CHAPTER 1

"Knowledge can only carry you so far…"

Prof. Ozpin, former Headmaster, Beacon Academy, Vale

In her mind, she replayed it every day. Moments and years blurring together and streaming past in a river of memory, over and over again. The rush of the wind, her calls to her teammates, the thrill of the hunt, then pain, gods, blinding pain; she had heard people use the expression but never imagined until that point that there could actually be a sensation so agonizing that everything else fell away. Light, sound, color, feeling, all faded before the searing pain that burned red, red, red.

Red like roses, haunted dreams, and praying for some kind of rest.

Riven by pain, she struggled to keep that youthful smile on her face, for those who gathered at her bedside. She saw the pain in their eyes – a mirrored reflection of her own – and it hurt her even more to see it. So she put on a brave face – wasn't that what you were supposed to do when bad things happened? Wasn't that what she had done before? Been brave, even though every part of her wanted to scream her lungs raw and melt into the ground? She heard the words they whispered when they thought she was asleep: irreparable damage— never walk again— end of a promising career— poor girl—

Poor girl. That stung. That poor girl had saved the world when she was barely an adult, and now that poor girl got to sit here and listen to them, soak in their pity. It made it harder to keep a brave face when she heard things like that, knowing that they had no faith, not in themselves and certainly not in her. Not anymore.

Poor girl.

White is cold and filled with yearning, burdened by her failure's stress.

It was her fault. All of it. The botched hunt, the faulty intel, the creature escaping and… Ruby. The first time she saw her old friend – her oldest and truest friend – after the incident, she fell on her knees and wept. She might not have done so had others been present, but it was just the two of them, then. It had been two weeks already, work having rushed to meet her in the wake of the accident and her eagerness to meet it matched only by her fear of what that first meeting would be like.

"This is all my fault," she had said.

"No, it isn't," came the noble lie in response.

Mind clouded by grief, logic subservient to raw emotion, she had thrown herself back into her work but without passion, without thought, without grace. She didn't want to look at the ugliness of the reality that confronted her.

So she didn't.

Black the beast slips into shadow.

There was little doubt that Ruby's injury was the death knell for their team. Everyone knew it. Though they'd been estranged for a few years already, the spark that had so long kept their flame alive – a spark that endured the Fall of Beacon, the deaths of their friends, the rise of Salem, crisis after crisis and tragedy after tragedy – was gone. Whisked away, like a single fallen petal on an errant breeze that cared not for the lives it disturbed on its windy way.

Blake was the first to see Ruby, after the surgery – and had the least to say. She had been in Atlas on a diplomatic trip, representing her father and the rest of Menagerie. She shed tears, but they were shed in silence and in solidarity. For a long time the two had just sat there, Blake at the bedside and Ruby tucked beneath blankets attended to by a host of instruments and monitors, and cried together. When it was done, Blake stood, and left. She did not stop at the door to the room, or the door to the hospital, or anywhere beyond. She walked and sailed and flew. She was not running, as she had done years earlier, escaping a fate she thought she could delay. As she saw it, her team was a thing of the past, and while she maintained her contact with the others, she truly believed that this was the end of one era, and the beginning of a new.

And she went home.

Yellow fury burns cold.

Yang's world came crashing down when Ruby fell, bloodied and crippled, like a broken angel, to the earth. A child she had helped to raise, a sister who meant everything to her: the same young girl who had saved her life, given her purpose, helped her move on when everything in the world seemed broken and horrid and wrong… now lying there, her body a bank of machines ticking her vitals, a victim of that same broken world.

It wasn't fair.

Shut up girl, nothing's fair. If things were fair, you'd have a mother, a sister, a life beyond this.

But she didn't. She didn't have a mother, though she'd searched for so long and finally found something that disappointed her more than she could've ever imagined. She didn't have a life beyond this, because she had never imagined that she would need to. And now, the insidious little voice in the back of her mind told her, she didn't even have a sister.

She'll never be the same.

Shut up.

She's broken, twisted, undone, and you with her—

No.

Yes.

No.

Cold anger gripped her. It felt like something had reached into her chest and wrapped its hands around her heart. Every pulse of the organ felt restricted: she was numb. She was cold. She was angry. She wanted to let the fire rage, to let it burn down the entire forest and her along with it. She wanted to find the creature that had done this to Ruby and tear it, screaming, to unrecognizable pieces and burn them to ash. She wanted to scream. She wanted to fight. She wanted to die.

But seeing Ruby lying there… the only light that had ever burned brighter than her own… she pushed the rage away, sparing it for a time when it would be needed more. Ruby didn't need to be avenged right now. She needed to be saved.

She was there every step of the way. Surgery, recovery, therapy. She'd held Ruby's head and the two had cried for hours. She'd held her hand as the doctors gave one grim prognosis after another. She hated it: wasn't one time enough? Why did they have to keep calling in doctors from all over the kingdoms to tell them the same damn thing over and over again. Irreparable damage— never walk again— end of a promising career. She snapped one day, screamed at them to get out. It didn't help. Hell, if anything, it made it worse, because it showed Ruby just how thin the mask of control and composure that Yang had been wearing up until then truly was.

Yang was mad at Blake for leaving, but she understood. More than anything, she wished that her teammate had simply said goodbye to the rest of them. It echoed too much of a previous incident, where Blake fled following tragedy. But Yang was older now, she understood more clearly, even if it still hurt her.

Weiss was another matter. The Atlesian girl had always been stoic, and arrogant, and a workaholic, but this series of events made things all the worse. Because while Yang was always there, and Blake had been there and left, Weiss simply wasn't there. She blamed herself – rightly or not was irrelevant, as far as Yang was concerned; blame solved nothing – but she isolated herself from the source of her pain, as if it would somehow magically go away.

But Yang had stopped believing in magic years ago. Now, she placed her faith in people, and the fact that one of the people she unequivocally placed her trust in was burying her head in the sand was unforgivable.

She had cornered Weiss, to get her point across. Didn't invite her out to coffee (which she would have refused), didn't go and visit her at work (where she could have cited some excuse, or worse, had security throw Yang out on her ass). She found her at home. Weiss' apartment was a simple, two-room affair in an Atlesian highrise, ten-minutes flight via helipad from the SDC headquarters. She had eschewed going back and living in her family home – too many painful memories, even after her father died – and so when she returned home from another day of ignoring the world around her in favor of profit margins and shareholders, she flipped on the lights to find Yang waiting for her.

If she was surprised, she didn't show it. That irked Yang a little; the whole point of this was to make Weiss squirm.

"How did you get past Alder?" Weiss asked, referring to the thick-bodied, green-haired man she had hired to keep an eye on her apartment while she was away (which was nearly always).

Yang shrugged. "I have my ways." He was asleep in the master bedroom. Three days earlier, Yang had bumped (literally) into the man on the street. Like a gentleman, he had helped her collect the items she dropped, before blushing furiously when their eyes locked for more than a brief moment. Next came coffee, then a dinner date for three nights hence, concluding with so many whiskey sours that the poor man had to be carted up to the apartment slung over Yang's shoulder. "We need to talk," she told her teammate.

Weiss said nothing, just sighed and dropped her bag on the couch, before rummaging through the refrigerator and pulling out two shiny cans. Yang cocked a quizzical eyebrow. "When did you start drinking pisswater like the rest of us peasants?"

"Hangovers are easier to manage," Weiss replied simply, and Yang could've laughed under different circumstances. In the airy light of the apartment, Weiss' pale face took on an almost ethereal shade, but Yang could see the dark lines ringing her narrow eyes, the disheveled quality of her hair and makeup. She looked like she hadn't slept in a week. She probably hadn't.

"I won't insult your intelligence by suggesting that you don't know why I'm here," Yang began, before Weiss interrupted.

"Yet you'll waste both our time by giving yourself a disclaimer." She slung one of the cans to Yang, who caught it nimbly, but did not open it. Weiss popped the top of her own and took a long, practiced drink, dropping into a chair across the small living space, facing Yang and the cityscape beyond. Shit, Yang mused to herself. She's drinking like a teenager at a post-prom kegger. What the hell has happened to her? Weiss had never been the most emotional of the group, not by a longshot. She felt, sure, and strongly, but she had never been one to let that emotion grab hold of her. This person, sitting across from Yang now, was a far cry from the heiress that she had met and mocked so many years ago.

"How's Ruby?" Weiss asked, surprising Yang with her interest. She would've thought that Weiss would rather leave the matter unspoken, continuing her practice of isolating herself from the matter.

"She's good," Yang lied. A pregnant pause grew between them. "She's… doing better," she corrected herself. "As well as can be expected, all things considered. Today, we got a visit from a doctor from Menagerie of all places, said he was the premier medical expert on the entire island." Not that it had made a difference; the man had taken one look at Ruby and declared her a non-starter. "As advanced as some of our techniques are," he had said, "we sadly lack the equipment and funding to make any sort of real effective prosthetic or replacement."

That was the dish de jour, apparently. Pretty much every other doctor had said the same thing, and even the ones who noted that they did have the funding and technology needed said that it would be one of the most difficult experiments they had ever undertaken, with no guarantee of success. Yang had questioned one of the doctors about it after he left the room.

"The simple fact," he had said, "is that any prosthetics we have designed before would be incapable of coping with the stress that they would undergo as part of a Huntress' accoutrements. Miss Rose's semblance, her dynamism, her… propensity to take risks," Yang had almost punched him when he said that bit, "would reduce the effective lifespan of the limbs to a fraction of what they would be under any other circumstance."

"I've seen people like us use prosthetic legs before," Yang had said haughtily. "They didn't seem to have any trouble standing up to the stress."

The doctor had correctly inferred her meaning. "Mercury Black's prosthetics were custom-made, and unfortunately were never recovered after his death, so we have nothing to study."

"And what about this, then?" Yang had asked, incensed, holding her own prosthetic arm for the man to see. "Tell me that this isn't reverse-engineerable or something. Hell, I'll give it to you if that's what it takes, take it apart and study it, I don't care. There has to be something you can do!"

"Miss Xiao-Long," the man had said warily, seeing the flames flickering in her irises. "That arm of yours is proprietary Atlesian military technology, developed with the support of the Schnee Dust Company."

"You think I don't know that?"

"I'm certain you do, and as such, I believe you already know who you should be talking to about what you're proposing."

And so here she was, watching Weiss crush a can of near-beer with the best of them, her stomach roiling as she contemplated how best to say what she had come here to say. Did she plead with Weiss? Play off of her guilt? Attempt to lessen the blow by promising how, if it worked, things would go back to the way they had always been, nothing would change, and life would simply go on?

Nah. Fuck it. Best to just be blunt with her.

"I want you to speak to Ironwood," Yang said. Weiss did not lower the can from her lips, but she stopped drinking. "And the board at the SDC. I want them to dig up their old files, their blueprints, whatever, and find some way – any way – to get Ruby walking again. I don't care how you do it. I just want it done. And I know that, even if you haven't allowed yourself to accept it, you already knew that this was an option. You haven't taken it yet, for whatever reason, but I don't care. Really, I don't."

She stood, setting down the can and striding across the small room to tower over her still-seated teammate. "You care about Ruby. In a way, you love her, same as I do. But you blame yourself for what happened, so you've cut yourself off from her, because seeing her like this makes you feel bad."

Weiss has lowered the can now but refuses to meet Yang's gaze. "It is my fault," she says in a small voice.

Yang hits her upside the head. A bit of beer sloshes out of the can and only Weiss' clean white leggings. Before Weiss can cry out, Yang drops to a knee and looks her dead in the eye. "Who fucking cares if it's your fault? Maybe you made a mistake, maybe you didn't. If you did, you're owning it, great, good for you. If not, you're feeling guilty for nothing, which is just stupid." Lavender and ice blue eyes hover inches from one another. "Either way, you're hurting Ruby more than this injury ever could. Yesterday, she had the curtains around her bed closed. She was asleep, but she woke up when I opened the door. You know what she did? She threw back the curtain and called your name. And when she saw me, she tried to hide her disappointment, but I'm not stupid, I saw the meaning there.

"She misses you, Weiss. You're her best friend, and you've abandoned her." The word – abandoned – is like a slap in the face to the shorter woman. She rockets to her feet, staggering Yang backwards.

"You think I don't know that?!" she shouts. "You think I don't lie awake every night wishing that I could take it all back? The reason nothing has been done about it is because I already asked, Yang, and they said no."

Yang feels as though she's been punched in the chest. "They…" she struggles. "What?"

Weiss falls back into her seat, eyes to the floor once again. "They said no," she repeats. "The board can't spare the funding with the Dust Embargo in effect, and Ironwood is away, won't respond to my messages." She lifts her gaze to Yang once again. "That's why I haven't been able to face Ruby. That's why I've been throwing myself into my work; I figure if I can get this stupid issue with the embargo sorted out, then maybe I can convince them to…"

She trails off. Yang can see everything clearly now; Weiss was not broken by what happened to Ruby: she was broken by the fact that no one cares. The most famous Huntress in the world, and the richest people around, with the best minds and the best tools, can't spare the time or money to keep her in the business. Yang sets her jaw, her mouth forming a hard line. She glances at her watch. Half an hour until midnight. She kicks Weiss' ankle. "Get up," she chirps.

"Wha—"

"We're going to go pay a little visit to the chairman of the SDC's board," Yang growls, cinders glowing at the roots of her hair. "And then we're going to give my sister her legs back, even if we have to break someone else's to do it."

It had taken five weeks for them to deliver the prototype to Ruby. Ahead of that, Yang had already begun assisting in (and sometimes taking over) physical therapy for the rest of her sister's body: "No more lying in bed," she'd proclaimed. "You're still a huntress. Imagine what old Professor Goodwitch would say if she saw you with those flabby little arms."

Though she'd smiled and gone along with the PT, there was still a hauntedness about Ruby. This was rectified somewhat by Weiss' sudden reappearance in her life, the haughty girl brought to a level by her old friend. Ruby did not inquire as to why Weiss had taken such a leave of absence, and truthfully, Weiss wasn't sure what she would say if Ruby did grow curious.

Neither did Ruby ask what strings had had to be pulled to manifest the shining new pair of legs presented to her, as she sat in the hospital's rehabilitation center doing arm curls, some new rock song or another blasting through her headphones. Yang and Weiss delivered the limbs together, watching from the sidelines as the Atlesian technicians deftly buckled the bewildered Ruby into a state-of-the-art harness. "We will need to perform a surgery to make sure that everything it attached completely," one of the techs said. "But for now, your sister and Miss Schnee insisted that you get a chance to feel what they're like at their most basic. Think of it like a bike with the training wheels on."

Ruby had taken a shaky moment, a long rattling breath, eyes brimming with tears as they locked with first Yang's, then Weiss' from across the room. Then, like a baby deer taking its first steps, she rocked unsteadily to her feet and bounded clumsily across the small room, half-leaping and half-falling into Yang's arms. Now the tears flowed freely. "Thank you," she sobbed, voice hoarse and rough with emotion. "Thank you-u-u-…"

Yang embraced her sister, then pulled Weiss close as well. And for a long while, the three sat and wept together, months of pain and shock rearing their head once more, before melting away in the face of something new. Something brighter. Something straight out of a fairy tale.

Author's Note: Howdy do. Oh Jesus Christ I can't believe I wrote that. Anyway, this is a thing! An AU thing, a FF thing, most of all a RWBY thing! I've been a fan of the series long enough to know how ravening the hiatus can become, so I wrote the fabulous Dishwasher1910 (check out his Artstation, Twitter, and Reddit for more of the real good stuff) and asked his humble permission to get this thing off the ground. It's still a little rough around the edges, so feedback would be greatly appreciated.

For a bit of context about the RWBY 3.0 AU (credit to Dish for the background): with the exception of this chapter (which serves as a scene-setter, so to speak) the Fic will take place ten years after the so-called "Salem Crisis," which I'm not going to say anything more about at this time, save that things happened, and ever since people have been dealing with the fallout. Just before the start of this chapter, as Dish establishes in one of his context posts, Ruby lost both of her legs fighting a new, previously-unseen variety of Grimm. This was approximately five years after the crisis, and thus five years before the start of the AU. A lot has changed: people, places, both before and after the Salem Crisis. People have gone their separate ways, forged new paths for themselves, and those paths don't always lead people to the same conclusions. Expect difficulty, interpersonal conflict, and some dangerous new creatures. It's a brave new world, but that doesn't make it any less deadly.

I'll be trying to update weekly, maybe more as I can muster it. Again, feel free to comment or PM with questions, suggestions, anything, and be sure to check out Dish's artwork for the inspiration for this whole shebang.

That's it, that's all I've got. Kisses.