Weiss knew Ruby's coffee like the back of her hand.
The raw cherries were grown from farms in Mistral, but they were transported by ship to Vacuo for processing, stripped from their pulp and washed clean. Dried under three hundred and fifty days a year of cloudless sun, the beans were polished and sorted, then packaged into crisp foil bags to be sent out across the kingdoms, ready to be freshly ground. That wasn't the whole of it, though, not when sugar had to be harvested from Haven's yield, purified into white crystals bright enough to glitter. Only the cream came from Vale proper, where hardy cattle were raised in fields surrounded by cliffs to guard them from Grimm.
Trade routes were the arteries of the world — or so her father said — carrying the lifeblood of citizens and goods across oceans and over treacherous mountains. Such was the reason she had them memorized, expected to know what industries could float or sink the Lien, regardless if they had anything at all to do with Dust. After all, it would give her a sharp eye for future investments, driving the roots of Schnee influence deeper into the inter-kingdom economy. Weiss was never under any misguided notion that the family business was anything but warfare, owing to their monopoly of fuel and ammunition, but even a dark engine needed its subsidiaries.
None of those reasons, logical enough to be printed out on snowflake-stamped letterhead, explained why that after stirring all of the ingredients together, watching caramel-colored warmth rise from sour black, her pulse skipped a beat, nor why raising the cup to her cheek and feeling the heat through the ceramic bled tension away from between narrow shoulders.
Weiss always took her coffee untouched, a constant established at fifteen when Father set a cup in front of her and Winter in silent invitation. Every breakfast before, they had been served milk or tea, expected to maintain poise and grace while he sifted through the early edition scroll feeds. After that morning, the two of them were expected to do the same, debating politics with bitterness on the back of her tongue. Coming to Beacon hadn't broken the habit, always half-expecting a mid-morning call from Atlas interrogating her about stock values and kingdom court decrees.
Fingers cupping the base of the mug, Weiss guarded the coils of steam rising into the air with her other hand, every step mindful as she went back into the hall, making a beeline for the spiral staircase up to the dorms. So late in the evening, students inevitably scattered to the four winds for the weekend or curled up in one of the lounges for movies and board games. Blake and Yang were at a coffee house downtown, a careful compromise between Blake's preference to stay in the room and Yang's burning desire to go to a club, as the place had both open mike night and karaoke. Weiss swore her ears were ringing from here.
Rather than trying to come up with new team combos or polish Crescent Rose with her free time, Weiss had seen Ruby nose-deep in notes from last week's lectures, biting at the knuckle on her right thumb whenever the subject got particularly dense. Blunt gouges were everywhere below the nail by the end of the first hour when Weiss decided some form of caffeine might be needed to help. The younger girl was too stubborn to give up, slogging through each page despite dark eyelashes threatening to droop.
With her own binder already cleanly color-coded, sympathy overtook an instinctive flicker of annoyance. Weiss knew Ruby was two years behind and struggled to pay attention outside practical exams when filled to the brim with restless energy, almost ready to explode by the end of the last period. The team had been left behind in a flurry of rose petals more than once, only for her to return seconds later, panting for breath after a hurried lap around the school.
Underneath the rush and flow, the cloak that chased boot-heavy footsteps with the snap of crimson fabric, there was an intimidating amount of raw talent, a huntress in the rough who came to it like a calling. Weiss had been jealous at first, so strongly she could taste it, wondering how some no-name upstart could take her rightful place as leader, the truth that much harder to swallow. If she had attended the Atlas academy track her father prepared, Ironwood would have given her command in an instant — it was often said the general was a man who let loyalty get the best of him — but only for the sake of her name, not true prowess.
That was the exact pitfall Weiss wanted to avoid by attending Beacon, even if the words she uttered in defense of the idea claimed that she and Winter should go to separate schools to make the education between them more well-rounded. Little could be said against her sister, a twin without scar or blemish, but in public together they were judged as one entity, and Weiss hungered for a space to call her own, without exception or compromise. To imagine what it would have been like for them to end up on the same team, one forced to be subordinate to the other.
Her plans hadn't accounted for such a place to be a dorm with almost astonishingly basic amenities, nor for it to feel right sleeping with four girls to a room, all eager for bunk beds. There was no explanation for why hearing 'team RWBY' from a professor's mouth made her swell with pride, but it was nothing compared to the mystery of why it felt like her heart beat next to the one in Ruby's chest instead of her own, not without using words that Father countermanded as weakness, impractical.
Weiss thought her mother would understand, were she awake.
Approaching the top bunk, which deserved some sort of medal for looking so dangerous while being stable enough to withstand a two-sister pillow fight, Weiss brushed the makeshift canopy of Ruby's cloak aside to find her holding a scroll a few inches from her face, mouth screwed together in a tight frown as she turned it this way and that, trying to decipher an alchemical diagram.
It was a simple fusion of red and blue Dust, although the lines along which it was drawn were utterly complex, allowing for whatever metal was placed in the center to be cold-forged with an application of Aura. Before humans settled into modern kingdoms, living as nomads fleeing from ruins to makeshift villages, it had been an impressive method of creating weapon blanks without a stable blacksmith, but now it was just fodder for history class and so woefully wasteful of energy, Weiss was rather glad Ruby didn't find it appealing.
"I brought you some coffee." She said, soft as not to startle, but Ruby still bolted straight up, nearly clocking her head on the ceiling.
"Weiss!" Embarrassment inflamed both cheeks with color, soft with a youth that disappeared on the way down to shoulders wrought like iron, forearms that built more corded muscle by the day. Crescent Rose was built for travel, but the scythe outweighed Myrtenaster almost five-fold. "You and Blake need bells on your shoes or something."
Had she been so quiet, lost in thought? "Is that your way of saying thank you?"
"No, um—" Setting the scroll aside, Ruby relieved the cup from her hands, not even bothering to take its temperature before taking a large sip. "It's really good."
The last word was paired with a wince. "Did you burn your tongue?"
"Half of it, maybe." Ruby answered quickly. "Come up here."
Weiss opened her mouth to agree before her eyes flickered to the scroll, the pair of textbooks laying open on the opposite side of the bed. "You're supposed to be studying."
"Which is why I want you up here. Oobleck said we had to label everything in this diagram, but it doesn't make any sense."
It would be a disservice to simply give Ruby the answer, but what kind of partner — or girlfriend — would she be to deny her in a time of need? Bracing one leg against the frame of her own bed, Weiss hoisted herself up, managing a graceful swing onto the empty end of the mattress. Ruby spread out the pillows to make more room, settling on her stomach so Weiss could lay beside her with a full view of the diagram.
"So what doesn't make sense?" She asked, affecting the same air as her old tutors. It was always better to guide with questions instead of giving facts verbatim.
"This is a walking forge, right?" Ruby jabbed her finger between the criss-crossing lines of Dust on the screen. "You hit the metal into the die at the same time as the reaction."
Giving a firm nod, Weiss traced the design of the hammer to the left, crude but powerful. "I'm sure Signal had proper equipment instead of something like this."
Joy, pure and earnest, lit up silver eyes. "You have no idea! The power hammers are huge and there's an arc furnace that makes the prettiest steel you've ever seen. My uncle let me use his old blade mold when I made Crescent Rose so it's just like his."
The weapon lay close in reach, wrapped in a blanket of its own. Weiss had the misfortune of pressing her feet against chilled metal in the middle of the night more than once, on the rare occasions the two of them slept in the same bed. "Now think of the basic mechanics behind that. The fire is fed by red Dust and then the metal is cooled by a constant spray of blue. How that could be done without a dome covering it?"
"Well, you need—" Letting out an oh of delighted awe, Ruby picked up the diagram and flipped it on its side, pointing to the red circle now positioned at the top. "That's the trigger. Your Aura charges it, you drop the hammer, and then the recoil of energy activates the cooling?"
For a split second excitement turned vulnerable, anticipating her answer. "Yes. Very good."
"That's so complicated, though." Ruby frowned. "It uses five circuits when you only need two. What a waste of Dust."
"Three." Weiss corrected automatically. She was all too familiar with the hearth in the heart of every Schnee factory, capable of mass-producing any number of weapon components. It was an incredibly precise method, requiring almost a dozen technicians surveying the machine at once to ensure nothing went haywire. "You need three."
"No, I mean, you draw a red line and a blue line, stick the mold in the center and then you have one person on each side. They use their Aura at the same time — fire, boom, ice — and a third person hammers the metal right in the middle. Qrow and I helped Yang make her gauntlet forms that way 'cause she thought doing it old-school was better—"
Ruby kept talking faster, words blurring together as Weiss lay there in idle shock, imagining how much manpower and energy could be saved using a two-way circuit instead of the triangle forge in current circulation; it had been considered impossible, inherently unstable, but with a pair controlling the surge of Aura, there was no reason the active Dust couldn't be controlled. How long had such a provincial method existed? Did her father know about this?
"—Weiss, if you think I'm being boring, you can just, you know, say."
Behind Ruby's small smile was a touch of hurt, and that certainly wouldn't do. "You are not boring, Ruby Rose. You're brilliant."
Halfway through guzzling down her coffee in an attempt to hide her expression, Ruby blushed almost all the way up the roots of red-black hair. Swallowing down a particularly large gulp, the smile returned ten times brighter. "Really?"
"I don't give compliments if I don't mean them." Weiss said firmly.
"How about a kiss, then?" Ruby asked, shying as soon as the question left her lips.
She should have seen the question coming, but Weiss still raised a brow. "Is that the only reason you wanted me up here?"
"Not the only." Hands locked around the cup, Ruby looked down into its depths. "You do a lot for me, Weiss, and I like doing stuff for you too."
It was such a kind, simple way to remind Weiss of her own folly, how often she was starved for touch. Her father wasn't cruel, no, but he had raised her and Winter with what might be called calculated affection. She was always encouraged to read and converse with her sister rather than roughhouse or braiding each other's hair, a quiet division enforced by separate rooms. They were twins, yes, but expected to stand as individuals rather than acting in concert. When Weiss had scarred her eye, it felt like severing the final thread of similarity between them, never again to be mistaken for the other.
Ruby had a sister too, but she and Yang embraced as easily as they squabbled, love exchanged with bumped elbows and laughter. Despite finding a lot of people overwhelming — and Weiss understood that, albeit for different reasons — Ruby didn't shy from getting close when she trusted someone. Weiss remembered shaking like a leaf the first time they kissed, counting the seconds until so many passed she had to take in a startled breath, but the younger girl still hadn't pulled away.
The hunger that came after was frightening, trying to remain sedate when she constantly yearned to entwine their fingers together, hide her face in the curve of Ruby's shoulder where she fit so well, fall asleep with their hips and arms aligned. Weiss never wanted to push, take too much, poison the well of kindness offered to her so openly. Ruby with her hands stubborn enough to try and cup the ocean between them, callouses and scars across the topography of skin Weiss had memorized like trade routes and capitals, with silver eyes never tarnished despite so much loss, painting every step with lush and lively red as petals fell behind her.
There was often a cold voice, like a needle poised near Weiss' ear, that whispered she hadn't earned something so precious yet, but it was staved off whenever they came together, whether it was sitting at the breakfast table or in a breathless, laughing tangle beneath blankets and sheets.
Weiss let out a soft gasp as Ruby's lips found hers, tasting of cream, heavy and sweet. Within the confines of a cup, she found it distasteful, but in this she could expect nothing less, sugar chasing away any bitter aftertaste.
"You doing okay, Weiss?" Ruby murmured.
It took a moment to answer, clinging to an anchor as she was, but the threat of drowning, fading, was gone. "Better."
I love you was held on the back of her tongue, hiding behind her teeth, the tightness in her throat. The time would come for the words, Weiss knew, when it felt like a proper confession instead of a fearful plea to stay.
The rest of the coffee went cold, but the comfort of Ruby's mouth returned again and again.
—