The Second Time it Caught them by Surprise
Roman would be the first to admit that this was a fairly odd occurrence. After wandering the halls of what he assumed was Beacon, he had wound up in a heavily decorated dorm room with questionably safe furnishings. That is, if you could even bother to call makeshift bunk beds held together with rope and books remotely 'safe'. Roman chuckled and made his way further into the room, noting immediately that Red was presently comatose in the roped up top bunk. He smirked but didn't bother trying to reach her at her current position. One of her bratty friends was sleeping in the bunk below and either way he wasn't risking the weight limit on that hazardous hanging mattress.
So he studied the room from the windowsill, making mental guesses as to who owned what in their abode. The fancy painting on the wall…definitely looked like it belonged to the girl beneath Red. She seemed like a princess personality, if memory served its purpose she certainly fought like one. The boy band posters were loud and obnoxious, and very slanted—probably Blondie's then. The bookshelf was organized and swollen with books, and if Roman looked closely there seemed to be a ninja themed harlequin romance hidden between the folds of a more seasoned novel. Likely the property of the cat girl, she seemed like the quiet type to have her nose in a book. And the curtain…was crimson in color and had an enormous, slanted cut through it—likely Red's handiwork. Roman chuckled and fingered the shoddy sewing holding the damaged fabric together when a small squeak sprung up to his left.
"How the hell did you get in here?!" Red had her pillow at the ready as she stared at Roman, her eyes wide and her face beet red.
"Such harsh words for such a sweet girl," Roman said mockingly with a playful smirk. "If you must know, I walked."
"You walked here wearing nothing but that?!"
Roman looked down at himself nonchalantly and figured that she was likely referring to his normal pajamas, or rather, the fact that his only garment at the moment was a pair of pajama pants. He looked back up at Red and tilted his head, finding her flustered reaction all too amusing. "You walked all the way to my apartment wearing nothing but that," he noted as he gestured lightly to her sleepwear, and if her blush could've gotten any darker, it probably did.
Red growled and pelted her pillow at him. "Get out!" she shrieked quietly as she found more objects to throw at him, and Roman couldn't help but laugh at her. Even when she hopped off the bed, he couldn't help but be amused at her clumsy kicks as they aimed poorly at his shins. His amusement probably stemmed from how graceless and void of any combat skill the attacks were, yet despite this Red still managed to make him back out of the room, laughing all the while as she growled with fury. "Go away! Get!" she hissed.
Roman had to hold his hand over his mouth to stifle his laughter. "Hell, Red, why don't you just start chanting 'Get back ye demon' and make the whole thing a lot quicker?"
"Shut up!" Red backed Roman into the hallway and began pushing him to the right. Roman was still laughing despite her rather forceful methods.
"What in the world are you doing?"
"I'm pushing you back to your apartment!"
"You're going the wrong way."
Red let out another, much louder groan of anger as she whipped around to the other side of his body and started pushing him from the front. Roman couldn't help but admit that the look of determination she was wearing was nothing short of adorable.
"You know Red, I hate to point this out, but I do know how to walk on my own."
"I don't trust you to!" she yelled, her voice raising slightly above the hushed tone she'd been exercising.
"Oh? Why not?"
"You snuck into my dorm room!"
"And you snuck into my apartment."
"That's not the same!" Red wailed, banging a small fist against Roman's chest in flustered retaliation.
"You're right. It's worse."
"Oh if I had Crescent Rose with me right now…"
Roman perked an eyebrow and chose to assume that she was referring to her scythe. "I was wondering where your giant weed cutter had gotten to. You didn't misplace it anywhere, did you?"
Roman smirked as Red glared daggers into him with her eyes—poor girl looked like she was about to pop a blood vessel. "I didn't lose it, Torchwick! We keep them in our lockers at night! Now get out before my team notices that I'm gone!"
"Your team is asleep."
"They might wake up!"
"Raise your voice a little louder, Red," Roman smirked and pressed a finger against her lips, "Maybe they will."
Red's eyes widened and darted around as if she had only just realized that she was in the middle of a dark hallway in her pajamas with her hands flat against a criminal's bare chest. The look of shock was fitting as she stepped back a little and looked around frantically, obviously trying to make sure no one had seen them. "You really need to go," she murmured as she looked back towards him. Roman's brow furrowed at that. He's seen this face on Red before, like the night before she seemed...
Afraid.
Roman tilted his head and stared down at her thoughtfully, his lips set in a thin frown as he held his concentration. "Are you worried about me?" It was a shot in the dark question, but as Red's eyes focused on him again something told him he was right.
"What?! No! No I…" Red's gaze quivered and fell to the floor, her tiny hands balling into fists before she spoke again. "The night watch will return to this part of the building soon, just leave before they find you, okay? And before I change my mind."
"Aw, Red that's really too sweet of you. I'm touched," Roman smirked as the girl glared up at him again.
"I should turn you in, you know."
"Oh I do know."
"And I didn't help you out. Remember that."
"I know Red," Roman smiled and leaned in to deliver a small kiss to the girl's lips. He pulled out slightly, his small smile changing to a playful smirk as he spoke again.
"You're secret's safe with me."
oooOOOooo
Roman was not having a good day. Where the first dream about Red had been unexpected, the second had taken on a whole new level of strange and had gone from a manageable afterthought to a string of mental images that was continuing to haunt him well into the afternoon. He felt frustrated with it all—and somewhat akin to a preteen mass of volatile hormones, much to his dismay. At any given moment he would go from positively giddy to concerned to glaring murder at any object that moved. Admittedly the latter emotion had taken up the majority of the day as every time a memory of Red made him smile in a less then vindictive way he spent hours trying to etch into his brain that he did not like Red at all. And even though he kept repeating the process, it wouldn't work. He agitated himself with his own mental weakness.
This was probably why, at five in the evening, Roman was laying on his couch with an old magazine slapped over his face instead of listening attentively to the small assembly that he was supposed to be hosting.
"Aw, did you not catch enough sleep, Roman? Stay up past your bedtime?"
Roman lifted the magazine off his face slightly to glare at Mercury, who was slumping unceremoniously in one of his kitchen chairs. His gaze flicked momentarily to the snickering green haired girl next to the boy before focusing back to him. "Geez, Mercury, did Cinder never teach you how to properly mock someone? Because if that's all you can manage then I'm afraid you're far more pitiful than I'd previously thought."
Mercury scowled at the comment and Roman replaced the magazine over his eyes, smiling happily at his handiwork. Rendering people speechless when you were in a bad mood was quite uplifting.
"Roman, is there any reason that you have not contributed once to this meeting?" Cinder's soft, threatening voice reached his ears and he sighed in response.
"Stress headache," Roman replied carelessly, "Way too many close encounters with authority in the past few jobs you've given me. You did notice that I was put on death row after escaping prison, right?"
"I did, but I thought that with your talent for avoiding arrest, it wouldn't be an issue."
"Well talent or not, the death penalty makes the possibility of being captured a little more threatening, doesn't it? Not saying I don't want to continue working for you Cinder, but I do think we ought to lay low until the heat dies down. The train incident has the whole city on red alert and we're not prepared enough to operate around this much security with the Vytal Festival in the way."
"If you had been listening like you were supposed to be, you would know that we decided to halt operations until the heat dies down over an hour ago. In the meantime, we've been compiling a list of individuals to watch out for once we begin moving again. Care to contribute?"
Roman grumbled a little to himself before lifting off the couch and heading to the table where Cinder, Adam, Neo, Mercury, and Emerald were all seated around Cinder's scroll. Roman leaned over Cinder's shoulder to glance at the scroll's screen, which had two columns of identification photos and their respective titles, the left side for people listed as 'threats' and the right for those listed as 'not a threat'. He sighed and flicked a finger across the right list, scrolling past dozens of unimportant people before one in particular stuck out to him.
Ruby Rose
Age: 15
Occupation: first year at Beacon and leader of team RWBY
NOT A THREAT
Roman squinted at the picture and the description for a moment. That was definitely Red. Younger than he'd expected. She definitely skipped a year or two if she was already at Beacon. "Put Red on the threat list," Roman mumbled lazily, "preferably before she makes us all into sitting ducks later on."
"Red…you mean Ruby?" Roman straightened himself and glanced at Emerald, who was staring at him with a look of surprise. He gave a curt nod before walking to the adjacent kitchen to pour himself a cup of something alcoholic. He needed something to calm his nerves before the thought of Red could make him smile like an idiot.
"The kid was made specifically to get in the way of any criminal operative in Vale," he stated simply as he came back into the room with a glass of brandy in hand. "She's been a thorn in my side from the very beginning."
"She seemed kinda nice when we ran into her at Beacon. Also kinda ditsy though," Emerald shrugged.
"She is ditsy, I'll grant you that," Roman smirked and took a sip of his brandy.
"She also didn't seem like much of a threat when I fought her at the Transmit Tower…" Cinder murmured, her eyes narrowing in thought.
"You fought her?" Roman perked an eyebrow. "When was this?"
"During the Beacon Dance."
Roman barely stifled a snicker. "That's a formal event, isn't it?"
"Yes."
"Was Red wearing heels?"
"I didn't take the time to look at her footwear," Cinder frowned, "But she didn't seem to be very steady on her feet, if that's what you mean."
"She was probably wearing heels," Roman confirmed, "But if you must know her combat ability isn't the reason she should be on that list."
"Then what is your reason?"
"Did I forget to tell you why I had to start the train early?"
"I assumed it was because something went awry with the nearby Grimm. Was it something else?"
"It was Red," Roman said bluntly. "She and her merry band of do-gooders found the underground base against all odds and tried to stop the train. They failed, but in the long run they did succeed in slowing us down. You saw her description, she's a team leader. And her team's been watching us far too closely for far too long. We need to watch them back."
"Very well. We'll add all of Team RWBY to the list."
"Good," Roman finished off his glass of brandy and sauntered back to the couch. "Wake me up if you need anything else," he muttered as he placed the magazine over his eyes once more. The group continued their conversations and Roman let out a small barely audible sigh of relief. He was glad they weren't paying attention to him, because the mention of Red had veered his thoughts back to his dream the night before; the mental images of her blushing and the feel of her hands on his chest, her lips against his own, they preyed on his brain like a ferocious beast, relentless and very aggravating. Ruby Rose. It was a pretty name, one well suited to a girl like Red. She was certainly cute enough to pull it off…Roman scowled under the safety of the magazine on his face. He needed to stop thinking about it. She wasn't pretty, she wasn't cute, she wasn't even real. They were dreams. He was becoming attached to a ghost.
She was just a dream. And she going to stay that way.
oooOOOooo
Around the same time on a certain rooftop at Beacon Academy, Ruby was sitting alone, hugging her knees with one arm and pressing her fingers to her lips, lost in thought as she enjoyed the one free moment she'd had to think about her dream from the night before. Yang had tried once more to get Ruby to tell her about it, but she had refused again—and much more adamantly this time. If the first dream was concerning for not being a nightmare, then the second one should've scared her beyond her wits for not being one. If Roman Torchwick showing up half dressed in her dorm room didn't seem like a creepy scary thing while she was dreaming about it then something had to have snapped in her mind. Maybe it was her sanity.
Ruby groaned and hid her head between her knees as she remembered the worst part. He had kissed her. More than in the first dream, an actual kiss, and even though she had been too flustered to kiss him back at the time she was pretty sure…that she'd liked it. She was not supposed to like the idea of Torchwick kissing her. She wasn't supposed to dream about Torchwick kissing her. And yet here she was, in the aftermath, with a furious blush plastered on her face as she mentally cursed herself for craving more. She needed to stop. He wasn't handsome, he wasn't a good kisser, he wasn't real. These were dreams. Nothing more than disturbing mental images.
He was just a dream. He was nothing more than that.
oooOOOooo
Rosewick trash Peeves reporting in. So I'm still breaking all the laws of Remnant logic for the sake of Chemistry, and I'd like to thank you all profusely for the lightning fast positive reception I got on the first chapter. Three reviews, seven favorites, and sixteen follows, all within twenty four hours of publication. Wow. You guys are super awesome, thank you so much. So a couple of things I'd like to clarify about this chapter just in case some of you have questions:
1.- Roman escaping was a big security issue for Ironwood and he may or may not have killed a few guards on his way out. Hence his sentence was upped to the equivalent of "Somebody please kill this f**ker".
2.- Roman has about a dozen apartments strewn throughout the city of Vale, and none of them are under his name. He uses them as crash pads that he pays for generously to bribed landlords/cronies, which he can do because as far as I'm concerned Roman is a pureblood white collar criminal.
3.- Of the RWBY villains, Roman is one of the only two that has fought Ruby before, and the only one that's lost. And as confident and charismatic as Roman is, he has often struck me as the only cautious villain, as to date he is the only one I've seen that has ever planned for unforeseen circumstances. I don't think anyone else would've really thought to classify Ruby as a threat.
Feel free to review, follow, favorite, etc. I'll be happy if you do, my ego likes being fed, it makes me write faster. Next chapter will be out as soon as possible for the sake of Chemistry. Until then though…
Rosewick trash Peeves out until next chapter.
