"I hate you and I'm leaving!" Ruby stomped her foot and forced down her tears. Yang could tell she was on the edge of breaking down.
"Ruby, wait! Just - Ruby! - please. Where are you going?" Yang asked, still trying to figure out why Ruby was mad.
"What?"
"If you're leaving here, you must be going somewhere." Yang's mind worked furiously to buy time.
"It doesn't matter where." Ruby crossed her arms. Ruby had the delightful habit of being adorable when she was upset, which always made it easy on Yang at times like these. Sometimes she needed Dad, most of the time, she could handle Ruby. She'd been able to for a few years now.
"Well you have to be going somewhere."
"No I don't."
"But then you wouldn't be leaving. You'd just be wandering aimlessly, and then maybe you'd wander right back here, and then you might as well not have left anyways." Ruby frowned and Yang grinned. Step one was confuse the target.
Cut the blue wire… Yang imagined herself as a technician defusing a reactor that had gone rogue.
"Then I'll just always go away from you. Get as far away from you as I can."
"What if there's a wall?" Yang arched an eyebrow and kicked her feet up on the table.
"You shouldn't do that. Dad would be mad." Ruby said after thinking for a second, pointing at Yang's feet. Distraction. Yang frowned. Her sister was starting to learn her tricks.
"Dad's away, what he doesn't know won't hurt him."
"I'd go sideways. Then keep going once I was past the wall." Ruby said after a while. "That would let me get further away from you."
Yang thought for a moment. "Okay, so what if there's like a 'U' shaped wall. Then you'd be getting further away until you hit the middle of the U. But then you can't get any further."
"I would see and go around."
"What if it was a really, really long wall though? You couldn't see. And then at some point you'd be going towards me without knowing it. Or what if I made a circle wall. What would you do then?"
Ruby scrunched her eyes up as she thought.
"I just want to not be here right now."
"I can make you not be here right now if you want."
"What?" Ruby looked more focused than upset, trying to stay a step ahead of Yang in this epic duel of wits.
"Well, are you in Atlas?" Yang could feel the noose snapping, the trip wire breaking, the trapdoor opening…
"No, I'm-"
"Okay, then are you in Vaccuo?" Beat her to the punch.
"No-" Yang opened her mouth to speak, and Ruby stopped speaking in anticipation. Yang let the the tension build for an appropriate amount of time?
"Beacon?" Yang whispered it dangerously, mischievously.
"I wish," A little smile had shown up on her face. Beacon was their Haven. Well, Haven was Haven, but metaphorically speaking. Ever since they'd both decided to become huntresses, it was their perfect destiny.
"But not yet?" Yang asked. Ruby clenched her fists ambitiously.
"Not. Yet." She's so determined. Yang smiled to herself.
"So, if you're not in Atlas, you're not in Vaccuo, and you're not at Beacon-"
"Yet,"
"Yet," Yang conceded, raising her hands in surrender. "Then you must be someplace else, right?"
"Right…" Ruby's eyes narrowed in suspicion. More and more lately she had begun to recognize the key words of Yang's tricks. I'll have to come up with more. Yang decided.
"So if you're someplace else, you can't be here, right?"
Ruby pouted, trying to figure out how Yang had got her there.
"That's not right?"
"How so?" Yang shrugged her shoulders in faux-innocence.
"This is a trick." Ruby decided, not denying it, but dismissing it.
"Prove it." Yang challenged.
And Ruby started to chew on her lip. Mission accomplished.
"Ruby?" Yang kicked her feet back down and walked over to her little sister. She hugged her close. "What is it?"
Ruby hugged her tight before saying anything.
"You… Don't spend any time with me anymore." Ruby hugged herself as she stepped back and looked up at Yang. "You spend all your time with your friends."
Yang sighed. She had just started going to the small school at the other end of the island. Dad had homeschooled her for a while, but with Ruby also starting to learn, it was a bit much for him to handle. Dad had finally conceded to Qrow and put her into a regular school.
"I still spend time with you Ruby, I just don't have as much time at home anymore." It was true. Even if she finished her work early in school she would have to wait to come home. It's like, who are the people you love?"
"You and dad." Ruby said.
"And it was just you and dad for me before." Smiled at Ruby, who looked a little less sad for it. "But now there's more people in my heart."
"So you don't love me as much then." Ruby took a step away.
"Ruby, I don't love you any less. My heart just grew to love other people too! It's like the rings on a tree trunk. You and dad are the first circle, but there's more and more rings around you with other people. As we grow up we grow more and more rings, but our centres are always the same. And Ruby? You and dad are always going to be my centre."
Two days later, it was with great confusion that Taiyang came home to find a picture of he, Yang, and Ruby holding hands with dark circles resembling holes in their chests. It was with great mirth that Yang refused to explain it, and the only explanation he ever got from Ruby was "it's our first circles."
/
A/n
Later, we modelled these circles/rings as electron shells to prove that for every dimension there was at least d-1 many points (where d is the power of the dimension, and d 1, ie, R^3 describes a dimension of 3), a_1, a_2, …, a_d, about which you can symmetrically place n many electron rings (or the dimensional equivalent) where the dimension of the ring equivalent is d-1 (in 3d, this would correlate to an eggshell) such that, with identical initial velocities pointed towards the point of symmetry, the ring-equivalents will form an equilibrium after each ring-equivalent travels along a linear path. Find the radius of such a sphere of 3 shells directed at the origin from a radius of 1 in R^3. Ruby was then forced to concede that the transient function was indeed mostly in the imaginary plane, and was equivalently forced to conclude that love was a myth. Think your damn metaphors through Yang. Now Ruby doesn't believe in love because of your poorly researched metaphor about love as a child.
You fucked up kid.
So yeah, I needed a break from school.
Hope it was somewhat enjoyable .
Cheers,
-Unjax