A/N: Has anyone done this yet? I feel like the answer is probably 'yes', at least somewhere on the Internet. I meant to check before I got to writing, but then I didn't check and I'd already finished writing and there isn't anything exactly like this on this site. So.
This is specifically a fusion fic. Y'know, the kind of crossover where characters from one universe are jammed into the roles of characters in the other universe—in this case, RWBY characters in lieu of Steven Universe characters on a version of Remnant that was Pink Diamond's first and last colony. I've had to bend the rules of both universes a little to make them play nice together (Gems with masculine appearances being a thing I had to make happen if I didn't want to Rule 63 a few characters, for example), but I'm actually quite happy with the result! There shouldn't be much in the way of spoilers for either show, except indirectly as regards some of the logic behind casting.
Short but sweet, and written from...*checks notes* Weiss's POV? ...Okay then. I've never really written Weiss before, but sure. Inspired partly by Bubble Buddies (SU) and select segments of the Initiation arc from RWBY Vol. 1.
Once upon a time, a dazzling Rose Quartz so deep in colour she was nearly red led a rebellion against the Great Diamond Authority.
Her banner was an unpopular one at first: the preservation of organic life on this newly-settled colony world, so unimportant to most Diamonds that it lacked even a name. But there was one Diamond to whom this world was very important: Pink Diamond, who'd been given this planet as her first colony by the eldest of her siblings. Gems began to realise that by challenging Pink Diamond, Rose Quartz was not simply defending the lives of the curious Gem-shaped creatures who called this planet home, nor the strange, soft environment in which they dwelled. She was fighting to topple the great Hierarchy of Gems, the almighty caste system which bound each type of Gem to their place and their role. And this concept, dangerous and unprecedented though it was, held a lustre that to some was more brilliantly alluring than any Diamond.
These rebel Gems dared more than to step outside their appointed places in life, like the masterless Pearl that followed Rose Quartz so faithfully and even fought at her side. Some of them went so far as to Fuse with Gems outside their Caste, like the fearsome Garnet who served as one of Rose Quartz's most skilled generals. Many even gave themselves individual names as the humans did, as hushed urban legend claimed some high-ranking Gems once had in the distant past.
The war was a brutal one, and by far the longest in Homeworld's history. Rebellions had occurred before, but until Rose Quartz, none had ever come so close to succeeding. The war came to a head with the death of Pink Diamond, and came to a close at the hands of her three elders. Homeworld recalled its Gems and marked down the sorry remnant of a world as a failure, a loss that could be made up in time, but the Great Diamond Authority—the siblings of shattered Pink Diamond—would never forget what happened on the garden world's blasted soil.
Still, their gaze turned away, and it was enough. Enough for Remnant's natives to flourish and prosper, enough for time to dull the fear and pain of coming so close to extinction, and enough for the surviving rebel Gems to emerge from their stronghold, devastated, mourning, but alive.
In time, Rose Quartz and her Pearl and Garnet confidants would find an abandoned Kindergarten with a single Quartz soldier who had emerged confused and alone. They took her into the fold, saying nothing of the traits that would mark her as defective in Homeworld's eyes. The Gems were weary of war and mindful of the one too young to have known it, and they left their stronghold behind in favour of making a pleasant home for themselves on a little island called Patch, where the four of them watched the great city of Vale rise inch by steady inch until a sprawling seaside city dominated the coast across the channel. And there they live still, mostly happily and hopefully ever after.
Though it's true Rose Quartz no longer quite looks the part...
"I just wanted to give you your hair thingy back!" the weird girl bawled, clinging tight to the side of the giant black bird that had just scooped them up.
"I'm starting to think I'd rather you have kept it!" Weiss shrieked, also clutching on for dear life. "What the heck is this thing and why does it want you so bad?!"
"It's a Gem monster and I don't know!" the other girl shouted back, nearly sobbing the last few words. "Look—what's your name?"
"Seriously?!"
"I'm Ruby! Ruby Rose Quartz! What's your name!?"
Weiss stared at her, eyes wild with fear and incredulity.
"Weiss!" was her wailed reply. "I am Weiss Schnee and this isn't supposed to ever happen to me!"
"It's very nice to meet you, Weiss! I'm really sorry about this and I just need to know if you trust me!"
"What?"
"Do you trust me?!"
"No!" Weiss squealed. "Why would I trust you?"
"Okay, well, I'm really going to need you to trust me if we're gonna get out of this, so you've got ten seconds to change your mind and let go when I tell you to! Ten! Nine! Eight!"
"Oh gods," Weiss breathed. She took a peek at the surface below and immediately regretted it. She'd been in lower-flying helicopters. "Oh gods."
"Seven! Six!"
It occurred to Weiss that she was about to die.
"Five! Four!"
It further occurred to Weiss that since she was about to die, she really had nothing to lose by doing as Ruby said—
"Three! Two! One jumpjumpjump!"
—and letting go.
"AAAAAAAAAAAH!"
Weiss screamed as she fell through the air in a graceless flailing of limbs. An exhilarated whoop rushed past her ears from below, and fury rolled in to fill every void left around her terror. What's more, Ruby had foolishly given Weiss the perfect weapon for the occasion: her full name.
"RUBY ROSE QUARTZ, YOU SELFISH MANIAC!" she bellowed into the wind.
But then there were arms wrapped around her waist and a bubble of transparent rosy red energy blossomed into being around her, tinting the world into sunset hues and blocking out the harsh, salt-scented wind.
"Brace yourself against one of the sides if you can!" Ruby told her, letting go. "I'm going to see if I can slow us down."
"How?" Weiss demanded, and immediately she wanted to kick herself. How was the girl who'd just pulled a magic barrier out of nowhere going to put the brakes on their fall? Why was she even asking these questions?
Ruby grinned. "I'm going to go almost as fast the other way, duh."
She jumped, and—dissolved into flower petals.
"Oh," Weiss said, laughing hysterically. "Of course."
The petals hit the top of the bubble, hard, and Weiss became aware of a thrumming through the shield's walls, like a heavy vibration, or like—well, like Ruby running repeatedly into the bubble's upper boundary at high speeds in a bizarre, masochistic vertical tug-of-war with gravity. The worst (best?) part was that it was actually working. Weiss just didn't know if it would be enough. She saw an empty stretch of beach below them, good, but everything was getting bigger and bigger by the second—the waves of the sea, the buildings of Vale, and she didn't actually know what terminal velocity was or how to even begin calculating their rapidly-decreasing altitude while the fall was in progress but a sickening jolt in her stomach told her that this was going to be close.
"We're still going to crash!" she hollered, unable to tear her horrified gaze away from the sand speeding towards her between her feet. She squeezed her eyes shut instead, because surely it was better not to see your impeding doom. Or was it? Should she open her eyes again? Oh gods—!
And then they crashed, and her eyes flew open without her conscious intent as she slammed into the concave floor. Sand fountained around the bubble, and Weiss felt her own little bubble of hysterical laughter. "Of course! Sand! The sand cushioned some of the—"
She squeaked—it was probably the start of a scream she didn't have the breath to finish—as Ruby fell heavily onto her back with an "Oof!" of forced-out air.
"—impact," Weiss groaned. "Ugh, get off me!"
Before Ruby had a chance to comply, the tip of a sharp, curved blade dug into the top of the bubble.
Pop!
The energy exploded outwards, and Weiss groaned even louder as she realised she was now laying directly on the sand in her expensive all-white clothes. Ugh, some of it was going down the front of her sundress...!
A weird sound caught her attention, and she heard Ruby swear under her breath and scramble off of her. It was like a rhythmic sort of...slapping...
Weiss braced her hands against the beach and pushed herself onto her knees, wincing in pain, to see two rather colourful individuals standing around her and Ruby's personal impact crater. One of them, a woman with long, wild blond hair and violet eyes, was smirking down at them and slowly clapping.
Weiss felt herself flush.
"Nice one, Rubes," the blond woman—no, teenager, with that posture, in those clothes—snickered, finally lowering her hands. Her...pale yellow hands. Actual yellow, at least on the fingers and. Brown gloves covered the palms. And—yes, what Weiss had taken for blond was in fact a bright golden-yellow. "Way better than that lame-ass slingshot ride at the amusement park, right?"
"Yaaaaaaang," Ruby whined. She barely looked up at the yellow girl to do it, busy tipping trace amounts of sand out of the rolled-up cuffs of her jean shorts.
The man beside Yang, all greys and blacks (even his skin was a washed-out grey), lowered the massive scythe leaning against his shoulder and knelt down, gripping the tool's haft a little below the blade and letting the rest of the handle hang down into the shallow crater.
"Wait," Weiss realised, once she'd finished processing the existence of the scythe. "You're the one who burst our bubble, aren't you?!"
Yang immediately burst out laughing, loud, raucous cackles of sheer glee, and Weiss's flush deepened.
"Stop that!" she demanded, stamping her foot. Her heeled sandal sunk into the sand, and Yang laughed even harder. Even the man with the scythe looked like he might be suppressing a snicker, and when Weiss looked to Ruby the girl was covering her mouth and desperately trying not to meet her eyes.
"Oh, I see how it is," Weiss grumbled, crossing her arms. Never mind that she was sure at least two of these people were millennia old, because any Schnee worth her name knew a Gem when she saw one. They still couldn't muster the maturity to understand the hell she'd just been put through. Ruby, at least, she could excuse. Probably. The name and the powers were suspicious, but otherwise she seemed perfectly human, the only unusual bit of colour on her the dark red at the ends of her hair—just as easily explained by an ombre dye job as any sort of supernatural or extraterrestrial origin. Still. Superpowers.
"C'mon, Weiss," Ruby said through a wide smile, grabbing hold of the scythe handle with one hand and holding the other out to Weiss. "It's okay to laugh when you've almost died," and wow, that was quite a sentence for someone her own age at most to throw out that casually. "We're not trying to make fun of you."
"I am!"
"Yang!" Ruby snapped, glaring viciously at the Gem woman, who had her right hand planted cockily on her hip, something glinting on the outside of her forearm. "Ugh. I promise, they're not so bad. Besides, it beats trying to climb your way out of here, right?"
Weiss narrowed her eyes, unconvinced, but she laid her hand in Ruby's anyway.
"Nice thought, short stuff, but one at a time," the man said.
"I know!" Ruby called up. "Okay, put your hands like this..." She directed Weiss to essentially wrap herself around the scythe handle. "Okay, Qrow!"
Weiss felt herself being hauled upwards, and in seconds she was over the edge of the sand pit. She fancied the air tasted freer up here.
"Thank you," she said to the Gem man—Crow? Really?—because it seemed polite and manners were about the only thing she had left. Even if everyone else was going to be rude and it was really tempting to respond in kind.
"Yep," was Qrow's less-than-inspired reply; he barely looked at her (just long enough for her to see the eerie red of his eyes) before he jerked a thumb over his shoulder and knelt back down, lowering the scythe handle for Ruby. The short red cape over his shoulders shifted as he did so, giving Weiss a brief glimpse of a smooth dark grey cabochon set between his shoulder blades, visible thanks to a clearly-intentional cutout in the back of his shirt.
A little affronted at his dismissal, it took Weiss a moment to follow his gesture. She let her eyes pass right over Yang, who pulled an exaggerated face in reply (reinforcing Weiss's opinion that if anyone deserved to be ignored, it was her) and turned to see a third Gem, also masculine in appearance, standing a few feet back from the edge of the sand pit, green-tinted hands folded atop the silver handle of a cane. He smiled pleasantly at her, one of those hands lifting to beckon her closer.
"Let's have a look at you," he said, his voice modulated in a fashion Weiss recognised; it was somewhere between the even, soothing speaking tones of her tutors and the aristocratic inflection those same tutors had tried to impress upon her. "You'll have to forgive my companions; they forget, sometimes, how fragile humans are compared to ourselves."
"I'm pretty sure I'm alright," Weiss said as she approached, uncertain and wary. His manner was genial enough and his silvery hair gave an impression of age, but dear gods he was tall, taller and broader both than Qrow had been, and okay so a Schnee knew a Gem when she saw one but that didn't mean the Schnee heiress had ever actually interacted with one before today. "Actually," she added, "I think Ruby falling on me did more damage than me falling out of the sky in the first place."
The tall Gem chuckled. "Indeed. You do seem to be able to move about just fine, and I don't see any wounds. Still, I'd suggest you let a doctor take a look at you. Not all damage can be so easily seen." He pitched his voice louder, looking over Weiss's shoulder. "And how did the two of you come to be falling out of the sky in the first place, if I may ask, young Rose?"
"It wasn't my fault!" Ruby objected, looking hurt as she stepped level with Weiss, Qrow and Yang trailing behind her. She reached into her pocket and pulled out Weiss's favourite scrunchie. "I was just trying to give this back to Weiss when this huge Gem monster shaped like a bird swooped down on us! We were down that way," she pointed back towards Patch, "by the lighthouse near the ferry port."
"So, lemme get this straight." Qrow's rough voice broke in, and he looked down at Ruby with a raised eyebrow and the edge of a wry smile. "A giant bird comes down at you, and somehow you wind up on its back hundreds of feet in the air."
Ruby blushed. "I—I figured it wouldn't be able to attack us if we were on its back."
"I mean, she's right," Yang said, grinning. "Way to go, Ruby!"
"Points for ingenuity, I suppose," mused the third Gem.
Qrow rolled his eyes. "Unbelievable."
"Ah, and there's our feathered nemesis now," the green Gem said, looking up at the sky with a placid smile. The rest of them wheeled around, Qrow readjusting his grip on his scythe while Yang clenched her fists, strange metal bracers appearing on her wrists and extending to cover the backs of her hands. "Ruby, please escort your young friend away from the battlefield. She's been through quite enough today."
She has, Weiss thought dazedly, watching as the giant bird monster dove in for the kill. Again. She really has.
"No! I want to help!" Ruby insisted. "You guys have been letting me come on missions but you still try to keep me away from the fighting! Am I one of you or not?!"
"Ruby—"
"Ozpin!"
"Ruby Rose Quartz." Ozpin didn't raise his voice, but his tone was stern layered on grim layered on disappointed, and Ruby quailed immediately, chin tucking into her red hoodie. "One of us needs to see the young lady here to safety. You already know her, and you are still in training. This is the part of the mission you are best suited for, and you are better suited for it than the rest of us."
Weiss had to bow to the master. Clearly, she still had much to learn about the invocation of full names. Ruby had gone from defiantly staring Ozpin down to watching her own shoe scuff at the sand.
"Ruby, take the girl and go!" Qrow ordered. "Oz, get over here!"
Ruby's head shot up, and Ozpin smiled wryly, pushing tinted spectacles higher up his nose. "Duty calls." He laid a hand on Ruby's shoulder briefly as he brushed past her; his other hand was twirling his cane up into a singlestick grip. The girl's jaw set.
"Right! C'mon, Weiss, let's get out of here!"
For the second time that day, Weiss found herself hand-in-hand with Ruby Rose Quartz. She was also once again wondering if she was about to die, but she'd decided to stop counting the number of times that happened. It was starting to dawn on her that running and/or fighting for her life was just a hazard of being in Ruby's presence.
"Where are we going?" Weiss demanded breathlessly as they ran.
She heard what sounded like gunshots behind her, an ungodly loud avian screech of pain or anger or both, and a sound like metal scraping glass.
"To the best bakery in town!" Ruby declared, grinning at her. "Where else do you run in a crisis?"
Weiss risked a glance over her shoulder and beheld video-game levels of physics-defying combat: Qrow and his scythe spinning into a lethal whirlwind of motion targeting any limb he could reach. Yang vaulting from point to point atop the monster and pummelling it like a speed bag every time she got the leverage, unleashing shotgun blasts from her gauntlets as she moved. Ozpin wielding his cane like a club to land a pair of heavy blows to one wing before leaping back into something like a fencer's stance and lunging forward for a series of precise, impossibly-swift thrusts. She looked back at the completely unfazed Ruby.
"You're—" she had to breathe again—"completely insane!"
"Don't be mean!" Ruby chastised her. "Look, I can get us there super-quick, too!"
Grunting with effort but barely breaking stride, Ruby scooped her up bridal-style and then there were petals everywhere and wind rushing past Weiss's face—
And then she was back on her feet, staring up at a quaint little bakery sign ("Juniper Bake House & Patisserie", it read in curly script) while Ruby waved through the window at the redhead behind the counter, who smiled with the brilliance of a professional model and waved back.
"Someone'll call us when the monster's bubbled," Ruby assured her, as if those words in that order were supposed to mean anything to a normal person. "C'mon, this place has the greatest cookies and cupcakes you will ever eat. Ever."
She opened the door for Weiss, making the shop bell chime, and gestured for the heiress to precede her inside.
At least, Weiss reflected, casting a quick glance down at herself as she stepped into the air-conditioning, Ruby's run had stripped most of the sand off of her. She looked presentable, even if there was a bit of chafing under the sundress. She'd just have to bear it for now.
"Hello again, Ruby!" The girl behind the counter nearly sang her greeting, her brilliant green eyes seeming to glow with happiness. Now that Weiss was closer, she estimated they were about the same age; the redhead might have been a year or so her elder, probably working here part-time and after school. There was an odd maturity about her that made it hard to say. "What will it be for you today? We still have some strawberry cheese danishes!"
"Ooh!" Ruby dashed up to the pastry case in a whirl of petals; the shopkeeper was utterly unperturbed by this, and for a brief moment Weiss was reminded of what envy felt like before she viciously quashed the emotion. "I'll definitely take one of those! D'you still have any pan o' shock-a-lots?"
The other girl winced a little, which mostly manifested as a twitch of an eye while her smile remained. Weiss bypassed wincing and went straight to cringing.
"What did the Langue Méridienne ever do to you?" she demanded. Ruby looked over her shoulder at the older girl, eyes wide.
"Huh?"
"It's pain au chocolat, or pains au chocolat," she pointedly hissed the 's' on 'pains', slurring it into the 'au', "and they're on the bottom shelf." Weiss pointed without looking, determined to make sure Ruby understood the gravity of her crime against grammar by fixing her with her most severe scowl.
"Aha! Thanks." Ruby's smile had definitely wilted a little, but she seemed equally determined not to lose her cheer: a surprisingly immovable object in the face of the unstoppable force which Weiss liked to think of herself as. "Uh, I'll take one of those home—or maybe opera cake...? Nah, the pastry's good. So that, a danish, and whatever Weiss wants. Oh! Weiss, this is Pyrrha. Pyrrha, this is Weiss! We just escaped a giant bird attack together."
"Oh my goodness! That's certainly one way to bond," Pyrrha's initial wide-eyed surprise quickly gave way to a gentle chuckle; Weiss fought hard to keep her jaw from dropping. "Hello, Weiss. It's very nice to meet you!"
Weiss honestly wasn't sure if she wanted to shake Pyrrha by the shoulders and demand to know why she was acting as if this was normal, or fall on her knees and plead with this idol of sanguinity to impart her wisdom.
"...Yyyyyyeah. It's..." Get it together. She cleared her throat and inclined her head. "It is a pleasure to make your acquaintance."
"Hm." Tilting her head (which caused the light to glint brightly off the metal of her headband), Pyrrha tapped near the corner of her lips, looking thoughtful. "You look like a macaron girl. Am I close?"
That depends, Weiss bit back, stepping closer to the counter so that she could look into the case for herself. Right on top sat two trays of macaron laid sideways, one tray deep pink, one creamy white with faint speckles. She hummed, narrowing her eyes critically. The tops looked smooth, the feet were even and ruffled, and the filling was neat and regular.
"Yes," she agreed, nodding and looking up at Pyrrha again. "What flavours do you have?
"It varies. Today we have vanilla and raspberry."
Two of each, she nearly asked, but imagined her father's disapproving look and mentally quailed. "One of each, please."
"Ooh yeah, they're really good," Ruby chimed in. "The chocolate ones are like crumbly Oreos. Kind of expensive for being so teeny, though."
Weiss's eyes squeezed shut. "You are an absolute rube."
"Yup, that's me!" She beamed, cocking her head and pointing at herself with both hands. "Rube-y!
From beneath the counter, amongst the rustle of wax paper as Pyrrha rummaged for bags and pastry wraps, Weiss could swear she heard a snort and a smothered laugh.
"Why am I even here?" Weiss wondered aloud, staring up at the ceiling.
"For macarons," Ruby said matter-of-factly, shaping the 'r' wrong and landing too hard on the 'n'. But she didn't voice the 's', and the fact that she'd at least tried to mimic the correct pronunciation made Weiss feel better, somehow.
"I meant more like how did I get here."
"I carried you," Ruby answered in the same tone as before.
"Cosmically, Ruby. A tiny girl—"
"Hey!"
"—wearing a hoodie in the middle of summer used super-speed to carry me to a bakery after I fell from the sky."
"Well where else is an angel gonna fall from?"
Weiss jumped at the sudden, masculine voice; so did Pyrrha, which resulted in a loud thump and a yelp of startlement and pain as the top of her head collided with the underside of the counter.
The blond boy who'd been leaning against the doorway from the kitchen, practically leering at Weiss, gave a start of his own, wide blue eyes darting down to his presumed coworker.
"Oh my gosh, Pyrrha, are you okay?" His voice was a lot less smooth and a bit higher now as he stepped forward and bent down, offering a hand to help her up. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to startle you like that, I was just—I—"
He sighed, rubbing at the back of his neck as Pyrrha straightened up, giving a rueful rub of her own to the crown of her head. "This was not my finest moment," he offered at last, flushing red."
"I-it's fine, Jaune," Pyrrha assured him, her lips twitching upward and a little waver like the hint of a laugh breaking into her voice.
Weiss edged over to Ruby, muttering "Do not introduce me."
Ruby glanced between her and Jaune, but shrugged. "Heya, Jaune. How's the training regimen going?"
"Huh? O-oh, yeah. Working out like crazy, that's me. With the stretching and the lifting and...running..." He laughed nervously. "Definitely getting good at the running."
"He's really improving!" Pyrrha beamed at Jaune as she sidled past him to get at the case, bag in hand. "At least, he's getting to work earlier these days, so he must be getting faster."
Jaune flushed, looking down at the ground. "Th-thanks, Pyrrha."
"Baseball tryouts," Ruby explained, catching Weiss's blank look. "The high school team'll be looking for new players once term starts. I think that puts Jaune playing next season's games? ...I don't know much about sports."
"Me neither," Weiss found herself admitting, which caused Ruby to perk up from the slight slump she'd fallen into at her own rueful confession and smile at her.
"Alright, here's your pastries and your macarons." Pyrrha returned to the counter, pushing the bag forward and taking Ruby's lien. "I hope you enjoy everything!"
"I always do!" Ruby beamed as she tucked her change into a pocket and grabbed the bag. "Thanks, Pyrrha! It was great to see you too, Jaune."
"Come back soon!" Pyrrha trilled.
"See ya, Ruby. Oh—wait, I never got your—!"
Weiss breathed a sigh of relief as the door closed behind them, even the sound of the bell muffled by thick glass. "Dodged a bullet..."
"He's a nice guy," Ruby said, rather defensively. "Just kinda...awkward, when it comes to girls."
"Well, he certainly doesn't lack for confidence," Weiss sighed.
"Or persistence. Yang calls it the 'shotgun approach'. Hey, let's walk near the museum! There's tons of places to sit there, and the gardens are really pretty."
"I suppose," Weiss said, and then mentally kicked herself as her brain caught up with her mouth. What was she doing? She was supposed to be walking home from her piano lesson, not—bumming around town with a superpowered stranger who'd gotten her kidnapped by a bird and then bought her cookies!
Except Ruby had bought her cookies, and Weiss wanted them, and it would be rude to take them and run. And while Ruby had (probably) endangered her life, she'd also (definitely) saved it, and even with the near-death experience she still had—Weiss checked her watch—almost twenty minutes before Klein would expect her home, since her lesson had ended early.
So here she was, following the weirdest person she'd ever met into one of the nicer downtown districts for a sorry-your-day-got-derailed-by-literal-monsters snack in the museum gardens.
Absently, she tugged at the front of her sundress, her mouth curling as sand crumbled off the inside of the fabric and fell against her skin. The motion caught Ruby's eye, and she frowned sympathetically.
"I'm sorry you got sand in your bra," she said, sounding genuinely remorseful, and Weiss's carefully-maintained translucent-pale skin blushed stoplight red from her head right down to her chest.
"How about we save the talking for when we get there?" she suggested pointedly, ignoring the unusually high pitch of her voice. "Great, let's do that, glad you agree."
"...Okay," Ruby mumbled, looking at her out of the corner of her eye like Weiss was the weird one.
When she did finally get home and Klein asked her how her day had been, Weiss was going to have to either lie or just start laughing, and laughing, and maybe crying too.
The gardens were virtually empty this time of day. Ruby and Weiss sat on a curved concrete bench beneath a gnarled old willow tree, looking out over a bed filled with columbines and bleeding-hearts and coral bells that gave way to irises and wild roses where the sun was stronger. Even the willow itself had plants strewn about its roots, from the heart-shaped leaves of wild ginger to white-petalled wood anemones to the deep green spikes of lilies-of-the-valley well past their bloom. The noise of the city was distant, background, held away by space and off-white marble walls.
"This is nice," Weiss said in some surprise. The City of Vale was relatively large, and Weiss was fairly new to it, so when Ruby had mentioned a museum she hadn't been certain which one the younger girl had been referring to. The stately marble building off to her right wasn't one that had come to mind. "I don't think I've been here before."
"It's the natural history museum." Ruby brushed some of the pastry crumbs off the front of her hoodie before taking another bite of her danish. "Mmph. The exhibits are really cool too. Dr. Oobleck takes me to see them sometimes. He's my tutor," she added before Weiss could ask. "Well, sort of; I think we're friends too. He covers history and some science and sometimes I have to write papers for him so I guess that counts for language skills."
Weiss cocked her head. "You don't go to school?"
Ruby flushed, squirming as if uncomfortable. "Uh. No. I'm thinking about maybe asking about high school but..." She sighed. "I know, it's weird."
"No, it isn't." Weiss raised the raspberry macaron from where it sat on the napkin spread across her lap, inspecting it critically. "I was instructed by private tutors for much of my life as well. I moved to Vale specifically to attend Signal Academy—it's one of the premier schools in the world for college prep, you know." She bit off half of the little sandwich cookie; the meringue crumbled into colourful shards of sugar in her mouth, lightly fruity in flavour. The jam filling was strained of seeds and had been cooked down thick, but still tasted pleasantly tart and distinctly of raspberry.
"Oh; I know Signal! It's over on Patch, right by my house! Did you just move here recently?"
"Earlier this summer. I'm from Atlas originally." Which went without saying, since she'd already introduced herself with her full name and who didn't know the Schnee family was Atlesian? Weiss wanted to smack herself.
...Except Ruby just nodded, looking interested. "I've never been to Atlas. Actually, I've never really left Vale. Neither has my dad, except for some time he spent in Vacuo once when he was younger. All I know about Atlas is what I've read and what the Gems have told me about their trips." Weiss heard a scroll chime, a different tone from her own, and Ruby shifted her danish into a one handed grip as she dug the device out of her pocket. "Speaking of. Yang says they poofed the monster birdie and bubbled its core, so everything should be safe for now. I'll just...let her know what's up...and..."
Her tongue poked out between her teeth as she laboriously tapped out a message with a single thumb. "Sent! Now no one needs to worry." She smiled brightly at Weiss as she tucked her scroll away again, the expression shifting abruptly into one of surprise as her hand disappeared from view. "Huh? Oh!"
Her hand reappeared, holding Weiss's scrunchie. "I never got to return this! I'm sorry." She held it out, and Weiss took it from her. Something about her face felt odd as she did so.
...She was smiling, Weiss realised, and couldn't quite bring herself to stop.
"Thank you," she said, the words tasting strange on her tongue. She popped the rest of the macaron into her mouth, where it began to dissolve, and brushed her fingers together briskly, ridding them of finely-powdered pink meringue before she reached for her ponytail. She didn't have a hairbrush with her, so she just looped the scrunchie right over the elastic band already in place, tugging at the fabric until it flared just right, like a tiny crown perched off-centre at the back of her head.
Ruby gave her a thumbs up when she was done, saying nothing as she was busy taking another huge bite out of the danish in her other hand.
Weiss's little smile faded as she gazed out over the flowers; one hand tapped lightly at the delicate shell of the vanilla macaron, still untasted. "So. Ruby. That's...the name of a gemstone." She felt stupid for stating the obvious. She hated feeling stupid; it made her want to lash out, to snap even though it had been her choice to broach the subject that way, and she could feel the dull ache in her teeth that meant she'd begun to subconsciously clench her jaw.
"Yup," Ruby agreed, oblivious. "Crystalline aluminum oxide, coloured by chromium, hardness of nine. Wonder what it is about the titanium and iron that makes for such a class difference. I mean, it's such a trace amount, y'know? They're all corundum." She sighed. "We care too much about colour."
Weiss's finger punched right through the merengue, causing the top of the cookie to cave in on itself, its buttercream filling slightly chill against her fingertip. She stared blankly at Ruby for a long moment. Ruby stared back, slowly tilting her head to one side.
"Everything okay there, Weiss?" Her voice was careful, like she was trying not to spook the older girl.
"Yes," Weiss said quickly, mechanically. "It's—yes." She looked down at her macaron and hurried to lift it, bite it in half, hide the evidence of her brief lapse in composure. "'They'," she echoed once she had swallowed. "So you're not...?"
Ruby snorted in laughter, a hideously undignified sound. "What, a Ruby? Psh, no. Dad thought it was a nice name and Mom didn't want me to feel constrained by labels. They don't make Rubies in my shade. Plus, I'm way too tall." She was one of the shortest people Weiss had ever met, even considering her age, but she also clearly meant every word. "Nope, I'm human."
Evidently, Weiss's expression conveyed her skepticism perfectly. Ruby made a face and shoved the rest of her danish into it.
"Okay, half-human," she amended, sounding most put-upon—or maybe that was the mouthful of danish, which she swallowed before continuing. "I know what you're thinking, 'that's not a thing!', but it's true. See?"
She reached down, grabbing the hem of her hoodie and pulling it up over her head. She tied the arms of it around her waist and ran her fingers through her short hair until it laid mostly flat again, but Weiss wasn't paying attention to any of that. All her focus was caught by what should have been an empty stretch of skin, the flat space over the upper sternum, above cleavage and below clavicle. Instead, partially-hidden until Ruby tugged her rumpled black tank top down into place, there was the large upper face of a round-cut brilliant gem set directly in her body. In the indirect sunlight of their shaded bench, it seemed to glow subtly in a warm rose red.
Weiss realised her mouth was gaping. She snapped it closed with a click of teeth-on-teeth and immediately winced.
"Ta-dah," Ruby announced, smiling weakly. She didn't seem ashamed of the Gem; her body language was too open, too easy for that, and she hadn't hesitated to remove her hoodie. It wasn't her nature, impossible as said nature was, that had her worried. Just Weiss's potential reaction to it.
"Ruby Rose Quartz," Weiss said as she remembered. "And 'young Rose'—that's what, er, the green Gem called you. So is that your Gem half? Rose Quartz?"
Ruby nodded. "Yeah. This was my mother's. Now it's mine." She wouldn't meet Weiss's eyes.
"It's..."
Weiss struggled to find the right word. And the longer she did, the more Ruby's shoulders drooped, tucking inwards, her body turning subtly away. It was a familiar posture, horribly familiar, one she'd spent years training herself out of because a Schnee didn't cower and now she was making someone feel small and worthless and unwanted and—
"It's pretty," Weiss blurted out, and it wasn't the word she wanted, but it wasn't not the word she wanted either. More importantly, it made Ruby lift her head, made her shoulders straighten and her jean shorts go scrape-scrape against the concrete bench as the incremental shifting away from Weiss was undone in a single swift movement. Ruby's eyes were wide as they met Weiss's, and Weiss had no idea what her face looked like in that moment but clearly it was at least sincere, because Ruby smiled, huffing out a breathless laugh of relief.
"I guess?" She touched her fingertips to the skin around her Gem as if to reassure herself. "I never really thought about it. It's just there, y'know? Like my nose, or my belly button, or my knees. Normal body parts, just, I've got one extra from most humans and it's also a shiny rock. That's all."
"Right," Weiss agreed inanely. "Makes sense," which was a bold-faced lie, but it didn't feel like it should have been a lie. It was more like a truth she hadn't grown into yet.
"His name's Ozpin, by the way."
"Huh?"
"The green Gem. The one who calls me 'young Rose'?" Ruby prompted her. "His name's Ozpin. He's a Garnet subtype called a Demantoid. He's pretty formal; when he talks about Mom he usually calls her 'Lady Rose', so I think that's where my nickname comes from. The feminine Gem is a Quartz like me. Her name's Yang. I'm pretty sure she's Amethyst by make but she identifies as Ametrine since she's got so much Citrine colouration. The other masculine Gem is Qrow—that's Qrow with a Q, and he's a Pearl. He and my Mom were best friends. I think he's specifically a Black Pearl, but his eyes are red and he mostly seems grey, not black, but actual like jewellery black pearls do look grey and I've never actually seen another Gem Pearl so...?"
Ruby shrugged expansively, as if she hadn't just casually dumped a bunch of extraterrestrial socio-ethnic politics in Weiss's lap. Somehow the fact that it all sounded like simple geology jargon made it worse.
Weiss had so many questions. About Gems, about Ruby, about Ruby's mom and how someone could inherit a Gem, about monsters brazen enough to enter not just a kingdom's borders but a capitol city's limits despite the fact that every history book said that the Gems of Remnant and the humans and Faunus they'd trained in combat had culled the better part of the monster population in the great Hunts of centuries past. And somehow out of everything she wanted to ask, the question that won out—the only question that ever even made it out—was "Why a Q?"
Ruby shrugged again, the gesture smaller, contained. Less 'who can truly fathom the cosmos?' and more 'but what're you gonna do?'.
Weiss nodded slowly. "Okay," she said, and popped the other half of the macaron in her mouth.
They parted ways in front of the museum's main gate. Weiss found herself glancing back over her shoulder after walking just a few paces, and thus caught Ruby doing the same thing, the facets of her Rose Quartz gem glinting in the worn light of the late-afternoon sun. Ruby grinned and waved brightly at her before turning away, short legs striding confidently west towards Patch, the mostly-empty bakery bag swinging loosely in her grip. Weiss touched a hand to her scrunchie, feeling its ruffled edge brushing her fingers, and turned back east towards home. The taste of vanilla still lingered on her tongue.
Since the day had begun, she'd lost her patience, her temper, and her sanity. Nearing day's end, she'd gained patience and even temper back along with her favourite scrunchie, plus two gourmet cookies and the scroll number of the half-alien girl who'd bought them for her. Sanity, she concluded, was probably gone for good. Time would tell if it was a fair exchange.
A/N: Yeah, I was surprised when it wound up as a character-interaction piece, too.
So that's a wrap—for now, anyway, because I've actually got some ideas for continuing in this weird little hybrid setting in a multi-chapter story that loosely adapts some of the plot elements and structure of early instalments of both shows, especially Steven Universe. I don't know if that's something people would be interested in or not, but if I wind up writing it, odds are good I'll also wind up posting it. In fact, the "second chapter" of this story is brief excerpts from some rough drafts of that hypothetical future fanfic, so you might consider that a sneak preview...unless it turns out to be more of a tech demo scenario and I've just (re?)invented vaporfic. But I already have an actual chart where I've figured out which characters correspond to which and what kind of Gem everyone is and what people's Fusions would be and plotted out things to do with some of the RWBY characters that were left over when I ran out of sufficiently-prominent SU characters, and it'd be a shame to let all that planning go to waste.
I'm guessing this double-digit-large crossover category doesn't see a ton of traffic, so since you're one of the few passers-by as it were, consider leaving a review! I don't tend to respond much via PM—I'm more of a "give a shout back in the next chapter's author's notes" kind of person, which is less-than-helpful for one-shots—but I always read through feedback and very much appreciate receiving it. Plus, in this case there's an element of interest-gauging involved too, so it'd be quite helpful. Thanks for stopping by!