Some days, Oscar still couldn't believe himself.
It seemed like just yesterday that he was living his quiet life on the farm. He could still feel the movements of his hoe and sickle, from fingertip to his shoulders and down to his legs. Gazes out at the horizon where the mountains lay, tips shrouded in mist. Dreams of something more.
He'd traveled three thousand kilometers since then, most of the way across the continent of Anima. He'd seen heroes and bandits, huntsmen and monsters. He'd seen tremendous battles, of both bloody massacre and political maneuvers. He wasn't honestly sure which he liked less.
The party raged around him. Lights flashing, music blaring. The old drunk guy, Qrow, was off somewhere being old and drunk. Though, to be fair, everyone was drunk. The new girls that had joined them today, blonde and white-hair, were tipsily dancing together, if you could call it that. Everyone was giving them a wide berth.
Yes, everyone was drunk, that is, except for him. How ironic was it that the drunkest one of the lot was the one who said he couldn't have alcohol. So Oscar sat at the side of the room, nursing a tall glass of ginger ale.
If only his aunt could see him now.
How many times had he swung that sickle, pretending to be a huntsman? He would twirl and stab invisible enemies, saving his farmhouse and his aunt over and over again. He'd dreamed of a knight in shining armor, falling from the sky in front of a group of helpless civilians, and carving the black shadow monsters into smoke.
He remembered their faces. When they'd burst into Raven's camp, only to find Yang, already there, staring down the leader herself. Ruby's look of adoration, immediately falling to shock, to horror upon seeing a girl in white chained to a post, and then those soft silver eyes had turned the color of an October tempest.
What he had not dreamed of was a girl barely older than himself turning an engorged, twisted version of the scythe he'd chaffed wheat with countless times on human beings, the weapon changing the grass, the walls, and everything else around it to its own color.
He remembered their faces. The man with the silver eyes and missing tooth, drawing himself together and breathing deeply in ... only to be knocked clear through a stone hut with a single punch from someone wearing sunglasses.
What he had not dreamed of was running for his life from the very elements themselves as the girl with roughly cropped hair rose in fire and lightning over the camp.
And he remembered their faces. Qrow's look of fury towards Ruby as he passed the flaming outer wall of the camp. Ruby's head held high and proud, blood splattered over her skin and running down the side of her face as she carried Weiss in her arms. Yang, leaning heavily on Jaune's shoulder with her mechanical arm, supporting her over her brutalized leg. Smiling.
Oscar squeezed his eyes together and drained his ginger ale.
The music pulsed in time to his headache. He brought his glass over to the bar, hoped that the tender three feet away heard his shout of 'thank you', and left the club.
The door cut out the music almost immediately. Isolated as they were along the outskirts of the city of Mistral, the bits that leaked through the heavy doors were virtually the only sound remaining, but it faded as he walked around the side of the building. His shoes were quickly dampened by the light dusting of dew over the close-cropped grass, a silvery blue-green color in the evening light. The sun had just set, a beautiful spectrum of colors on the horizon fading to a deep violet in the sky above and behind him. The ground dropped in a steep hill behind the club, over a rich forest made of deep green, extending as far as the eye could see underneath the remnants of the sunset.
They had forests in the north of Anima, but only just. The ground by the old farmhouse was as flat as could be for hundreds of kilometers in every direction. It was perfect for wheat, barley, other grains... a perpetual pale green and dusty yellow. He'd dreamed of those mountains, looking down on a world where anywhere was his home. It was somehow comforting, looking over the dusky shadows of the world in front of him, no matter how many monsters lived inside it.
But as he rounded the side of the building, silence falling over the world, he caught a glimpse of red from the corner of his eye. He hastily stepped back, but a twig on the ground cracked, and Ruby turned to look at him with eyes reflecting a soft silver in the twilight.
"Hey," she said with a small but nonetheless genuine smile.
Oscar froze.
Ruby tilted her head, as if in acceptance, and went back to staring into the horizon.
Oscar hesitated, but something about seeing the girl who was typically bouncing off the walls just sitting alone with herself drew him in. He found himself sitting down next to her, earning another smile.
"Why are you out here? Hasn't it been a really long time since you've seen your sister?" he asked tentatively.
"Weiss too." Ruby shrugged. "Sometimes you just gotta get away from everything for a bit, you know?"
"Yeah." Oscar couldn't stop his eyes from glancing towards the block of metal that was the folded state of Ruby's scythe, lying on the ground next to her.
Ruby wasn't looking though. "I'm not really a fancy, dance-y kind of girl. You ever do this stuff before you joined us?"
"No, never," Oscar said, fighting to keep the tremor out of his voice. "I think it's just going to take me a bit to get used to things, you know?"
Ruby sighed. "Yeah, me too."
"What do you mean?" Oscar asked in surprise.
Ruby looked at him with a touch of humor. "We all got graduated two and a half years early from huntress training, you know."
"I heard about that," Oscar said. "The Fall of Beacon?"
"Yep," Ruby said. "And just like that!" - she snapped her fingers and a rose petal appeared, slowly flitting to the ground - "Suddenly, we're huntresses and huntsman. Out to save the world!"
"If I'm honest," Oscar said, "today didn't ... really feel like saving the world."
"Maybe, maybe not," Ruby said. She plucked a blade of grass and rolled it between her fingers. "Sometimes things are personal, sometimes less so." She paused, as if considering for a second. "There's lots of different kinds of bad guys in the world. Sure, our job would be a lot easier if it was only the Grimm, and people just got along, but sometimes life just doesn't work out like that."
"What happened today," Oscar said. "How can we do that, and not be the bad guys ourselves?" He stared up at Ruby, as if hoping for reassurance.
"Easy," Ruby said. "That's what good guys do. They stop bad guys from doing bad things. Sometimes you can talk to people, you can reason and help them learn to live their lives without hurting anyone. But sometimes you can't. Sometimes you don't have time, and sometimes people just won't let you. Sometimes you see your partner chained to a wall and you see the same look in the captor's eyes as you did when you watched the White Fang drop Grimm onto innocent people." She stared at the blade of grass, woven in on itself between her fingers. "Maybe there was a better way. But that tribe is not going to hurt anyone else for a very long time."
"Even so, I just feel ... sick," Oscar said, staring at his knees.
There was a rustle of movement next to him, and suddenly Ruby's arms wrapped around him, pulling him into a tight hug. Her skin almost burned against Oscar's, and he froze.
"That's how you know you're one of the good guys," she said softly. "Look at what we did. Throw a celebration of Weiss and Yang rejoining us, everyone gets drunk off their butts, and the two of us who don't drink go sit outside and stare at the sunset to feel better."
She sat back against the wall of the club before continuing. "It's hard on everyone when it's not just Grimm, or when someone gets hurt really badly, or ... things go wrong. Yang told me once that sometimes bad things just happen and there's no reason for it. She was in a really bad way when she said that. So maybe she was right and maybe she isn't." She breathed slowly. "But that's why we're here. In case bad things do happen, it's our job to fix them, to make the world right. As long as you understand what you're doing and you're working to make the world a better place, that's how you know you're a good guy." She smiled, silver eyes shining in the darkness, and held out her hand, a bracelet woven out of grass and laced with rose petals around her wrist.
Oscar reached out in amazement, but Ruby's hand flashed out, and an instant later the bracelet was around his own wrist, delicate blades and petals completely untouched. Ruby giggled. Oscar raised his wrist in front of his eyes to see better, but it fell apart, grass falling on his lap. The rose petals evaporated in pink and red smoke before they landed.
"Oops," Ruby said. "The grass here is too short to do that properly. Yang showed me, you know. She thought it was really neat that I could add the petals."
Oscar looked at her, words stalling on the tip of his tongue. The hard, lean muscles in Ruby's forearms that he'd seen twirling that scythe, far too heavy for him to lift, as if it was made from tinfoil, were now delicately weaving strands of grass together.
Ruby looked up at him. "You look like you have more questions," she said.
Oscar considered for a moment, staring out over the forest before speaking: "I guess I'm just wondering how you got mixed up in all this. I mean, the life of a huntsman is just ... so ..." - he gestured into the air - "Who would ask for this?"
"Me," Ruby said. "I asked for this. Because someone has to do good in this world." She looked at Oscar. "Being able to make a difference is what makes life worth living. I am a huntress ... because there is nothing in the world that I would rather be." She grinned.
Oscar shared her look before gazing into the last remnants of violet over the horizon.
"You're the most amazing girl I've ever met," he said.
Oscar had not dreamed of sitting together with Ruby Rose on the top of a hill, staring into the darkness well into the night. But, after all, sometimes good things just happen.