proliferated around her as soldiers looked wildly for a threat that wasn’t materializing.
But then it did materialize; directly into Winter’s back as a large weight which cannonballed into her, her vision ever-so-briefly filling with a flash of gold before she was knocked forwards.
Her chin slammed into the pavement, her Aura doing nothing to prevent the sudden pain which burst through her head, and her vision blacked out for a period that could’ve been anywhere between a day and a century—and when her sight came back, she had to wonder if the impact had been too much for her suddenly-overtaxed mind, because now she was staring a squat little gray corgi in the face. It stared right back at her, growling for all the world’s worth.
…Hadn’t she seen this dog before?
There was a muted thud of something else landing beside her, and then Winter looked up and saw two licensed Huntsmen standing between the monster and the Atlesian forces, with their weapons unmistakably aimed in the wrong direction.
“Hold. Your. Fire.” General Ironwood’s voice was nothing but hard steel, and his expression unreadable focus. He had lowered Due Process, but was still holding it at his side. “Taiyang. Qrow. You have ten seconds to explain what in the name of—explain exactly what you are doing.”
The strange Grimm convulsed violently. But even though Winter’s glyph had been dispelled when her head hit the ground, that was all the movement it attempted.
There was a unique mixture of despair and hatred in Branwen’s face as he glanced back and forth between the General and the beast. When he spoke, there wasn’t a trace of his earlier drunkenness to be found. Winter wasn’t sure if that made her evaluation of him better or worse. “Something’s different about this Grimm. Something’s wrong.”
Winter arched a viciously skeptic eyebrow, and the General stared back in disbelief. “And you felt that was reason enough to violently interfere with our elimination of one of the monsters attacking your kingdom?”
“James. You will never again have the right to judge whatever choices Qrow or I make.”
It took Winter a moment to recognize the blonde-haired Huntsman standing beside Branwen—it was Xiao Long, the one who’d inexplicably held the General at weaponpoint earlier that night.
“Taiyang, is that really relevant right now—”
“Jimmy, you numbskull, will you just hold your fucking horses for a second and let us take a look?!” Branwen burst out, his voice oddly thick with emotion that Winter couldn’t identify.
As soon as the roughly spoken Jimmy had breached the night air, there was something which sounded suspiciously like stifled giggles from the crowd of civilians. But the General only blinked. In the face of the drunkard’s mocking words, that was a truly uncharacteristic display of weakness. Especially in sight of his own soldiers.
Feeling the need to step into the vacuum, Winter spoke up. “Will you at least provide us with the knowledge of what makes this monster so different from the rest?”
Instead of replying, the two men turned to the Grimm, which had gone as still as an inanimate object. They knelt down beside its hulking form, and then Branwen stowed his scythe on his back while Xiao Long retracted the claws back into his gauntlets. The corgi was at their side, too, having slipped past Winter at some point. It was nudging at Xiao Long’s legs insistently, and paradoxically its growling had been replaced by a mournful whine.
That whine was the first moment in which Winter felt truly uprooted from any understanding of the situation.
She kept her sword raised, but she was no longer sure what it would be aimed at. No one intervened as Xiao Long reached out with a strangely gentle hand and brushed the tips of his fingers through the strange mane of long fur that cascaded down over the Grimm. Then he whispered something that only Branwen, Winter, and the General were close enough to hear.
“Summer…?”
The corgi’s whining intensified.
Winter didn’t understand the significance of the word, but the General did. He had gone ashen.
And then the Grimm shrank away from Xiao Long’s touch like a prey animal, twitching rapidly all over. Except, there was a pattern…
Winter stared. Was… was the creature shaking its head?
A mimic-type Grimm couldn’t comprehend human speech and answer questions in any way. But if this Grimm was giving a negative answer—and she didn’t know how else to interpret its bone-plated maw repeatedly, insistently shaking back and forth, distinct even amidst the full-body shivers—then… then…
The mood amongst the soldiers and civilians had shifted, spreading whispery murmurs across the square. Even those unable to get a glimpse of the scene could sense in the air that something was wrong.
Xiao Long’s hand followed the Grimm as it shrank away. “Summer,” he said again, more confidently. “Summer, it’s okay.”
More frantic shakes of the monster’s head.
The corgi’s whining grew louder, louder, until it was too loud for any dog that small to make the sound, and that was when Winter realized the monster had joined in the sound, its form vibrating with a plaintive whine as if it was afraid of itself.
Winter’s breathing was accelerating too quickly. Something was wrong. Something was terribly wrong.
And then Branwen reached out with both arms. The monster didn’t shrink away this time, its whine only increasing in volume as Branwen slowly took hold of its massive clawed hands which had been positioned to cover its face this entire time.
Branwen’s Aura flared as the Grimm liquid shifted and squished around his fingers, but he never once flinched as he slowly, carefully moved the monster’s hands away and revealed what’d been hidden ever since the monster had fallen.
Winter was positioned at just the right angle to see past the two kneeling men and right into the monster’s face and the monster’s eyes—
When their eyes met, Winter’s heart stuttered, nearly stopped, and stumbled back into a rhythm pounding as hard as if she was at a full sprint.
The Grimm had a silver eye.
“…Ruby?” Winter whispered.
Her voice was nothing but an unprofessional rasp, completely forgetting just how large an audience there was. But the rest of the world had become completely mute, falling far beyond the soldier’s discipline which normally marshaled her attention, and all that Winter Schnee could do in mind and sight and sound was bear witness to a series of belated and terrifying realizations.
In a fraction of a second, shorter than the moment it took to pull a trigger, horrifyingly familiar aspects of this Grimm crashed over Winter’s consciousness. Little markers that hadn’t even registered during the heat of battle. And if Winter had subconsciously noticed any of these strange traits during the attack moments ago, they’d been discarded immediately by a mind that paid no time or attention to things that seemed frivolous.
Now, nothing had ever seemed less frivolous. The strange mane of the Grimm, so unlike the liquid and bone everywhere else—it wasn’t fur. It was hair. Hair which was deep black and red, fading between the two colors a way which she had previously dismissed as typical Grimm coloring. But now, she was understanding that she’d seen this hair already, thousands of times before, almost always tied in a braid. It was the right length too, and wild and thick like—
Good soldiers follow orders. Ruby’s longtime mantra. Ruby’s favored words to calm her down in stressful moments. The words that Ruby had stopped repeating sometime in the last few weeks.
And then before Winter could process any more of the truth, Branwen broke the silence with a single wounded word.
“…Kid?”
The Grimm’s whining abruptly stopped. It shook its head out, sending more crumbling pieces of its bone mask flying away, and Winter saw flashes of something pale which wasn’t bone—flashes of skin. Human skin, drowning under the black liquid.
“Ruby isn’t isn’t isn’t isn’t isn’t a kid. Ruby is a monster. Monster monster monster monstermonstermonstermonster.”
“No, please…” Taiyang said in a voice that warbled unsteadily. “Please, no, no, no…”
How had Winter failed to recognize Ruby’s voice before? How could she have ever recognized the words hissed at her as coming from anywhere besides Ruby’s mouth? The fog of war was a woefully inadequate excuse for why she’d thought the Grimm’s voice completely alien, especially when she was hearing the same exact crackling, hissing voice that she’d encountered in the alley and the Ruby underneath was unmistakable.
Ruby began to move.
Slowly, laboriously, as if under excruciating pain. Nothing about the movement could be called sudden except for the random twitches all over. That was why she could rise to her feet without breaking the paralyzed silence which had infected every other occupant of the city square, Huntress and soldier and civilian alike and even the two who had been bold enough to approach Ruby in the first place. Every soul was held hostage by a dreadful, comprehending awe.
Every soul except one.
Ruby rose shakily to her full height, towering over the Huntresses standing between it and the rest of the world, and her shape was fully apparent again. This time, Winter could not disregard the unnaturally human shape glimmering under the full moon.
Ruby was still staring at Winter.
Winter was frozen in place, her swords almost too heavy to lift as red and silver eyes stared into her soul, ringed by a cracked faceplate which bore too much resemblance to a pair of goggles.
“Good soldiers follow orders,” Ruby growled out.
Winter understood now. That wasn’t a taunt.
Her orders were to kill the Grimm. Ruby was a Grimm.
It was a plea.
When the beast lifted its eyes and James Ironwood recognized the silver pupil staring out from within the gruesome visage, a chill ran down his spine; the rarest of sensations to assail him. His line of work and duty meant he’d seen the worst of what the world had to offer, and his Semblance meant he’d long since learned how to be perfectly numb to such horrors. But there was no repressing the acute and genuine unsettlement he felt right now.
The chill had come for Ironwood when he’d first opened the strange vault in an abandoned laboratory and found a child inside. The chill had come for him when he’d learned the truth of Salem’s true immortality. And now, the greatest chill yet found him again as the Grimm making a mockery of Project Moonrise threw back its head and howled. The sound might’ve rolled over the entire city.
“Ruby,” Taiyang said in a voice that sounded like begging for an apology. “Ruby, we’ll—”
That was all he could say before a horrific crunching split the air, coming from somewhere inside Ruby, and she was thrown into a series of twisting contortions as Ironwood’s grip on Due Process tightened and he wondered if this was the moment when the situation became untenable—
A pair of massive wings erupted from her back, sized for a monster that should’ve been larger than her, sending out a shower of Grimm droplets which hissed wildly against pavement and armor and Aura, and then Ruby lunged at Ironwood with blinding speed.
She moved faster than had previously seemed possible, knocking aside Taiyang and Qrow and Winter before any of them could react, and then she did not knock aside Ironwood. Instead, she snatched him up with unthinkable strength, holding him in a grip not even he could escape from as she took off into the night, flying straight up with tremendously powerful flaps of her wings.
Ironwood spent several dazed seconds struggling fruitlessly against claws of hardened bone which held him at arm’s length as boiling-hot and humid breaths washed over him, and he could only think of one reason why Ruby would suddenly be so aggressive after practically surrendering before: The Grimm was overtaking her completely.
The previous docility only made sense if Ruby had been able to fight the Grimm possessing her and prevent it from doing any actual harm—and she was now clearly losing that battle as the Grimm carried Ironwood higher and higher into the night without any sign of slowing. And whatever the true level of strength and speed hidden within that ever-undulating liquid… Ironwood already had little hope of matching it.
Mettle, once again, had nothing to offer.
He tightened his grip on Due Process, eyeing the broken faceplate which effectively formed a partial target around the dull silver eye. That was undoubtedly the weakest spot on the Grimm, the one bit of human vulnerability still shining through the layers of a monster. The eye was usually the most difficult place to hit on any Grimm, but at this close a range, the shot would be child’s play.
Ironwood started to raise his pistol. Then he hesitated.
After shaping Ruby’s life for a purpose that she never would’ve been able to fulfill, this was how he would end it? By his own hand, like a petulant god bored with a toy it had created for itself?
…No. He couldn’t make the error of thinking this was Ruby. This was a monster that was overtaking Ruby and clearly winning the battle for control of her body. He could not let his guard down, not when the danger was becoming more and more apparent. Whatever was left of Ruby’s soul in there, Ironwood would be doing her a mercy by putting an end to her misery.
But just as he started to raise his pistol, one word rumbled out of Ruby’s mouth, and it was perhaps the only word that could’ve made him freeze in this situation.
“Argentum.”
Argentum. Project Argentum. The title of the forever-unknown experiments done on Ruby by a dead man before Ironwood had found her. That secluded laboratory and its contents had long since been reduced to a scar in the side of a mountain, but the questions Atlas was left with had never left Ironwood’s mind.
“Argentum Argentum is a weapon weapon weapon of Salem Salem Salem Salem Salem Salem SALEM! ”
And now, at long last, Ironwood had the answer to what exactly Arthur Watts had been doing with a silver-eyed child all those years ago.
“Argentum is powerful POWERFUL! Argentum is dangerous DANGEROUS!”
The urgency in Ruby’s words only propelled more questions through Ironwood’s mind. Had this Grimm been hidden inside Ruby all along? Had Ironwood built a pillar of his military around a ticking time bomb? Had Ruby somehow been a trap? Had Salem’s side planted her in that laboratory with the seeds of evil germinating deep inside her, embedding Ruby firmly in Atlas without the girl herself ever knowing just how dangerous she was?
With a sinking feeling, Ironwood wondered if there was more truth to the words of the hijacked broadcast than he ever would’ve let himself consider otherwise. When Salem’s agent had suggested to the world that Ruby was a Grimm within a human skin, had she been speaking something she knew to be truth?
…But if Ruby had effectively been a sleeper agent, then why had the enemy waited until after the broadcast concluded to unleash the monster contained inside her? Why not show the world exactly how dangerous and unstable Atlas’s project was, making every other insinuation in the broadcast ring even truer? It made no sense.
…Unless it hadn’t been Salem who unleashed the monster.
Ironwood’s eyes widened as Ruby continued staring at him with her fangs bared and glinting in the light of the moon. Like she was waiting for something.
Ruby, who had been told last night that she was the only one who could save the world. Ruby, who knew they were fighting an enemy more powerful than anyone alive. Ruby, who had tried to find a normal life, only to learn that the world needed to be saved first. Ruby, the girl who would do anything to save the world.
Disjointed facts fell together into a perfect line of horrific plausibility which allowed Ironwood to understand with bitter clarity the sequence of events that’d led to the monster in the sky.
When Ruby had learned from the broadcast the secret under her skin, she had been operating under the belief that she was the only one who could kill Salem and save the world. And so on a night when her life was falling apart, Ruby had in her desperation found a way to unleash the hidden Grimm herself, doubtlessly hoping that she could somehow control it and become vastly more powerful. Perhaps powerful enough to win the war.
And she hadn’t known the truth. She hadn’t known the war couldn’t be won.
And with the disappearing remnants of her mind, Ruby had realized her mistake, and this was why she was pulling Ironwood into the sky. To give him the chance to kill her uninterrupted before it was too late, before she lost all control of herself irreversibly. He could see it in her eyes; the desperation of running out of time.
But first, he would tell Ruby the truth. It was the least he could do, before freeing her from the prison that her existence had become.
“Ruby. What I told you last night, about your silver eyes being the only avenue to killing Salem…”
Ruby growled. Ironwood could not glean any emotion from the sound. She was still ascending, her wings flapping tirelessly, mechanically.
“I was wrong. I believed it was the truth when I told you, but today, I discovered otherwise.”
Ruby twitched, and the ears atop her head tilted back. The liquid’s shimmering intensified, catching more of the moonlight, if such a thing was possible.
“Salem can’t be killed by silver eyes.” There was one more small mercy in killing Ruby: she would be spared the torture of living with the truth. “You can’t kill her.”
Mid-beat, Ruby’s wings froze, as if they’d been turned to stone.
“Can’t…?”
Ironwood nodded. “No one can.”
With nothing holding them aloft, they began to fall. Ironwood raised Due Process again, training the barrel on the silver eye. He had no need for Mettle in this moment. Ruby’s last words had solidified his resolve. And even if she’d never spoken, her resolve would never have been in question. The silver eye didn’t blink as it stared down the unforgiving barrel of the most famous pistol in the world.
Ruby was meeting her end with bravery. Like any good soldier.
Ruby growled again, suddenly much louder, and without blinking, Ironwood pulled the trigger.
When Ruby took flight with the General in her clutches, the square dissolved into chaos. Winter abruptly drowned all the horror and secondhand pain she’d felt seeing the Grimm transmogrify itself around Ruby in a truly grisly manner, and summoned a Manticore large enough to carry her in an aerial chase. Amidst the panicked shouting of her troops and the gunfire as they shot ineffectually at the sky and the confused jabber of the crowd—were some of the civilians jeering? —Winter kept her eyes on Ruby’s newly-winged form in the sky, tracking it and preparing—
“You stay here with the headless chickens, Schnee. If anyone’s going after my niece, it’s gonna me me.”
Winter instinctively tensed at Branwen’s grating voice, but summoned civility from somewhere to respond, “With what?” She barely bit back a sardonic remark about the man’s first name.
Branwen didn’t so much as blink. “Trade secret. But even without it, I’d still try flapping my godsdamned arms before I let a bullet-brained Atlesian twit try rescuing her.”
Then he was gone, and Winter was forced to accept that there was no point in going after him when the still-panicked Atlesian troops needed someone to lay down order before a civilian got shot.
At least barking out orders and forcibly reorganizing her soldiers would keep her from seething over the fact that the alcoholic believed he would do a better job of saving Ruby than Winter, the woman who was sworn to protect Ruby, except that if Winter thought for more than a half-second about how many mistakes she’d made—
BLAM.
The General’s pistol rang out from somewhere above, and Winter’s blood went colder than her namesake.
“Ruby…?” she whispered to the sky, her only point of reference being the faint white blur marking the General’s coat, and the slightly darker blur next to it, both forms descending rapidly. Too rapidly.
What immediately became apparent to Winter was that Ruby’s wings were still moving wildly even as she fell—not because she was failing to keep herself aloft, but because she was diving as fast as she seemed capable of—diving after the General, who was falling faster only because he carried less air resistance.
Moments before impact, the General executed his signature landing strategy—turning and firing his pistol downward to break his momentum. But his abrupt stop meant Ruby had now caught up to him, her limbs thrashing wildly—
Winter had to call up a glyph-shield to protect the General, who would’ve been caught completely off-guard otherwise. She tried to angle the glyph to simply deflect Ruby away instead of stopping her dead-on, hoping that would be enough to avoid seriously hurting Ruby.
She wouldn’t have needed to worry.
Ruby was momentarily stunned when she skidded off the glyph, her momentum being redirected into a storefront, but she’d barely hit the wall when she sprang upright again, her wings crumpling themselves back into the Grimm liquid with a series of crunches like a twig snapping. In the same moment the wings disappeared, gleaming new bone plates as white as Winter’s hair emerged from the black liquid, armor regrowing itself with unnerving speed in every place where a plate had been damaged by gunfire.
Suddenly, it was as if she hadn’t been hit by a single one of their bullets.
And at the same moment, Ruby unleashed a truly deafening roar that made Winter’s sword rattle in her hilt, and slammed one paw into the ground with enough force to send a shockwave through the ground everywhere, and Winter would’ve been thrown off-balance if not for her own glyphs.
But that roar was nothing compared to the immediately-following tectonically resonant and perfectly intelligible shriek which exploded out from Ruby’s maw.
“YOU WERE WRONG!”
Her eyes. Ruby’s eyes. Winter couldn’t draw air into her throat. Both of Ruby’s eyes, red and silver, were suddenly glowing with a supernova’s intensity, casting two very different lights out into the world—the red Grimm eye swirling within its borders like a hurricane, and the silver iris brighter than the shattered moon above. Both eyes were laser-focused on the General and nothing else. She might’ve been blind to the outside world.
“RUBY WAS ALL FOR NOTHING!”
If Winter had given an order to hold fire, no one would have obeyed it. Possibly not even herself. Every subordinate present opened fire, and the resulting torrent of bullets inflicted absolutely no damage on Ruby’s enraged form, gunshots bouncing uselessly off hardened armor that weathered the ongoing barrage with hardly a scratch to show, only shredding the surrounding pavement with ricochets. And any shots which found the liquid between armor plates were simply absorbed with a dull blankness that left no trace of impact.
In the next dumbfounded quarter-second, Winter barely noticed Branwen and Xiao Long drawing their weapons in a defensive posture, their expressions drained of nearly all life. She barely noticed the strangely rigid look the General carried as he drew Due Process again, looking for all the world like he had been the one to shatter the moon. Winter barely noticed the screams and gunfire from everywhere, because all she could see was Ruby’s suddenly godlike form, a supernova of raging strength that had been completely absent before.
And a strange thrum of fearful awe ran through Winter’s chest as she realized why something had changed:
Before, the unthinkable amalgamation of Ruby and Grimm had been holding back.
And now she wasn’t.
Penny’s choice was to make her final stand here and now, to fight until the end.
She closed the distance between the two Maidens in the space of seconds and barreled into Cinder without slowing down, carrying her until they slammed into the outer walls of the half-destroyed CCT.
If driving Cinder headlong into a solid concrete wall had any effect on her, she did not show it as she wrested herself out of Penny’s grip with unthinkable strength.
“Look at you!” Cinder snarled, summoning a pair of molten-glass swords to her hands from thin air and launching herself at Penny, propelled by a blast of summoned fire. “Finally showing what’s under your skin. You’re a monster, just like me!”
“I am nothing like you!” Penny brought up Luminous Electra to block the swords which came slashing at her, and simultaneously, she sent Floating Array into action for the first time in years. She flung the full arc of eight swords at Cinder’s unprotected side, but a blast of fire was there before the blow could land and then Penny was thrown back. “You hurt people!” she screamed, barely bringing up a gust of wind in time to repel an explosion of flames sent at her. The fire roared around her, getting as close as inches from her face before it curved away sharply under the power of a hurricane-force wind. That time, her Maiden powers had been commanded by nothing but instinct.
“And you don’t?!” came Cinder’s voice while Penny strained to keep her footing in the face of flames bombarding her with the power of a bursting dam. “You are a product of this disgraceful institution, an enforcer of a world built on subjugation that makes an enemy of anyone who doesn’t fit within it and anyone who dares to oppose it!”
The wind was picking up, and Penny wasn’t sure if it came from her own powers or from Cinder’s. The growing storm was wreaking havoc on her radar, returning glitches that were almost indecipherable. And without much advance notice, Cinder could very well—
“Why would you let yourself be the toy weapon of a world that cares nothing for you?!” Cinder burst out of the firestorm, her movement hidden by Penny’s increasingly besieged radar systems just as she’d feared. Luminous Electra was in the wrong position to block the attack—
But Floating Array was there, spinning into Cinder’s face and neutralizing most of her momentum just before she would’ve driven her swords into Penny’s chest. However, she had no time to consider her gratefulness for the return of the swords, because even with a faceful of kinetically active swords, Cinder found some way to twist around Penny’s guard again, navigate the arc of swords and force them apart with fire and make room for her relentless advance again. Her swords of strange molten glass, so searingly hot that they ignited the air they touched, flashed towards Penny’s face while she had no footing to dodge—
The glass fractured ineffectually against the face of Penny’s helmet, the tempered and honed materials of her father’s gift doing their job of keeping her safe. Penny’s expanded vision flickered, but only for a moment, and while Cinder was ever so slightly off-balance, Penny lashed out with Luminous Electra, landing a direct hit to Cinder’s midsection.
“This is my home!” she shouted back at Cinder. “These are my friends! I have found plenty of care and love for myself in this world! You are WRONG!”
“Only because you are USEFUL to them!” Cinder tossed her fractured glass swords aside, discarding them without hesitation, and summoned replacements from midair in the form of a deluge of smaller blades hurled at Penny.
Penny deflected them all by spinning Floating Array in front of her vertically, the swords moving fast enough to function as an enormous shield as a spray of glass cascaded away from her.
“You refused to change your mind when I pulled the veil away from your eyes! Beyond saving! Just like everyone—”
“NO!” Penny screamed, unleashing a wave of gale-force wind on pure instinct which threw Cinder back, and Penny saw an opening. She channeled maximum power to her legs and leapt forward, bringing Luminous Electra down overhead and sending two arcs of Floating Array at Cinder from either side, forming a three-pronged attack which her opponent had no answer for.
“Perhaps there was truth in your words, but I will not ever let someone like you guide me towards that truth when you did so much more to hurt me than anyone else alive!”
The successful strike rewarded Penny with a flash of Cinder’s Aura, and she pushed forward, pushing processing away from language and towards calculating another attack, meaning that for several seconds all she could do was scream angrily. Then Cinder was leaping away and rising into the air, the first time she’d undertaken anything resembling a retreat.
Penny ignited her wings and rose into the air, refusing to allow any distance between herself and Cinder. “Amber was my first friend I could remember, and you MURDERED her! She was running away from Ozpin! Perhaps she would have believed what you told me! Perhaps she would have joined you, if you had seen her as a person and not simply a tool of what she was fleeing!”
Floating Array and Luminous Electra flashed together in concert, a dance of blades that ceaselessly struck at Cinder.
“Perhaps I would have joined you, when I found out exactly why Amber ran away and what the Maiden powers were! Because I learned that I would have no choice in becoming Fall! That I would be forced into being a weapon! That I would have no choice! If someone else had been there to show me another choice, then perhaps I would have taken it!”
She was upon Cinder again. Another spinning arc of swords. Another blast of wind that buffeted Cinder, all while the light around the two of them grew brighter and brighter.
“But NO! You never showed me a real choice! You wanted to control me just as much as everyone else! You PUT A VIRUS IN ME!”
On those last words, Cinder, in the middle of swinging to defend herself, hesitated. And that was all Penny needed to slip through her defenses once again, and slam Luminous Electra’s blade into her face.
Cinder went flying, and only barely caught herself with her Maiden powers before she would’ve hit the ground. She did not immediately attack again, and her tone was strangely absent of hatred when she said, “What?”
“You knew I was a synthetic person, and you knew I had a connection to the CCTnet, and you still uploaded the virus to the CCTnet! The virus—the virus that—” Penny shook all over, suddenly unable to move as a bombardment of raw memory data crashed over her consciousness, reminding her vividly of things she never wanted to be reminded again. She could not stop her hands from going instinctively to her head to try and protect her from something that could not be physically blocked.
“Crept—inside—wrong—couldn’t stop—no, no NO NO—”
Her primary vision flashed between the outside world and reminders of a horrific night. If there was one bit of awful, selfish solace Penny could find in the fall of the CCT tower, it was that she would never again have to see the place where it had happened.
Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. She did not have sufficient words to describe the feeling, to describe what it felt like when she couldn’t stop something from overcoming her, it hurt it hurt it hurt—
Thud.
Penny was on the ground. She wasn’t flying anymore. Her Maiden flames were extinguished. She could barely think. She was fortunate only that Cinder did not seem to have any interest in attacking.
“Why did you do it?” she whimpered. “How could I ever trust you after you did that to me?”
Cinder was still hovering and stationary. She flew in a way that was completely unlike Penny’s flight mode. Penny could almost call it unstable, the way that flames and smoke billowed out from under her shoes in two barely contained infernos, holding her aloft atop nothing but roiling air. Her entire body quivered as it balanced on the volatile energy. Not in a way that suggested fear, but rather in a way that suggested she was an ignited Dust crystal, smoldering and crackling and about to detonate and destroy everything around her. But all she seemed capable of doing was staring at Penny with a face twisted into some emotion which Penny did not have the spare processing power to decipher.
It was Ruby’s howling that alerted the ragtag collection of rescuers. When a keening wail that sounded like all the world’s pain rolled up into one wave of noise sliced through the bullhead, Weiss recognized the source almost instantly. No Grimm made a sound like that. Blake was even faster, her Faunus ears flicking in the direction of the howl that seemed to go on forever as she directed Nimbus to swing the airship around.
Yang was bent over, choking out intermittent sobs and panting for breath like she’d sprinted every meter the airship had covered tonight, and it was rare that Weiss felt more useless than right now. All she could do was rub her hand slowly up and down Yang’s back, hoping it offered any comfort. With her other hand, Weiss kept hold of a grab handle and squinted into the distance, trying to make out something, anything in the direction they were now flying towards.
“I don’t know what to do,” Yang gasped out. Her entire body shook, and then she sounded like the next words had to be squeezed out between the grief overwhelming her. “When—when you keep telling someone she does deserve love and support, and her life is worth something—what’re you supposed to do when she hears that and it only makes her more afraid she’s an evil monster who deceived everyone?! It’s not like we can tell her the opposite!”
No one in the airship had a response—at least, not immediately. Weiss, having turned over the same question endlessly and compared it to her own struggle with her father’s ultimatum, felt as if she had… pieces of a response. Now that they finally had an idea of Ruby’s location, it didn’t feel like an unnecessary distraction to voice what was still a vague outline of an idea.
“Perhaps we could apply the advice we gave Penny in Mountain Glenn?” she said. The question was directed mostly at her remaining teammates.
Confront-and-accept. It was the same words Penny had used to help Weiss when she was mired in the depths of her own hopeless situation, but that was the extent of her thinking thus far. She was hoping someone else could find a way to use that advice that didn’t sound like an even worse choice than everything they’d already tried.
But there wasn’t a chance for anyone to respond before they were too close to the source of the howl, too close to the city square which had descended into a chaos unlike any other.
“Weiss, Yang, I want you two on the ground first,” Blake said. “Can you do that?”
Yang raised her head. Her eyes were wet with tears, but she nodded resolutely, as did Weiss.
A distinct, not-distant roar blasted across their ears.
“Pyrrha, can you get me down safely if you use your Semblance on Gambol Shroud?”
“Certainly.”
Another roar, louder.
“Jaune, you shouldn’t come because your Aura’s down, but the look on your face is telling me you won’t listen, so hitch a ride down with Nora and Ren, you three will be last out—”
Then they crested the last row of rooftops before the epicenter, and there was no more time for planning.
The last thing Weiss heard before she leapt out of the airship was a scream that triggered some deep-seated fear response inside her, the kind of fear response that made her instincts hiss survive and made Myrtenaster feel as necessary as the blood in her veins.
“KILL!”
When Yang hit the ground, she felt one more piece of her extremely limited Aura evaporate, and found—
“RUBY WAS ALWAYS WORTHLESS!”
An extremely large crowd of evacuees. A bunch of soldiers who looked like they were doing fuckall. And Ruby.
“HATE YOU! HATE YOU!”
Ruby, who Yang was standing directly in the path of.
“HATEYOUHATEYOUHATEYOUHATEYOUHATEYOU—”
Ruby’s visible silver eye was inhumanly luminous, a far cry from the dull silver Yang had seen in the ruins of Beacon, and she was staring right through Yang at whatever she was shrieking at, and she didn’t even seem to recognize her older sister as she closed the distance between them in the blink of an eye.
Yang knew she had to move. But her mind fell away into the wrong place as Ruby bore down on her, and suddenly, Yang wasn’t seeing Ruby Grimm-ravaged as she was right now, Yang was seeing Ruby lying unconscious on the floor of Amity again, and that reminded Yang that this blood was on her hands this Grimm goop was on her hands—Yang had punched Ruby, Yang had hurt Ruby, Yang had killed Ruby, everything was Yang’s fault, the Hound was Yang’s fault because she thought about Ruby too much, every time she thought about Ruby something bad happened to Ruby, because Yang didn’t deserve to have her as a sister, thinking about Ruby was bad, Yang thinking about Ruby hurt Ruby, think about something else, not Ruby not Ruby not Ruby not Ruby—
“Yang, get—”
An arm swept Yang up and yanked her out of the way just before Ruby would’ve trampled her.
It was Dad, clutching her close to him, and Yang made herself clamp down on the terrified thoughts which kept screaming at her that this was all her fault, because she had to tell Dad—
“Dad, it’s Ruby!” she gasped, the words spilling out so fast she was afraid he wouldn’t understand her. “It’s, it’s Ruby in that Grimm! Don’t hurt her—please, all she’s trying to do is hurt herself!”
“I know. I know, sunny little dragon,” Dad whispered before depositing her somewhere else and sprinting back towards the—towards what exactly?
“YOU WERE WRONG! RUBY WAS WRONG! MOONRISE WAS WRONG! WRONGWRONGWRONGWRONGWRONGWRONG—”
Gods, the voice. That wasn’t—no, it was still Ruby’s voice underneath the Grimm no matter what, but it had a new and unfamiliar dimension: Rage that couldn’t be stopped by anything in the universe. Rage which could’ve matched the boiling inferno that was Cinder Fall.
Yang reoriented her senses just in time to see Ruby slam into a visibly-shaken General Ironwood, a storm of wickedly sharp claws slashing across his head and upper body and making his Aura flare wildly.
Almost simultaneous flares of Aura erupted from Ironwood as he took hits on either side of his body before blocking a glancing strike, ducking away from a fourth blow, and being punched squarely in the face with a fifth. The punch sent him flying with another bright flash of Aura, and Ruby leapt after him with a snarl that reverberated to the far corners of every witness’s soul. But just before she would’ve landed on top of him, a glyph appeared not around Ruby but around Ironwood, shoving him away and ensuring that all Ruby slammed into was the side of a building. Or rather, through.
Yang sprinted towards the new, gaping hole in that building, and the word berserk rattled around tauntingly in her head, a word that other kids had used to call her as an insult years ago when it was harder to keep everything bottled up inside.
But before she could get close enough to have even a hope of reaching Ruby, the mutated form of her sister sprang out of the debris, chunks of concrete and cinderblock tumbling off her. The roar she unleashed brought the rest of the building tumbling down behind her, the destruction completely beneath her notice.
More gunfire erupted from the Atlesians behind Yang, and any terror she might’ve felt at knowing her baby sister was being shot at was snuffed out by the simple, obvious fact that the barrage wasn’t having any effect. Ruby’s head whipped back and forth as she searched for something, paying less attention to the bullets than if they’d been dust motes swirling in the air.
And then Ruby’s eyes, wild and yet laser-focused, landed on something behind Yang again, and Ruby shrieked once more.
“KILL!”
All Yang could do was watch while the liquid that endlessly flowed over Ruby’s limbs rippled viscerally as she crouched and leapt, covering in a single leap the distance between herself and—
Ironwood. Ruby was on Ironwood like a homing beacon, and the path between her and the object of her fury was littered with soldiers who she batted away like toys lined up for a play siege. Weiss was too caught up in casting a flurry of glyphs to catch airborne soldiers just before they would’ve slammed into a concrete wall while Dad helped her out, and Blake was across the square shouting questions at Weiss’s older sister, and Team JNPR was too far away, which meant Yang would be the first one to get to her sister once again. Or, she would’ve been, if a hand hadn’t shot out and grabbed her before she was halfway there.
This time, it was Uncle Qrow, shaking his head emphatically at Yang. “You ain’t looking too good right now, firecracker. Really, I don’t want you anywhere near—”
Yang gaped at her uncle, who himself looked a few fractions of a heartbeat from being a corpse, and tried to snap something back, only to realize she didn’t have any breath to do so. And she didn’t have the strength to shake off the hands on her shoulders.
Okay. Fuck. Yang doubled over and hyperventilated until she could summon an actual voice, even if it was several orders of magnitude fainter. “What happened? What’s Ruby doing? She’s, she’s doing, more! Too much more, she never even came close to hurting us—what’s wrong?! What changed?!”
“NOTHING! NOTHING! NOTHING! NOTHING!”
Yang was appalled by the complete lack of an answer written all over her uncle’s face, but a reply came from somewhere else.
“She’s not trying to hurt herself anymore.” Blake was here again, and her eyes were fixed on Ruby. “Now she’s angry.”
“Nail on the head, kid,” Qrow said, finally letting go of Yang. “Still, at least she’s only angry at one idiot out of everyone here.”
Qrow probably meant his answer to be encouraging, but all it did was remind Yang of the crowd of civilians staring at Ruby in a deep, saturated horror which far surpassed the sort of reaction brought by a single large Grimm. They recognized what was buried in the Grimm liquid, too.
Or… were they seeing Ruby at all? Were they seeing only what they’d been told on the Vytal broadcast? Were they seeing what they thought was the truth? Did they think this was what Ruby had been all along?
…And that was probably just what Ruby wanted them to think, wasn’t it?
Suddenly, Penny wasn’t scared. She was angry.
She was angry at Cinder for being so excruciatingly hypocritical. How could she claim that she wanted to free Penny when she had unleashed the virus, and—and—how? HOW?
Penny raised her head, glared into Cinder’s frustratingly enigmatic expression, and screamed words that felt good to say. The words made the choking paralysis in her consciousness disappear, made her feel like a person again, made her feel less powerless.
“YOU put your virus in me! YOU just wanted to use me, too! You—you are just like everything you told me you were saving me from!”
Suddenly, Cinder shifted to an emotion that was far easier to recognize: Rage.
It almost felt gratifying for Penny to see that inexplicable mess of conflicting emotions be wiped clean from Cinder’s face, because now she could see the face of an enemy again, and she did not have to waste time on wondering why Cinder would have done such a thing like the virus, when the answer was perfectly obvious and she could let herself be enraged about it.
And then the ground erupted underfoot.
A vertical blast of lava nearly hit Penny in the face, but her evasion was costly, as a fireball slammed into her unprotected chest like a battering ram, hurling her backwards.
“How DARE you compare me to THEM!” Cinder roared, flying at Penny while hurling another fireball from each hand. “Ozpin—Ironwood—Atlas, every kingdom, they perpetuate a world order which tramples mercilessly on untold numbers of souls while using us as nothing but fuel for the comfort of a spoiled few!”
Even if there was an appropriate reply to that, Penny’s processing power was elsewhere, attempting to dodge every droplet of liquid rock from fresh sprays of lava that erupted in every direction. All the wind she could summon wasn’t powerful enough to completely push away everything, and the drops which were small enough to pass between the spinning shield of Floating Array hit her indiscriminately, leaving dark, bowed scorch marks in the metal that flexed ominously. Her armor could only take so much.
“I dared to hope you could be BETTER than everyone else!” Cinder’s words were accompanied by another barrage of flames from midair, while Penny tried to take off again—
And then Cinder burst through a plume of lava, white-hot matter cascading off her everywhere as she slammed directly into Penny before she could get more than a meter aloft, the impact lifting her off the ground.
“I thought I’d found something worth saving! Something that deserved freedom as much as I do!” Blazing fingers which she wielded like claws came slashing at Penny’s face, and it was only by the grace of her helmet that Cinder didn’t score a direct hit on her photoreceptors and several other key sensory systems that might’ve disabled them irreversibly.
But Cinder hadn’t just crashed into Penny—she’d picked her up entirely, and she was still flying, only gaining speed while Floating Array slashed uselessly against her Aura over and over, and Penny’s radar realized Cinder was pointed directly at—
Alarms screamed across Penny’s consciousness as Cinder piledrove her into the exact same part of the CCT that Penny had thrown Cinder into. The reinforced concrete wall was no match for a second explosive impact.
If it could be called fortune, breaking through the walls of the CCT lobby and the resulting wave of debris knocked Penny loose from Cinder’s supernaturally-strong clutches. But crashing backfirst into a solid-marble pillar was barely a better situation. The blow and impact was so disorienting that her balance-coordination sensors were knocked briefly offline, and all she could do was stay on the ground, spinning Floating Array wildly in front of her, blocking fireballs which Cinder fired from across the lobby with deadly accuracy.
“But NO! You do nothing but guard the useless, shining veneer of a hideously bloodstained world!” Cinder screamed, her voice echoing off everything.
By now, Penny’s internal temperatures were being pushed to dangerously, critically high levels. So high, in fact, that each exhalation of superheated air from her mouth was past the autoignition threshold for many of the building materials used in the CCT’s lobby. It forced her to concoct a makeshift cooling strategy with Maiden magic—a summoned tornado which constantly whirled around her body, carrying away heated air and replacing it with relatively less heated air from the environment. And that constant flow of heat created a shimmering haze all around her body just like the one which surrounded Cinder—except that Cinder’s was one done without thinking, and Penny’s was done actively, for survival.
Finally, Penny had to bypass her balance-coordination systems and pull herself upright with the help of Luminous Electra, while Floating Array shielded her from the worst of Cinder’s attacks—until Penny noticed the deep glow spreading through the floor towards her.
Upright again, she finally had a good read on Cinder’s position, and that was what allowed her to see Cinder on one knee, a palm flattened against the floor, while the neverending torrent of fire came from her other hand. As for what the hand against the floor was doing—Cinder was turning the once-gleaming marble floor into a white-hot bed of painfully bright lava which was spreading to every corner, including underneath Penny—
Penny’s coordination systems finally rebooted, and that allowed her to launched herself into the air on orange just before the superheated floor under her turned entirely to lava. But taking off meant making herself vulnerable again, as now Cinder closed the distance between them.
With a flick of her hands, she threw two whips of fire and light at Penny, and dodging them meant diving dangerously close to the lava while a third blast of fire dissipated against the arc of Floating Array.
Cinder had turned the entire first floor of the Cross Continental Transmit System tower into a lava field. Not the scattered plumes and flows that she’d produced before, but a field, odd chunks of debris being consumed by a brilliant orange mire which was hundreds of times hotter than anything Penny’s computers could produce even at their most dangerous output. From wall to wall, there was nothing but superheated rock that would melt her body. And Cinder stood between her and any way out—genuinely stood on the lava, the points of her heels digging ever so slightly into the liquid rock like something heavy placed at the center of a bed. She did not appear affected by its heat in the least.
“You’re just as rotten as anything else in Atlas!” Cinder snarled as she flung a shower of superheated glass at Penny. “You’re no better than Karyatis!” She spat the name like a slur.
Until now, there had been no space in Penny’s systems for any kind of rebuttal, but now she made room for words, no matter how vulnerable that left her defenses, because she had to say—
“I would rather be like Ruby than like you!” she screamed.
A pillar of flame, almost pure energy, thundered into Penny, punctuated by a shriek of rage.
“Karyatis is nothing! A being of empty promises and willful ignorance! A protector of greed and a jailor of the starving! She deserves to burn just like everyone else in Atlas!”
Without the section of processing power abruptly redesignated to answering Cinder, Penny couldn’t avoid being thrown back into something which buckled under her impact and made a clang that could only come from the contact of metal on metal. She’d been thrown into a set of elevator doors, forcing them halfway apart. There was no elevator behind them, only the yawning chasm of the elevator shaft.
Cinder spun towards Penny again. The lava field cast a strange glow on her burns, making them seem all the starker and fresher and more painful. She was approaching Penny with a look of immense hunger that was far too close to what she’d addressed Penny with in the memorial garden.
Penny heard metal groaning. How much longer could the rest of the tower even stand, with its foundations melting? She could already see the glow of heat slowly climbing up several support columns in the walls. She had to move, but where—
Penny’s built-in photoreceptors couldn’t notice what was directly above her head far away, but the photoreceptors of her helmet could. A small square of darkness different from the rest, glowing dimly from distant fires—the night sky. Marking the place where the upper half of the CCT had been knocked down, leaving an elevator shaft exposed to the sky. A way out.
Penny summoned Maiden fire to her wings once again and shot upward into darkness. Thunder overwhelmed her audioreceptors as Cinder blasted after her, filling the shaft with a malevolent glow. For just a moment, it was a pure chase, Maiden chasing Maiden while the building shook around them.
And then, three-quarters of the way to the top, Penny registered a deep rumble emanating from… everywhere. When the walls of the elevator shaft began to shake milliseconds later, she realized she hadn’t plotted her escape a moment too soon—what remained of the tower was collapsing.
The square of night sky she was flying towards wavered and then warped, turning from a square into a narrow diamond, and then it was gone entirely, closing up under a wave of debris that came tumbling towards Penny. She leveled Luminous Electra and all of Floating Array in front of her as a spear to pierce the obstacles, and braced herself for impact.
She almost didn’t make it through the avalanche of detritus, steel beams and chunks of concrete and plaster bashing against her helmet and scraping over her, but then she was free, blasting into unburdened sky as a dust cloud billowed under her and the remnants of the CCT and its supporting buttresses came down entirely in a burst of fire and lava. With Cinder still inside.
Penny stopped in midair, and began visually scanning the wreckage for signs of life, hardly daring to hope this was a victory.
But then, a blaring alarm from diagnostics captured the entirety of her attention. It was an urgent alert, one that could not be dismissed without the full focus and commitment of her consciousness matrix, an alert only reserved for the gravest of system failures—
EMERGENCY: BATTERY CELLS APPROACHING CRITICAL ENERGY DEPLETION. ALL SYSTEMS OPERATING ON RESERVE POWER. SEEK CHARGE IMMEDIATELY.
…What?
The flames powering Penny’s rockets juddered perilously.
She had charged the previous evening! Even with a night of fighting this intense, it was still just one night! And her flight mode, normally the greatest drain on battery, was being fueled by Maiden magic, not her battery cells! This shouldn’t have been possible! How could—
Oh.
Oh, no.
Penny returned to the damage report of systems rendered inoperable by the lightning strike in Amity, and found two system failures which she had not consciously noted until now.
Battery cells A, B, and F: Inoperable.
Ingestive energy-synthesizing incinerator system: Inoperable.
More than enough loss to create a low-battery emergency, and any hopes that this was a false alarm vanished.
Suddenly, a deep rumble emanated from the now-featureless pile of rubble that had once been the CCT, and from within, an ominous glow erupted.
Penny brought up Luminous Electra just in time to mostly shield herself from the explosion of debris and shrapnel which pelted her as Cinder exploded out of the wreckage, appearing no worse for the wear for being buried alive.
“STOP STANDING IN MY WAY AND DIE ALREADY!” she screamed, streaking towards Penny in a fiery blur.
Penny rocketed backwards, now acutely aware of the energy expenditure that every single move carried. The particular way the battery cells had failed meant her battery life estimation subroutine wasn’t registering the loss, and instead it had frozen the readings at what they’d been the moment of the lightning strike. It was partly why she hadn’t noticed sooner. Only an entirely separate, redundant (but less accurate) alarm had triggered to warn Penny of the situation. If her battery estimation was faulty, then she had no idea how much time she actually had left. No idea how much time she had to stop Cinder. No idea if that was even possible anymore.
Weiss had just managed to yank one last Atlesian foot soldier out of danger when suddenly, she found Winter and General Ironwood beside her. For once, they were relieved of Ruby’s pursuit due to the fact that Ruby was being momentarily delayed by nothing less than an all-out artillery barrage.
“How much Aura do you have left, sir?” Winter said.
“Don’t worry about it,” was Ironwood’s terse reply.
“Sir, we need to get you out of here—”
“No.” Ironwood shook off the hand on his shoulder which was urging him along, and turned back towards Ruby. “I will reap what I have sown.”
Until now, Weiss had only half-listened to the conversation as she frantically tried to piece together a series of glyphs that would give her what she needed for the plan she’d cobbled together with Blake—but now she swung to face the man, and wondered if he’d actually said what he’d just—
For once, Winter matched Weiss’s disbelief, and said,“Sir, she will kill you,” in perhaps the most dubious tone Weiss had ever heard from her sister.
“I said what I said, Lieutenant, and that’s an order.” If Ironwood cared that Weiss and several other foot soldiers could hear this, he wasn’t showing it.
“Sir, pardon my tone, but this helps absolutely no one—”
Winter was cut off by a screech of metal being strained past its breaking point, and the three Atlesians turned just in time to process that Ruby was hefting an artillery cannon over her head, crumpling the solid-metal barrel in her claws and breaking off odd bits of metal—
“NOTHING! NOTHING! NOTHING! NOTHING!”
And then she threw the cannon at Ironwood.
The sisters called up glyphs in near-perfect unison, barely stopping the cannon in midair before it would’ve bowled them all over, but that was only half of the assault. The other half was Ruby hurling herself forward after the cannon, and both Schnees were knocked away by the impact. For Weiss, she registered it as a rush of wind and claws and a burning red eye, and then Ruby was past them but not past—
Ironwood didn’t move, raising Due Process with just enough time to fire one shot before Ruby was on him.
Weiss’s heart nearly stopped as the BLAM resonated through her ears, but even at this close a range and this powerful a weapon, Ironwood’s shot only slowed Ruby. It didn’t slow her enough for him to evade, or maybe he no longer cared to evade. Regardless, what happened next was that Ironwood could not dodge Ruby’s lunging jaws.
Oh, Yang thought with a strange detachment as she watched Ironwood’s Aura flash and shimmer around him while Ruby shook him around like a ragdoll, snarling all the while as she kept him held fast in her mouth. Oh, gods, she’s going to—
She took a halting step forward, and would’ve fallen on her face if not for Blake catching her around the waist.
“Yang. Yang,” she said forcefully but kindly. “Weiss has an idea, but I need you to—”
Blake and Yang froze as, in the corners of their vision, they caught the telltale shimmer of an Aura breaking. It wasn’t the darker-blue of Ironwood’s Aura that they’d already seen flash repeatedly in this fight. Rather, this Aura break was a light shade of blue, one that was much more familiar to Blake and Yang. As both of them turned to fully process what’d just happened, their hearts came to a simultaneous stop as they both thought, Weiss—
It wasn’t Weiss.
It was Winter.
Winter, who dove between Ruby and Ironwood and used a precisely-placed glyph to shove Ironwood away while simultaneously driving her sword arm into the side of the Grimm maw which was still partially opened—and still doing everything in its power to close all the way.
When Winter’s Aura dissolved in that same fraction of a second, there was no part of her arm which had a hope of stopping Ruby’s bone-white Grimm fangs from clamping all the way down. All the way through.
Was it the sound or the scream that was worse? Weiss would never know, because both were wiped from her immediate memory as Ruby spun around with blood dripping from suddenly bright-red fangs, and Weiss couldn’t move, because that was Winter’s blood WINTER’S—
“WINTER!”
Through some unknown mastery of battle compartmentalization, she pushed herself into Ruby’s path with a glyph and used another to anchor herself to the ground, because she would not move, all while Winter, was flying through the air away from her, and clearly missing one arm.
Suddenly, the unstoppable blur of motion that Ruby had been for several minutes was gone, and she was all but a statue. The only part of her that moved was her eyes of wild red and silver, tracking Winter’s wounded form through the air.
Weiss drew upon every lesson in poise and confidence and composure that she had absorbed throughout her twisted husk of a childhood, and did not look away from Ruby, even as that choice necessitated losing sight of Winter, Winter who was hurt and maimed and—
Weiss called up a series of glyphs around Ruby, putting an end to the endless pinging of bullets off Ruby. Even if the Atlesians’ light weaponry wasn’t doing a lick of damage, she would not let Ruby be pulled away from her friends again. She consciously chose not to use a holding glyph on Ruby herself.
And Weiss was right to trust that instinct, because Ruby made no attempt to pursue Winter. Nor did she pursue Ironwood, whose Aura had dissolved in midair as Winter’s glyph carried him away. Her entire Grimm form heaved with heavy breaths, seemingly gulping down liters of air, and her ears flicked back and forth between Winter and Weiss and Ironwood and then back to Weiss.
Weiss heard running feet behind her, people scrambling towards her sister to give her medical attention, and she still did not let herself turn away from the fifth member of Team RSPBY. Weiss wasn’t Penny. She could never be Penny in all the ways that Penny was so achingly, beautifully unique. Perhaps Penny would be better at this, but Penny was fighting an unthinkable battle at the school to give everyone in this city, Ruby included, another chance. And Weiss had promised Penny to be the finest partner she could possibly be. Now it was time to carry out her duty.
“Ruby,” she said. “It’s not too late.”
Her voice rang across the square without wavering, even as her heart thudded and the red of the bloodied fangs saturated her memory. This was because Weiss believed what she was saying, every bit as much as Penny and Ruby had believed it when they’d told her the same.
Ruby finally moved—but only in two halting steps backward, shrinking away from everything ahead of her. Then she shook her head in a way that was vastly more subdued, the movement not strong enough to shake off any more of the blood clinging to her fangs. And then those fangs parted again for words which had lost so much volume, Weiss could hardly believe it was the same voice.
“No, no, nonononono, no… Too late, it’s too late, Ruby is a killer, Ruby is a MONSTER, Ruby was built and broken and ruined for nothing, nothing, nothing…”
There had been one spike in volume where it felt for a moment as if her rage would reignite, but by the end Ruby was collapsing onto her haunches, clutching her head. It reminded Weiss all too much of her own physical collapse after that call from her father which fractured her world.
Weiss’s focus was solely on remembering what Penny had said to her. Remembering what Blake and Yang had said to Penny. Remembering what she herself had said to Penny. Remembering Ruby amidst every single one of those exchanges of aid and support, in so many ways the center of their team.
Others were gathering beside Weiss—her teammates and her friends who were also Ruby’s teammates and friends, and Yang’s family which was also Ruby’s family. (And perhaps also more of a family to Weiss than her own bloodline had ever managed.)
Ruby was still kneeling in the pulverized asphalt and shivering, but then her gaze crept up for just a moment—long enough to recognize how many people were gathered before her. That was all it took for her to snap her gaze back downward. A quiet whine flooded with shame escaped her.
“Weiss is right,” Blake said. She was at Weiss’s side, and holding Yang upright with both hands as she spoke. “It’s not too late for you, Ruby. I promise.”
Ruby remained silent, but she could not stop her Grimm ears from repeatedly flicking in Blake’s direction as she spoke.
“You told me it isn’t too late,” Weiss went on. “And so did Penny.”
As soon as Weiss breathed the name of her partner, Ruby broke into a far louder whine mixed with hiccuping sobs, her claws scrabbling and clawing at nothing but black liquid.
“And she would tell you the same exact thing! And she would believe it—” Weiss nearly faltered, but by a hair’s breadth her memory summoned the right phrasing which Penny and Ruby had invented together. “—with all her battery and soul.”
At that moment, the moon slipped free of the clouds cloaking it, and it once again cast its full radiance over Ruby and Weiss and Yang and Blake and everyone else in the square. Somewhere distant, that same light fell over a green-eyed girl battling for a second chance.
Ruby let her arms go limp, her claws falling away from where they’d scrabbled against her head. Under the light of Weiss’s glyphs and the moonlight and the red-silver glow cast by Ruby’s own eyes, there wasn’t a single detail of her face which was hidden from view. And Ruby had never been more apparent within the Grimm features, heartrendingly so.
By some miracle of understanding, the Atlesian forces had stopped firing, and a strange silence dominated the rest of the square. Weiss held her breath.
Red and silver eyes went completely unfocused, seeing nothing, and then Ruby wailed.
The sound echoed in Weiss’s soul. It only seemed to intensify in its echoes which reverberated off every wall and corner of the square, building up into a howl that could’ve shaken apart the world. The pure pain and despair bottled up within made her heart ache desperately.
And then, like a wave receding back into the water after crashing violently against the shore, Ruby trailed off into silence, and collapsed onto her side.
Yang couldn’t tear her eyes away from the bright red blood dripping from Ruby’s fangs. Red like Ruby. Red like roses. Red like the scarf around Yang’s neck. Red like blood on the day Yang lost her arm.
Yang stumbled forwards. The only thing keeping her upright was Blake’s arms—at least, she thought they were Blake’s arms…
“Yang, I think you’re going into shock…”
Shock. Shock was—that was something about blood, right? That didn’t matter to Yang. If Ruby wanted blood, she could have Yang’s. All of it.
Yang found herself at Ruby’s side, without any real idea of how she’d arrived here. But now that she was beside her baby sister again, the world was suddenly coming into sharper focus.
Ruby was crying.
Even under the murk of the Grimm fluid, it was blisteringly obvious for Yang to recognize. Her shoulders were shuddering, and great big saturated gasps were escaping her, sounding like something being dredged up from the depths of the ocean. It was impossible to see actual tears, but the Grimm liquid and the blood dripping off Ruby everywhere might as well have been a century’s worth of tears.
It’s not too late. That was how they’d finally pierced the fog of self-destruction drowning Ruby, and now… now Yang had no idea what came next, but she was clinging to those four words with all her life.
Then, a whine.
“I don’t want to feel this way…”
Yang’s heart nearly stopped. Ruby had said that. Not the Hound. Not the Grimm. Ruby. Ruby. Her voice was thready, almost too faint.
She knelt down beside Ruby and reached out. This time, Ruby didn’t shrink away from her touch. Weiss and Blake followed her lead, and Yang was dimly aware of Team JNPR forming a circle around Ruby from further away, forming a protective barrier between Ruby and the rest of the world.
“I don’t want to feel like nothing… Nothing nothing nothing nothing…”
Yang’s prosthetic hand sank into the Grimm matter surrounding Ruby’s face, and she pushed her fingers forward until she felt something that could only be the curve of Ruby’s cheeks. The liquid hissed violently around the last of Yang’s Aura—and then her Aura gave out.
But her prosthetic arm was still the only thing touching the liquid, meaning that the Grimm liquid could do nothing except hiss and bubble around unflinching metal. Meaning there was nothing which could stop Yang from gently stroking Ruby’s submerged cheek over and over.
“It can still be something.” Tears and sweat stung at Yang’s eyes, but she hated every blink, hated anything that meant not seeing her baby sister for any amount of time. “We’ll make it something. Together. You, and me, and your teammates, and your family, and…”
…Was it Yang’s sanity shattering into stupid impossible hopes, or was the hissing of the Grimm fluid getting quieter?
Ruby twitched and sniffled—although in her current form, the sniffle sounded more like a clogged storm drain being cleared. “What if I feel this way forever? I don’t wanna hurt hurt hurt hurt forever…”
“What if you don’t?” Blake said, her voice saturated with impossible dreams. “What if there’s unthinkably beautiful joy in your future that you can’t see right now? What if I can promise it’s there, because I once felt just like you did, and I lived to see that unimaginable joy?”
It couldn’t be Yang’s mental instability. The liquid’s hissing was definitely quieter. She could hear her own labored breathing again.
“What if I hurt everyone again? What if I kill you all?” Ruby’s voice warbled just a little bit, a familiar note of fear sparking back into existence. “Killkillkillkill—”
“Hey, Ruby? Can I tell you something?” Yang said.
Ruby cut off the runaway word with a sob that made her body shake, stared at Yang with wide eyes that didn’t match, and nodded. The motion made her fangs rub against the flesh half of Yang’s arm, leaving behind a smear of still-warm blood.
“Even if you did someday cause my death? It doesn’t matter. I’d rather die with you in my life than live without you.”
Yang heard several different people sucking in concerned breaths behind her, and she didn’t care how worried she made everyone else, because it was the damn truth.
Ruby whimpered, and slowly raised her head. “You… you really mean it?” she growled quietly. “You want me, even though I’m nothing like what I was born to be?”
“Ruby…” Yang’s heart clenched. She felt confident enough to let some of the intensity burning within into her voice, and she leaned closer. “Maybe you’re not the sibling I imagined, but you’re the sister I have, and that’s so much better than anything I could’ve ever dreamed up.”
The hissing of the Grimm matter was almost inaudible. The bone armor surrounding Ruby’s eyes looked like a pair of goggles.
“And you may not be the baby I imagined, but you’re the daughter I actually get to give my love to after believing she was gone forever.” Dad was here now, somewhere close behind Yang. “That could never be disappointing.”
More sobs erupted from Ruby, so sudden and so forceful that a small part of Yang’s mind feared Ruby would shake herself apart. She kept going, but… Yang wasn’t worried weirdly. It felt like the good kind of crying, the kind Yang Xiao Long never experienced.
Without anything else to say, she braced herself and looked sideways at the crowds of civilians and soldiers that’d never stopped watching. She wanted to know what they were thinking. She wanted to know if any of them were thinking about cutting Ruby down.
The soldiers’ visors hid too much of their faces for Yang to have any idea about them. They still weren’t shooting, but that meant nothing when all it could take was one impulse, one twitch of a trigger finger. Then, the civilians—
Yang expected disgust, disdain, maybe anger, maybe the stupid kind of fear people only got around something they had no right being afraid of. But she didn’t see any of that.
She saw people squeezing their faces in the tight-lipped way people did when they were trying desperately to hold back tears. She saw hands hovering over mouths, a universal gesture of dismay. She saw—she saw looks of softness. There were people who looked angry, too, but they weren’t really looking at Ruby. They were looking at the Atlesians, all of them.
Yang saw so many people who… who cared.
When Ruby’s sobs trailed off again into a low growl and then no sound at all, Yang turned back to her with a heart rediscovering hope.
“I’m scared,” Ruby mumbled. “I’m really, really, really scared… I was always nothing, nothing nothing, and what if I’ll never be something?”
Was the Grimm liquid still hissing around Yang’s prosthetic, or had it stopped entirely? Maybe Yang didn’t trust her ears to know the difference, but… Fuck it.
Yang leaned all the way forward, and let the rest of herself sink into the now-silent Grimm liquid without any Aura to protect herself.
And nothing at all happened. Except that she could hug Ruby again.
“You’re here, Ruby,” Yang said. She was never going to let go. “I can feel your heart and your soul, and how real you are. You’re already something.”
Then it wasn’t just Yang hugging Ruby. It was Weiss and Blake too, her teammates joining her on either side and sinking into the Grimm liquid to wrap their arms around the real girl clawing her way to the surface. Blake had just as much Aura as Yang—zero—and there wasn’t so much as a flicker from Weiss’s Aura.
“Everything you’ve done with us has been real,” Blake said. “You’ve done so much. You’ve been through so much. Only a girl who isn’t nothing could’ve done all that, lived through all that. I’m proud of you, Ruby. As your leader, your teammate, and your friend, I’m so proud of you.”
“We all are.” Weiss was also in contact with Ruby’s fangs, and… Either she hadn’t noticed Winter’s blood soaking into the pearly fabric of her bolero and staining it irreversibly red, or she was doing an extraordinary job of making herself ignore it.
Ruby shifted slowly, her Grimm-drowned limbs moving with exactitude, and then—and then, she was hugging Yang. She was hugging Yang.
Yang was afraid to move—not because of the massive Grimm claws clutching at her or the bloody maw pressing into her shoulder or the sheer fact that Ruby’s enlarged form nearly engulfed her entirely in the hug—but because Yang was afraid if she moved, she would ruin everything again somehow.
Ruby wailed.
Random bits of Grimm bone dug into Yang’s clothing and skin and left painful scratches, but Yang never stopped holding onto her, and neither did Weiss or Blake.
“I’m sorry…” Ruby mumbled in a half-growl, half-whine, her Grimm ears flicking wildly in every direction. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry… Thank you for… for believing in me, and not hating me…”
“Thank you for helping me escape from my father’s shadow,” Weiss said. “Could nothing have done that?”
“Could nothing have changed her mind so completely about the White Fang in just a few months?” Blake added with a beautiful seamlessness that Yang wasn’t capable of right now.
Then she realized she would need to say something too, so Ruby would hear this from her entire team—except, not her entire team, because Penny was still fighting, and then Yang realized someone needed to say something for Penny—
In words made halting by her own fear of failure, Yang said, “Could nothing have such a beautiful and neverending love for Penny?”
But Blake tensed as soon as she realized what Yang was saying, and that made Yang realize too late, wait no bringing up Penny might make everything worse for Ruby all over again, it’s all my fault I shouldn’t have said anything I shouldn’t have done anything I shouldn’t have come here I’m a terrible sister—
Ruby took in a wet, ragged breath, and Yang was already panicking. She opened her mouth, desperately scrambling for any sort of damage control to say before she broke Ruby all over again—
Ruby tensed and threw her head back, and blinding silver light exploded out from her, immersing Yang and Weiss and Blake and Dad and Team JNPR and Uncle Qrow and Zwei and the civilians and the soldiers and maybe everyone and everything in a blast of luminosity Yang had thought she’d never see again.
In the eternity that followed, Ruby broke the impossible silence with a scream beyond syllables, just an eruption of raw hurt like she was being burned alive and chopped limb from limb, and there was nothing Yang could do because the light was everywhere and she couldn’t shield Ruby from any of it and maybe this was the only way to save her from the Grimm but it was HURTING HER—
The weight in her embrace changed. Something shifted. When the light faded away and Yang could see again, she was staring at a girl who’d turned to stone.
Penny lashed out in a wide circle with Floating Array again and again, no longer prioritizing strategy, only hoping she could get close enough to find and seize some opening which would let her end this fight before it was too late. Even as her prediction algorithms knew how little chance of success that plan carried.
Cinder was an erupting volcano, obliterating everything in her path with pure heat and turning the battlefield into a molten wasteland. Penny’s strength and speed and weaponry and flight abilities were not enough, and neither was her magic—everything that she could muster together in one concerted effort was only enough to hold Cinder at bay. One mistake, one processing cycle which didn’t complete fast enough, one sword flying out of line, any of that could mean defeat. If she didn’t drain herself of her lifeforce first.
She dove to avoid Cinder, slashing Floating Array behind her to avoid another volley of fire, and tried to attack from below, only to be tossed away by a wave of immense force.
Cinder’s next fireball knocked Penny out of the sky, and when she made a hard landing a fraction of a second later, something in her legs gave way, a diagnostic reaching her moments later to inform her she’d just lost a servo in her right knee. She struggled to her feet, only to receive another direct-hit blast of fire, and she only avoided being knocked all the way down by half of Floating Array driving itself into the ground—without a conscious command—to anchor her in place.
Another emergency alert regarding her battery blared, and Penny somehow managed to ignore it.
The school had become a desolate, scorched landscape, with conflagrations spreading with impossible quickness through the rubble of the school. It couldn’t have been further than the home which Penny had always known Beacon as.
Cinder touched down, separated from Penny by a churning lava flow which showed no signs of slowing. A storm of fire descended, encircling the two like the eye of a hurricane. Then, Cinder screamed words at her which could barely be understood above the ever-increasing roar of flames.
“How could you get attached to Karyatis, who is an avatar of everything you sought to escape?!”
Penny’s vision stuttered. She aligned Floating Array around herself, every blade aimed at Cinder. “I care about her! I wanted to help her escape! I wanted her to find freedom, too!”
No sooner were the words out of her mouth when the ground cracked apart underneath her, and although her processing speed was no worse than at the fight’s start, the broken servo joint in her right knee could not fully follow the command given to it. And so she couldn’t entirely dodge the lava geyser which erupted underneath her. The superheated rock caught Penny in her trailing leg as she leapt sideways.
New warnings screamed across her consciousness as the bare metal of her leg came into contact with temperatures not even Penny’s body could be designed to handle. When she landed from the jump, her right ankle joint had been fused in place, and the rest of the leg was barely operational.
Another fireball hit her, and she couldn’t dodge or block. Her only option was to absorb the impact with her body, at whatever cost.
Penny had to use Luminous Electra for support to pull herself fully upright. Her blade was riddled with burn marks and darkened spots where it’d met so many blasts of fire and heat, and the glowing circuit-board pattern was flickering. But still she faced Cinder, who stalked forward, her entire form glimmering and blurring as fire swirled around her like she was made of it.
Cinder snarled. “Freedom?!” A fireball appeared in either hand. “She couldn’t give freedom to ME!”
“Why would Ruby—” Penny stopped, in speech and movement. Her taste sensors had become jammed on at some point during the fight, and the taste of smoke and ash and various sublimated minerals was slowly overwhelming her. She tilted her head.
Cinder’s words… Everything she’d said… Why did it all sound… familiar?
She had to know where in her past Cinder came from. She quite literally had the answer already, somewhere in her old memories, but those memories weren’t indexed yet. Indexing would take several hours that she didn’t have. Trying to find a specific memory amidst the ocean of new, unlabeled and unorganized data would be like trying to find the right book in the remains of a tornado-stricken library.
But. But. If she tried to brute-force fuzzier conceptual associations through subroutines underpinning her consciousness matrix, then maybe she could activate a connection to something and trigger a memory retrieval like the accidental memory retrievals from months past—
Penny stared at Cinder, and tried to compress everything she’d screamed or growled or hissed at her with eyes full of hatred or hunger or disdain into one datatable which would be pushed through a string of code that hadn’t ever intentionally activated—
Suddenly, Penny wasn’t seeing Cinder. She was seeing a shock collar, in her hands, her hands clenching it, breaking it, destroying it, and after seeing only snatches of that memory weeks ago, she was finally seeing who had been wearing the shock collar.
The retrieved memory ended, and the afterimage of wide, terrified amber eyes were practically burned into Penny’s consciousness as she met those same eyes again in the present day. Hardly a second had passed between Cinder’s last words and the moment when Penny reached a conclusion which made a terrifying amount of sense.
“Cinder.” Penny took an abbreviated step forward, dragging her solidified ankle through the ashes. “Were you a weapon, too?”
All of Cinder’s raging flames abruptly vanished, a candle being snuffed out. And for a moment, she was just a girl standing in a field of lava which she held no control over, isolated and alone on a small slab of darkest-black volcanic rock as she said, “What?”
Her voice was empty. The single word held no contempt.
EMERGENCY: BATTERY CELLS CRITICALLY DEPLETED
“A weapon like me? And Ruby? Did… Did I leave you behind in Atlas?” Penny said. “When I escaped?”
Penny had escaped from Atlas. Cinder had clearly not escaped in the way Penny had. Cinder recognized Penny. Cinder hated Penny and Ruby with a special passion reserved only for them. The logical dots to connect told Penny that she had done something unthinkable in her past: She had abandoned someone who needed help. She had abandoned someone who wanted to be free. She had abandoned someone who was suffering.
Why would she do that?!
“I am sorry,” Penny said, stumbling over her words. Her vocal synthesizer felt unnaturally slow. “I am sorry I did not help you! I am sorry Ruby did not help you!”
“What?” Cinder’s voice scraped against something unseen. Her hands glowed unsteadily, like a fire trying to catch—or embers on the verge of burning out. Her eyes roved all over Penny. But she seemed frozen to the ground, as if she feared the lava which she had commanded would suddenly try to swallow her up.
“You did not deserve to be someone else’s tool!” Penny said. “Just as I and Ruby did not!”
EMERGENCY PROTOCOL: ENTERING DEEP POWER CONSERVATION MODE—
No! Penny cut off the protocol before it could launch. She had made her choice. But her diagnostics protested sharply.
THIS ACTION WILL BRING DEATH
Penny ignored the blaring warning, which was louder than anything else that evening, and let Floating Array relax entirely, the blades pointed at the ground instead of Cinder.
ALL SYSTEMS MUST BE IN AGREEMENT
A brief shiver propagated across Penny’s body, a signal which passed through every system which made up every corner of her consciousness, from the largest and the most readily apparent to the smallest and most easily unnoticed, searching for any part of Penny which was not ready for what might come next.
There wasn’t.
Penny took another unstable step towards Cinder, holding out the hand which was not carrying Luminous Electra. In the gentlest tone she could muster, she said, “I am sorry that there was no one to help you.”
“SHUT UP!”
Cinder’s shriek cut through the thickening haze and echoed off the mountains of rubble, and all her towering rage came thundering back in an intensity that matched only the moment she’d first recognized Penny’s Maiden powers.
Lava erupted behind Penny, on either side, blindingly bright and throwing her sensors into chaos and preventing any escape as Cinder threw herself at Penny, barreling into her at full speed.
Suddenly, too fast to process (and Penny had a sinking feeling that her processing speed was the first thing to degrade as her battery cells ran empty), she was flat on her back, pinned down by Cinder. Cinder’s legs were locked around her midsection, trapping her in place.
“I don’t need HELP!” Cinder roared into Penny’s face, spitting help like it was a disgusting insult.
Penny tried to throw Cinder off—tried even to just struggle, to somehow make it harder for Cinder to hold her down, but all her strength seemed to have left her. She couldn’t tell if it was because of her opponent’s seemingly endless power, or because of her own body shutting down.
“I have MYSELF, which is more than you or any other weakling in this world can ever have! I need NOTHING! Except YOU, who I need DEAD!”
One of Cinder’s hands closed around Penny’s neck, and the other slammed flat against the faceplate of her helmet, her palms turning red-hot and glowing while thin wisps of smoke rose up wherever her skin made contact. And then her voice turned to a soft hiss which was deadlier and more vicious than anything else she had said tonight.
“I may not be able to just burn you down like everything else in this world, Battle Angel… But I can make you melt.”
Penny’s vision glitched wildly as Cinder’s palm began burning through her helmet, and although she couldn’t see the effects of the hand at her throat, internal temperature sensors there registered hotter and hotter peaks which no pace of cooling could mitigate. Cinder Fall was not lying in the slightest.
She was losing entire sections of her helmet’s vision, and her neck joints were no longer responding in any way to movement commands. Luminous Electra laid out of reach, meters away in the ashes. She still had Floating Array, the swords and their cables lying in a disorganized web around her, waiting for her to call them forth. But Cinder had too much Aura and time.
…Time.
In a strange way, Penny had time, now. She wouldn’t melt immediately. Cinder had to take time to kill her.
And with time, there was still one thing Floating Array could do. It took time, time which hadn’t been available for Penny until now.
Penny sent a command to eight swords, and sluggishly they rose into the air above her and Cinder.
Cinder didn’t show any concern for the blades as they moved—or perhaps couldn’t even notice them in her sole and overwhelming focus on the girl trapped beneath her—and that obliviousness continued as the swords arranged themselves into a circle aimed directly at Cinder and as Penny triggered another long-dormant function.
Eight swords began to rotate with agonizing slowness. At any moment, she expected Cinder to look up and notice what was pointed at her. But Cinder only continued scowling down at Penny.
Penny’s logic core went completely silent, an ever-constant stream of information vanishing. It was a terrible absence, a hole burning somewhere in her chest as she realized: she was shutting down. To power the laser, she was redirecting power from everything else in her body.
Would it be enough?
Her helmet failed entirely, the red-hot metal giving way as Cinder shoved the remnants aside, exposing Penny’s scorched, damaged face to the air once again. Suddenly, her field of vision was entirely limited to her human-mimicking photoreceptors, and all she could see was Cinder, her face distorted with malevolence and further distorted by the cataclysmic light from everywhere around.
Floating Array spun faster. Penny’s thoughtstream fell quieter and quieter as more programs and subroutines were shut down to reroute all power to one final shot.
Cinder’s grip had shifted entirely to Penny’s neck, and she was almost through the armor there which laid over her internals, and once the heat reached deep enough…
Cinder snarled at her, a sound that was more animal than human, and her grip only tightened.
The swords weren’t spinning fast enough. Weren’t accelerating quickly enough.
The Maiden magic. Penny still had Amber’s gift. She lacked the processing to wield it as any sort of weapon. But all she needed was one last push.
A stiff wind swept across the remains of Beacon Academy, stirring up the smoke and flames in its wake. It would never have been strong enough to break Cinder’s hold on Penny, but it was just strong enough to give Floating Array the jumpstart it needed—to finally push Penny’s swords to the right velocity.
A faint green light appeared in the center of the ring of swords, one which steadily grew brighter and brighter until it was bright as daylight, and yet it still evaded Cinder’s notice, the molten brightness of everything else swallowing up the electric-green brightness of Penny’s decision.
“I’m sorry,” Penny said.
It was an apology not just for what she’d done, but what she was about to do.
Cinder must have noticed something different in Penny’s expression, or her tone. Or perhaps the green light had grown too bright to be drowned out by the volcanic light it fought against. Or perhaps Cinder heard a faint but new hum rising above the perpetual crackling roar of the inferno swallowing the school. Whatever the reason, Cinder raised her head and found herself staring into a green light which burned brighter than anything.
The recognition came too late. She had no time to react. The laser which erupted from the center of Floating Array like a baleful eye casting judgment on Cinder caught her squarely in the face, and the flash for one instant turned Beacon Academy into brightest day, like only Ruby’s eyes could. From the city, where anyone could see it, it appeared like lightning from the gods piercing the night.
Yang, Blake, and Weiss, catatonic with despair as they stared at the petrified statue bearing a perfect resemblance to the Hound, were witnesses to the supernova over Vale. The three immediately recognized the light as the same brilliant green of Penny’s Aura.
Team JNPR, knowing Penny was still at Beacon, saw the direction the flash had come from, and immediately understood it had to involve Penny in some way.
No one else in the square knew enough to understand who the light originated from, but the nearly incomprehensible green light froze the crowds almost as much as a blast of silver light might’ve frozen a pack of Grimm.
The light of Floating Array was, in fact, the last thing Penny saw with her photoreceptors. Her eyes shut down before the blast could fade away. Other systems throughout her body rapidly followed, turning Penny’s world into an overwhelming emptiness. But Penny paid it no attention, and with the last cycles of her processors, she focused on the final thing which she could choose.
In the end, who to have in her final thoughts was a very simple choice.
There was one girl who could not see the light that Penny unleashed. But Ruby would see what came after.
First, a flash of silver that swept away the murky haze that’d hung over her vision, before it faded away to… nothing.
Actually, less than nothing and less than darkness. It felt like being in the deepest sleep and wide awake at the same time, different realms pulling at different corners of her consciousness. She felt indistinct, unmade, nonexistent, like she’d fallen through the world—
Until the world suddenly snapped back into stark focus, free of the incessant cacophony of a Hound, and Ruby found herself standing in a too-bright white void.
Her first thought was, Oh. This is death.
Ruby hadn’t even meant to activate her eyes. But Yang had said Penny’s name and then something welled up deep inside Ruby and she couldn’t stop the feeling from unleashing itself because it’d been building for too long, and… silver eyes killed Grimm.
But then Ruby looked up and found Penny standing before her with hands clasped at her waist, and nothing made sense anymore.
“Penny?” Ruby whispered. On reflex, she took a halting step forward, and immediately negated it with two steps back because maybe Penny didn’t want to be near her right now. “What’s—where are we?”
Penny met Ruby’s gaze, and in that moment, all Ruby could notice was how bright her eyes were—a brightness Ruby would never again carry in the place where one eye had been.
“Are you aware of the Maidens?” Penny said.
Oh.
Ruby’s insides twisted and twisted until she was sure she’d implode. She’d been given a question instead of an answer, but it told her everything. She already knew Penny was a Maiden. She already knew how the transfer of the magic worked. Which meant Penny was—
No. No. The word was too enormous, filling up her head and her throat and swallowing her thoughts and choking her breath away—
Dead. Dead.
All the air left Ruby’s lungs. She fell to her knees and covered her hands with her face, as if that would do anything to block out the cataclysms she’d set in motion. “I’m sorry! I’m so sorry, Penny! I—I—this is all my fault…”
Penny’s footsteps echoed in Ruby’s ears. Almost against her will, she lowered her hands. Except, as she did so, she realized there wasn’t any blood or Grimm goop on her hands. She was human-shaped again, with a face that felt fake and nothing but an emptiness where there used to be a left eye. She was herself again, at least as much as she could be anymore.
Penny appeared as she had when Ruby last saw her, bare metal everywhere—and too many scorch marks to count, too many dents and places where metal had started to warp and melt, and…
Ruby didn’t move from her knees. She may as well have been staring into the eyes of a goddess as a worshipper, and also as a penitent who had done something unspeakably sacrilegious.
“I… I…”
Ruby was trying desperately to think of a way she might’ve deceived Penny into giving her the Maiden magic, because she wanted so badly to drown herself in self-blame and self-hatred again. Drowning in those kinds of feelings, no matter how much it hurt, felt tempting. Maybe it felt tempting because of how much it would hurt. Because it would feel like something she deserved.
But Ruby couldn’t convince herself this time. She couldn’t see any way how secretly being an evil worthless liar would’ve led to Penny bringing her here. Penny had just… chosen Ruby.
That was all.
Penny held out two hands to Ruby, beckoning her forward to an inevitability. “I am sorry, Ruby. I did not intend this as a burden. I… I simply wanted to see you one last time.”
Ruby had to scale a mountain to get upright again, but she did it. And immediately lost all her strength and fell into Penny’s arms, her vision going blurry with tears. This close, the whir of Penny’s body was so easy to hear, and she wanted nothing but to hear it for the rest of time. “Penny…”
“I am sorry.” Penny said. “I… I know you have carried so many incomprehensible expectations for so long in your life, and this seems like just one more, but I wanted to share a real goodbye with you.”
Ruby tried to set herself back on her own weight, but she couldn’t. She couldn’t pull away from Penny. How could she? How much more time did they have? How much longer before the magic made them go separate ways?
“I’ll be strong for you, I promise…” It was a lie. Ruby wasn’t strong. She was the furthest thing from strong.
With the utmost gentleness, Penny did what Ruby couldn’t do herself, and set her back on her own weight. Now able to meet Ruby’s eyes, she said:
“I do not need you to be strong, Moonbeam. I do not need you to be a soldier, or a Maiden, or a weapon. If you never pick up a weapon again, that is okay. I only need you to be Ruby.”
Ruby took a deep breath, only to get caught in a sob halfway through which turned into a hiccuping fit. She looked down at herself, and found her body dissolving into a storm of silver-colored rose petals which only had the vaguest shape of a broken girl. There were no identifying features beyond that. She raised her arms and turned her hands back and forth, trying to find some trace of something real in the swirling mess of herself, a maelstrom of metallic petals. “But I still barely know what Ruby is, and what if it’s too late?”
“You will find out. I promise.” Penny reached out and took Ruby’s hands, as her own hands lit up with the color of her lovely green Aura. “Your story isn’t over. It is just beginning.”
Why did Ruby feel a small slice of herself wanting to believe that? Why did those words feel like a lifeline for a life she thought she’d convinced herself was broken forever?
Penny’s hands weren’t just glowing with her Aura. Her Aura was also lighting up in a complex pattern of green circuitry which swirled entrancingly over her palms. Then, as Ruby’s own hands turned luminous with her own Aura, the green circuit-board pattern spread to Ruby’s hands as well. A path of battery and soul, heart and circuit, linking the two extraordinary girls.
“You will always carry a part of me with you,” Penny said, rubbing a thumb over Ruby’s knuckles. “I hope it will be enough to remind you about the vast multitudes of yourself we found together.”
“Firefly…” Ruby stared at the green circuits which pulsed under her own skin now, and a powerful surge of longing brought tears streaming down her cheeks. “I don’t want you to go…” she whispered. “I’m sorry… I love you…”
But Penny was fading away, and Ruby was left with nothing but the afterimage of a freckled smile and a voice whispering “I love you too,” before everything was gone.
A new sensation flooded every part of Ruby's body, the closest thing to feeling touch she could remember. But nothing had ever felt more wrong. The sensation felt like leaves withering on a tree branch, turning brittle and dry and inevitably slipping away to the ground, where they would decompose into oblivion. It felt like sunlight fading into something dim and lethargic for winter that couldn’t warm a single thing it touched. It felt like a lush freshwater spring turning silent as winter approached and animals slipped into hibernation and the water froze over and it became a place devoid of any life.
It felt like the end.
And a terrible beginning.
“PENNYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY!”
A red flame erupted around Ruby’s intact eye, and something immense and unyielding exploded out from inside her as she screamed Penny’s name into every corner of the universe.
The Grimm-shaped tomb holding Ruby in a petrified state shattered in an explosion of magic, and Ruby Karyatis Rose, the next Fall Maiden, fell back into the fairytale.
Notes:
I just want to say an emphatic thank you to everyone who's been reading this up until now. I got genuinely emotional over the support people gave when I realized I was going to have to miss a weekly for the first time in this story's 70-chapter run. I'm going to try returning to weekly updates after this, but my life's a lot busier now than it was a month ago (in an incredibly good way, to be clear). So... We'll see. But this story is going to continue, all the way to the end. That is a promise!
Longest chapter of the story so far. 18,000 words. And I can really only think of two or three future chapters that might top this one for length.
Chapter 72: Lost and Found
Notes:
EDIT: Apologies again, but I don’t think I can plan on weekly updates until I’ve gotten settled in with my new job/living place/way of life/etc
And we're back in the weekly updates!
Content warning for this chapter (click this text to reveal):
Grief, mourning, suicidal thoughts
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Waking up came to Ruby slowly, like a blanket of morning fog lifting. From the barely-remembered flashes of color flitting through her memory, she had the impression she’d woken up at least once before, but this time felt more permanent. More real.
Real. Real girl.
She remembered, Penny, and she hurt so bad she nearly forgot to breathe.
She didn’t know where she was, except that she was in a bed with thick blankets which she sank into when she shifted her position.
I should open my eyes.
Eye.
I should open my eye.
It almost hurt too much to do that. But she remembered Penny again, and she remembered the promise she’d made to Penny, to be strong for her—or at least, to be Ruby for her, whatever it was and whatever that meant being.
Her eyelids—eyelid—felt like it’d rusted shut, but she pried it open and tried to make sense of where she was. At first, everything was blurry. But even when sharper focus returned, there were no answers.
I don’t recognize this place.
It was a bedroom. It didn’t have much in it, just the bed and a nightstand with a lamp and a door and a window looking out on a forest of half-bare trees and…
And Weiss and Blake and Yang asleep against the wall opposite Ruby, slumped bonelessly over one another in a tangle of limbs and torsos.
Ruby didn’t move. She didn’t want to wake them up.
Yang was drooling onto Blake’s forehead. One of Weiss’s hands was clenching a fistful of the shag carpet they laid on. Blake’s Faunus ears were flat against her head, twitching every few seconds. All three of them had faces tight with too many bad emotions, even in the middle of a deep sleep.
Yang had her prosthetic detached. A few seconds later, Ruby noticed arm lying nearby. Not just the arm, actually, Ember Celica and Myrtenaster and Gambol Shroud were in a loose pile that basically mirrored their sleeping positions.
For a half-second, Ruby wondered, wait where’s Lunar Enforcer, until she remembered exactly what’d happened to the war scythe.
Had it been two hours or two days since… since everything? She didn’t want to get out of bed. She wanted to go back to sleep. She wanted to fall asleep and never wake up again. She didn’t want to face a world without Penny.
But Penny asked me to. She wanted me to keep moving forward. I have to. For her.
Silent tears appeared in her vision, doing their best to turn themselves into loud ugly sobs that would wake up the other three girls. Ruby buried her face in a pillow and shook all over until the cannonball in her throat stopped threatening to break the silence, and then she tried moving again.
Shoving aside the blankets and pulling herself out of bed was the hardest thing she’d ever done. She heard joints in her back creaking and cracking like an old piece of machinery just taken out of storage as she stood up. Moving felt wrong. She’d never felt more out of place in her own body.
There was a small stack of clothing on the nightstand, and that made Ruby realize she was still in her combat gear from the night everything went wrong. It was barely recognizable as combat gear anymore, but the gray and black and navy blue Atlesian colors had never looked more unfamiliar on her.
The longer she looked at the military clothing, the more she hated it.
I thought that kingdom was my life. I thought it was my destiny. I thought Atlas and I were one and the same, but turns out, that kingdom did NOTHING for me, and now I’m just… I’m just…
Suddenly, Ruby needed more than anything else in the world to get these stupid pieces of Atlesian fabric off. She grabbed the clothes off the table and went for the door as fast as she could without making noise.
There was a handwritten note taped to the door directly across the hallway, labeling it as the bathroom. That couldn’t have been put there for anyone except Ruby. She was a stranger in someone’s house.
I’d be a stranger in anyone’s house.
She knocked once, and when there was no reply, she swung the door open. The hinge squeaked, making her freeze and listen for any sign of anyone else noticing her, but she only heard silence.
When she flipped on the bathroom light, she found herself reflected in a large mirror over the sink, giving her the first real look at herself since… since…
The girl staring back at Ruby in the mirror was unrecognizable. Her hair only reached to her chin. The rest of its length had been cut off, or burned off, or maybe even just dissolved by the Grimm goop. And even with only chin-length hair, it was a tangled, matted mess, the worst Ruby had ever seen it. And making the maelstrom of knots even more hopeless was the dirt and sweat and dried blood caked into it. It was an unforgiving gauntlet for anyone who might try dragging a hairbrush through there.
But Ruby’s starkly shortened hair only held her attention for a second before her gaze froze on another change to her appearance. This one could never, ever be undone, not with patience or care or the right tools or anything. An angry diagonal line of raw scar tissue ran from her forehead to across her nose, a stripe of humiliation announcing to the world the scope of her failures. And at the epicenter of the damage, a scarred pit where her left eye should’ve been.
It looked… better than she expected, because it didn’t look monstrous or creepy or scary, it just looked like a spot on her face gone blurry in a photo developed wrong. It also looked… worse than she expected, because it was a permanent and inescapable reminder that one eye, half of what she’d defined herself by, was gone.
She was dirty, and her remaining eye was dark and sunken and dull, and her skin was paler, and she looked skinnier, and… She didn’t even look like a girl that could be loved. She just looked like some feral half-alive thing that’d been dragged out of a back alley so it could be euthanized.
Maybe this reflection, even so empty, was finally the true Ruby she’d been trying to find all along. Maybe the true Ruby was an empty picture frame, something that’d only ever defined itself by what it could be to other people. So was there a canvas that could fit inside the frame of the Ruby-shaped girl? Could she paint anything into that canvas like Penny had shown her?
Ruby grit her teeth and turned away from the mirror. If nothing else, the empty frame was at least going to get out of these stupid Atlesian clothes—
Time to see if she could even pick up a paintbrush.
The clothes that’d been left for her were a little too big for her and a little worn and a little threadbare in some places. It wasn’t anything fancy, either, just some underwear and an old motorcycle t-shirt and a pair of sweatpants and a yellow hoodie. And, tucked between the pants and the hoodie, a plain black eyepatch.
Ruby reached for the eyepatch first, only to hesitate as soon as she picked it up. She trailed her fingers across the bumpy scar tissue on her face, watching herself in the mirror, and wondered why it felt so hard to just put on an eyepatch when her eye was already gone. She raised the eyepatch until it was being held next to her face, and tried to imagine herself with it on.
I’ll… I’ll save the eyepatch for last.
The moment Ruby started pulling the Atlesian stuff off and putting something else on, it felt like a tectonic shift, like the weight of the world slipping off her shoulders. Once done, she stared at the soiled fabrics now piled up at her feet with all the bulk and uselessness of a pile of spent ammunition. The eyepatch felt like nothing compared to the disgust she felt when she imagined herself putting on Atlas’s uniform again.
Even if that kingdom wanted me back, I’d rather die.
That realization sparked her into action, and she grabbed the discarded clothes, crumpling them up into as tight a ball as she could before shoving open the window and the screen and hurling the clothes through. She didn’t see where it landed, but she hoped it was on cold, hard ground.
She slammed the window shut with vicious satisfaction.
But as soon as she spun back to the mirror and the eyepatch still lying on the sink, the bravado abruptly vanished, and all the crushing everything came back down on her while the eyepatch loomed larger and larger in her vision.
Ruby picked it up again, sat down on the nearest hard surface—the side of the bathtub—and held it at arm’s length and tried to make herself comfortable with its existence. Her eye wasn’t going to come back if she avoided thinking about it for long enough. It wasn’t like no one had ever seen a girl with an eyepatch before. It was just a piece of cloth attached to an elastic band.
She couldn’t put it on. She wanted to go back to sleep.
There was a knock on the door.
Ruby flinched and instinctively twisted into a fighting stance, only to immediately remember that if someone actually wanted to hurt her, they wouldn’t bother knocking first. Which meant it was probably someone who wanted to help her. That didn’t feel any less scary, actually.
Another knock, softer than the last one. Then, Blake’s voice carefully asking, “Ruby?”
Briefly, Ruby considered following the discarded clothing out the window, until she remembered, Penny.
She had to try for Penny.
It took her a while to remember how to use her vocal cords. Her throat felt like a seized engine in desperate need of lubricant, and when she finally got it working, the “Hey,” she answered Blake with was dry and crackly and lifeless.
The door edged open. Blake’s amber eye peered through the crack, and once she saw Ruby inside, she pushed it the rest of the way open. Weiss was several feet behind her. Yang was standing even further back in the doorway of the bedroom, with a lower half that looked like it wanted to run towards Ruby and an upper half that looked like it wanted to run in the exact opposite direction.
All three girls had eyes that were still puffy and red from too much crying.
Ruby jammed the eyepatch in a pocket and stood up. “I’m still alive.” She meant it as an answer to Blake, because Blake had said her name like she was a live bomb about to explode.
It wasn’t like Blake was wrong to talk like that.
“I’m not going to hurt myself again,” she added. “I—I—” At the last second, she decided not to say even though I want to. That would just make the people who cared about her panic again for no reason. She was going to keep her promise to Penny, and that meant she wouldn’t do anything to herself no matter how much she wanted to, no matter how much it felt like she should be the one suffering for everything she’d caused—
“—I’m sorry,” was what she finished with instead.
“You have absolutely nothing to apologize for,” Weiss said, in the same exact tone of voice as Blake.
Ruby nodded. Her gaze fell to Weiss’s jacket, which was the same one she’d been wearing on that night—she could tell because of the bloodstains.
The bloodstains that were. Winter’s bloodstains. Because Ruby had. Because Ruby had bitten her arm off. Because she’d been so angry she couldn’t contain it. Winter’s arm, when Winter hadn’t been the one who—who—
“I know,” Ruby said.
The other three girls exchanged unreadable looks before Blake said, “Ruby, can we give you a hug?”
There were several ways Ruby wanted to reply to that: a flat-out no, telling them she was tired and wanted to go back to sleep, asking them if they really wanted to give her a hug or if they were just trying to make her feel better—and what she did was none of those, because an unintended whimper escaped her first and then her legs betrayed her and went weak enough to make her topple into Blake.
The involuntary whimpering only got louder once Weiss and Yang joined. Why did she care so much about hugs when she couldn’t even feel them?
“I, um—”
“I’m really glad you’re still here, Ruby,” Yang said softly, her tone thicker and denser than the Grimm goop Ruby had tried to drown herself in.
This time, Ruby didn’t have the strength to push down the sobs that erupted, and all she could do was heave wildly for breath with her whole body while she clung to the people promising her a love she had to learn to accept.
Eventually, Ruby lifted her head from where it was resting against someone’s neck, and asked the question burning a hole in her chest.
“What—what happened after… after you stopped me?”
The night that Beacon fell
To Blake, the stone statue she was now staring helplessly at was a sickeningly obvious conclusion.
They’d all seen Ruby’s eyes turn other Grimm to stone. And with Ruby drowning in the same Grimm, one blast of her eyes didn’t free her. It only left Blake, Weiss, and Yang facing a too-perfect replica of Ruby’s Grimm-mutated form, her maw captured wide-open in the middle of a scream of pain, her Grimm body contorting in an equally visceral expression of pain. She had no way of knowing if Ruby was trapped somewhere inside alive. Had no way of knowing if trying to break the stone would hurt Ruby.
Blake also found herself wondering, what would’ve happened if Ruby’s eyeblast hadn’t petrified herself? Would the silver light have done the other thing it was capable of, and vaporized any Grimm matter it came in contact with? Would it… would it have left anything of Ruby?
FLASH.
Blake froze as an immense green supernova lit up the night sky, emanating from the direction of Beacon. The brightness stung her eyes, and even though the light itself faded rapidly, the afterimage left a deep imprint in her subconscious mind which immediately recognized the color as a match to Penny’s Aura.
“Penny…?” Blake’s quiet plea to the sky was entirely futile; she had no way to make any sense of what she’d seen, and nor did anyone else. The school, although lit by flames, showed no signs of the battle which had previously raged in distant, brilliant flashes until the burst of truly incomprehensible light. It felt apocalyptic, like—
The stone statue of Ruby, which Yang was still holding tightly, shattered in an explosion of red light which was dark and sickly, and then Ruby, just Ruby and nothing more, was convulsing in Yang’s arms as herself again, one eye wide open but seeing nothing as she stared straight into the heavens and screamed:
“PENNYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY!”
There was no time for joy. There was no time for any kind of exultation. Because the pinpricks of pain as little jagged shards of rock bounced off Blake was nothing compared to the overwhelming cold that suddenly ran through every vein and artery in her body as she realized that around Ruby’s one remaining eye was—
A Maiden flame.
Blake couldn’t breathe.
Ruby was a Maiden.
The Maiden powers transferred upon death.
There was only one Maiden who would have Ruby in her final thoughts.
No.
No.
NO!
The sound of Grimm in the air was intensifying rapidly, maybe because everyone of Blake’s senses was suddenly tortuously hyper-aware of the world in all its monstrous reality, or maybe because Blake was drawing them all to her position because she was suddenly full of pressurized, burning grief, a fuel tank about to rupture.
Ruby had gone silent, collapsing into unconsciousness, but hardly a microsecond had passed before Blake took up the words that’d ceased shrieking from Ruby’s mouth.
“PENNY!”
Yang didn’t understand anything when the green flash split the night sky. It evoked a very old emotion inside Yang, dredged up memories of a time when she’d been a kid on Patch and she’d seen strange bursts of silver light in the woods around their house. It made her afraid in a hundred different ways.
She understood even less when the statue of Ruby—which she was afraid to break for fear of hurting her sister somehow if she was still trapped in there somewhere—disintegrated violently, pelting Yang and anyone else nearby with pulverized rock and then RUBY WAS THERE AGAIN and… wait… what was around her… eye…?
“PENNY!”
The scream came from Blake. Yang stiffened at the raw grief primed and ready to catch fire in her voice. Before she could ask what was wrong, Blake stumbled into a series of halting words fragmented by choked-down sobs, looking wildly between her teammates.
“Penny. She—Ruby’s a Maiden. Penny gave it, the Maidens, they only give their magic—to the last girl thought of—in—in—” The last word was visibly sticking in Blake’s throat, but Yang had a terrible idea of what she was about to say but she wouldn’t let herself believe it until there was no other choice—
“—in death.”
“NO!”
Yang didn’t scream so much as she broke, her world shattering in a way that would never be reassembled no matter how many days, months, years, decades, centuries passed.
Penny was dead.
Yang couldn’t breathe. Her mouth was moving, and her chest was heaving, but there wasn’t any air getting into her lungs. Her throat was getting tighter and tighter and her lungs were shrinking until they didn’t feel like they could hold anything and there was a rattling howl coming from her mouth that wasn’t human so much as it was some animalistic part of her biology crying out in pain.
She couldn’t say it. She couldn’t think it. She couldn’t acknowledge it. Not even when the irrefutable evidence was right there to burn itself into her memory. She didn’t deserve to be alive when Penny was dead and this was her fault and, of course it was Yang Xiao Long’s fault, just like everyone else she’d lost! Of course Penny was gone and dead dead dead because she’d made the terrible mistake of being friends with Yang Xiao Long. It was because Yang hadn’t been good enough. Yang didn’t deserve to have anyone care about her ever again, because that would inevitably ruin their lives because everyone Yang cared about or even just anyone Yang thought about was ruined so Yang couldn’t think about anyone—anyone except herself. Perfect. The only person Yang was allowed to think about was herself, because then nobody would get hurt except Yang. And that was fine. Hurt Yang, punch Yang, strangle Yang, burn Yang alive, flay Yang, pull out Yang’s hair, just don’t let it happen to anyone else—
An entirely new kind of panic took hold of Yang as she realized someone was touching her side. Someone was touching Yang. Didn’t they know Yang was cursed? Didn’t they know Yang killed everything she touched?
She tried to jerk away from whoever was touching her before it was too late, but the movement only pushed her into contact with someone else and Yang was a murderer murderer murderer—
The touch suddenly disappeared, and Yang felt a different sensation—the pinprick of a needle on her arm, injecting something into her. Seconds later, she felt herself slipping into unconsciousness, and she hoped the oblivion would never let go of her.
Someone had administered a tranquilizer to Yang because she’d become a genuine danger to herself, and the only reason why Weiss wasn’t in the same exact situation was because she had forgotten how to move.
Gone.
Gone.
Penny was gone.
Why was she still alive when Penny, the braver, kinder, stronger Huntress, was dead?! It wasn’t fair! It wasn’t right! Nothing would be right ever again!
The world wobbled dangerously around her while something built and built and built in her chest until it forcibly broke her paralysis. Her entire face twitched, shivered, and then she began to cry in a way that she didn’t even know she was capable of, her hands clawing at her bloodstained bolero and twisting it mercilessly in her grasp until her knuckles screamed for her to let go. She refused. Her voice stumbled through every pitch her vocal cords were capable of before giving out entirely, leaving her to sob in a humiliating soundlessness, her chin juddering wildly as her vision became incomprehensible.
“Penny!”
Weiss said her name again, and then again, and again, and again until it didn’t even make sense on her tongue, until it was just a muddled repetition of sounds that meant nothing except grief and come back and I’m sorry and it should’ve been me.
There was nothing to hold onto, no one who could hold her close, everyone fractured by their grief. Weiss had never felt more alone in her life.
“Why?” she sobbed. “Why? Why? WHY?”
That question could never be answered, but Weiss needed to ask it more than she needed to breathe. Nothing would be ever right again.
Present day
If Blake somehow forgot which direction the city was from Patch, she could just follow the trail of smoke.
Except that calling it a trail of smoke didn’t quite do it justice. It was an immense pillar of black-and-gray ash that kept on billowing from the city, splitting the sky like an apocalypse coming to pass as the smoke was blown west by the wind, away from the volcano which had replaced Beacon.
But as much as the incinerated bits of city blocks dominated the sky, no one present was paying attention to it. All of Blake’s attention was on Ruby, who was crouched on the front lawn of the Branwen-Xiao Long household with her hands buried in the pockets of the hoodie Yang had given to her. Ruby herself was studying the house built from logs, tilting her head from side to side as if she didn’t understand the structure.
“So this is where I should’ve grown up,” Ruby said finally.
A cold autumn wind whistled between the girls, bringing with it a flutter of brittle leaves, one of which became stuck in Ruby’s hair.
“It looks really nice,” she added.
The way Ruby was crouching reminded Blake too much of a dog sitting on its haunches.
“Our parents put a lot of work into it,” Yang said. “Did it all themselves.”
Ruby turned her head just enough to look at Yang without standing up. “Where’s… the room I lived in?”
Blake, Weiss, and Yang were huddled together to minimize their exposure to the cold wind, which was why Blake could feel the sudden thumping of Yang’s heart as she raised a finger and pointed to one particular corner of the house.
Ruby shivered.
“Mom used to tell me about how she gave you a room that got extra sunlight,” Yang said. “She said her mistake was not realizing it was also the room most vulnerable to attack.”
If Blake looked very closely, she could see the wood and building materials which made up that corner were a very slightly different shade than the rest of the house. As if they’d had to be replaced at some point after the house was built.
“Summer didn’t do anything wrong, though!” One of Yang’s hands clenched into a fist. “She just wanted you to have the brightest life you possibly could! She didn’t know someone would… would…”
An airship navigating the clouds above caught and reflected the afternoon sun with its polished metal exterior, sending an irrepressible glimmer into Blake’s vision.
“I may be here, but…” Ruby’s voice was so, so dull. A blade that could only grate roughly against whatever it touched. “That’s where Ruby Rose died.”
Even with too much space between them, Yang reflexively reached out. “Ruby—”
“Ruby Rose should’ve been raised with her mom and her dad and her sister and her uncle and her dog and however many other friends she would’ve had growing up here, and Ruby Rose should’ve grown out of the corner room and gone off to fight monsters with a weapon she designed all by herself, and she would’ve gone to Beacon with her sister who wouldn’t have lost an arm looking for her, and… and maybe she wouldn’t even be named Ruby, because I don’t remember how I picked my name, everyone who knew me in Atlas said I was already calling myself Ruby when they found me, so…”
Ruby trailed off just as her voice reached a worryingly frenetic pace and shook her head violently. “That girl won’t ever exist again.”
“But you’re still here,” Blake said. “That’s more important than whatever could’ve been.”
Ruby didn’t answer immediately. Instead, she raised her hands and made a frame with her fingers, apparently trying to picture something about the environment within her mind. Then she shrugged and stood up. “I guess Ruby Karyatis was born here, too, whatever that means.”
She walked over to the other three girls, her not-quite-fitting hand-me-downs from Yang flapping in the wind where they were too big for her body.
“So can we—”
Blake abruptly stopped paying attention to Ruby as her Faunus ears picked up a noise from above before anyone else did. She looked up, and realized the airship she’d noticed earlier was circling lower and lower, unmistakably closing in on them—
An Atlesian airship. A unique one, with a sleek, bespoke chassis that she’d never seen before.
Adrenaline surged through Blake. None of them had their weapons right now—they were all in the house—but they had full Aura, so if Blake told Ruby to run, then maybe the three of them could hold off whoever was coming for Ruby for long enough for her to hide somewhere.
“Incoming threat,” she said in a low voice to her teammates.
Three more heads whipped skyward, but Weiss was the first to react.
“That’s Winter’s airship?!”
That only made Blake more on alert, actually, because Weiss’s sister seemed like exactly who Atlas would pick to try and guilt Ruby into coming back to Atlas of her own accord. At least she was more confident about beating Winter in a fight, even unarmed. Given that Winter was more unarmed than her at the moment.
But Ruby had frozen as she’d seen the airship, also recognizing it as her eye went inhumanly wide. And then she was clutching painfully to Blake’s arm as she squeezed behind her and Yang to peer out from between their shoulders.
“Ruby, run,” Blake whispered.
But Ruby only shook her head in fear. “I don’t—I don’t—I can’t—”
The airship touched down a moderate distance away, and with a sharp hiss, a boarding ramp lowered from the bottom. At the sound of the pneumatics, Ruby flinched like she’d been struck.
Blake’s entire frame tensed as she waited for whatever they would face. This was not the first time that she’d faced down an Atlesian in defense of Ruby and contemplated martial resistance, but this was the first time that she would actually be doing so. If necessary, of course.
Winter Schnee walked down the exit ramp, her normally-impeccable hair pulled back in a simple ponytail and the tightly-bandaged stump of her arm cradled in a sling. Her swords were not holstered at her side.
She stopped at the bottom of the ramp, not yet standing on Patch’s ground, and tired blue eyes swept over the four girls, hitching noticeably as they passed over a still-hiding Ruby. However, Blake was caught truly off-guard by where Winter’s gaze landed—Weiss.
“Sister,” Winter said. Her voice was monotonous and almost painfully even; she sounded as if she was in the process of relearning how to speak. “You shouldn’t return to Atlas.”
If anything, Weiss looked more surprised than Blake that Winter was apparently here for her. But she recovered in a way that only Weiss could, smoothly answering, “I’m not afraid to face my father after defying him.”
Winter sighed. “You misunderstand. This is not a matter of opinion. This is a matter of your status as an international fugitive.”
Weiss blinked. “…Pardon?”
“Would you like to know what the Schnee Dust Company did last night while Vale burned? They notified the Atlesian courts of their full and unrelenting intent to press charges, and as of today, there is a warrant out for your arrest in Atlas. On ninety-one counts of corporate sabotage, electronic espionage, unlawful access to and distribution of intellectual property—” She paused. “I don’t think I need to bother continuing.”
The White Fang kept an informal leaderboard of which members were most wanted by the various kingdoms, and if Blake’s memory was serving her correctly, Weiss had just rocketed to very near the top of the Atlesian leaderboard.
“Oh,” Weiss said faintly. “You mean… I cannot return home?” There was the slightest tremble of her lower lip as she said that, and Blake reached for her, giving her a soft squeeze of the shoulder which she hoped was comforting.
“Not unless you want to spend the rest of your life in prison.”
“Not ever…” Weiss whispered, mostly to herself. There was a more noticeable tremble, this time in her shoulders. Yang pressed closer to her—as much as she could while still shielding Ruby with her body.
“I’m telling you this now because the Atlesian forces in Vale will be departing the kingdom as soon as the evacuation fleet arrives,” Winter said.
“What?” Three simultaneous exclamations of disbelief answered that statement, while Ruby remained soundless.
“The geopolitical situation has never been tenser, Weiss. The Vale government does not want us here. We’ve already overstayed our welcome.”
“But the city’s still under siege!” Blake said.
“The Atlesian military and the government of Vale are both fully aware of the reality of the situation, and it has not swayed any minds on either side.” Winter shook her head. “One Vale council member told me this morning, we’d rather see the kingdom fall on its own than let it stand on the strength of your military.”
…Well, it wasn’t as if Blake could fully blame Vale’s government for taking that stance. But the situation was still so perilous, even after a day of fighting, that it didn’t seem pragmatic to just… tell the authoritarian martial might to fuck off the one time it might actually be needed. She cast another look at the trail of smoke leading away from Vale. She would’ve liked to save the burning that kingdom to the ground until after they’d made sure this kingdom wasn’t burning down anytime soon. And… the city’s borders were still very much compromised as of right now.
Regardless, there was one thing Blake hadn’t changed her mind about, which she would be making very clear to Winter before this visit was over. “Well, it doesn’t matter if Atlas is leaving, but Ruby is staying here,” Blake said. “Or anywhere except Atlas. Your kingdom isn’t touching her ever again.”
She narrowed her eyes, and did her best to display what years and years of fighting for the White Fang had etched deep into her irises.
It almost wasn’t necessary. Winter Schnee gave a tired, acquiescent nod in reply with barely a glance at Blake, and turned back towards the belly of her airship. However, two steps up the ramp, she paused.
“By the way, Weiss—” she said over her shoulder. “Even with an arrest warrant served, you must stay on your guard for the worst possible impulses of our father. I have no proof of this, but I fully believe that he’s put a bounty on your head—one that cashes out alive or dead.”
Weiss nodded numbly. “…Thank you for informing me?”
And finally, Winter acknowledged Ruby. Her eyes landed on the former supersoldier still hiding behind Blake and Yang and Weiss, and when their gazes met, Ruby flinched again.
Winter held her position as the first sign of life appeared in her eyes after an unthinkable dullness had pervaded them for the entire conversation. Even if that emotion was acute pain, it was still an emotion.
“I am sorry,” she said. “I am sorry for not understanding what I was doing to you, Ruby.”
And before any kind of response could be offered from anyone, Winter turned and finished her march back up into the airship. The ramp closed after her immediately.
Ruby still hadn’t worked up the steel to put on her eyepatch. It was still in her pocket where she’d left it.
Dry fallen leaves crunched weakly underfoot as Ruby trailed behind Yang, Blake, and Weiss on a tiny but well-traveled path through Patch’s woods. It was an understatement to say the others had been reluctant to take Ruby here, but she wasn’t taking no for an answer.
She wanted to see it. She had to see it. It felt desperately important for reasons she couldn’t even begin to say. If she tried really, really hard to put into her voice why she had to see this, she probably would’ve just started screaming.
So she didn’t take no for an answer, and finally she got Yang to surrender. She probably could get Yang to do anything for her, if she tried hard enough. The thought scared Ruby. She didn’t deserve to have that kind of power over anyone.
But that wasn’t important right now. The only thing that mattered was, Ruby was going to see her own grave.
The ache in her chest and her mind was getting more and more overwhelming the longer she was awake, and she didn’t know why but looking at her grave felt like the only thing which could maybe possibly make her feel better at all.
Or maybe it would make her hurt a million times worse. She didn’t mind taking the risk, though. It wasn’t like there wasn’t already a gaping wound in her soul.
The path took them skirting by a large wild meadow, and it probably would’ve looked nice in the summer when it was all green and bright and alive or in the winter when it was under a pristine snowfall. But it was fall, and the meadow just looked dead and empty and brown like a hole in the woods, and it looked like how being the Fall Maiden made Ruby feel.
She hadn’t used the magic since waking up, and if she had her way she wouldn’t use them for the rest of her life. These were Penny’s powers. They didn’t belong to her. She didn’t deserve them. This beautiful magic she’d wielded didn’t deserve to be besmirched by the blood-red Aura of Ruby Karyatis, who’d hurt Penny and insulted Penny and caused Penny’s death, and…
“Here we are,” Yang said, yanking Ruby out of the spiraling thoughts.
Aside from the view, it was much less grand than she expected. One grave that she almost missed because of how close to the treeline it was, and one grave front and center by the cliff, the headstone which had turned this plot of land into a graveyard in the first place.
Ruby could feel the worried eyes on her as she shuffled across the clearing. Out here on the exposed ground where they’d been exposed to much harsher elements, the decaying leaves underfoot didn’t crunch when they were stepped on—they only disintegrated soundlessly.
The Lost Rose Child.
There hadn’t even been a name before she was stolen. Ruby would never have any idea what that girl might’ve been like, if she had never ended up on the other side of the world as an unwilling lab experiment. Maybe the Lost Rose Child would’ve hated fighting and weapons and would’ve decided to spend her life doing something much more peaceful, like being a writer. Maybe the Lost Rose Child wouldn’t have ever figured out she was trans, or taken way longer to realize. Maybe the Lost Rose Child wouldn’t have a broken sensory system so she would know what hugs were supposed to feel like and maybe the Lost Rose Child wouldn’t have caused the apocalypse and wouldn’t have been responsible for Penny’s death—
Before her head could get clogged up with too many bad thoughts, Ruby tried to focus only on the second line etched into the grave.
Someone, in another time, will remember us.
But that only made it easier to cry. Because now she was thinking about Penny, she was thinking about Penny and Ruby, she was thinking about the us that she would remember forever, she was thinking about how the world wouldn’t remember them the right way, she needed Penny to be remembered the right way, was Penny going to have a grave, where would her grave be, would there be anything to bury at her grave—
Ruby clenched her jaw as hard as she possibly could to try and hold down a sob. She was facing away from Blake and Weiss and Yang, and some part of her hoped that if she could keep her tears silent, they wouldn’t notice her crying.
There was no way to know what kind of ghost was memorialized at this grave. There wasn’t anything to miss being, because Ruby would never know. It was a grave to potential more than anything else, to a girl that would only ever be what could’ve been.
And yet, that Lost Rose Child was standing right fucking here, and she wasn’t nothing, she was something, even if she still had no idea what that something was, she was just Ruby and she was real even if this gravestone made her feel less real than she ever had before—
Something was filling Ruby up, something that didn’t feel like tears, and it took her too long to realize it was something she hadn’t expected to ever feel again: Anger.
By the time she understood what she was feeling, it was too late to keep it hidden inside, and she screamed. Maybe she was screaming at nothing. Maybe she was screaming at the grave. Maybe she was screaming at herself. Maybe she was screaming at the world.
Whatever it was, before Blake or Yang or Weiss could stop her, Ruby lifted one Aura-assisted foot and slammed it down into the gravestone with as much force as she and her Aura could muster, and she was rewarded with a satisfying CRUNCH and a massive crack appearing right down the middle of the rock, cleaving it completely in two. And then she was stomping on it over and over again with still Aura-enhanced feet, pulverizing it further and further until she was standing in a pile of, essentially, gravel.
Ruby came to a stop, panting heavily, and bared her teeth at the gravestone’s remains. It’d been as thoroughly destroyed as the CCT tower. It was unrecognizable. Nobody had tried to stop her.
That was the closest anything had come to feeling good since waking up.
But Ruby was still left with a thought pounding in her head, one that couldn’t be kicked to smithereens.
“How do I mourn someone who’s still alive?” she whispered to nobody. “How do I mourn myself?”
As much as Ruby hoped it would, destroying the gravestone didn’t fix anything forever. It made her feel better for almost the amount of time it took to walk back to the house, and by the time Ruby got back to the room she’d been given to sleep in, she was right back to not knowing how to live with this much hurt. And not knowing how to live in a world without Penny.
Her own heartbeat was too loud in her ears. She wished she could turn off her hearing. Like a light switch. She wanted the world to be silenced. She wished she could turn off her brain, too. Not to die, because Penny wouldn’t want that, but just to… turn off her thoughts. Turn off her processing. Turn off the hurting.
Her body wasn’t supposed to feel pain. Because it was broken. But she was hurting anyways, because physical pain and emotional pain weren’t the same and right now she was all emotional pain, so much sadness and hopelessness and despair and guilt and grief and sorrow and loneliness and self-hatred everywhere that it felt like she’d already lived an entire life with it.
Her body couldn’t feel useful pain like I’m hungry or I’m thirsty or I need medical attention, but it could feel useless emotional pain. Her body was so STUPID. It couldn’t even be broken in the one way that would’ve helped right now.
Ruby closed the door behind her, because she didn’t want anyone looking in and noticing she was curled up on her bed and crying, and that was when she noticed there was something on her bed which definitely hadn’t been there before.
It was a huge book laying open on the bedspread, definitely heavy enough to break a bone if it was dropped on someone’s foot with no Aura. And it looked old, well-used but also clearly taken care of. It was bound in ornate gold and leather, and the pages themselves…
Ruby hadn’t put it here. This hadn’t even been in the room before. There hadn’t been anyone else in the house besides the four girls, and none of the other three were the kind to just leave a book out for Ruby like a demand to read it…
Curiosity got the best of her. Curiosity felt nice. It felt like something different from hurting.
Ruby hopped up onto the bed, and as soon as she saw the pages, she realized what this book was.
It was an old, old collection of fairytales. Ruby knew this because she recognized the story the book had been opened to.
The Girl In The Tower.
Notes:
EDIT: Apologies again, but I don’t think I can plan on weekly updates until I’ve gotten settled in with my new job/living place/way of life/etc
I have to say, as the writer, it feels like I can finally breathe after so long.
Chapter 73: Dead Girl Walking
Notes:
So! Life is finally returning to stability, which means I can budget time to write again! So hopefully this will be the last of the slow period.
I'm really excited to be forging onward into Volume 4 of this story. Now that we're out of Beacon, the canon divergence is really going to start coming into play, and I feel the urge to quote Anakin in Episode 3 and say "this is where the fun begins," except who am I kidding, the first 72 chapters have also been fun as hell, and a true joy in so many ways! I wouldn't have gotten this far if I wasn't having the time of my life writing it! And the time of my life reading every single one of the comments! It's been incredible to see so many responses to this story in so many different ways, and I just want to say, thank you.
Thank you for being along for so much of the ride, and I hope that the volumes ahead bring you just as much excitement as they're bringing me to plan and write. Much ahead.
Content warning for this chapter (click this text to reveal):
Grief, mourning, self-hatred
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
The Girl In The Tower.
Ruby knew it almost by heart. When she was younger and reading it, she’d always thought to herself that someday she would be such a good soldier, that there would never be another Girl In The Tower, ever again. Because she would free them all.
Realizing the irony of her younger self’s belief was almost as painful as knowing what the cost had been to free herself.
Ruby stared at the open book of fairytales on her bed, no closer to knowing who’d left it.
Maybe they meant it as a lesson.
Maybe there was someone in this house who wanted to make sure she remembered exactly how and where and why and when she went wrong.
She flopped down on the bed, landing on her side, and ran her fingers over the first words of the story.
Once upon a time…
The pages were made of a thick, creamy material, and although they were yellowed with age, they still carried a gloss that let the pages glide under her fingers as she turned them.
The story was just how Ruby remembered, and it could’ve been just like any other time she’d read The Girl In The Tower.
Except.
Except it wasn’t.
This time, all she could think about was how she had been a Girl In The Tower, too. All her life. She’d never questioned it. Never even thought about being a girl trapped in the tower just like in that fairytale. Never even considered that there was anything for her beyond the bright Atlesian towers that kept Project Moonrise a secret.
Until it was too late.
Ruby came to the end of the story, and she sat in hopeless silence, staring at the final word.
End.
In the fairytale, the girl got to escape the tower and have her happily ever after with her beloved companion.
That wasn’t how real life worked. She felt stupid for ever thinking she was a fairytale come true. She had known nothing. She was really just a tragedy. And maybe tragedies were the only kind of story that existed.
If my story is a tragedy, then why am I still here?
A tear fell from her face to the last page of the fairytale, leaving a small dark blot. Penny was gone. Beacon had fallen. The end. That was the end. So why wasn’t everything over?
Even the people in the fairytale tragedies had it better. They usually died at the end, meaning they didn’t have to live every second after the ending. The people in fairytales didn’t have to live ever after with the awful, crushing knowledge of just how everything had gone wrong. They didn’t have to live with the tragedy for the rest of their lives.
Suddenly, Ruby couldn’t breathe, because all she could think about was the rest of her life stretching out for however many years, every single one of those days remembering her mistakes and the deaths she’d caused and remembering Penny, and how was she supposed to live all those years if they would hurt like that?
I know I promised Penny, but… how do I live with all this? How is it possible?
Ruby flicked to the next page, to whatever came after The Girl In The Tower, because she just needed to see something else, something that didn’t remind her of everything she’d done wrong—
The next page didn’t have a fairytale. Instead, it had someone’s handwriting.
Ruby blinked at the regal cursive which had been written in rich, black ink without leaving a single stroke out of line or a blot somewhere. She didn’t recognize it as Weiss or Blake or Yang’s handwriting, so if it was the writing of whoever had left the book here for her, that ruled them out as the ones responsible, so who…?
The words themselves offered no insight, but they did seem aimed right at Ruby’s chest like an arrow piercing her skin.
Quite an inspiring tale, wouldn’t you say?
At that moment
Blake’s spoon was too small for her mug, which she knew because she’d dropped the spoon into her tea five minutes ago and hadn’t bothered to fish it out yet.
Three girls sat around the kitchen table, attempting to drink cups of tea and continuing to try to come to grips with their new reality, and failing miserably at both tasks.
For the last eight minutes, Weiss had been taking a sip from her mug every thirty seconds on the dot, possibly timing it with the tick of the clock on the wall. Blake was quite sure Weiss had not tasted so much as a drop of whatever liquid passed over her taste buds in that time. She could’ve slipped poison into Weiss’s mug for all she would’ve noticed. And still, Weiss was somehow faring better, relatively, than Yang. Who had done nothing but stare straight down at her reflection in the now-cold drink.
It felt as if the only living thing in the kitchen was the pot of soup on the stove, which burbled and hissed and sounded much more alive than the three dead-eyed girls.
They were waiting for word of a thousand different things from the city, and there was nothing to do but wait. With the CCT entirely destroyed, there wasn’t anything left that could be salvaged and repurposed for local, in-kingdom communications. The news would come whenever Yang’s father and uncle returned from the city.
“It… It doesn’t feel real,” Yang said, and immediately she winced and shook her head violently. “I—I hate myself for saying something that’s been said a billion times already about every other fucking tragedy on the planet, but—I can’t not say it, because it’s true! Penny was the realest girl and realest person I’ve ever met; how is someone so real supposed to just… stop existing?! It doesn’t feel possible!”
“Where does all that realness go now?” Blake mumbled into her mug. Weiss and Yang threw confused looks at her, but she didn’t see them, and it wasn’t the kind of thing she could’ve explained in that moment even if she tried to.
“Where do we go?” Weiss said, and from her tone she meant it quite literally. “How can we be a team without Penny?”
Just the thought of fighting without Penny for the rest of their days brought its own anxiety for Blake, the anxiety someone might feel when forced to wield an unbalanced weapon in a life-or-death battle.
That was to say nothing of Ruby, for whom Blake was asking the same question, except with a thousand times more fear, because too much of Ruby had died with Penny. When Blake looked into that dull silver eye and tried to reconcile it with the joy and life that had always sparked within Ruby’s irises before, she couldn’t shake the acute sensation of talking to a dead girl walking.
A silence fell, or something close to one. It couldn’t quite be a full silence because of the distant droning of airship engines from far above outside—the remnants of the Atlesian army departing aboard cruisers newly-arrived from Atlas to evacuate them. It was a shockingly quick departure, considering how those new ships had just arrived hours ago, but by now there was no love lost between anyone aboard those ships and anyone still on the ground.
(If Blake had been watching the fleet’s departure, she would’ve noticed that one of the massive cruisers was in noticeably worse shape than the rest of the fleet, long jagged gashes cut in its side where it’d plowed into the ground. It wasn’t one of the ships that’d been shot down on the night of the Fall, though, because it was still just airworthy enough to be towed by two other cruisers through the sky as smoke trailed from its own struggling, flickering engines.)
(If any of the girls had been looking, they might have recognized it as one they’d seen many times over the semester, and had seen once more at the fall of Beacon under the worst circumstances. If they had been looking close enough to read the name on the damaged cruiser’s hull, they would’ve seen that the damaged ship being towed back to Atlas was the Pandora.)
(But none of them were watching, and none of them knew of the promise Penny had made aboard the Pandora just minutes before her death.)
The sound of the front door opening broke the stillness and caught Weiss in the middle of another mechanically timed sip of her tea, causing a spill all over her lap. Thankfully, by then it was far below any temperature that might’ve brought a risk of being burnt.
“Dad?” Yang said, her voice cracking halfway through the syllable.
“Sorry, Firecracker.” Moments later, Qrow sidled into the kitchen, his flask in hand, and jerked his chin in greeting. “He’s a few minutes behind me, so it’s up to me to be the bearer of the bad news. Most of it.”
“Is the school safe?” Weiss said.
Qrow sighed and rubbed his chin. “Well, it’s technically not overrun by Grimm anymore, but that’s because it’s been turned into an active volcano. So it’s not getting reclaimed anytime soon. Whatever the Summer Maiden did with her magic there that night, the lava flows aren’t stopping. They’ve reached all the way to the city, and part of the border’s been destroyed. We’re trying to make a stable defensive line deeper in the city, but the Grimm aren’t letting up, and we just don’t have the firepower to push them back.”
It took an extended moment for the meaning of those words to sink into Weiss, Blake, and Yang, and in that time, Qrow added, “In other words. Not great.”
“…What happens next?” Yang said.
Qrow didn’t reply immediately, instead reaching for his flask and taking a swig. Blake noticed Weiss trying and failing to stifle a deep frown, one that seemed to go beyond ordinary repulsion. She filed that away as something to ask about much later.
Also, she’d seen Yang’s uncle drain his flask dry that morning. Where exactly had he replenished his supply amidst this very-much-ongoing catastrophe?
“Can I be honest with you kids? It’s gonna be the snowball effect,” Qrow said finally.
The three girls stiffened as one. They were all too familiar with that term from their classes. It was one of the basic concepts of Grimm warfare that a Huntress needed to understand. It was the worst-case scenario to be avoided at all costs.
“A bunch of people get negative emotions all at once, and that attracts a bunch of Grimm,” Yang said. “And the Grimm cause more negative emotions, which attracts more Grimm, which causes more negative emotions, which…” She trailed off, and Blake finished it for her.
“And on, and on. Until everyone’s either dead or fled.”
A snowball, left unattended to tumble down the side of a mountain, might pull more snow down with it, and gather enough momentum and speed and inevitability to turn into an avalanche that would flatten everything in its path.
Blake knew the snowball effect was only ever supposed to happen with small settlements. Villages. The kingdoms, at least the ones of modern day, were supposed to be too big to set off those kinds of unstoppable catastrophes. (Except for Menagerie, which had the unique problem of not being large enough to be too-big-to-fall the way the other kingdoms were, and yet too large to live beneath the notice of larger Grimm hordes the way a small-enough settlement might. The kingdom had balanced on a knife’s edge from the moment it was constructed.)
But regardless of size, Blake also knew something as enormous as last night’s attack had never happened before. They were in unknown territory.
“Do you mean… the city is going to fall?” she said in a hushed voice.
Another silence, somehow more uncomfortable than the last, fell over the table. If the city fell, then the outlying settlements wouldn’t be able to defend themselves, which meant… which meant…
“The kingdom’s gonna fall,” Qrow said bluntly. “We’re shorthanded everywhere. We lost so many good fighters in one night. Nothing’s stopping the Grimm. Nothing’s distracting them. We’re the biggest target on the planet right now. I’m seeing Grimm from other continents hanging out here, Grimm that I didn’t even know could migrate this far, Grimm that should be too dumb to come this far. And everyone in the city’s starting to figure out, it’s not a question of if the city falls. It’s a question of when.”
He made an approach at sitting in one of the vacant chairs at the kitchen table, but stubbed his toe against a table leg in the process, drawing a muttered curse and a wince from him before he sat down heavily. “Course, doesn’t help that we told a bunch of people who can fight to fuck off, but… I really can’t bring myself to be banged up about kicking Atlas out of here, no matter how much worse it makes our situation.”
Blake closed her eyes, trying to slow the sudden bombardment of awful outcomes in her mind. How many Faunus had nowhere to evacuate, nowhere that would care to take them? Would the evacuation procedures pay enough attention to the poorer, majority-Faunus areas of the city where it was harder to know how many people exactly needed evacuation?
Blake wouldn’t be the leader of the Vale Branch of the White Fang because there wouldn’t be a Vale. She could almost hear Adam spitting, and what does our darling leader in Vale have left to lead?
Blake felt personally culpable in—in everything. Everything, including what’d happened to Penny. If she’d done more with the White Fang, maybe she could’ve found out about the plot to take over Beacon sooner, and averted the crisis entirely… if she’d been able to stand up to Adam sooner… if she’d just tried harder and hadn’t been so afraid, if she’d been a better leader actually capable of leading… How many were dead because of her inability to lead?
“What do we do, then?” Weiss said, her voice as small as Blake had ever heard it. The question didn’t exactly pull Blake out of her spiral, but it slowed her descent into self-blame, at the very least.
Qrow grimaced. He looked at his flask, visibly contemplating another drink, but after a few seconds, he left it sitting on the table. “Well. First things first, Barty told me you wanted answers about who’s behind this. About who we’re really fighting. Taiyang’s not gonna be happy that we’re having this talk so soon—he wanted to wait until at least after you graduated, but we don’t have a choice anymore. Besides, it’s not like you can graduate now. I gotta give you the usual warning, if you don’t want to be involved in something that’s probably going to kill you, then you should leave this conversation right now, but I don’t think any of you wanna be left in the dark after what you’ve lost.”
What remained of Team Raspberry exchanged grim looks, followed by three decisive nods. None of them had to think about it for more than a second. They couldn’t turn away from whatever this was, not after losing Penny. Blake could see her own thoughts reflected in Weiss and Yang’s expressions: I owe this to Penny. To keep fighting for her.
“So,” Yang said. “Who’s Salem?”
Who’s Salem?
For Yang, the question came with a memory of telling Ruby the truth about her family yesterday—just as Ruby began descending into panic, that name had spilled from her lips. She’d said the name like it was the source of all the world’s problems.
And, as her uncle was telling them, that was the truth.
“Salem is an entity who commands the Grimm. No one knows where she came from, or how old she is. All we know is, she’s magic. And she wants to rule the world. Or destroy it. Maybe it’s the same to her.”
Her jokester uncle, always looking for some way to poke a needle in an overinflated situation or yank a rug out from under someone getting too high up on a soapbox, had never sounded more dead serious in his entire dopey life.
“Some time so far ago that no history book’s big enough for it, Remnant was ruled by a pair of gods who were brothers. That’s what Ozpin called them, just the Brothers. Light and Dark. They had their differences, but sometimes they worked together. One of the times they worked together, they created humanity. All of us. Creatures with the capability for light and dark in equal measure, and the ability to choose for themselves.”
Yang’s attention was all on Qrow, but out of the corner of her eye, she could see Blake squinting at him in a way that suggested she didn’t like something about this. Or maybe a lot of things about this.
“The Brothers also bestowed four gifts upon Remnant, for us to use as we saw fit. And then they disappeared.” Qrow shrugged. “Or maybe they decided we could be left to our own devices. No one knows. That’s not what’s important, though. What’s important is what they left behind. The four relics. The Sword of Destruction, the Staff of Creation, the Lamp of Knowledge, and the Crown of Choice. Each of them granting the unimaginable power to whoever holds them.”
Yang said nothing. What could she say in the face of this, on top of all the other shattered remnants of their previous world she was still shifting hopelessly through?
“You’re all still on board with me? You don’t think I’m crazy?” Qrow looked at each of them in turn, and received three affirmative responses. “Well, good, because believing that makes everything else easier. So, Salem. You’ve noticed that humanity’s gotten pretty good at defending ourselves from the Grimm, and that’s not good for Salem’s goals. So what’s a Queen Of Darkness to do when her hordes of destruction and chaos aren’t getting the results she wants? She looks for more firepower. Like the Relics. But getting them ain’t easy. They’re hidden in a special kind of vault. A kind that doesn’t really have a key or a password. It’s more that there’s always only one person in the world who can open one of the four vaults.”
Blake gasped sharply, her Faunus ears going flat against her head. “There are four relics. There are four Maidens. Don’t tell me—”
“Bingo,” Qrow said. “The Maidens are keys.”
“Keys,” Blake repeated. She shifted her seat so that she was sitting closer to Yang and Weiss, and as she continued looking at Qrow, her gaze rapidly cooled. “When Ozpin made his offer, I recall a distinct lack of mention of anything about being a key.”
What? Yang blinked at her partner. What was Blake talking about?
But Qrow seemed to understand her perfectly, because he winced. “Yeah, I know it doesn’t look good, but you have to understand, this kind of information can’t fall into the wrong hands. Even if we trust you enough to make the offer at all, we can’t tell you everything until we know you’re committed. It would cause chaos—”
“Save it,” Blake snapped, startling Yang with how much ferocity vibrated in her voice. “I know what you’re going to say next, and I’d rather not hear it, because I’ve already heard that kind of reasoning for a thousand other problems, and I’m tired of it.”
Qrow blinked owlishly at her, swaying ever-so-slightly in his seat, while Blake’s eyes remained narrowed.
Weiss saved the conversation with a grace that Yang could only recognize as belonging to her alone.
“I apologize, but I feel as if I’m missing something immense.” She subtly pulled Blake back a little by the shoulder, and pointed at Qrow. “Maiden. I keep hearing that word. Penny called herself a Maiden. Doctor Oobleck said Ozpin died defending a Maiden. Blake—you knew Ruby was a ‘Maiden’ as soon as the red flame erupted around her eye. Am I supposed to know what that is already?”
“Sorry, snow-cone.” Qrow nodded to Blake. “White Fang Princess over here knows way more about the Maidens because Oz made an offer to her to be one of them.”
Yang had no idea what Qrow was talking about… except, if that was the mystery meeting that’d called Blake away from their dorm room right before things went south with Ruby—wait, just how long had he and his weird group which apparently included the deceased headmaster been planning to—
“So, Ice Princess, you know the Story Of The Seasons?” Qrow didn’t need to ask the same question to Yang, because he already knew the answer.
“Well, yes, but I hardly—” Weiss cut herself off, her eyes widening. “Those Maidens. You’re not saying—?”
“Yeah, those Maidens were real, and their magic gets passed down from generation to generation, always to young women. They’re passed on randomly, unless the Maiden had another young woman in her final thoughts before dying, in which case that girl gets the magic. They wield the powers of the seasons and they’re a one-woman-army, yada yada yada. I don’t have much to say because you’ve all already seen a Maiden in action, and that goes way further than getting a lecture about them. You follow me?”
“Two Maidens, actually,” Blake said.
Qrow blinked at her, momentarily agape. “…What?”
“We’ve seen two Maidens. Summer and Fall. Cinder and Penny.”
Qrow followed that with a longer pause before he said, “Penny. As in that Penny? Your teammate? The one who’s, uh—”
“Indeed.”
That threw Qrow for even more of a loop, and he leaned back, rubbing his woefully-unshaven chin vigorously before shaking his head. “Well, I’ll be damned. Your robot girl teammate actually became the Fall Maiden?”
Yang winced. She didn’t like that tone at all. Blake’s ears went slanted as soon as the word robot was out of Qrow’s mouth. A deep red flush of anger started to spread across Weiss’s collarbone and neck. And all three of them were beaten to an answer by someone else.
“Don’t call her that.”
The occupants of the kitchen jumped, because none of them—not even Blake with her Faunus ears—had noticed Ruby slinking down from upstairs and lurking in the stairwell, watching them silently for some unknown amount of time. It was she who had spoken just now, her lips pulled back in a snarl directed at Qrow, exposing her teeth like a guard dog showing its fangs as a warning.
As had happened every time since Ruby woke up, Yang’s heart broke when she saw her baby sister. There was a million reasons for that heartbreak, but right now the suddenly-boiling pit in Yang’s stomach came mostly from seeing Ruby’s teeth.
Had Ruby noticed yet that her canines—and why oh why did those two specific teeth have to be called that of all things—were longer than they should’ve been and much sharper?
Yang had noticed the pair of teeth that morning, before Ruby woke up, and seen flashes of it throughout the day as Ruby talked, and now the snarl put it on full display, and dissolved any hopes Yang had of it just being a hallucination or a nightmare or anything but the truth.
The truth was that the Grimm liquid had left a parting mark on Ruby, and her two canine teeth were almost too long to fit comfortably in her mouth. Much more like a hound’s fangs.
“Don’t you dare call her that,” Ruby growled once more, not moving from her vantage point on the stairs.
“What?” Qrow said. Most of the color was gone from his face—from hearing the anger in Ruby’s voice or from seeing the pair of fangs, Yang couldn’t tell.
“Robot. Nobody gets to call Penny that,” Ruby said, her voice losing none of its venom. “I was the only person who ever got to use that word for Penny, only because she trusted me with that word. And now I don’t even trust myself with it.”
Qrow opened his mouth, but Yang cut off whatever disastrous reply was on the tip of his tongue by kicking him in the shin.
“…How are you feeling, kid?” he said instead.
Ruby’s snarl slowly faded, the fangs disappearing under her lips again as she returned to an unreadable state of emotions. She shrugged. “I already know about Salem.”
Gods. Yang didn’t know what was worse, that Ruby already knew about Salem, or that Ruby found a way to answer how are you feeling? without actually saying anything about her body or her mind.
“The General told me.” Ruby winced and shook her head violently. “I mean, Ironwood. Sorry. Reflex.”
“It’s okay,” Yang said automatically.
“It isn’t,” Ruby said, just as automatically. “He told me the night before. The night—the night before everything went wrong. He thought it would get me back on his side. And he was kind of right. I believed him. I believed I was the only one who could kill Salem. Until… Until…”
Ruby lifted her gaze, staring at some point beyond any of them, and then there was a brief, sudden widening of her eyes.
The only part of the night Ruby remembered with perfect clarity was the end, standing in a lifeless white void with Penny. Everything before that, after pushing herself into the Grimm pool, was blurred by a film of Grimm matter and a frenzy of hurts hurts hurts so bad just make it stop please screaming in her head with everything she did, every choice she made, everything she tried to make her existence stop.
More than anything else, there was one part of her memory that she could only read as an echo of an incomprehensible storm of anger anger ANGER HATE YOU HATE with no hint of what laid inside or what had triggered it, until the storm abruptly faded into a memory of seeing Weiss standing in her path and saying, it’s not too late.
Ruby couldn’t remember what had made her so angry. All she remembered was being angrier than ever before, the Grimm in every corner of her responding to her anger with more agitation which made everything in her head feel worse and then more and more and she’d just… exploded. But. What had made her angry in the first place?
Ruby couldn’t remember. At least, until thirty seconds ago, she hadn’t remembered. And then she was telling the others about what Ironwood had said about Salem the night before the attack, and Ruby remembered something else Ironwood had said about Salem. Not from before the attack. During the attack. To Ruby.
“You can’t kill her. No one can.”
It’d sounded like the truth. It’d felt like the truth. It’d smelled like the truth to Ruby-Hound-Monster’s nose, and it had set all her thoughts on fire, because if it was true, that meant…
All for nothing. Everything Atlas did to her, all for nothing.
So that was why Ruby couldn’t stand the idea of wearing an Atlesian uniform anymore ever again when she woke up.
But if it was the truth, then—then, what Qrow was telling Blake and Yang and Weiss—
All that flashed through Ruby’s mind in the space of a second, long enough for everyone to notice something was wrong, and then she realized she couldn’t tell them what Ironwood had told her.
How was she supposed to tell them Salem couldn’t die, tell them Penny’s death had been for—for nothing—
No.
She couldn’t say it. She wouldn’t say it. She would never tell anyone else that Penny had died for a world that couldn’t be saved. Ruby would keep this horrible secret and probably take it to the grave, and she hoped Ironwood choked and died on that secret too.
So Ruby refocused her eye on the others, and simply said, “Until I blew up.”
The others stared at her, and for a second Ruby was terrified that her secret was written all over her face, that they knew just by looking at her—
Qrow stared. “And I thought I couldn’t want to kill Jimmy any more.”
Ruby winced. Those words were triggering memories of how close she’d come to killing him—but more importantly how close she’d been to killing Winter, when she’d sunk her own teeth straight through yielding flesh— “Can we—can we just keep talking about Salem? Please?”
That wasn’t even her trying to hide her secret, she just wanted to think about anything else besides Winter maimed and broken because of her.
She sat down on the third step from the landing, keeping her hands jammed into the pocket of her borrowed hoodie as Qrow mercifully went back to his explanation.
…But if he called Penny robot again in that kind of dismissive voice, Ruby was going to reconsider how bad she would feel about maiming one more person on her side.
“So, Salem’s already got the key to one relic with her lackey being the Summer Maiden. Funny thing is, we don’t know if she has the actual Relic of Destruction yet, because now we can’t open its vault to check if the sword’s gone—”
“Hang on, wouldn’t we already know by now if the Queen of the Grimm has a magical thingy of destruction?” Yang said. “Like. I don’t know how it works, but if she has that, then…?” She waved vaguely.
“Yeah, that’s the point in favor of her not having it yet,” Qrow said. “We’re all still standing here. The point against that is—” He pointed with his flask to the smoke outside. “Things aren’t exactly going swimmingly out there.”
Suddenly, Ruby had to close her eyes, because if she didn’t, she wasn’t going to be able to hold down the sob fighting to get free—brought on by a burst of fresh pain in her head. Swimmingly. One of Penny’s favorite words.
…Was the rest of her life going to be like this, remembering Penny everywhere and missing her a million times more than she missed her own eye? How did anyone live with that? Why did anyone try to?
She pulled her hoodie down over her face and tried to keep listening to Qrow.
“—Winter’s vault holds Creation, and Spring’s vault holds Knowledge, and Fall… has…"
He trailed off into silence, and Ruby knew everyone was looking at her, because she was the Fall Maiden which meant she had to get the crown somehow even though she had no idea where the stupid vault was, and it didn’t matter anyways because Salem was gonna win someday, so… she didn’t have anything for them. Even though they were still looking at her.
“Wait.” Weiss saved Ruby from having to reply. “You… you said the Relic of Choice is a crown?”
“Yeah?”
“I—I thought I saw a crown, on Penny’s head, just before she fought Cinder…” Weiss said.
Ruby looked up.
Weiss was pressing a hand to her forehead, blinking hard. “I thought it was a hallucination borne from stress, but… No. It was just a moment, but I’m positive, it was a crown I saw on Penny’s head, as if she was a ruler of all that was worth protecting…”
“You’re sure? You didn’t see it appear out of thin air, did you?” When Weiss nodded, Qrow rubbed his face vigorously and let out a hard sigh. “Well, fuck me, that’s the relic.”
Ruby looked back down.
“Oz did a funny thing with Choice—it’s in a vault somewhere, sure, but there’s no way in. No door. He told me, the only way to get the relic is if the Fall Maiden summons it directly. He never said how the summoning worked exactly, but he seemed pretty confident that even if one of Salem’s women ended up being Fall, they wouldn’t get their hands on the crown. Did you see where it went?”
“I… I don’t know. I don’t remember.” Frustration leaked into Weiss’s voice. “I should remember! It was—it was Penny’s last moments, and I can’t even remember them correctly!”
Ruby didn’t see Blake and Yang pushing their chairs closer to Weiss, but she felt the vibrations of the chair legs through the floor as they moved..
“Weiss, you were fighting for your life,” Blake said. “Just like we all were. The fact that you can remember anything is a testament to how much you care about her.”
“Hey, speaking as someone who’s actually an idiot for forgetting very important things about her loved ones—you’re okay, Weiss,” Yang said. “I was an idiot. You were trying to survive. There’s a world of difference between us.”
There was a brief silence, which probably meant Blake was shooting Yang a look—wait, hold on, Yang was talking about not remembering Ruby looked like Summer, which meant, Yang was calling Ruby a loved one.
She couldn’t help the little gasp that slipped out, and hoped no one else heard it. Yang didn’t have to call her that. But she did. She called Ruby a loved one, and… she meant it. Ruby knew she meant it, because she’d never doubt it again after how Yang had hugged her right through the Grimm goop and held her so close and told her, I’d rather die with you than live without you.
It hurt, remembering that, but in a different way than everything else hurt. A good kind of hurt? Was that possible? She wanted to feel more of it. She wanted to hold onto it forever.
She looked up, and realized everyone was already looking at her.
“Ruby, is there anything you know about the crown?” Blake said.
Ruby shrugged. The Maiden flame appeared around her remaining eye, a sickly red light that wavered somewhere between blood and the color of a Grimm’s eye. It flickered and sputtered like a fire on the verge of going out. She didn’t like seeing it because it reminded her this was Penny’s it was supposed to be Penny’s not hers, she’d stolen this power, she wanted to give it back to Penny more than anything—
“Crown?” she said to empty air. “Hey, can I get the crown? The Relic of Choice? The Crown of Choice? Please?”
Half-bare branches rustled outside, the occasional leaf drifting past the window. A squirrel scampered across the windowsill, an acorn stuffed in its mouth. Nothing happened.
“Well, makes me feel better to know Oz wasn’t lying about the security system,” Qrow said after a long enough time had passed. “Honestly, I don’t even know what Salem would do with Choice, it doesn’t sound like it would do much for her, but I also don’t wanna find out.”
Ruby wasn’t even disappointed. It just made perfect sense. Of course Penny could summon the Crown but Ruby couldn’t. Because Penny was the true Maiden, the storybook one who deserved to be magic because she was already magical in so many ways. And Ruby was just the Maiden because Penny had wanted to say goodbye, and that was all that mattered about the magic to her; it was Penny’s goodbye.
“You will always carry a part of me with you. I hope it will be enough to remind you about the vast multitudes of yourself we found together.”
Ruby didn’t need it to be anything else.
The front door opened again.
Because Ruby was in the stairwell directly across from the entry room, she was the first person to see Taiyang Xiao Long enter with a familiar sword in his arms.
Ruby leapt up fast enough to nearly trip over her feet down the last few sets of stairs before she caught herself with a white-knuckled grip on the banister. She descended slowly and deliberately to the kitchen, never taking her eyes off the battered, tarnished form of Luminous Electra.
She saw, out of the corner of her eyes, Weiss and Blake and Yang standing up in a fumble of limbs, Blake’s hand going to her mouth while Yang clutched the back of her chair like it was the only thing keeping her tethered to the earth, and Weiss reached out with both arms, grabbing at empty air in a movement that seemed both conscious and unconscious.
Even as a seasoned Huntsman, it didn’t look like it’d been easy for Taiyang to get the massive sword here from Vale. He was out of breath and covered in sweat, and exhaustion saturated his every move, but when he set the blade down on the table between the four girls, he did so with the utmost gentleness and caution.
Ruby, Weiss, Blake, and Yang could only stare at Luminous Electra, and Penny’s emblem built into the hilt stared out at everything like an unseeing eye.
Ruby didn’t realize her legs had been bringing her slowly to the table until she was right there, her hands hovering just over Luminous Electra. She stopped herself and looked up uncertainly at Penny’s teammates, wondering if she was getting in their way—
They glanced at each other and nodded solemnly, and Ruby knew it was okay.
Swallowing down something hard and heavy in her chest, she leaned in and ran her hands slowly over the blade, trying to memorize what Penny had crafted. She wanted to remember Luminous Electra in the way Penny would remember an important memory, creating a far larger data file that would store more information about a given moment, so much more information than anyone could ever imagine being contained in just one pulse of time. Ruby wanted to upload every inch of Luminous Electra’s design to her mind, so that a decade from now she would still be able to forge a perfect reproduction from scratch based on nothing but her own thoughts.
The sword was in its full zweihander configuration, and in that mode, by default the power symbol and the blade’s circuit-board patterning were supposed to be illuminated by an electric green glow from within the blade. But Luminous Electra was completely unlit, leaving the emblem and the patterning a far duller green than Ruby was used to. The weapon was covered in spots where the metal had darkened under what could’ve only been an exposure to intense heat, and in other places there were gouges in metal which had been meticulously forged to be resistant to such damage. One of the crossguards had been bent to a woeful angle, and from the way the metal shaft was twisted, she could tell the crossguard had been had partially melted before it re-cooled into its current warped form.
Ruby tore her gaze away from Luminous Electra, and pushed the hilt towards Weiss. The movement swung the blade’s tip in the opposite direction, leaving it pointing more towards Ruby than anyone else.
“It’s yours,” Ruby said, looking Weiss in the eyes. “She was your partner. Her weapon deserves your protection.”
Weiss’s breath caught faintly, her eyes flicking from the sword to Ruby, and then she shook her head firmly.
“No.” Weiss pushed the hilt back into Ruby’s grasp. “She was your love, Ruby, and I will honor that. This should be yours.”
Ruby wanted to say more, protest more, but… she just couldn’t. She was just so tired of… not everything, but close to everything. She didn’t want to talk anymore right now. So made herself accept Weiss’s generosity, and why was accepting generosity so exhausting?
Ruby leaned closer, closer, until her face was hovering so close to the blade that she probably would’ve been able to smell the metal, if she had a sense of smell. She wondered if it smelled at all like Penny.
Even after being through a war’s worth of fighting in one night, Luminous Electra was still painfully beautiful, the sight of it making Ruby remember all the best things about Penny in the worst ways.
It had been through so much, and it was still here. Still beautiful. Still something.
Ruby’s vision went blurry, but she didn’t realize she was really crying until the first tear landed delicately on Penny’s emblem and stayed there. She followed the tear down, pressing her cheek to the sword and trying to imagine what it was supposed to feel like against her skin. She tried to imagine what might’ve been supposed to feel like to press her cheek into the shining metal of Penny’s face.
She tried to imagine, if not Penny, what else could possibly fill the hole in her heart.
Trying her absolute best to be unobtrusive while asking a question which could only ever be dreadfully obtrusive, Weiss turned to Yang’s father and quietly asked, “Did you find her—her—?”
Her voice stuttered into nothingness, the last word perfectly obvious even if she couldn’t bring herself to say it. Body. Just the shape of the word in her mind was painful.
Taiyang shook his head slowly, never lifting his gaze from watching his long-lost daughter grieve someone—someone who Taiyang had known for longer than he’d known Ruby.
“The sword was all I found,” he said. He wiped aside a few strands of hair plastered to his forehead with sweat. “No other trace of her. Or anyone else.”
“Oh.” That one syllable was a horribly inadequate reply, but Weiss was at a loss for what else she could offer as verbal acknowledgement of the statement. On some level, she had known this result already. The supernova of green light from the night before, Penny’s final act—how could Weiss ever understand that as anything but a genuine explosion? In other words, something which obliterated everything in its radius, including the girl who unleashed it. In the face of Cinder’s immense strength, perhaps Penny had decided there was no other way to stop her.
All that, and the fact that Weiss was already at full capacity for grief, explained why she barely reacted to the news that there was nothing left of Penny to bury.
“The campus is unrecognizable. If we’d waited a few more hours for the search, I think her weapon would’ve been gone, too. Swallowed up by the lava flows.”
In response to that, Weiss had no syllables at all.
Yang liked tending to a fire. It was the kind of thing she could busy herself with for hours on end, keeping watch and rearranging logs and adding fresh wood and fanning the flames. It was kind of a vigil for her, to keep the flame at its brightest and boldest.
This time, she felt like she was using herself as fuel for the blaze, channeling the flames of her soul, which were meant to erupt as her Semblance, into the fireplace instead.
She had a good fire going tonight. The best in a while. Well, like what they said about flames burning bright…
She heard a sound behind her, and wondered if she could ignore it, only to then recognize the tenor of Blake’s footsteps.
“Hey,” Yang said.
“Just a heads-up, be prepared for houseguests soon. A lot of them.”
Yang let out a half-laugh. “Why would that be a bad thing? The house is gonna love that.” The Xiao Long household was always too empty. Maybe that was why the fireplace was doing so good tonight, because the cabin could finally sense a chance to be a safe haven to its fullest extent.
“When I say a lot, I mean—”
“—The entire leadership structure of the Vale Branch of the White Fang, for starters,” came a new voice from the doorway, one which Yang recognized after a second.
“Oh, hey,” she said, nodding a greeting to Ilia, who was carrying three backpacks—one on her back, one on her front, and one in her arms. “What’s going on, exactly?”
“Headquarters burned to the ground,” Blake said, taking one of the backpacks from Ilia. “I asked your dad if we could make camp here for a few days while we figure out… everything, really.”
“Oh, thank goddesses everywhere for this fire.” Ilia dropped her last two bags on the floor with a thud and crouched down in front of the fire, holding her hands close and sighing. “It’s too cold out there. I miss Menagerie.”
“Rare words.”
“I know, I know—Hey, Blake.” Ilia jumped upright, disappearing from Yang’s vision. “Actually, I need to hug you. I mean it, it’s been way, way too—”
There was a thwumpf and an oof, presumably from Blake crashing into Ilia, and a half-smile flitted over Yang’s face which only the fire could see.
“Oh, I never thought I’d be able to hug you again,” Ilia said. “I missed you, Blake. I missed you so much.”
Blake made a soft noise that might’ve been a sob, and there was a long silence. Eventually—
“I’m just glad that we’re both okay, and working together again,” Blake said. “It’s good being allies with you, Ilia.”
“And it’s good having you as a leader. Especially right now, with how everything’s falling apart.”
“Sarcasm?”
Yang heard Ilia sucking in a breath through her teeth, and that was enough to make her turn around to see how serious she was actually being, and—Ah. Ilia was dead serious and suddenly stonefaced.
“How bad is it?” Yang said. Except for what she could see from Patch, she hadn’t seen any of the city since last night, and… last night, she’d barely paid attention to anything that wasn’t saving Ruby. And then she’d been sedated.
Ilia crossed her arms, any remaining good cheer vanishing from her tone as she looked out the window in the direction of the city. They couldn’t actually see the city itself from here on the far side of Patch, but the blazing glow of too many fires reflected in the night sky was perfectly clear.
“When I say bad, I mean, the Council’s going to give the order to evacuate the city by the end of the week, Blake.”
Blake closed her eyes. Yang’s stomach twisted in on itself, and the fire behind them flickered perilously.
Ilia shrugged helplessly. “We picked up some chatter about it on our way over, and I was going to wait until we were all sitting down to tell you, but… what’s the point in waiting to deliver the bad news?”
“Which means we need to start our own evacuations now,” Blake said. “All the Faunus who don’t have an easy ride out, we’ve got to scrape together some way to get them all out of here before it’s too late—and then I don’t know where the actual leadership should relocate—” She broke off, and fixed a resolute look on Ilia. “We should call our meeting now, actually. It’s as good as a time as any.”
Ilia nodded. “I’ll find everyone. Or at least try to. This house is a fucking maze.”
She left without another word, and Yang didn’t turn back to the fire. She watched Blake rub her temples in silence for several seconds, and then she muttered, “If things are bad enough for the Council to already be thinking about making the call to evacuate…”
“It’s a war,” Yang said. It felt horribly final saying it out loud, like she’d just signed an official declaration. Even though it’d been going on for longer than any of them had been alive. This was just… a new face of it.
Blake sat down heavily on the floor, pulling her knees up towards her chest and staring into the fire. “Yang, I’d ask what have we gotten ourselves into, but… knowing everything, I don’t think there’s any way we ever don’t get ourselves into this.”
Yang could think of several ways in which that absolutely wasn’t true, mainly because she could think of several ways the fall of Vale was entirely and solely her fault. If she’d been smarter, or better, or stronger, or anything other than she was, then she wouldn’t have pushed Ruby too far, and then the tournament fight wouldn’t have turned out the way it did, and then—and then—and then Penny would still be here—
“I didn’t ask for this!” Blake burst out suddenly, breaking Yang’s thoughts just before they became too poisonous. “I just wanted to make the world a better place for my people and myself. I didn’t—I didn’t want to be caught in the center of a global cold war that’s just turned hot, but now that I know what’s happening, I have to fight. I couldn’t live with myself if I tried to pretend nothing had changed. But I—I’m scared, Yang. I’ve never been in a fight like this, and it’s a new playing field, and I don’t know if anything I do will work.”
Before Yang could reply, there was a sudden swish of fabric, like somebody slipping against the carpet, and her head whipped toward the sound, only to find her sister.
“Hey,” Ruby said, slinking out of the doorway where she’d been lurking for how long?
“How are you doing?” Yang said, before cringing at herself for asking such a meaningless question, of course Ruby wouldn’t want to answer that five hundred times a day—
“Weird,” Ruby said. She sat down beside Yang, and after a few seconds, she leaned into Yang’s side.
As soon as she made contact, Yang had to resist the brief twinge of panic where her mind screamed don’t let her touch you DON’T don’t let her get hurt by you any more than she already has, you’re cursed, and in turn she found herself squeezing Blake’s hand too hard and silently repeating over and over in her mind that it wasn’t true, that wasn’t how any of it worked, she wasn’t cursed—
“There’s a lot of people showing up,” Ruby said. “Students. White Fang. A lot of people finding people they didn’t know were dead or alive. A lot of people finding out someone they care about is still alive.” She took a deep breath, and her entire body clenched. “Um. Is it bad that I’m… jealous of them?” She stumbled into her next words in a frantic rush. “I mean, I don’t want them to get bad news! I don’t want bad things to happen! I just—I just—”
She shifted her position, and fell into Yang’s lap, her eye staring up at the ceiling while tears leaked from it. Yang told herself, don’t focus on the scar tissue, focus on anything else, and ended up focusing on Ruby’s hair.
Yang tried to thread her fingers through it, just like how she’d seen Penny do it to Ruby sometimes, but she couldn’t even manage that comfort, because Ruby’s now-chin-length hair was more tangled than anything Yang had ever seen in her life. In her hands, it felt less like hair, and more like… mesh.
“Things like Ilia getting to hug Blake again, or Nora finding Neon after thinking she was dead all day, or those two girls whose names I don’t even know who were celebrating being reunited by making out in the bathroom upstairs—I—I look at them all, and all I can think about is, why don’t I get to find Penny alive and safe and happy? Why do they get the happy ending, and not me?”
“I know I can’t change it, I know I can’t undo it, I just… I can’t stop thinking, why can’t I get that, too?” Now Ruby looked at Yang, her eyes pleading. “You—you know how it feels, right? Because you lost two moms, how did you… deal with it?”
Yang’s answer would be a terrible one. Because she’d dealt with it by not dealing with it, and then by going trekking through the woods looking for certain lost family members until she lost an arm for her trouble, and then she’d dealt with it by being extremely mentally ill. And then somewhere along the way after that, things had gotten better, except she had no idea how, and maybe it had been a mirage, because everything was worse again.
She was saved from having to answer by Qrow and Taiyang entering the room. Exactly who she needed, actually.
“Hey, Dad, Uncle Qrow?”
Qrow was the one who replied, throwing them a curious look that lingered on Ruby. “Yeah?”
“What…” The next words stuck in Yang’s mouth and did their best to stay there, but she forced it out with a hard breath. “How did you keep going when Mom died?”
Ruby looked to Qrow as soon as the question was in the air, her eye wide and searching, practically hanging on whatever answer he could give.
Maybe Yang knew on some level that the answer was keep moving forward, but… that didn’t feel helpful in the slightest right now. It was like telling someone crushed under a boulder to keep moving forward.
“Honestly?” Qrow took a drink from his flask. “I spent the next few months in a state of being permanently blackout drunk because that was the only thing that made life bearable.”
At the disappointed, disbelieving, and disgusted looks he received in response, he sighed. “Hey, I didn’t say my answer would be good—”
“I’m going to sleep,” Ruby said abruptly, before vanishing.
It took Yang several terrified seconds to realize Ruby had activated her Semblance. And it took her that long, because something about Ruby’s Semblance had changed again.
It was almost the same as before. Ruby still dissolved into a mass of tiny particles which rushed away at high speed—Yang could feel the wind on her face and fluttering in her hair. It was just, it was just, once Ruby activated her Semblance, there was nothing.
No silver dust. No rose petals. No trail of anything. Just Ruby dissolving into nothing but the wind which rushed by, before she reappeared at the top of the stairs a blink of an eye later, materializing out of nothing. She didn’t look back at them.
Yang waited until Ruby was out of sight to turn to Qrow and say, “Yo, can you pass me a drink?”
“Yang—” Dad started to say, but Qrow was already tossing the flask to her.
“Thanks.” Yang caught it with one hand, unscrewed the cap, and dumped the contents into the fireplace, making the flames flare righteously.
“Hey—”
“Uncle Qrow, I love you, but everything about you which I’m used to is just making Ruby feel worse in every possible way. Could you try to stick to that promise you made her in our dorm room, about being a better version of yourself? Or did you drink it out of your memory already—”
Qrow stared into the fire, and sighed.
“I don’t know,” he said finally. “I just don’t know if I can anymore, kid.”
As it turned out, it was the last thing to be said in that room for the night.
Ruby’s eyepatch was still in her pocket. She still hadn’t worked up the courage to put it on.
Ugh.
The ugh didn’t have anything to do with the eyepatch. It was more about—about that whole conversation she’d just had. She wasn’t mad. She was just a little annoyed. Maybe more than a little annoyed. But not a lot annoyed. She hadn’t been expecting any good answers! Because if anyone had good answers to how do I live with all this? then they would’ve told her already!
So, yeah, she would just figure it out herself. Somehow. Just like the Girl Who Turned to Stone. That witch hadn’t had anyone to help her out, and she’d figured out how to keep living by herself.
I wish I could turn to stone.
The irony of wishing for that after what she’d done to herself with her silver eyes was so sharp, it could’ve been the weapon that took away one of Ruby’s eyes.
There wasn’t enough irony in the world to stop her from wishing for it, of course. It was just… ironic. Like a lot of other things about her life.
That strange book of fairytales was still on her bed where she’d left it, open to the same page after The Girl In The Tower where she’d stopped reading at. She’d half-expected it to disappear while she was gone, now that she’d read it, but nope. Still there.
Ruby went to move it off the bed, only to pause with her hands hovering over the page, rereading the words that someone had written in there.
Quite an inspiring tale, wouldn’t you say?
“Yeah. Inspiring to everyone except me,” Ruby muttered. “I’m more like if the girl escaped the tower by jumping out and breaking her neck.”
She picked up the book, and was just about to slam it shut when something on the page made her freeze.
Movement. On the paper. In the paper? Letters forming. Ink appearing from nowhere. An invisible hand writing out words in that same perfect cursive beneath the first handwritten sentence, forming another sentence. This one wasn’t a question, but—
On the contrary, I can plainly see that you stand at the precipice of your tower yet, no longer afraid of the long fall beneath you, because you have finally discovered how to fly.
Ruby blinked once, twice, three times, and the writing didn’t change. She reached down and rubbed a finger against the newly formed letters. The ink was perfectly dry, like it’d been printed into the book long ago. The same exact shade of black ink as the first, and these words were still addressing her.
…Answering exactly what she’d just said out loud.
Of all the things Ruby could say to a magical book, she went with an answer which felt like the least important and the most important at the same time.
“Penny was the one who could fly,” she said. “Not me.” No matter how much she wished she could too, she just… couldn’t.
Then more letters took shape, not all at once, but rather as being traced by a pen. It was fascinating to watch, and Ruby’s mind was lighting up with a thousand more questions, her mind suddenly thrumming with more curiosity than she’d ever thought she would have again.
Anything is possible, especially for someone as brave as you. You can still escape into a beautiful future. To quote an excellent piece of advice that one of your friends told you recently—it’s not too late.
Ruby swallowed. And, any possibility that this was somehow only a fancy trick was going up in smoke. The book had just repeated exactly what’d finally broken Ruby-Hound-Monster out of her self-destructive rampage.
The place you find yourself, as hopeless as it may feel, is very familiar to me. I understand how you’re feeling. I went through the same pain and confusion. And I promise you, it is possible to find your way. Just as I did, long ago.
The room wobbled around Ruby. She sat back down, any thoughts of putting the book aside entirely forgotten. She couldn’t believe… was she really ready to believe that someone could actually have real answers for her, for everything that felt hopeless?
“How do you know?” Ruby said to the book. “You’re just a story. What do you really know about girls in towers, besides what’s already written in you?”
Was that a breeze through the open window making the pages flutter slightly, or… had the storybook just done its equivalent of a quiet laugh? And then—
I am much more than the story, little one. Once upon a time, I was the girl in the tower, about whom this age-old fairytale was written.
Ruby gasped, and dropped the book.
But dropping it didn’t really matter, since she was back on her bed. It simply thudded into the mattress and laid there serenely, still open to the page which held more words taking shape.
Our towers may be different, our captors answering to different names, even our means of escape different, but I promise that you are like me.
By now, the writing had reached the end of the page. Ruby fumbled with the paper, flipping an extra page in her hurry, making her wince—she was afraid to lose contact, she couldn’t mess up now—but the words were still there, still streaming into existence.
The same indomitable spirit resides in both of us.
“I—I’m not.” The words on the page thumped against Ruby’s tired brain, so bold they had to be incorrect. Right? “I’m not indomitable. I’m just… nothing.” Maybe even less than nothing. Waking up, she’d felt negative. Like her soul had disappeared along with her eye. “Nothing.”
I can show you how to be far more.
Ruby pulled away from the book. Soldier’s instincts which still clung stubbornly to her were reminding her very insistently that under no circumstances should she ever trust strange messages from a mysterious device, or artifact, or whatever. But everything that wasn’t a soldier was feeling… something that Ruby didn’t dare to call hope.
Magic. Why not keep reading for a little more, and see where this fairytale led?
“Who are you?” Ruby said finally. “The Girl In The Tower never gave her a name in any version of her story. So what should I call you?”
There was a moment’s pause. Then, more slowly than anything else written, a name appeared.
Salem.
Notes:
I'm still planning to do weekly updates on Fridays, btw. I just got this chapter finished and then thought to myself "I can't wait five days to post this lmao" so, hope you enjoyed the unscheduled update!
Chapter 74: The Shape Of A Girl
Notes:
I am still trying to get back to doing weekly updates, I promise. Life is good, just real busy.
Content warning for this chapter (click this text to reveal):
Grief, mourning, depression, dysphoria (of a certain kind)
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Salem.
Salem.
Ruby laid on the bed with her arms stretched out, half-sunken into the blankets she couldn’t fall asleep in as she stared up at the ceiling and its skeleton of timber beams that looked like they could stand for millennia.
Salem.
Salem.
It had been four hours since processing those five letters, and Ruby hadn’t gotten a single second of sleep. The book was still lying on the floor in the spot where she threw it after slamming it shut. After that, it hadn’t done anything else that an evil magical book might’ve been able to do, like bursting into flames or turning into a rampaging Grimm or siphoning away Ruby’s life force. But it could hear Ruby. Salem could hear Ruby. Maybe she could hear things even with the book closed, which meant maybe she was listening right now.
What did she want?
Well, actually, that was probably a pretty easy question to answer.
Ruby pulled her knees up to her chest, hugging herself as tightly as she could. Something about her time as Ruby-Hound-Monster, as short as it was, was knocking loose memories that were older than anything else she could think of. She was remembering the time before Atlas had found her. When she’d been trapped in a strange dead man’s laboratory, the first time she’d been a Hound.
If she closed her eyes and thought really, really hard, she could remember a dark, reddened haze over everything just like the haze over Ruby-Hound-Monster’s eyes, and through that haze she remembered a pale white presence—that was Salem, wasn’t it? She couldn’t remember details but it felt like Salem in her memory even if she had no idea what Salem looked like—leaning down to look at her from what felt like a great height. Ruby remembered something weighing her down all over, making it so that she couldn’t move even as something else did the moving for her. That wasn’t at all how Ruby-Hound-Monster the night before had moved—Ruby’s mind had been a frantic roar of everything, all of her self-destruction and self-hatred magnified in a million ways by the Grimm, but… everything she’d done had been her decision, just a decision-making process that was sped up too fast for her to stop and think most of the time. In the old, old memory, though… Ruby wasn’t doing anything. Something else was moving around her.
There was more of the memory. Ruby remembered Salem reaching out with an inquisitive hand, a look on her face that was more curious than anything else. She remembered Salem’s hand on her head, the side of her head, and she could feel it except that she remembered instinctively feeling a shape that felt more like a wolf’s head than a human’s.
She remembered Salem’s hand at her head feeling desperately important, the most important thing in existence, and she remembered craving more of it with everything in her being. She remembered the Hound greedily leaning into the touch.
She wondered if any part of this memory was really hers, or if it was just something else imprinting itself onto her. That was her whole entire life, wasn’t it? Other people and other things imprinting themselves onto her while all she ever could be was a bunch of blankness letting them do that.
“Your story isn’t over. It is just beginning.”
Ruby shivered again, harder. Her hands gathered up the sheets and clenched them with fists as tight as she could, while Penny’s dying words echoed in her mind, louder than anything in the universe. Ruby wanted to believe Penny. She wanted to believe she could write her own story. She wanted to, she had to do it, for Penny, no matter how much it hurt, because Penny would’ve wanted her to keep going even with so much poison in her thoughts…
But how? How was she supposed to keep going, how was she supposed to figure any of this out, how was she supposed to hurt less, how was she supposed to live after she’d found out she was already dead?
Almost unbidden, the words Salem had written into the book flashed through Ruby’s memory again.
“You can still escape into a beautiful future. I promise you, it is possible to find your way.”
Ruby knew it was Salem, Ruby knew Salem was evil, Ruby knew she shouldn’t trust her, but… why did what Salem was saying sound so much like something Penny would say…?
She raised her head just enough to see the book again. She didn’t understand. If Salem wanted her to be a Hound again, then—if she could sneak this book into the house, then why not just sneak in and steal Ruby away again without bothering with this fairytale stuff? Wouldn’t that be easier? What was the point of all this? And if Salem just wanted to eavesdrop on people, then why tell Ruby she was listening? That ruined the whole plan. So that couldn’t be her plan either—
“What do you want?” Ruby said to the book.
Several seconds later, she realized how ridiculous it was to ask it that way. She hopped out of bed and padded over to the book. When it was in her hands again, she kept going. “Do you just want me to be a—a Hound again?”
Ruby stumbled over Hound tentatively, as if it might be some trigger word which might make her abruptly turn back into whatever beast Salem had crafted out of her, but nothing happened. Just an echo in her memory of that word, said by Salem and Cinder and by another voice which felt oily and slick and not at all like the other two voices that’d said it.
When she opened the book to page with the name Salem written into it, there was a reply waiting for her.
Do you want to be a Hound?
Ruby stared at the page. The question seemed impossibly alien, and she couldn’t suppress a shiver.
“I don’t want anything,” she said. “I just—”
That wasn’t true. There was one thing she wanted.
Penny…
Ruby didn’t want anything except Penny. Who she would never see again.
Ruby’s vision grew blurry and her face grew tight, but she wouldn’t let herself burst into the loudest sobs of her life in earshot of the Grimm Queen. She clenched her jaw until the blurriness cleared and she could speak.
“I just want to be something,” she said finally. “It’s what Penny wanted.” She almost didn’t care what she was, she just wanted to be something—anything! And maybe that would make life bearable, make every future day hurt less than today did! “If I’m nothing, then I’m failing her.”
And what would you believe, if I told you I could help you be so much more than nothing?
“You’re…” Ruby took a step back, remembered she was still holding the book, and then she dropped it again. It made a terrific thump that had a chance of waking people, or even bringing someone to investigate, but Ruby didn’t care about that as she stumbled back onto the bed and let herself collapse as the world fell into a painfully sharp focus.
“You want me to join you,” Ruby said to the enemy listening.
The next morning
A terrible possibility was percolating in Weiss’s mind. It had begun not long after Yang’s father returned without Penny’s body, and over the night the possibility had grown and grown until she could not ignore it anymore. She had to put a voice to it, because if she was correct…
The remnants of Team Battleship laid together on Yang’s bed in a rough triangle, staring up at the ceiling. They were perfectly aware they probably didn’t have the mental bandwidth to make sense of the world that day, but they were all trying anyways because they had to. Ruby was absent, still asleep in the bedroom which she’d been given entirely to herself even as the rest of the house filled up with refugees from Vale.
Weiss took a deep breath and spoke without moving her gaze from the ceiling. “About Penny.”
She felt Blake and Yang tense up on either side of her.
“Because of the fact that her—her body couldn’t be found I… I can’t stop myself from wondering about something.” In a way, she felt despicable for what she was about to suggest, but… “What if there’s a reason why she can’t be found? What if that reason is, could Atlas have taken her body?”
A dead silence ensued.
“…That’s horrifyingly plausible,” Blake said.
The image of Luminous Electra, battered and abandoned, refused to leave Weiss’s mind. Penny’s power symbol emblem loomed almost hypnotically within her thoughts, reminding her endlessly of the glow which should’ve been present but wasn’t. If someone had stolen Penny’s body, they had not bothered to take her weapon alongside her. That choice—which could only be intentional, stank of a certain Atlesian coldness that Weiss had grown up immersed in.
Yang bolted upright, her eyes wide and fixed on a point in the distance. “And if they took her, that means—”
“—They want their project back.”
All three girls startled at Ruby’s voice, including Blake, who once again hadn’t heard her approach even with her magnified hearing. By now, those silent approaches were unnerving Weiss.
Ruby was standing in the hallway, but as she continued, she stepped inside, closing the door behind her. “It’s exactly what Atlas would do. The world’s falling apart, that kingdom could come under invasion any day, so of course they just… take what’s left of Penny, just so they can have one of their special weapons projects in their arsenal again, to make themselves feel less threatened.”
She hissed the word project like it was the dirtiest thing she’d ever let pass her lips, and seated herself on the floor with her back against the bedframe, facing away from Weiss and Blake and Yang.
“They’re going to try remaking her,” Ruby said.
There was a saturated pause.
“Penny was her own person.” Blake was the one who broke the silence of horrified realization, crumpling folds of the blanket in both hands like it was vital to her survival. “She wasn’t an appliance that could just be reproduced on an assembly line. She was unique. She had a heart and a soul, and that can’t be duplicated. Atlas might make a million other synthetic people with their own hearts and souls, but they can’t make Penny again. That was the beauty of her.” By the end, she was fighting to get words out through tears which were doing their best to stifle her breath.
Yang raised her prosthetic arm, turning it back and forth. “Penny was one of a kind. If I lost my arm tomorrow and had to find another one, even if it was the same model and shape and colors, it wouldn’t be the same arm. Maybe I could make it a new part of me, but it still wouldn’t be the same as before. I don’t think it’d be any different for whatever Atlas tries doing to Penny.”
Wordlessly, Weiss watched Ruby, trying to gauge how she might be reacting to this. There was little she could see of Ruby’s face from this angle, only the tension in her shoulders and the way her entire upper body was pressed flat against the bed now.
“What about her memories?” Ruby said. “If they have her body, that means they have her memory banks. And her memories, they exist in physical storage. If someone got electricity to those memory banks again, got everything up and running… then what? Then what do we call the synthetic person who would be in there now, who knows nothing except those memories, Penny’s memories?”
“Ruby—”
Ruby ignored Yang, her voice quickening as worry bled in. “Would it be like restarting someone’s heart after they died? Or would it be like… like… like making another synthetic person entirely who wakes up in Penny’s body, only knowing Penny’s memories and life and name and thoughts and feelings and tendencies but unable to tell if they should be hers or if they should be someone else’s? What do we do if that happens? What if that girl doesn’t know if she wants those memories? What if that girl doesn’t know if she wants to be Penny or not? How do we help her if she feels like she knows us and doesn’t know us at the same time, what if she wants to be Penny but is afraid we won’t think she’s really Penny, what if—”
Her voice gave out abruptly, and she doubled over, coughing and gasping, while Weiss reached for Ruby’s shoulder. “Ruby, breathe, please—”
“What do we do?!” Ruby shrieked, finally whipping around to face her teammates, her eye blazing with tears. “I know Atlas! I know they’d try something like this, and I know they wouldn’t help Penny or whoever wakes up in Penny’s body at all, and I know I already failed her, but how am I supposed to live with knowing there’s a tiny chance she might—might—”
Ruby gave one hopeless shake of her head and went silent, looking from Weiss to Blake to Yang, her gaze pleading with them to give her an answer.
Yang pulled herself upright just a little bit, meeting Ruby with tired eyes before jerking her gaze off-center with a small but sharp movement, as if she was afraid to actually look directly at Ruby. And that movement made Weiss frown internally, because knowing Yang, that might very well be the truth about her.
“If something like that does happen, I think the answer’s simple,” Yang said. “If that girl wants to be Penny, then she is Penny. If that girl doesn’t want to be Penny, then she isn’t Penny.”
“And if she isn’t sure what she wants, then I’d be happy to help her figure it out,” Blake said. “And if, after taking some time to figure it out, if her answer was yes, then I’d accept her as my teammate and my friend again without blinking.”
Weiss nodded. “As would I.”
“Yeah…” Ruby was quivering in the manner of something in danger of exploding, but she kept her voice quiet as her gaze sank. “I just… I keep thinking about it. It feels… it kind of feels good. I know it shouldn’t, I know I shouldn’t be thinking about it, but…”
Yang flopped back down, and rolled all the way over until she was facing the wall instead of her teammates. “We can’t let ourselves think about it, unless it actually happens.”
Ruby’s voice was barely a whisper now. “Can you tell me why?”
“It would ruin us,” Yang said. “It would drain the life out of us, if we devoted ourselves to hoping there was some chance she could come back to life, and then that hope turned out to be false. We can’t spend years not knowing if we should grieve her or hold onto hope for her return. We can’t hang onto a lifeline which might turn out to be the opposite of a lifeline. It might just be pulling us into something deeper and more suffocating and worse, and…” Yang shook her head. “Of course I don’t want Penny to be dead! But I can’t go through life tearing myself apart wondering if I should be grieving or hoping for a girl who I want back more than anything!”
Weiss tried to send a discreet look Ruby’s way, to check on her reaction to that statement. Unfortunately, Blake had the same idea, and while one person checking Ruby’s reaction might’ve been discreet enough to be unnoticed, the same could not be said when it was two. Ruby blinked at them, and then her expression lapsed back into tiredness.
“What if. Maybe I want to suffocate on hope, even if it’s not real?” Ruby said.
The question made Weiss feel as if her heart was being pressed under a vise. A vise stronger than Penny’s grip. She couldn’t answer Ruby, suddenly trying to grapple with the idea of a hope so powerful and so consuming that it was too much, a hope that would suck everything out of her and leave nothing behind, just a walking collection of unanswerable longing in the shape of a girl—and then, if that hope were to dissolve, or disappear, or weaken… What would be left of herself? Would there be anything left?
“I spent years hoping Raven would come back,” Yang went on. “I searched for hidden signs and empty clues, and tried to decipher words and actions that weren’t there, and I hoped that if I just cracked the secret code then everything would be alright and I would be enough for Raven again. I hoped with everything I had left in my body that I could figure out a way to get her back, and I gave myself over to that hope until I had nothing left of myself. I turned into a gaping hole of a soul, because I hoped it would be filled by something else.”
Ruby didn’t answer.
Yang’s words triggered a different tide of memories in Weiss which came from an older time, before she’d met anyone in this room. “I did something similar, once,” Weiss said. “I poisoned myself with the hope that I could make my family what it was supposed to be. And when I finally came to the understanding that my family would be broken for the rest of my life, I was fourteen, and I have no memories whatsoever of the following three months. I felt as if I’d turned myself into… nothing.”
“Sounds familiar,” Blake said. “I used to think I’d poured all of myself into hoping I could make Adam into a better person. I didn’t think I could ever hope again. For all the pain that leaving him and the Fang brought… it was a relief to finally know that part was over.” She changed her position, shaking out an arm that’d been awkwardly positioned underneath her. “Closure. We need closure.”
Yang raised her prosthetic arm up and twisted it from one side to the other, slowly wiggling the fingers as the yellow paint caught the sunlight in just the right way to make it glow like it was about to ignite. “I’ve always needed closure. Not just for Penny. I’ve needed closure all my life, for so many different things. I lost my arm because I didn’t understand closure. I couldn’t stop hoping Raven or Summer would come back, no matter how much it looked and felt like I’d never see her again. I couldn’t stop wondering if she might somehow return, because it felt like there was still a chance, even if it was just a tiny one that didn’t make any sense and I shouldn’t have believed in it and I feel stupid for how much I wanted to believe it sometimes and—”
Yang stopped herself and let out a harsh little laugh, the harshness directed at herself. “This is, I think, the only thing that Penny and Raven will ever have in common. Two members of my family who aren’t here with me because I wasn’t enough. Because everything I try to hold too close—”
She cut herself off, but Weiss knew what had been on Yang’s tongue. More self-recrimination which was beyond unfair.
“Yang—”
“I need to grieve Penny,” Yang burst out. “Even if she gets remade later and the remade girl still wants to be the same girl she was before, I need to grieve Penny right now, I need to grieve her for this moment, because I can’t waste my life hoping for one more miracle. I’ve hoped for too many of those already. It would be too much. I… I can’t take any more of it. I just can’t.”
Even with Yang facing away, Weiss was at just the right angle to see her face reflected in one of the bedroom windows. Which was what allowed her to see the flash of red which passed through Yang’s irises before she squeezed her eyes shut.
“How do I stop it?” Ruby said. “How do I stop wanting her here again? How do I stop hurting like the only thing that’ll fix it is seeing her again?”
Of the three girls present with Ruby, Weiss was not confident any of them could provide the right answer, not when the three of them were facing different degrees of the same question.
“I need the world to stop,” Ruby said. “I need everything to stop happening so I can—so I can learn how to keep moving forward, for Penny. Why didn’t the world stop for Penny? Why is everything still happening?”
“Oop, sorry, didn’t mean to get in your way—”
The Atlesian exchange student’s voice broke off as she realized who she’d just bumped into, and she stared at Ruby for several moments, blinking rapidly and doing a bad job of hiding her shock.
Ruby vaguely recognized this girl. She was one of the people in Ruby’s year, who Ruby had tangentially existed in the same space with during her several months building a cover story before traveling to Vale for the the Vytal Festival.
They’d never talked directly, of course—Ruby had never talked to any of the other students in Atlas Academy directly unless absolutely necessary—but the other girl was probably thinking about all the times they might’ve passed each other in the hall, not knowing she was five feet away from a girl who’d been twisted unthinkably into a weapon—
“It’s okay,” Ruby said, because the girl was kind of standing in her way and she just wanted to get this over with. “I won’t bite.”
Except the word bite made her remember what she’d done to Winter, which made her remember what she’d done to Penny, what she’d done to everyone—
The Atlesian student squeaked and hurried past Ruby, disappearing into a room down the hallway. Yang’s house was getting more and more packed with students and refugees and students who were refugees, and somehow Ruby had never felt more alone.
She slipped back into her bedroom, closing the door as quietly as she could.
Yang, Blake, and Weiss were going into the city—to see a memorial Team JNPR had built for Penny. They’d asked Ruby if she wanted to come. Ruby had said no, because she couldn’t bear the thought of everyone in the city seeing her, seeing the girl who had once been Argentum and Moonrise and, the girl who was just wrong, and she couldn’t stand the thought of just—all those eyes on her, and no one else but her.
Would the rest of the world ever see Ruby for what she was now, which was just a girl with so many things wrong with her? Probably not. She would be forever remembered for what she’d used to be. A girl frozen in time against her will. Like she’d been turned to stone.
The only memorial for Penny she needed was right here in the room. Luminous Electra’s unlit emblem stared at Ruby as she entered and went right to the bookshelf.
It was where Ruby had left Salem’s book of fairytales, sitting with perfect innocence amidst the other books. She picked it up once more, sat down against the wall beside Luminous Electra, and shifted her weight so her head was resting against Penny’s sword.
“Did you feel like nothing, too?” Ruby said to a new page. “When you were trapped in the tower?” The rest of the book was more fairytales, and so her conversation with Salem took place in the margins, meandering between paragraphs and lingering in the larger blank spaces surrounding the beginnings and endings of other stories.
‘Nothing’ does not even begin to describe it. I did not feel like a person. I felt like an object belonging to someone else, to be used for their whims. I felt as if every moment of my future had already been decided for me, from my first breath to my last. And yet, amidst such powerlessness, it was also a terrible burden which trapped me, a burden that I never asked for.
Fervently following the words, Ruby couldn’t hold back a soft gasp as familiarity resonated through her. It felt…
Our pain is very, very familiar to each other.
Unconsciously, Ruby pressed herself harder into Luminous Electra. Salem’s words felt good. It felt good to hear someone describe just how Ruby felt but in different words, someone else’s words. It… it made her feel like something besides nothing, to know there was someone else. It felt almost like—almost like—the day she and Penny had told each other the truth about themselves.
Ruby had never forgotten the thrill of that day, that hour, that beautiful moment alone together when she’d asked Penny, are you like me? and received an answer of yes.
(And then later it wasn’t yes, because Ruby Karyatis was a lie all along, and there was nothing about her that was like Penny, because Penny was so much better and Ruby was just a broken girl that’d grown up in the wrong place and realized too late that everything about her was wrong—)
Ruby turned back to an earlier page, finding something Salem wrote earlier: You are like me.
If that was true… If Salem was right… then Ruby really wasn’t nothing, because there was someone else like her…
“How did you feel like something again?” she said. “How did you stop hurting? How do I do that, too?”
There was the slightest of pauses before a reply came.
I let myself be angry.
The words shivered on the page—whether because of the power behind them, or because of Ruby’s grip briefly faltering, she couldn’t say.
I let myself be angry at the world that had done this to me. I let myself be angry at the prison I was still trapped in. Anger gave me purpose. It gave me determination. It gave me what I’d needed for so long.
Ruby remembered being angry at Atlas and at everything, the day that it’d all gone wrong. She remembered being so angry she couldn’t breathe. She remembered being angry yesterday morning, when she’d hurled the Atlesian uniform out the window and when she’d crushed her gravestone-not-gravestone to unrecognizable bits. She remembered being angry today, when she’d realized what exactly Atlas might do if they’d gotten their hands on Penny’s body.
So much has been done to you. Let yourself be angry, little one. Just as I have.
But even after all that, anger still felt like a distant cloud on the horizon, falling away from Ruby’s vision without realizing it. She couldn’t summon anger like a weapon the way Salem was talking about it. If there was a valve in her head which controlled the release of anger, it was rusty and unreliable and only seemed to move when she didn’t want it to move.
…Besides, when had her anger ever helped her? It’d only contributed to things going wrong, so wrong—anger just felt like a recipe for more bad things happening, as if Ruby hadn’t hurt enough people already! And maybe Salem was more than okay with bad things happening, but Ruby sure wasn’t!
“That doesn’t help me,” Ruby snapped. “I don’t want to hurt anyone else. I just want to stop hurting. Maybe you stopped hurting because you started destroying the world, but that doesn’t work for me because I’m actually a person and I care about things!” Oh, she suddenly felt so stupid. She’d gotten her hopes up about the Queen Of The Grimm, the avatar of all destruction and despair, would have helpful advice about how to stop feeling pain. Salem probably felt pain when happy things happened, like if she saw people kissing or someone laughed near her or—
You think that is what I want you to do with your anger?
Ruby wished she could do a verbal equivalent of a blink just so Salem could see how mockingly Ruby was blinking at the page right now. “Well, yeah, you want me to be angry, and you want me to join you, and you want to destroy the world—”
More of Salem’s words appeared mid-sentence. Could that be called an interruption? Did it count as interrupting when Ruby could still finish her sentence unbothered?
Is that what you were told? That I simply want to destroy the world, and nothing more?
The first sentence ran right to the end of that page’s margins, and then the page slowly turned by itself, the paper rustling in a way that sounded like a long, faint sigh before the second sentence appeared.
“Huh?” Ruby somehow felt like she’d disappointed the Queen of the Grimm. Even while knowing full well that Beacon was gone and Vale was burning and Penny was dead and it was all because of Salem, and yet. And yet.
How little he thinks of me, that he offers such a banal explanation for my motives. And how little he must think of his subordinates, if he expects them to accept that without question. Can he even answer to what his own motivations have been twisted into?
“He? Who’s he? Do you—you don’t mean General Ironwood, right?”
There is so little that you or or your friends know of the truth, child.
“Why should I believe you?”
You already know that you were lied to about so much else in your life, for so long. You were lied to about your ability to destroy me.
Ruby instinctively hissed at the memories of Ruby-Hound-Monster rearing their head in her memory again, the words that Ironwood had said gravely to Ruby-Hound-Monster which Ruby still didn’t know what to do with. That memory felt like something that could work loose the valve of rage in her mind, remembering that her whole life everything wrong with it all she’d lost was all for nothing. Nothing.
That ability of your eyes was the foundation of everything which was done to you by Atlas, everything which turned you from a girl named Ruby Rose into a soldier called Project Moonrise. Your entire life was built upon a great and terrible lie. If that is so, then what else can you accept as a lie, Ruby Karyatis Rose?
Seeing the name Ruby Rose sent a bolt of shame through Ruby’s head, like she’d done something wrong. And she was doing something wrong. She didn’t deserve the Rose after the Ruby. Did she even deserve Karyatis, either, when she would probably never see Fria again and was so much worse than the kind, caring woman who had watched over Ruby for years and tried to do right by her?
She stared at the page while a cannonball’s worth of aching tried to fly out of her chest. Really, Ruby herself was a lie. A living, breathing lie. Who had thought for the longest time that she was the truest thing in the world. Maybe it wasn’t so difficult to believe there could be another lie this big, or a lot of lies this big.
“What do you really want?” she said, the words feeling so strange on her mouth. She was asking a Grimm what it wanted, when the answer should’ve been perfectly obvious. But once upon a time, other things had seemed perfectly obvious, like Project Moonrise being born to save the world.
Even though it’d taken the better part of a minute to arrive at the question, Salem’s answer came swiftly.
You may have gathered by now that when I talk of my anger, I am speaking not only of the tower from the fairytale. I am referring to another tower entirely, one which you will not find mentioned in any storybook. This world—all of it—is a prison. We are all captives, every single one of us subject to the whims of forces which you have barely begun to comprehend. I am not the only immortal being that walks Remnant. I have an enemy as old as I am.
The words pounded through Ruby’s head, and she could hardly breathe.
My enemy created every aspect of the kingdoms as his project, for the sole purpose of maintaining deference to the jailors who carelessly treat our world and its inhabitants as their property. And no kingdom is more focused upon this purpose than Atlas, the kingdom that broke you by trying to build you up into something you could never be. Atlas intended you to be a weapon of this man.
Ruby’s hands were shaking. “Who?”
I know him by another name, but you know him as Ozpin.
“How?” She hadn’t realized she was leaning closer and closer to the book until the surprise of the name made her jerk back upright. She almost knocked Luminous Electra over as she collected her scrambled thoughts, putting them into a line which she hoped made sense. “He was nice! He isn’t trying to hold us prisoner, he’s just—” Ruby shook her head violently, as something else occurred to her, something that didn’t add up with what Salem was saying at all. “He was nice to Penny! He gave Penny a home when she ran away from Atlas, and he knew she was from Atlas and he didn’t try to take her back to Atlas! He wasn’t trying to hurt her!”
But what did Ozpin do instead of forcing Penny to return to Atlas? He gave her the gift of shelter in his own academy, where he hand-picks his own subordinates who will help him impose his will upon the world. And she believed she’d found freedom, offering no resistance which she doubtlessly would’ve if he forced her back to Atlas. Perhaps he even genuinely convinced himself he had no desire to make her one of his weapons, even as it became clear that was exactly what would happen. That is the hypocrisy of Ozpin. He claims to be the one who is doing what’s right, and yet he tolerates so much suffering while claiming there is nothing which can be done about it. He tolerated Atlas, because it was useful to him, and so he tolerated what was done to you.
“I…” There were too many questions buzzing in Ruby’s mind, too many directions she could take her response, all of them pressing—why should she believe any of that, where was the proof, how did Salem know Ozpin in the first place, were there any other immortals—
“But you cause suffering, too,” Ruby said. It felt like what Penny would’ve said first, and that made it the best choice.
I do, and I don’t deny that I do. One of many things which sets me apart from Ozpin—I can be honest about the suffering I am responsible for.
Ruby turned, finding her reflection in Luminous Electra. The scratches and heat damage and tarnishing all along the blade made the image of herself there too blurry to make out finer details. All she could see was the shape of a girl.
“You still haven’t said what you want,” she said finally. When she looked back to the book:
That is something which I will only answer face-to-face.
Even in such a short time, working with limited materials, Team JNPR had done a beautiful job with Penny’s memorial, and by the time Weiss, Blake, and Yang had collected themselves enough to visit it in the city, it was finished. As finished as it could ever be while the city was under an increasingly overwhelming onslaught.
From what had been unrecognizable metal debris, Weiss recognized the work of Pyrrha’s Semblance which had bent and reshaped metal to give shape to a magnified version of Penny’s emblem. The emblem was poised atop a chunk of concrete, and into that concrete words had been burned permanently via an electric current—Nora’s doing. As for the words themselves, it was Ren’s poetry. As for Jaune’s contribution, it was a small metal engraving of Penny herself which he’d added beside Ren’s words—and others might’ve thought it odd that Jaune just had that readily available, but Weiss, Blake, and Yang knew he kept engravings of all his teammates and friends attached to the inside of his shield, where he could see them in battle, because it gave him additional motivation to fight. And he’d gladly pried off the section with Penny to add it to the memorial.
The memorial was beautiful, and it hurt Weiss perhaps more than anything else ever had, and she wouldn’t have had it any other way.
“You ever think about all the reminders of Penny we have that’re just… gone?” Yang said eventually. “All those pictures we had on our wall. Penny’s workshop and all the little keepsakes she kept there. All the mementoes that we put in her tower because we thought there would be no better place for them.” She thought about it for a second, and then corrected herself. “We knew there’d be no better place.”
“And then…” Blake trailed off. She didn’t need to clarify the then.
They went quiet again as a thousand memories washed over them, beautiful and painful all at the same time. Memories that they barely had any physical reminders of anymore. And at some point, this reminder in front of them would be gone, too, because Vale…
A loud explosion echoed in the distance, the ground rocking almost imperceptibly underneath them. They raised their heads, listening for any further sign of trouble, but that was all for the immediate moment.
“Ruby was right when she asked why the world couldn’t stop for Penny,” Yang said, her voice low and husky with grief. “It’s not fair. I still have to worry about the kingdom, and probably the rest of the world, and the White Fang still needs our help, and Old Man Schnee isn’t going to stop trying to make Weiss’s life miserable, and I just—I need time. I need everything to stop happening for five seconds just so I can—I can—”
She faltered, but Weiss understood the sentiment perfectly. She needed time to just… let the hurt sink in, soak all the way down to her bones, replace the blood in her veins, and maybe then she would have a better idea of how to live with it. And an equally pressing injustice—
“Things never even had a chance to stop happening when she was still alive and hurting,” Weiss said. “The world didn’t give her space for her own pain when she was still experiencing it! And that’s partly my fault!”
Blake and Yang turned to her curiously; this was something Weiss hadn’t given voice to before and she wasn’t even sure if she could make sense of this to what was left of her team.
“Penny was hacked! Her body was violated! She went through an atrocity that I can barely understand! And then—and then my father gave me that ultimatum, and then suddenly I had to yank the spotlight onto myself without leaving any space for Penny, and then we went on our mission, and then Ruby used her eyes, and the dance seemed so far away by the time the tournament started! And… and…”
Weiss thought back to that night around the campfire in Mountain Glenn, when she’d barely said anything to Penny while Yang and Blake talked Penny through romantic feelings and fears. She’d buried herself in her sleeping bag and tried to tune it all out instead of helping Penny. She had been as unhelpful to Penny as possible in a moment of intense vulnerability for her. “Do you think, if I’d been there for her more after the dance, if I hadn’t been so wrapped up in my own problems… Do you think then she would’ve been less self-sacrificial? More likely to value her own life as much as she valued others’ lives?” She could barely get out words through the violent quaver in her voice. “Do you think, if I’d helped her more, would she still be alive?”
The quaver morphed into tears, and then she was falling forward and burying herself in Blake’s chest while she shook all over.
The only answer she received was the distant shriek of a Grimm. Blake and Yang didn't have anything they could answer with except embracing her as tightly as they could. And in all honesty, Weiss didn’t want answers. She wanted her partner to be alive.
Eventually though, something had to break the moment, because nothing about this day or week or even month allowed for moments to exist as long as they needed. The return to reality came via Yang making a quiet noise of warning.
“Hey, don’t be obvious about it, but I think someone’s watching us, at the corner to our right?”
Weiss didn’t have to lift her head far to catch sight of the lone figure Yang was referring to, who appeared to also be attempting to not be obvious about watching them.
“I don’t think we need to be worried,” Blake said in a discreet murmur. “I think she’s just… curious?”
“I…” She wasn’t looking them, Weiss realized. She was looking at Penny’s memorial. “I can’t shake the feeling that I’ve seen her somewhere—”
Then a memory clicked into place, but without adding any clarity to Weiss’s confusion. Why would one of the receptionists who usually worked in the CCT have any special interest in Penny?
Several years ago
The first time Holly ever saw the odd orange-haired girl was during a woefully early-in-the-morning shift which she was deeply regretting taking.
The biggest reason why she enjoyed her job as a receptionist in the Cross-Continental Transmit System tower was all the different people she got to interact with! But at this hour, she’d been the only living thing in the tower’s communications center for forty-five minutes and counting, and the sun wasn’t even up yet because it was the dead of winter. The darkness and emptiness was starting to get to her. It felt a little too much like she was the last soul on the planet.
So when the elevator dinged merrily to announce an arrival, Holly immediately perked up. She straightened her posture so she didn’t look like she’d spent most of the shift until now watching MechaChangerBots II: Bright Of The Moon on her computer—a movie she’d watched at least twelve times in her life.
The elevator doors parted to reveal a freckled girl in a plain gray dress with green highlights. She stepped out cautiously, casting curious looks around the room as if she wasn’t sure she was allowed in here.
Normally, Holly would assume this was a student, but it was the winter vacation at Beacon, so it was a curious teenager wandering around, probably. Even if this seemed like a strange time to do that. But regardless of circumstance, the girl seemed like she might need assistance, so…
“Welcome to the Cross-Continental Transmit System communications center!” Holly chirped, jumping into a script that might as well have been programmed into her by this point. “How may I help you?”
The girl jumped at her voice, apparently having not noticed Holly. Which was also odd, because Holly’s desk was the first thing people saw when entering the communications center. But all thoughts of that oddity were immediately swept from Holly’s mind by what happened next.
The orange-haired girl froze as soon as she set eyes on her, and she didn’t just freeze—she froze froze with all the immediacy of time itself stopping while her eyes went incredibly wide.
Holly blinked, and after a few seconds in which nothing else happened, she asked, “Are… you okay?”
The girl tilted her head, studying her with the intensity of a spotlight. Then, without moving any other part of her body besides her mouth, she spoke.
“Are you an artificial consciousness?”
Holly blinked again. “Pardon?”
“You are a hologram,” the girl said, moving her head to a different angle and then another. “But you are behaving in a manner which is not traditionally associated with large-language models which might be used in customer service scenarios such as this.”
And that was when Holly was reminded of one very understandable reason why someone might feel compelled to ask this.
“Oh! Right!” She looked down at the holographic form of herself which was sitting behind the reception desk. “I’m sorry for the confusion, but I’m not actually a hol—I mean, yes, this is a hologram, but it’s not actually me, sadly. It’s just a holographic model of my actual body. I’m downstairs in one of the server rooms with a full VR rig!”
The full-body holographic projector built into the reception desk (and the accompanying custom VR rig) was a fun piece of Atlesian technology in the CCT that’d been installed during the tower’s construction, with the caveat that no one who worked here had ever figured out a way to make it actually useful. At least, until Holly came along. Because when she’d first taken her job and the holographic projection system had been mentioned during her training, she’d been enthralled immediately. You mean I can do my work as a hologram? Sign me up right now! It was astounding nobody else had thought to do this before. Who wouldn’t want to?
And she’d been doing it for so long that it just… felt natural by now. At her desk, she’d look down at herself and she wouldn’t process it as a projection; she’d just process it as her own body. So on the occasion when first-time visitors to the CCT got confused about her appearance, it usually took longer than it should’ve to remember why they were confused. Such as now.
“Oh,” the girl said quietly, and Holly had never seen anyone look more crestfallen in her life.
“Are you… disappointed?” she said, struck by the feeling that she’d done something terribly wrong.
“Of course not!” the girl said, her words interrupted by a startlingly loud hiccup. “There is nothing wrong with a person being a human instead of an artificial consciousness! It is a pleasure to meet you, Miss Graham!” She waved cheerily like nothing had ever happened.
Holly’s first thought was, Okay, how did you read my nametag so fast from that far away?
Her second thought was, why do I want to say “I’m sorry” so much?
No matter how much she wanted to apologize, it didn’t seem like a good idea, though, because this girl clearly wanted to move on. So, onto more easily tread ground—
“Well, is there anything I can help you with?” she said, her voice reverting to the Friendly Neighborhood Receptionist tone that it’d briefly been knocked out of. “Oh, and you can call me Holly, by the way—I don’t know why my boss insists that we have our last names on our nametags. It’s not like this is the military or something.”
“Noted! My name is Penny, and I do not need any help, thank you! I am just exploring the premises.”
“I’ll, um, let you know if I ever meet an artificial consciousness,” Holly said, actually meaning it despite having absolutely no idea if she would encounter this girl named Penny ever again, or where she might run into an artificial consciousness.
But Penny gave her a wide, warm smile which suggested she took the reply in all the genuineness Holly meant it, which was… nice. “Thank you!” she said, before giving a cheery wave and re-entering the elevator she’d just exited.
Holly spent the rest of her shift with a faint ache in her chest.
Much time later
It was business as usual at the CCT for Holly on the day when an oddly familiar girl with white hair in a long ponytail walked up to her desk with her scroll out. “Hello, I wanted to—”
She stopped short, her eyes going very wide. Holly went from half-paying attention to the girl to closing the window she’d had open on her computer as she realized this might be a longer conversation. She had seen this kind of reaction exactly one other time.
“Welcome to the Cross-Continental Transmit System communications center! How can I help you?”
The girl continued to gape at her like a landed fish. And the sense of I’ve seen you before Holly was getting from looking at her was only getting stronger—until she realized she was looking at Weiss Schnee, and Weiss Schnee was looking back at her like Holly was the bigger deal somehow.
“You’re—you’re a hologram,” Weiss Schnee said.
Holly raised an eyebrow, and so did her hologram. That was the level of detail this technological marvel of a rig was capable of; minutely-accurate eyebrow tracking. “Yes, and I assure you that I am also a very real person.”
Schnee glanced down at her scroll, frantically tapped out something, and then turned and sprinted back into the elevator.
Holly stared at the now-closed elevator. If she had a nickel for every time a girl had taken her existence as something world-shattering, she’d have a dime.
So, did Weiss Schnee had a phobia of artificial intelligence? Or did she think this was a technology that her company needed to get its hands on? Or did she think Holly was actually stolen SDC technology? All of these outcomes seemed like they would lead to a fun conversation with her boss.
As it turned out, the reason Weiss Schnee had hightailed it out of the CCT was none of those things, because fifteen minutes later she was back with none other than Penny.
It actually hadn’t been too long since Holly last saw Penny. There’d been a few infrequent encounters at work as time had passed—quick exchanges of greetings always initiated by Penny with a bright smile along with occasional updates on advancements in technology that might someday lead to artificial consciousness. She seemed to live nearby, or at least have regular access to the CCT. Holly’s current hypothesis was that she was a professor’s daughter, because she didn’t exactly seem like Huntress material in the way most Beacon students did.
“Look!” Weiss said breathlessly, before pointing to Holly without a shred of subtlety. “There she is!”
Penny followed the path of Weiss’s finger, and recognition crossed her face when she saw Holly. She seemed highly amused by her companion’s behavior.
“Weiss,” Penny said. “That is a human.”
“Unfortunately,” Holly added.
“What?” Now officially confirmed to be Weiss Schnee, she whipped her gaze back and forth between Holly and Penny with rapidly growing bewilderment. “But you—you’re—that!” She gestured wildly.
“I’m sitting in a very fancy holographic projection chamber somewhere underneath us,” Holly said. “You know you could have just asked me when you saw me, right? You’d be far from the first to do so.”
“I already asked her this question a long time ago,” Penny added helpfully.
Weiss erupted into a flaming blush. “I thought that would be rude! I wouldn’t just go up and ask someone if they’re a Faunus, so why should it be any different for asking someone if they’re an artificial consciousness?!”
“…Actually, that is shockingly good reasoning,” Penny said.
Months later
Holly was really depending on the Vytal Tournament to buoy her spirits.
There’d been some sort of technological catastrophe in the CCT recently, and the place had been crawling with Atlesian techs for days. Techs who didn’t exactly clean up the messes they made while fixing things, who also wouldn’t say what they were doing, and had somehow managed to render Holly’s treasured holographic projection system completely inoperable. Meaning, ever since then, she’d had no choice but to work her post in her corporeal body. No bright, blinking hologram. No comfortable hum of the computers around her rig. No digital marvel. Just Holly Graham, in the flesh.
She kind of hated it.
She didn’t understand why.
This was why she didn’t mind working the desk during the tournament itself. Watching the fights was the perfect distraction from how much she missed being digital.
Even better: watching the fights with her girlfriend, who’d given up a seat in the Colosseum to tag along with Holly to work today.
“On one side, it will be Ruby Karyatis and Ciel Soleil of Atlas Academy! And on the other side… Yang Xiao Long and Penny Pallas of Beacon Academy!”
“Yes! It’s her fight!” Holly shook her girlfriend’s elbow and leaned forward, turning up the volume on her screen. She was still having a hard time believing that the cheery girl fascinated with artificial intelligence was also a Beacon student, but there’d been no mistaking the freckled face that’d appeared on the broadcast during the singles round. That discovery simplified Holly’s rooting interests. A lot.
And Penny seemed to have a real chance of winning the whole thing! That is, if she could get through her opponent, who Holly could only describe as a force of nature after seeing Ruby Karyatis’s first-round match.
She couldn’t wait to see how this fight went.
“Allow me to introduce you to Project Battle Angel.”
Until now, Holly had watched the twisted broadcast with nothing but an all-consuming horror, but now, as the camera focused on Penny Pallas’s lifeless body, something else began to churn inside her. It was a mix of awe and curiosity and grief that she had never felt before.
Awe, because she hadn’t needed to look for an artificial consciousness; she’d been talking to a synthetic girl all along, and that meant it was possible to be an artificial girl—
Curiosity, because she wanted to know how. Had Penny always been a synthetic girl, born/built that way, or had she once upon a time been just a squishy-guts girl who had a deep affinity for tech and a strange ache whenever she thought too deeply about the difference?
And grief.
Holly didn’t know if it was possible to so acutely feel the loss of someone she’d barely known. But she felt as if she’d lost a desperately important connection without ever knowing she’d had it. And she knew exactly why.
Far too late, Holly understood why Penny had been so stunned to see what seemed to be a living, thinking hologram in the CCT all those months ago. Holly finally had an explanation for the longing that she could never place, too late to talk to anyone who would understand. When Penny had seen her for the first time that morning, she hadn’t just been asking are you an artificial girl?
Penny had been asking, and hoping, are you like me?
And now, too late to tell Penny, Holly had an answer.
I wish I was like you.
Present day
Holly had managed to pick the worst possible time to visit Penny’s memorial. The first second she’d had to do something like this since the kingdom exploded, and she showed up at the same time as three girls who she was quite sure were Penny’s teammates.
She couldn’t interrupt them, not in a moment like this—especially not when she didn’t know how she could explain her reason for visiting without sounding deranged.
She chose a shadowed street corner to hover at in hopes it would keep her out of their notice until they departed. And in the time it took to wait to be alone, she settled on exactly what she’d say to Penny’s memorial. An apology.
“I’m sorry you didn’t feel safe enough to tell anyone,” she said quietly to an empty square in which the late afternoon shadows were too long for her to be out for much longer. “I’m sorry that we’ll never have a real conversation. And I’m sorry that when you asked if I was like you, I couldn’t give you the answer we both wanted.”
When Ruby woke up the next morning, the first thing to enter her mind was the eyepatch she still hadn’t put on, which was still sitting on her beside table right where she’d left it.
What if I just didn’t wear it? Is there anything wrong with that?
She rolled over to one side. The curtains were drawn over the windows, but a narrow beam of light sliced through the middle of one set, placed just right to lay a thin stripe of luminosity across her body.
She slid off the bed, and when she reached for the curtains, she had to tilt her head to one side to make sure her hand actually grabbed the curtain, because with just one eye her depth perception wasn’t working right.
Her bedroom faced away from Vale, but she could still see the path the smoke left in the sky. A couple of the White Fang from Mountain Glenn were in the yard with Blake, talking to her with their heads bent close together. Whatever it was, it looked important.
She heard footsteps from the hallway, and went still, hoping they weren’t for her room. They stopped beside her door, but the door remained closed.
“So it’s true,” came a recognizable voice from the hall. Taiyang. Yang’s dad. Ruby’s dad. The person she was supposed to recognize as her dad. “They really are starting the evacuation in a few days.”
“Wish they weren’t,” answered the rougher, much more sleep-deprived voice of Qrow. “Y’know, the one time in my life I wish Atlas could’ve stuck around a little longer—and it’s right now, of course. As if I wasn’t feeling mixed up enough already.”
“Honestly, I think the city would’ve fallen with or without them. There was just too much damage.”
“Fair.”
There was a pause, and then Ruby thought she heard something like a doorknob rattling. Before she could jump back into her bed and pretend to be asleep, Qrow interrupted.
“Don’t wake her up, Tai. Kid’s probably still asleep. I know you’re worried, but I’ve been checking on her.”
“And you didn’t wake her up?”
“I know how to be stealthy. Birdbrain mode helps a lot with that.”
That made absolutely no sense to Ruby, but it seemed to satisfy Taiyang, because the conversation moved away.
She sighed, closed her eyes briefly, and walked back over to Salem’s book.
She would never belong in any of the places she was supposed to belong. But… if she became what Salem was offering her—no, what Salem was promising her… a place she could belong even when it was too late everywhere else. No more being a failure. No more poison in her thoughts. Maybe she would even stop hurting, completely.
She thought of being able to live with herself, being able to keep her promise to Penny, and she wanted it so much that she couldn’t breathe.
But. Penny. Penny.
Tears threatened the edge of Ruby’s vision. What would Penny do in this situation? Because that was the most important thing in keeping her promise to Penny: doing what Penny would’ve wanted. Which meant not throwing her life away, because Penny had given her one more chance. So if Penny was at the lowest point of her life, in more pain than ever before…
What if Salem had come to Penny after she’d been hacked in the CCT? What if Salem promised Penny that she could never be in danger of being attacked like that again and that no one would ever doubt she was a person? What if Salem had told her that she could make her stronger than any virus? What if Salem had promised Penny that there was a reason the CCT incident had happened, a reason that had nothing to do with Penny and which Penny could help solve just by joining her? What would Penny have done?
Ruby was holding the fairytale book open in her hands, but she hesitated, really trying to see the world through Penny’s eyes.
I could help you be so much more than nothing, Salem had written. The words still echoed alluringly in Ruby’s thoughts. It almost sounded like the best way she could keep her promise to Penny. Almost.
There wasn’t anything wrong with asking Salem more questions, was there? By now, Ruby was just… curious. And curiosity felt really nice. It felt like more than nothing.
Ruby opened the window and pulled herself onto the windowsill. It was a good place to perch herself and watch the leaves drift by while she talked to Salem, and if anyone saw her there with the book, they wouldn’t think anything was wrong. They might even be happy to see her actually doing something.
Notes:
To be clear, Holly won't be a significant character in the story after this chapter. I just wanted to write a section which showed the impact that Penny could've had on someone else's life without even realizing it.
The way I came up with the concept of Holly at all was, I thought to myself; "Hey, remember that hologram girl who greets Weiss in the CCT in Volume 2? What if she was a robotgirl? Wouldn't that be cool?" And that wasn't even a thought that had anything to do with War Machines, it was just an idle thought.
But then further research revealed that Holly does in fact appear as a flesh-and-blood being in other moments in the show (you can see her for a second right before one of the finals fights, and then again in one of the evacuation airships during the Battle of Beacon). So then I thought, "Well, she's probably using a VR rig of some sort to project a hologram of herself, but why would she do that... Oh my god, what if she subconsciously wants to be a robotgirl but doesn't even have the words to realize that's what she wants, until she meets Penny..."
And that's about when I realized I could work this into War Machines as the perfect solution for a problem I had, which was that I wanted to have a scene of an outsider grieving Penny Pallas because of some small but meaningful impact she'd had on the outsider's life, but for the longest time I was having trouble figuring out what that scene would actually be. And lo and behold, Holly Graham to the rescue.
And if you're wondering why I picked that name for her, just think about it for a bit :P
Chapter 75: Signs of the Apocalypse
Notes:
Content warning for this chapter (click this text to reveal):
Discussions of suicide attempts, mourning, depression, grief.
Chapter Text
Days later
Admittedly, Blake was having trouble deciding what felt more unreal: Blake Belladonna at a White Fang meeting, or Weiss Schnee at a White Fang meeting?
Either way, making a joke about this being a sign of the apocalypse felt a little too on-the-nose.
“So we’ve got every friendly ship we could find in the air, either on their way here, or outbound already,” she said to the table. “And we’ve mapped out every single neighborhood, block, and street that might need an evac. Can the rest of you confirm we’ve got all the outlying settlements accounted for, too?”
She received a wave of tired but resolute nods from what remained of the White Fang in Vale.
“As many as we can manage, and more,” Verdant said, his eyes halfway to being shut from exhaustion.
Blake exhaled, feeling what passed for relief at this point. From a certain point of view, she might be called the worst leader of the Vale Branch of the White Fang, because after this week, there wouldn’t be a single Faunus living in Vale. There wouldn’t be a single human, for that matter, but still. The thought of it refused to stop grating on her mind. The echo of Adam’s vitriol was not easily dismissed.
It was a miracle in itself that they were organizing anything resembling an evacuation for the White Fang and most of the economically-disadvantaged Faunus in Vale who would have difficulty getting an official, state-sanctioned evac, but that was only half the battle. They still had to find places for everyone to go. Most would probably end up in Menagerie, a state struggling to provide for its pre-existing population. Some would go to Vacuo, where they would be dealing with the largest refugee influx in centuries. A few could go to independent settlements around the world where they had family or connections or something that promised them a relatively safe bed. Far fewer went to Mistral. And none went to Atlas.
Atlas was one of the most infuriating things about this. The kingdom had closed their borders to any incoming refugees, and the Atlesian Council’s official reason for the decision was that the same agents of chaos and destruction who had attacked Beacon could “slip in unnoticed amongst the flood of anonymous refugees at our gates.”
That particular quote from the Atlesian memorandum made Blake physically nauseous.
“Most of the Fang will disperse to the other branches, and integrate into their ranks,” she said. “That still leaves the leadership core. As in, us.”
A silence fell, and she didn’t try to fight it. This didn’t make sense. Maybe it would never make sense. Vale was disappearing, and they were becoming a division without a home.
“I’m more reluctant to give the same order to disperse for anyone in this room,” Blake said after an appropriate pause. “It’s not that I don’t think we’d all be useful elsewhere, the Vacuo and Mistral branches need all the help they can get, but…” She looked around the table, at the faces that she’d fought alongside in the tunnel and then at Beacon and then in the streets of Vale. “We’ve been through…”
“I get it,” Verdant said. “We’ve been through a hell of a storm together already. Consider me by your side, wherever you wind up next.”
Nods of assent rippled through the rest of the table. Not once since the fall of Beacon had Blake wondered if her return to the White Fang was a dream, not even in moments such as this, because she knew that no dream would play out with one of her dearest friends dead. It was agonizingly real.
“Speaking of which,” Ilia said. “This feels like the perfect time to mention I got a letter from Sienna this morning.” She looked down, and then pulled a small parcel out of her pocket. “Two letters, actually, but only one was intended for you.”
At the mention of Sienna Khan, Blake tried to calm the pit in her stomach. She’d never feared Sienna nearly to the degree she had with Adam at any point after leaving, but all the same she’d dreaded what anyone in the Fang would’ve thought of a deserter and a traitor (and she still did, if to a less extreme degree). It seemed entirely reasonable that Sienna would have suspicions of Blake.
“Who is the other letter for?” she said.
“Adam.”
The pit in her stomach got worse. What did that mean? Did it mean Sienna didn’t trust her? Did it mean—Wait. With global communications down, did Sienna even know—
Ilia shrugged. “Of course, that one’s not getting delivered. Sienna sent me instructions with those letters, those instructions being to give the letter to whichever one of you or Adam was still alive.” She shrugged. “She knew a confrontation was coming, and she knew it was going to turn deadly. So when she wanted to get in contact with us…”
That made sense, Blake told herself, which was marginally successful at keeping her worst fears from proliferating.
Ilia unwrapped the parcel and slid an envelope down the table to Blake. It was wrinkled in places, and there was a smear of dirt on one corner, but the wax seal keeping it shut was still firmly in place and untampered with. Embossed on it was the insignia of the White Fang.
Blake read the letter first to herself, and then aloud to the table.
Blake,
I send this letter (and its companion) not knowing what situation it will reach in Vale, only that things have taken a turn for the disastrous. If you’re reading this, it means you’re back with us, and to know that would be an enormous weight off my shoulders. When you left, I couldn’t make any sense of your decision. It seemed incompatible with everything I knew about your bravery and your defiant spirit. But after all the echoes I’ve heard about Adam in the last few months, I think I’m beginning to understand why.
However, I have questions for you that can’t go unanswered. Whatever happened in Vale will not easily be moved past. A power struggle in the White Fang, regardless of who is involved, needs to be investigated and understood as fully as possible. Beyond that, I need to address you in your new capacity, whatever it may be. I trust the judgment of your comrades who have already welcomed you back, but I need to make sure that I understand what your goals are. Especially in a world that’s decided to suddenly catch fire. You know more about Adam than anyone else in the Fang, and I’m hoping that means you know more about his anonymous allies than anyone else. That’s something I badly need intel on. However much you have to share with me, I want to hear it.
But reporting to me about the situation, or helping the rest of leadership disentangle what’s happened in the Vale Branch since you reappeared, isn’t your first priority. I much prefer that you concentrate on the ongoing emergency in Vale and protecting the Faunus there, before anything else. I am asking you to return to Menagerie only when the situation is stable and you are able to.
And Blake, when you do come, be wary. Adam won the hearts of many in our cause. If my guess that you are now standing in his place is correct, then that will attract some controversy in certain circles, regardless of how deserving and qualified you are.
There’s a long road ahead. But it will feel just a little shorter with you here. Welcome back.
—Sienna Khan.
Blake lowered the letter and let out a sigh of relief. And it was real relief, not just relatively-by-today’s-standards relief. “It’s more than I could’ve hoped for.”
“It’s what I expected,” Ilia said.
Weiss had visibly wilted over the course of the letter, and Blake wasn’t sure why until she spoke up.
“You’re going to Menagerie, then?” Weiss said, barely meeting Blake’s eyes with her own which were suddenly wide and pensive.
“We’re going to Menagerie,” Blake corrected, refusing to let Weiss look away. “I wasn’t just going to leave you behind, Weiss. Or anyone else in this room.”
(What did it say about Yang’s mental state that she looked equally as startled as Weiss to be told that she could still be by Blake’s side?)
Weiss’s mouth fell open a little, and then she snapped it shut with a strangled noise of confusion. She glanced around the table and then said, “Am I… allowed on Menagerie?”
There was a snort from somewhere. Blake suspected Ilia.
“Weiss, after airing the SDC’s dirty laundry on a hijacked international broadcast and telling your father that he can receive your rapier where the sun doesn’t shine, I don’t think you have anything to worry about.”
“…Fair.”
Blake closed her eyes for a moment. Menagerie. Going back to Menagerie meant going home to her parents. Seeing them for the first time since she’d hurled awful words at them and told Had they seen her during the tournament, leading a team of Huntresses? If they had, what did they think of her now? Would they have any welcome left for her?
“By the way. You want to read the letter Sienna intended for Adam?” Ilia said, yanking Blake out of the dizzying spiral of her past choices.
“That—you’d let me do that?”
“Sienna literally said in her instructions you could read the other letter if you wanted to.”
An equally battered envelope was slid down to Blake before she had a chance to dither over reading it or not, and she found herself unsealing this one too, with somehow shakier hands.
Taurus,
I am ordering you back to Menagerie now, and upon arrival you will tell me exactly what you’ve been doing with our branch for the last several months. I don’t appreciate being left in the dark, especially not after the world’s been lit on fire. This is not a suggestion. It is an order, and failure to comply will be interpreted as treason.
—High Leader Sienna Khan.
“She didn’t tell me anything about letting Adam read your letter, so…”
Blake let the the letter fall to the table. It landed facedown. “We’re going to Menagerie as soon as the evacuations are complete.” It was one of the decisions she’d felt most sure about that week.
“Uh, one question.” Verdant jerked his head in the direction of the upstairs, and then lowered his voice to the point Blake almost couldn’t hear him. “Your teammate, Ruby. Is she… coming with us?”
“What? Do you have an issue with her presence?” Weiss said, and Blake was sure Weiss would’ve raised hackles in that moment if she had them.
“No, not at all. I just—” Verdant shrugged helplessly. “Does she want to come?”
Blake knew very well the answer to that question.
Pyrrha closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and knocked on the door she’d been standing in front of for too long. There was no time like the present.
There was a startled yelp, and then she heard Ruby’s voice saying, “Come in.”
Pyrrha pushed open the door cautiously, peering into the room, only to blink in surprise when she realized Ruby was alone in the room.
“Oh, hey, Pyrrha,” Ruby said. She was lying on her stomach on the bed, kicking her feet slowly back and forth, and her nose was practically buried in a book of significant size. “Need something?”
Pyrrha shook her head, already taking a step back. “I’m sorry. I thought I heard you talking to someone in here, and I just assumed it was one of your teammates, and I’m looking for Weiss…”
“Oh.” Ruby flicked ahead a page in the book. “Nope. Just me in here. Doing a lot of thinking out loud. About stuff. Sorry, I’ll be quieter.”
“Ah. I’ll—I’ll leave you to it, then.” Pyrrha put her hand on the knob, only to pause, studying Ruby. Her few encounters with Ruby over the past few days had been brief and unnerving, unable to look at the unmistakably hollowed-out girl for too long lest she seem like she was gawking at the scene of a tragedy. But something was different now.
There was something more alert in Ruby’s eye, a slight tinge of color in her cheeks that hadn’t been there before, and even just the way she was raising her head to look at Pyrrha was imbued with much more vitality.
“I think Weiss is in the basement with Blake and Yang,” Ruby said. Her voice had just a dusting of its old energy, too—something Pyrrha had yesterday assumed would be gone for a long, long time. “Helping Blake fix her weapon, something like that.”
“Thank you—and, Ruby…?”
Ruby raised a questioning eyebrow.
Pyrrha hesitated, suddenly feeling ridiculous. She wanted to ask something about Ruby’s state, but nothing she could say felt quite right. Are you okay? was a question with a blindingly obvious answer, and it seems like something has changed felt too invasive when she wasn’t the closest of friends with Ruby in the first place. She already had too many people hovering, wondering about her condition at every second, and Pyrrha wasn’t going to add one more to that pile. Ruby’s actual teammates were the best ones to ask this question.
“If there’s anything I can do for you, please let me know,” was what she settled on.
“Thanks.” Ruby’s eyes were already drifting back to the book; Pyrrha was clearly on the verge of overstaying her welcome.
It didn’t seem like it was necessarily the healthiest thing to leave Ruby lost in her own thoughts like that, but… she seemed to be doing something productive with herself, at least? And in the middle of an ongoing collapse, Pyrrha would have to make herself content with that until the world was in a more stable place.
Pyrrha closed the door, and found Weiss standing in the hallway, watching with a not-insignificant amount of tension in her shoulders.
Suddenly, the rest of the world, Ruby included, felt very distant from Pyrrha’s consciousness.
“I heard you asking for me,” Weiss said as a way of breaking the suddenly-frozen air between them. “I might be able to infer why, too.”
The frenzied battles taking place in Vale had one benefit, which was that they were a tremendous way for Pyrrha to avoid thinking about the implications of her and Weiss’s kiss. And it also gave her an excuse to avoid confronting those implications. Until now, her first chance to take a breath and get something resembling real, sustained sleep. Which left her sitting with the questions best answered sooner rather than later.
“We did promise to talk about this once we had the time,” she said, turning herself toward the end of the hall. “Perhaps we should go for a walk?”
It would have been a lovely fall afternoon, if not for how the smoke in the atmosphere had turned the sunlight into something too pale and shallow to offer any real brightness. The sun itself was reduced to just a faded disk in the sky, almost as inert as Pyrrha’s shield at her back.
“I… I don’t know what to feel anymore,” Weiss said, and at once Pyrrha understood where this would lead.
“That’s understandable,” she said, fixing her eyes on the trees around them. They were only skirting the woods around Yang’s house, wary of letting themselves stray too far from the safety in numbers that the cabin represented.
“Not just about you. About everything.” Weiss’s hand wandered to her side, her fingers brushing against herself. “I thought I understood how my world would fall apart, and then it fell apart in ways I still can’t comprehend. Penny. The fact that I’ll never be able to return to Atlas—for all I despise about it, it was my home, and now it’s forever barred to me. There’s so many pieces I need to pick up.”
Pyrrha nodded.
“I feel like I have to reassemble myself, and whatever of myself I can put back together will be in a completely different arrangement from what came before. And… I think somewhere in what’s changed, I can’t hold onto what I’ve felt for you. I… I have to let it go, because I can’t think of a way to fit it into myself anymore.”
Her eyes were caught somewhere between Pyrrha and the rest of the world, unable to look away but afraid to look too closely.
Pyrrha twisted a finger around a loose thread coming off her jacket. “It’s okay,” she said, and she genuinely meant it. “I understand, Weiss. Sometimes… sometimes life is just too much, and we have to move on.”
Weiss didn’t reply immediately. They walked amidst an increasingly colorless landscape, the ever-present smoke itching at their lungs.
“It felt like so much of my life had built up to that moment when I kissed you, and then…” Weiss shook her head. “And then it wasn’t.”
Pyrrha nodded again. A falling leaf flitted across the corner of her vision, a flash of amber that was there and then gone so quickly it could’ve been nothing but a vision of something that had never come to pass.
“Sometimes… things simply don’t happen, for whatever reason,” she said. “I think I stopped believing in destiny when the school fell but I survived.”
They stayed there in silence, even though there was no reason for them to still be outside. They stayed amidst the cold wind blowing over them and whistling through the surrounding forest, making the trees shiver out the last leaves still hanging.
Eventually, Weiss snuck a look at her. “You’re taking this… extraordinarily well.”
Pyrrha gave Weiss a sad smile. “How much would I really care about you, if I couldn’t understand or accept that your feelings are being pulled in far more necessary directions?”
Weiss’s breath hitched, and then she darted towards Pyrrha, wrapping her in a hug that threatened to break either Pyrrha’s ribs or Weiss’s arms.
When Weiss began to shake, Pyrrha didn’t try to hold back her own tears. She knew Weiss had a broken heart, and no matter how much she wanted to fix it, she also knew there was nothing she—or anyone else in the world—could do to for it, for now. Perhaps the only thing that would heal it was time.
“Hey, Salem?” Ruby whispered. She was being more careful with her volume now, especially because it was the middle of the night. And it wasn’t like she risked Salem not hearing her—she never had to wait long for a reply.
Yes, child?
“When you…” The next words stalled in Ruby’s mouth, got jammed up, and were almost too much effort to push the rest of the way. “When you were at your lowest point, when it felt like you would never stop hurting, did you ever think about killing yourself?”
There was a pause, the longest pause before a response yet.
Have you considered the same?
“Considered?” Ruby snorted quietly. “Tried. I tried a lot. I tried as hard as I could, and the only thing stopping me was the people who loved me more than anything, who told me I had a second chance. And now, I can’t. I can’t hurt myself. I can’t throw away my last chance at living, because I promised Penny. And… I’ve broken so many promises to her, that I won’t break this one, I can’t, I can’t end things no matter how bad it gets, no matter how much it hurts, no matter how much I want it to be done, no matter how afraid I am of shuffling alone through some meaningless shadow of existence as a ghost of what I could’ve been and never will be… no matter any of that, I’ve got to keep going, because… I just can’t.”
And there lies the answer to your question.
Ruby tried to make sense of those words, her mind curling around them like their meaning would become clear if she just squeezed them hard enough.
“…You couldn’t, either?”
I know what you’ve been through. I know the complete lack of choice you’ve had for so long. I have lived amidst that feeling of being acutely powerless for eons. And I know what freedom lies ahead for you, if you will let me show you.
As Salem wrote, the words on the page began to glimmer. Ruby at first thought it was light reflecting off the glossy black ink, but as they sparkled brighter and brighter like a flame coming to life, she realized it was magic. Not magic like the silver eyes, but magic like the power inside this book, inside Salem, couldn’t be contained no matter how hard anyone tried. A power like hunger, that refused to be denied.
Let me show you what true strength can feel like, little one. You can destroy everything that held you down. You can have your revenge on those who so callously broke you, your revenge on Atlas and so many others for what they demanded you to be, for what they took from you and for what they prevented you from being. You can shine like never before, untethered and uncaged. You can take back your life.
Ruby wanted her life back. Oh, she wanted it back so much. And Salem felt like someone who could bring it back.
Suddenly, she was filled with the overwhelming desire to close her eye and lean into the book and press her face against the pages and just… yield. Salem felt comforting. She felt like a beacon of light in a stormy sea. She felt like the truth. She felt like everything could be right and nothing would ever be wrong again and she felt like Ruby could be whole with her. She felt like destiny.
…Destiny.
The warm bubble of finally belonging somewhere which had been building in Ruby’s mind abruptly dissolved as a memory crashed into her, a memory of a beautiful and bright voice that she would never hear again.
“I do not believe in the concept of destiny.”
Suddenly, all Ruby could think about was Penny. Penny.
Maybe Salem could give Ruby a place where she belonged or a place where she was something or a life where she didn’t hurt anymore, but none of that mattered because Salem couldn’t bring back the girl she’d loved more than anything. And…
“I don’t want revenge,” Ruby said, her voice morphing into a growl. “I want Penny. And you’re the reason she’s gone.”
Her face was too tight again like she was about to cry, even as she felt unbearably angry at Salem and herself. What was she doing?! Why had she spent all this time listening to Salem, considering her offer, feeling like she was the answer, when she’d known the whole time that Salem’s plans were the reason Penny was dead?! Why had she just ignored that until now?!
“I’m not going to join you!” she hissed at the pages. “Not in a million years! I don’t care about your stupid fairytale, and I don’t care what happens to you or the world! You probably deserved it all! I bet you’re lying to me about everything to make you look better! I don’t believe any of it! I don’t want to! Try all you want, but I won’t! Even if it’s all true, I don’t care!”
She was getting too loud, but she didn’t care. Some part of her had a wild hope that maybe this would be enough to push Salem over the edge into killing her, vaporizing her through the book somehow or just strangling Ruby with the pages or turning the book into a Grimm with razor-sharp claws or something, but. No. Just blankness, no more words appearing.
She closed the book with finality and rolled over, and of course the first thing she saw was Luminous Electra. Her vision went blurry with the tears she couldn’t hold back anymore.
She was tired. She was so tired. And it wasn’t the kind of tired that sleep helped with, or anything else. It was the tiredness of knowing she was never going to win.
And that exhaustion made Salem’s siren song so viciously tempting even while the memory of Penny loomed in her mind. Why not just give up, and let herself follow the siren song of true strength? Ending a war that’d gone on forever sounded like a really good thing to do, and if she could help it end faster… Then she would still be helping people.
What was the point of refusing to join Salem because she’d killed Penny? It wouldn’t help anything. Penny was already dead. So who was Ruby really doing it for?
Ruby thought of The Girl Who Turned To Stone. The girl who learned just in time to live without her love. The girl who nearly threw away everything in a misguided attempt to bring her love back. Ruby knew what Penny’s favorite fairytale meant. Ruby knew refusing to join Salem wouldn’t bring Penny back.
Ruby took a shaky breath, and for a few seconds she just let herself just… consider it.
What happens if I say yes? What do I become?
It would mean Ruby would have done more to save the world than she’d ever done before. It felt really nice to think about. It felt tempting, to be something other than what she’d been. It felt good, like Salem really could stop all the pain.
And then she felt the book shift behind her, opening entirely of its own accord.
Ruby went stiff, but didn’t move. She heard pages fluttering, and then, in the whisper of paper rustling, Ruby heard the whisper of a voice, a faint sound barely carried to her ears.
“Forgive me for the intrusion, but it was necessary for what I feel that I must say.”
The voice from the book was so soft, so delicate and papery, that Ruby could barely believe the Queen of the Grimm would use it to communicate.
“Your beloved’s death was a tragedy. I harbored no ill will against her, but as a devoted ally of Ozpin, her death was unavoidable. Her fate was not preordained, but I will not let anything stand in the way of my goals.”
Ruby continued to stare at Luminous Electra, and did not move.
“She was a sad but necessary casualty, like so many others.”
Ruby couldn’t look at Luminous Electra anymore. It burned in her vision even when she squeezed her eye shut, like a branding mark which would follow her forever.
“Join me in my quest, and together, we can ensure that there are no more casualties of any kind. We can finish a war that has gone on for far too long.”
Ruby shook her head, even though she knew Salem wouldn’t see it. The negative reply was more for herself, to tell herself that no matter how much she wanted to, this wasn’t the right way—
“And when my fight is finished, you will be able to bring Penny back.”
Ruby’s eye flew open.
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