Chapter Twenty-Five
Mortals
This paperwork was going to kill his immortal self by drowning, and if Ruby wasn't already dead then he would seriously be considering sending her on a permanent assignment to the coldest region of Atlas.
He'd given Ruby reign of Beacon for less than six months, and within that time span she'd generated more bureaucratic nonsense than he'd seen in his three decades. He'd been limited himself only to the administration of Beacon as a school and not the umbrella term for all of Vale's Hunters, during her term and was now blindsided.
Ruby had completely ignored that problem and not bothered to even submit a proposal to apply a catch-all name for her Hunter's to replace the tradition of referring to them by their main Academy. When he'd sent her a note asking her to think of an idea, she'd brusquely replied for him to lock himself in his cocoa cave and to stop bothering her while she did real work.
He'd had a storm cloud hovering above his head for a while after that, much to the consternation of Glynda who'd thrown at mop and bucket at him after he'd tracked his dour mood across the campus.
He crumpled his discretionary budget sheet and threw it at his slumbering spymaster, the man taking up one of his couches and biding his time until the rest of his team got there, dried tear tracks marring his cheeks. He barely reacted to the object, catching it and crumpling it further, if only to avoid speaking to him.
Qrow hadn't said a single word to him since he'd all but demanded he return to Beacon, not telling him anything, not even after he arrived to meet him in front of the flags before daybreak. It hadn't taken him long to locate Ruby's name on the Stone to confirm the nightmare of the three lowered flags.
On his own desk, and across several of the paper's Ruby had left, his own teardrops could be seen whenever he'd gotten too caught up in trying to decipher the many files to wipe them away. So much work, so much accomplished, and yet much more planned, with only this paperwork to prove anything.
"Raven and Taiyang were spotted entering the campus." Glynda's voice suddenly sounded out from the intercom, his hand absentmindedly answering the blinking light, his mind needing some sort of reprieve from the cycle of dark thoughts.
Qrow finally moved from his couch and stood behind him, handing over the crumpled sheet. He looked over his shoulder to the hundreds of different orders and mission reports that made up Ruby's professional life, silently tallying which ones he'd been aware of and which had slipped through his radar.
They'd slipped even through his own radar, and he was supposed to have been Ruby's direct subordinate.
His elevator chimed open a few minutes later, letting in two people he hadn't seen in over a decade. Raven looked as young as ever, a new scar on her chin the only evidence she'd changed, but Tai looked to have seen better days, dark shadows under his eyes, a tiredness evident in his demeanor.
Qrow was moving before he realized he was being attacked, Harbinger snapping open into its sword form to deflect an angry Tai from punching him out the window, throwing him aside with as much struggle as a parent chastising a child. His encounter with Ruby during Mountain Glenn had made him re-evaluate his complacency towards his training, the smell of fresh weapon grease reaching his nose.
Tai crumpled against the same wall Ruby had thrown him into so long ago, adding yet more cracks to the marble. Raven winced as her former lover got slammed hard enough to force the anger from his eyes, bleeding them back to lilac. Qrow only tutted at his former teammate's rash actions, taking a long sip from his trusty flask.
"Sloppy." Tai moaned shortly before shifting his dislocated shoulder back into place, clenching his teeth as his Aura surged forth and chased away the pain. He reached up to Qrow's hand and was pulled back to his feet, getting a slap to the back of the head for causing trouble.
He couldn't fault him, knowing his attempted assault was tame compared to the ruin the future Signal Headmaster could reign down on him as one of the people in charge of Vale's greatest secondary Academy.
He tightened his grip on his cane as Qrow met Raven, the two twins facing off in his office, both with known potential to hit first and ask questions later. Raven had been the primary reason he'd recruited Qrow as his spymaster after Summer's death, her abandonment of Yang and her team throwing him into an alcoholic stupor only broken by guilt and renewed purpose.
It'd been one of the many times he'd had to manipulate events into his favor, not willing to throw such potential out the door, already having lost one Branwen to a misguided quest to learn about her birth home and reclaim her right to lead. He'd essentially guilted Qrow to working for him, using Summer's death and her daughter as primary motivators.
From him, he received almost exclusive and in-depth knowledge of how and where to deploy extra units, where political strife was rampant, as well as information on how the Hunter's perceived his leadership and decisions, an especially crucial function with Ruby's death and revelation as his successor.
"Bitch." He choked on his spittle, unable to see the smiles gracing the Branwen twin's faces, Qrow's Aura an ever moving miasma of dark and Raven's an ever teleporting mess of purple, chunks of it moving in and out of reality only to appear somewhere else in her core.
Curious how Auras evolved from that first instance he'd encountered them in this new world, not entirely sentient but entirely malleable even within blood relatives. He'd tried to map and learn how they changed, looking at the extra chromosome this new set of humans had been granted, but it resisted classification. The new pair acted more akin to a highly volatile virus across parent and child but eventually stabilized at birth.
But there was also the question of why certain Semblances remained locked within certain bloodlines, such as the Schnees, or the latent passive ability of his own Silvereyes. They seemingly resisted any outside incoming genetic change, marking them as dominant traits among other Semblances.
But that Punnett square was conveniently tossed out the window and then shredded by an angry and PMS'ing Salem because it certainly didn't explain why two people, namely Neo and Ruby, could have almost identical Auras, but vastly different Semblances. It not only meant Auras and Semblances were independent from one another in one case, but also entirely dependent on each other.
Most evidence supported Semblances were tied to Auras, the latter affecting and determining the former, but certain edge cases refused to finally prove the rule, and it entirely annoyed him he couldn't pin down Semblance creation, or why some of them were innately overpowered compared to others.
"Asshole." Where was he again, and why were Qrow and Raven not at each other's throats? Even Tai was quietly moving to crouch behind his desk, just waiting for the inevitable explosion between the two siblings, memories of the last time they were together playing in his mind.
He completely missed Tai reaching for his chair and upending him onto the floor, too lost in the mystery of the Branwens to realize where he had moved to or what he'd tried to the moment he saw him just second ago. The clatter of metal and the impact of his body on the floor pulled the attention of the Branwens away from each other.
"Came back finally?" Raven hummed and shrugged off Qrow's question, walking over to his desk to peruse the many documents laid out, ignoring his sputters as his brain struggled to reboot and comprehend the indignity he'd suffered. Few could say they'd done anything as humiliating to him, Tai now able to count himself among those few.
"That's for getting my daughter killed." He looked out through a squinted eye at Signal's deputy, nodding his head and accepting his punishment, closing his eyes and enjoying the cold floor at the moment until a sharp kick ruined it. "And that's for not telling me she was Beacon's next Commander."
He could suffer this until Tai got his answers. It was the least the man deserved.
"I didn't believe her when she ordered me back, but she did promise me a pardon if I returned and reactivated STRQ." She moved another set of papers aside, viewing many secrets she probably shouldn't have. Qrow and Tai snapped their necks around to stare at her, Qrow taking a long sip to hide his surprise. "And look at this, an already signed copy, ready for my signature."
"Don't make me rescind it." Oz hissed, picking himself up and righting his chair. He snatched back the pardon and set it aside on the tiny pile of papers he'd already sorted through. "I still don't yet entirely know why she went to Vacuo, or what she accomplishing seeing as Yang was too traumatized to do anything more than give back her emblem and hand over her Will, so consider yourself on probation."
"I'm your only S-rank, you can't afford to put me on probation." She snagged a pen from him and deftly signed her name before he could stop her, getting a pout from him when she was done.
He grabbed his pen back before she could damage any of the rest of the paperwork.
"Well, technically, because you went away without leave, your rank degraded down to A-rank." Raven bit back her retort, wanting to tell him where exactly he could stick his A-rank, regretting already signing the pardon and being forced to play nice with his infuriating personality. "The only S-ranks I have are currently suspended because their leader died, and aren't set to return until the Vytal Tournament."
Raven and Tai remained silent while Qrow stroked his beard in contemplation.
"I knew Ruby was up there, but all of them is a stretch." He winced as the wounds and pain of his encounter with her during Glenn acted up, utterly outclassed against not only her terrifying speed but entirely useless against her battlefield presence. "Though, she wouldn't have expected any less from them."
"Ruby was an S-rank?" Tai asked, getting a nod from both Ozpin and Qrow. That was probably the larger shock than learning she was his next Commander. "Blake, Weiss, and Yang are ALL S-ranked?"
"One of the many requirements for even being considered for the position is achieving S-rank, and until Raven here returned I didn't really have a choice but to consider her as a viable candidate, and for the last six months she was essentially in charge without being appointed."
"I can see she left you more than enough paperwork to deal with." Qrow pointed out.
"Yes, and because she so conveniently died, I can't send her on any mundane patrols for leaving me to deal with all of this." If Qrow was anyone else, he would happily retire having seen the infallible Ozpin pout at his predicament.
"Hold up, Stop. Wait a minute." Tai grabbed all of their attention. "You're telling me that Ruby, my Ruby, our Ruby, was our S-ranked Commander?"
"She was terrifyingly good at it too." Ozpin rested his face against the palm of his hand, pulling down his features to rub away the tiredness. "She had the entire next decade of Beacon planned out, all the way from our next expansion to the balanced budget sheets!"
His exasperation boiled over, a few of these balance sheets getting thrown out to his audience. Qrow unraveled the sheet of paper thrown at him earlier, glancing over the millions of Lien Ruby so casually seemed to manipulate and move, stopping his inspection on a particular account labeled as 'miscellaneous'.
He knew exactly why Oz was essentially throwing a tantrum, smirking at the exactly zero amount of funds allocated to it.
"She took away your hot chocolate." He crumbled up the sheet again and threw it right back, smiling satisfactorily as it bounced off his head. Oz straightened it out and placed it among the other similar sheets, resolving to look over it later.
"Now I only have the few tonnes of it left in my hanger because I don't dare mess with an excess budget for the first time in over a decade." The amount he had stored away was only slightly surprising. "Especially because she somehow balanced out funding and running Beacon at only slightly less than full performance."
"Wasn't supposed to be condemned several decades ago?" Raven chirped in, vastly interested in this new development, almost eager to learn of how Ruby had done the impossible freed the district from the harrowing nightmare of Grimm. "The place was supposed to be overrun and deigned hostile."
"It was, until about two weeks ago when I was assigned to shadow the team and they proceeded to rip through the district with absolute ease," Qrow interjected, knowing more than he could report and put down on paper. "It was the day I truly understood what Ruby had become, and how much stronger than me she was."
"What do you mean 'become'?" Raven wisely remained silent to Tai's question, having no doubt already interacted with the monster in the guise of Ruby and already thankful Tai hadn't seen fit the yell at her just yet for leaving those many years ago. Ruby was his priority and she took the forefront to his personal issues.
"I wasn't told where we were going until the bullhead landed and was ordered to remain silent, because this manipulating ass wanted me to see rather than simply be told, to learn what Ruby had 'become'." He spat the word out, crimson eyes glazing over with bloodlust. "What I hadn't been told was the district had already been cleared of Grimm and was instead occupied by an expeditionary force from the White Fang meant to use the tunnels to ferry Grimm into the inner districts to cause strife and gain influence."
"But you said -"
"Team RWBY slaughtered all but their leader, a man Blake later interrogated to get information of what his team was doing there and what else was planned in the area and then was summarily executed to prevent a loose end." Qrow cut Tai off with a sharp movement of his hand to let him continue speaking. "When I tried to order them to stop, Ruby ordered her team to continue without her and chose to engage me in combat where I was humiliatingly defeated."
"Good for the kid. Finally growing up and making her mark on the world." Okay, so maybe Raven wasn't the best person to have nearby when trying to convey the magnitude of her actions, so stuck in her pragmatic maternalism to understand, or maybe it was the failed psychological assessment talking. "Completely not anything like you described her to me though."
That part was interesting, Ozpin not knowing Qrow and Raven had remained in contact at all after their initial separation.
"No… no… that's… not Ruby." Tai collapsed limply against the Headmaster's desk, the life driven from his chest, replaced with a growing sense of horror and fear, his image of his daughter, Summer's daughter, shattered. "Ruby was nice and kind, bubbly and honest, friendly. She wasn't this monster you make her out to be. You have the wrong person."
"The Ruby we knew never existed. She was a mask she created to fit in with people." Qrow got a subtle nod and took out his scroll, quickly navigating to Ruby's profile via convenient shortcut, a bright glaring KIA banner reminding him she was gone. "Much like Raven here, she failed her psych exam."
Tai took the offered scroll and was first assaulted by the three profile pictures of Ruby, each one showing her slightly differently. The one from most recent memories was of her wearing her mirrored sunglasses, but the next two brought him up short. The second had her wearing a blindfold, and the third one had her eyes visible, a pair of soulless black voids where he knew Summer's silver eyes should've been.
Her official name had him swallowing thickly, the dual names of Belladonna and Branwen sending his thoughts spiraling. Everything important about her profile was wrong. She was sixteen, not twenty. She had silver eyes, not these black marbles. She was definitely not responsible for over fifteen classified S-ranked missions and was certainly not an alternatively sane psychopath as some psychologist from Monty claimed.
Before he could protest this wasn't his Ruby, a very important tag dragged his eyes away, labeling her as a time traveler from four years of their future. A quick look across her teammate's profiles also revealed they had similar tags associated with them, their ages, names, and psych assessments changing to suit them.
"That's so cool." Raven had at some point snuck behind him to gaze across his shoulder at the jaw-dropping documents in his hands. "Though that certainly explains why Yang didn't immediately try to kill me when she saw me, but damn can she punch." She traced the scar on her chin fondly. "She gets that from you by the way."
She got promptly slugged and sent into the same cracked wall he'd recently vacated. Ozpin only massaged the twitch from his forehead away, resolving to never have that part of the wall fixed as it only seemed to attract attention.
"Fairly sure she got that from both of you." A large sweatdrop made its way down Qrow's face as Tai turned to glare at him.
"Alright, I'll bite. Ruby wasn't the Ruby I knew, and I sure as hell don't want to know why she becomes a psychopath in our future, but tell me this." Both Qrow and Ozpin tried hard to keep the surprise from their faces at his quick acceptance. "Something or someone got through four S-ranks and managed to kill - " He stopped as his heart missed a beat, a dull emptiness settling deep into his chest. "- to kill one of them, and neither of you seems concerned."
Ozpin realized that matter only now, knowing it would do nothing to suppress Tai and Raven's curiosity. The remainder of RWBY had sent Tai here for a reason, Ruby sending Raven here for the same, to have him explain everything as petty revenge for siccing Qrow on them earlier during the Glenn expedition.
"I assume you found the hidden files then, Qrow." He swiped open the log file, grimacing at the timestamp denoting Qrow's last viewing of it. He'd kept his silence about it, for whatever reason, as much as it may have killed his heart to know Ruby had, in all terms, signed her own death warrant.
"My Commander's orders were her own, but I never expected her to activate it, or for her team to go through with it," Qrow grunted out, drinking the last of his alcohol for some measure of stability, the implications behind Ruby's last order hitting far worse than her death.
Ozpin brought up the order and stared at it for a while, Ruby's signature scrawled messily at the bottom, her teammates co-signing to mark their acceptance.
"Unlike Raven here, who only failed her psych assessment due to her rough childhood, Ruby failed so spectacularly she was deemed incapable of serving and a threat to not only herself but anyone she worked with." Ruby's initial report from Monty quickly found its way onto the holographic projector for Tai and Raven's viewing pleasure. "Her teammates only barely passed and received warnings for careful monitoring, mostly due to their unwavering loyalty to her and questionable morals."
Tai and Raven, already made aware of Team RWBY's actions silently revised their opinions of the team, marking them more as active combatants in a war rather than Hunters. Only the latter had ever fought within one, knowing how much of a toil the devastating nightmare could have on a mind.
"Almost immediately upon her acceptance, Ruby made me aware of who and what she once was, along with the consequences of her timeline, one of which was a psychopathic alter ego so ingrained in her psyche it was hard to tell the difference between the two."
"And yet she could so easily switch between the two as if changing clothes, Ruby taking the role as the Hunter in charge of administering the Hunters as a whole and leading, while her alter took charge of field assignments," Qrow added, keeping the name of the alter ego quiet more for Tai's sake than anything.
"But she was also acutely aware of the danger the alter ego could pose if she ever lost control over the shred of sanity she operated on, a danger she'd faced twice in her past, both times slaughtering hundreds without remorse until her team could calm her down or knock her out." Ozpin had long ago perused the records Ruby had granted him to gain a better perspective on how she had developed and the reasoning behind many of her actions.
Her utter pragmatism behind many of her orders was in stark contrast to his own policy of non-interference. She wasn't afraid to challenge the establishment or the status quo to impose her ideology, and definitely had the sheer ability to ensure she succeeded.
"In order to ensure she could never harm an innocent, Ruby created a last effort order in case she ever lost control, which was then verified and agreed upon by Weiss, Blake, and Yang." Prune made its way to the display now, the primary images of the four members of RWBY appearing at the top with a mission classification of SS across the top. "In the event she lost control, they'd be under orders to contain her, but…"
He scrolled down to the secondary and final part of the order, a ball of disbelief coalescing to join the horror from earlier. "... in the event the three of them determined she was too far gone to return to sanity or posed a large enough threat they couldn't contain, they then had the authority to kill her."
Silence reigned supreme in the office as Tai slumped limply onto the floor, not able to believe Yang could go through with such an order. She'd been terrified of him when she saw him earlier, not because she had to deliver the news, but the horrifying circumstances behind it.
"No, Yang wouldn't do that. She was supposed to protect her." Emotions stampeded down the rational words of his Headmaster, pushing away the changes to his two daughters and leaving him wanting their pre-Beacon selves back. "Where did they go? I want to talk to them."
"Even if I knew where they disappeared to, I wouldn't dare tell you to protect what little peace they'll get with each other. Besides, the three months we have until the Vytal Tournament will give us enough time to figure out how to deal with many of Ruby's orders, and there's enough to completely overwhelm Qrow's network."
The aforementioned spymaster repeatedly banged his head against the nearest wall at the mention of more work, already vaguely aware of the sort of orders Ruby gravitated to.
"Then what? You're going to let three of your Hunters get away with legal murder?" Righteous anger replaced his grief almost instantaneously, upset Yang had the audacity to even agree to such an order, let alone go through with it.
"Get away with it? They did nothing wrong as Ruby asked to die, and between them, they hold enough power to ignore any summons or punishment." Ozpin's replied, almost scripted, the reminder of certain files locked away sending goosebumps across his skin.
"Gonna roll over as usual then, just like when Raven left and you couldn't stop her!" Qrow's lips twisted into a grimace, Raven shrugging nonchalantly at her treasonous actions more than a decade ago.
Tai flinched away as Ozpin stood and slammed his hands onto the desk, anger roiling across her appearance, eyes flashing a brilliant silver, characteristic twinkle missing.
"Team RWBY isn't a team of Hunters, not with what they've accomplished so far, and especially not since the war they participated in the future. I couldn't go after Raven because I had no other S-rank to bring her in, and at the height of their power, Team RWBY annihilated the entirety of Vacuo from the map!" He sat back down, slumping as the anger faded. "You want to go punish your daughter and her team, then go, I won't stop you, but if you want answers, then shut the fuck up and wait for their return."
Raven looked suitably both impressed and terrified at the prospect of four people able to destroy a several million kilometer squared country, and not die from the Aura overload of channeling enough to do so.
"Who're we fighting?" The classic Branwen bloodlust glowed in Raven's eyes, memories of the Faunus Rights Revolution playing through her mind, the sounds of squishy flesh getting rent apart and the smell of decay ripe. So much pointless death to prove a small and simple point Faunus and Humans were equal, an easy point because they could reproduce with one another.
Many times in his traumatic past did humans try to bring in their own version of racist or speciesist policies, and each time they'd been rebuffed, both peacefully and violently. This next era of revolution was coming frighteningly fast and would be decided during the Vytal festivities, and would decide whether all of Ruby's work went to waste, or whether his sister began her reign of terror.
"In three months the White Fang will assault the Amity Colosseum and provoke a war between Atlas and Vale from their hijacking of their droid personnel." He predicted the snort from Qrow, continuing despite him wanted to get a word in. "Blake has already created an isolated server on the CCTS for their droid virus to infect, but will still transmit as if operational, leaving the attack crippled."
"The Fang's already crippled," Raven added, getting three quizzical looks in response. "Ruby negotiated a deal with Sienna Khan while in Vacuo for her guaranteed neutrality, support in denouncing Adam's Fang, and return to Menagerie in return for Beacon's support in passing the Faunus Equal Rights Bill."
"Ruby should've known Beacon has no control or influence within the Council." Tai pointed out as Ozpin quickly wrote down the events of Vacuo, finding it to fit too perfectly within Ruby's plans to be a coincidence.
"Legally, Beacon has no voice, true, but the representatives are subject to the will of the people. Yang has used both Qrow and Blake's network of informants to spread positive propaganda for Faunus rights with a predicted eight seats set to change during the pre-Vytal elections, and Blake has already executed three other Councilmembers for crimes ranging between hoarding child pornography and selling military secrets to the Fang. Idle, the team, has been not."
"Eleven seat changes aren't enough to pass the Bill, but Blake has enough blackmail to force both the Head Councilmember and three others to vote for it. With Beacon's CCTS tower, we control when the information about the resolution is released, so we wait for Adam to attack and time it to appear during their assault to demoralize them and eliminate the threat once and for all."
Raven narrowed her eyes, slightly pissed off her plans for a grand battle would be cut short.
"The Bill comes as a two-fold attack against the old regime as not only will it solidify Faunus rights within Vale, but the activation of Menagerie's CCTS tower will only be seen to support it, driving the remnants of the Fang away from their fanaticism and back to peace."
"Oh come on!" Raven whined childishly. "Ruby promised me a war, and I come all this way to find out she's completely cucked any and all possible wide-scale conflict." Ozpin stared at her unblinkingly, letting her know his feelings on her wanton sadism. Qrow smacked her on the back of her head for good measure. "Where did they get the money for a fucking Tower?"
"The SDC has been under the direct control of Weiss after Jacques Schnee's untimely death After she bought out the Board of Trustees, she freed all of the 'indentured servants' working in her mines and moved them to Menagerie over the course of the last few months. She's done wonders for building trust between the two entities, and has likely bankrupted her own company in this endeavor."
"Oh good, I almost thought I was going to be useless here, but apparently I can just take my vacation now. I don't even know why I came back as it seems everything's under fucking control." The lone female ranted, storming off towards the elevator and smashing the request button.
Tai snagged her hand as she moved into the elevator, stopping her completely. Her hair shaded over her eyes, leaving her blind to her emotions, but her hand tightened around her sword hilt.
"Let go Tai. I'm not in the mood for some emotional spittle to keep me here. Ruby's dead and Yang's gone, and whatever we had together has long burned out." Still refusing to turn around, she was blind to the sudden strength of Tai as he threw her into the same overused cracked wall. Moaning as her Aura activated, she brushed aside her hair to glare at Tai with a tilt to her head. "Now there's the Tai and I know and fell for."
Seriously, was every single problem going to be solved with liberal applications of violence? First, Ruby's entire outlook and so-called 'greater good' only came about because she was willing to use violent and ultimate means to ensure her version of the truth, and now, it looked like STRQ was getting back together because of similar violent means.
What was wrong with sitting down and talking?
The sounds of bureaucracy echoed in his ears, or rather the lack of work getting done did. So often did democracy fail because some twat decided to tie up its critical functions behind red tape to exploit the working class, get away with not paying his taxes, or avoid court sentencing. If anything, Ruby was proving money was useless and only might made right, and she could get away with it because that was the sad truth about the human race.
Their respect for power, to gravitate towards the strongest, would never leave them. Their primary need to assert control, whether positive or negative, came from their pride that they were right and better than others, and not even Ruby could escape it. She thought she was right and wanted to change the world.
Once Ruby and her team were gone, whether from old age or accident, the same forces they crushed would return and rise up to oppress another group of people until another powerful force rose up to challenge them, starting the same cycle again and again.
It was an intensely sobering thought, knowing they were doomed to repeat this cursed cycle almost permanently, but as he watched Tai pick up Raven and smile sadly at Qrow, he couldn't help but think whatever peace they could achieve was worth it, no matter how long it lasted or why it came about.
That small amount, however often it occurred, was why they existed, to provide some measure of peace to each new generation in hopes they would learn from it. Decades ago the Faunus Rights Revolution rocked the four city-states but gave them those decades back in a tentative peace, and soon more conflict would emerge only to give way to more peace. Lives would be lost and families torn asunder, but maybe, just maybe, they'd get through it.
He smiled as Qrow pulled Tai into a hug, both of them mourning the loss of their daughter. Ruby had done something universally good by bringing Raven back to her team, and even one good deed counted against her growing list of crimes. He'd have to find his ancient copy of the Geneva Convention and start a checklist, but for now, it was time to let his reforged team bond and cry.
Two days had passed since she saw either Weiss or Yang.
After their arrival at the freshly abandoned Castle Schnee, the now President went and locked herself in her new study, taking the box containing Ruby's Will and refusing to let them talk to her. Yang similarly went to the lowest reaches of the castle and commandeered Serenity's hangar, kicking out any scientist or engineer milling about to take full control and finally complete the project.
The only reason she knew where they even were was because she'd periodically sent out clones to make sure they were still alive and bring some food. They hadn't left their chosen domains for much more than to use the restrooms.
With no one other than Rei to keep her company, she was slowly starting to lose whatever shackles of sanity still remained after Ruby's death. Glowing red eyes were her only companion in a darkened bedroom, sucking all of her grief and anger away until she was nothing but an empty shell left slumped in front of a computer.
She didn't know how to feel about the little Grimm anymore. She had been Ruby's, a gift from a slighted deity to celebrate a pact between her children and her brother's faction to end a gruesome war before it even had the chance to begin. Ruby had made the deal for a reason, crippling herself in the process to protect innocent civilians not even native to her birth dimension. And now they had nothing left except for a creature they had been trained to annihilate with extreme prejudice with malignant eyes their leader had used to see the world again.
Eyes with better night vision than her own Faunus ones. Ones which could see further with better clarity than military binoculars. Which could and would frequently send greenhorn Hunters scattering for the hills. Which could see with both the visible and infrared spectrum and were specifically designed to hunt down humans.
A stupidly expensive vase saw its end against the wall as her anger boiled over. It was childish to react to her wife's death like this. Nothing would bring her back, and rationally, she should move on, clinging to Yang and Weiss as the two pillars of stability she still had. But she wasn't feeling entirely too rational at the moment, not with the Rei there to keep her in control, and especially not with the update she'd just received from Qrow.
She couldn't fault him too aggressively, not with the events of the last few days still rippling through Beacon and the new High Command team. Ruby had left specific instructions and moved into place so many pieces, leaving behind a veritable mountain of condensed notes for Ozpin and Qrow to get through, and if it was taking Weiss longer than two days to sort through it than what hope did the two of them have?
Complacency chased away the feelings of helplessness, the sudden calm sending her head spinning to look over at a yipping Rei, tongue lolling out in near drunken happiness. She was good for keeping hot heads cool, but Blake couldn't shake those glowing eyes so filled with innocence and mirth.
She was feeding on her negative emotions but she was still the little and docile puppy Ruby had first brought with, filled with constant negativity from the three castle inhabitants. Alone, without Rei to absorb the miasma of grief and desperation, she was sure there would've been at least a Grimm nest at the base of the mountain.
Maybe then, at least, it would've broken the other two from their funk and had them see some bright sunlight and breath in some fresh air. Sure she wasn't the pinnacle of health after sitting cloistered in a bedroom and letting her skin glow paler by the hour, but she at least had some contact with the outside world and that had to count for something.
And as much as she wanted to strangle Cinder Fall, she was an enigma not even she and Qrow together could track, disappearing with greater ease than Torchwick did among the underworld. With Junior at the helm of Beacon's criminal informants, he could be traced with some difficulty, but Fall moved through Salem's dimension, making it impossible.
She closed the laptop, vast spreadsheets filled with names, numbers, and geolocations burnt into her retinas. Massaging the images from her eyelids away, she felt Rei curl up against her legs and yip once, licking her a few times to grab her attention. She got a few head scratches for her trouble, rolling onto her back to indulge in some baseless pleasure until it suddenly stopped as her new owner stood and stretched as she walked to the door.
Her teammates deserved more than just a message notifying them the odds of their war had drastically changed. Rei scampered along, nipping at her heels as she padded down the carpeted hallway leading to Weiss' study. More so than usual, the empty corridors emanated a distant cold, the dark stone of the castle sapping any warmth still lingering from her blankets.
Yang's Aura flared up, chasing away the cold and replacing it with a comforting warmth, making her decision to be out and about in a camisole and shorts all the more reasonable. At least Rei wasn't affected by the cold, her impermeable form shrugging off the temperature.
She didn't quite know where Weiss had absconded with the Will and was even more confused with the castle layout than she was before after finding corridors to nowhere, disappearing staircases, and impossible overlapping rooms, but she could trust she'd eventually get there after kneeling down to Rei and asking her to find her white-haired other-mother.
The puppy leapt off in a great chase, periodically stopping to sniff the ground or air and then bounding off wherever her nose dragged her, Blake following dutifully. She stopped when Rei started scratching at a nondescript door, her claws unable to do more than leave shallow trenches streaked around the bottom rail.
She instantly ran in the moment Blake cracked open the door, nipping into the study in a burst of shadows. Blake opened the door further, not entirely sure what to expect after the last clone's visit, but certainly not expecting the office space to be littered with sheets of paper taped to every visible surface, with many more scattered around the floor and coffee table.
And smack in the middle was a slumped over Weiss, hands tangled in her messy and disorganized hair. She looked up at the noise, revealing tear marked cheeks and raw red eyes all centering around dull blue eyes.
She briefly composed herself, wiping her face clear with the back of her hand before speaking. "Leave Blake. I don't want to deal with one of your clones. I'm perfectly able to take care of myself."
A dark ball of fluff shot up to her desk and barked at her, innocent red just begging to be pet. A strangled sob forced itself from Weiss' throat, the little Grimm eliciting far too many memories to be healthy in her current state of mind. Too many times had Rei's natural eyes brokered fevered nightmares about Ruby wearing them, and too often did her mere presence remind them of what they had lost.
Blake looked over a few of the scattered sheets of paper, all of which were either absolutely filled with dense mathematical proofs which flew over her head or crossed out in haphazard scribbles.
"You're the real Blake, aren't you?" Weiss asked in a meek whisper after Blake refused to answer, hands grasping for some stability from Rei, the puppy all too willing to sit and be pampered. The Faunus carefully looked over the few maths she could make out, the few ancient variables she could make out pointing to a physics-based equation.
Another sheet had similar formulas, this time with color-coded variables, each corresponding to the four colors of Team RWBY. Enormous units of energy were highlighted in yellow, similarly large units of velocity and acceleration in red, and an unknown unit in blue. The last one had dozens of angry green arrows with question marks leading to them.
Dozens of more sheets had intricate fractal designs painted on them, each with corresponding stability and energy intake values. All but one had been slashed through with green and tweaked in the next iteration until the last one, a large 'WHY?' replacing the strikethrough. Under this one were their four relative masses denoted in kilograms with even more formulas and proofs scribbled underneath it, all with similar green arrows painted towards the 'WHY?'.
She finally settled on a sheet with a rough sketch depicting their four forms within a very familiar glyph with spiraling streaks of silver Aura trailing off into the positive z-axis. Large balls of red, blue, and yellow channeled Aura into the glyph while a purple Aura stood by. She didn't need to say anything, just hold up the paper accusingly, soft amber eyes filled with understanding.
Weiss refused to meet her gaze, far more interested in the ribbon wrapped around her teammate's throat. A tear threatened to spill over once her chin was moved upwards against her will, a pair of intensely smoldering cauldrons of gold invading her personal space to lock her in place. A chaste kiss shut down her remaining mental functions, her free hand reaching for the back of Blake's head and getting hopelessly tangled in her black locks.
Papers carefully organized on her desk were thrown aside as Blake grabbed her by the collar and dragged her over to her side, her other hand wrapping around her waist and holding her tightly against her own body. Instincts finally kicking in, Weiss wrapped her legs around Blake and locked her ankles, deepening the kiss to lose herself completely.
Rei whined softly and hid her eyes cutely behind her paws, her nature making her unable to absorb the bright and choking emotions of love and acceptance.
She was denied anything more as Blake broke the kiss and nipped at her bottom lip, resting her against the desk and pressing their foreheads together. Weiss didn't need to hear any words to know Blake had seen what'd she'd been up after devouring the contents of Ruby's Will, fruitlessly searching for a deus ex machina to bring their leader back to them.
Whatever problems Weiss was having with her unknown blue units paled in comparison to their lack of an expert in controlling Ruby's rather volatile and trigger happy Semblance, any attempted usage beyond barely accelerating their bodies ending in plowed furrows and injured pride. By the time they had made the first made the time/dimension jump, Ruby had reigned almost supreme control over her Semblance to the point of using it for neuronal and internal body function acceleration, a level they'd most likely never reach.
"I couldn't, I mean, I can't figure out why my time travel won't work the way I want it to." A tear threatened to streak down her cheek until Blake wiped it away with a caring thumb. It wasn't hard to imagine how much she wanted for her magnum opus to work, for it to throw the three of them back in time and prevent the terrible repercussions of Prune. "But time is understood so little and I can only move objects to other dimensions."
Blake released a quiet snort, the notions such an intricate part of their reality, space, could be bent to the whim of three Semblances working together, but for the more incorporeal and vicious time to remain beyond their reach. After years spent together on the field, she knew Weiss wasn't asking for absolution for her failure to get it to work, but for her failure to get back to Ruby.
Her eyes sparkled with forgiveness and Weiss breathed a sigh of relief and tightened her hold around her partner's neck, content to sit and let those golden lasers burn the last of her doubt away. If only Weiss had learned to accept the good times and not let her foul mouth ruin them, having been repressed far too long under Jacques' reign to let her freedom of speech lie quietly.
"Is two days all you need to mourn your wife?" The dark humorous overtone disguised a nasty undertone of accusation and betrayal, making the deep purple shadows under her suddenly sharp and freezing eyes stand out. Blake didn't immediately react to the increased grip on the back of her head or the seeping cold of her transplanted piece of Weiss' core reacting to its original owner's emotions.
Weiss got a front row seat to what an incensed and grieving Faunus could do as she was lifted with ease and slammed into a bookcase, the slats of woods stabbing sharply into her spine. This pain took a backseat to the lack of oxygen filtering down to her lungs, Blake's hold just soft enough to avoid breaking her larynx or snapping her neck.
A low growl reverberated against her eardrum and she swallowed heavily, the simple action made extremely painful. Blake's pupils were almost non-existent, thin black holes piercing the ever-glowing storm of an exploding quasar. Shackles of Aura held her limbs down, drastically weakening the token protest to her imprisonment.
Blake's Aura pressure wasn't anywhere near as devastating as Ruby's, a sucking void meant to drain her enemy's hope and leave them paralyzed with thoughts of suicide. No... her's was a creeping maelstrom of subtlety, meant to invoke the childish feeling of being scared of the dark, of being afraid of the monsters lurking just out of sight. Too often had she been the monster, using her sheer skill to skulk in shadows and the dark to end the lives of worse monsters.
By Beacon's own rules she wasn't doing anything remotely illegal, seeing as their governance extended to the threat of Grimm and their nests, but under the laws of the five countries, she'd be found guilty beyond a reasonable doubt by a jury of her peers. Ruby had done marvels by painstakingly writing out every single mission report by hand and then discretely filing into her team's physical file box, notifying Ozpin with a copy to be burnt at his discretion, but how she'd flown four S-ranks under the radar of the other three major countries was a mystery not worth pursuing. How Ozpin would handle their ranks and instances within the Hunter database was his problem, not theirs.
Wasn't like he could actually make them do anything, three S-ranks being just about equal to what the forces of Beacon could handle if the new High Command team was ignored.
Three normal S-ranks anyway.
"Don't forget who had to make the decision to either save Ruby from hell or kill her then and there to alleviate her suffering." A rarely used raspy voice tickled her eardrum, her brain taking a few precious seconds of oxygen-deprived thinking to realize Blake was actually speaking for the first time in forever. The grip on her throat lessened until she could place her feet back on stable ground, resolving to never again piss off her quiet but excessively violent teammate.
She could mentally feel Ruby's gaze on the back of her head, her leader reminding her too often she was just as violent and far more trigger happy to blow stuff up. A small smile graced her face, her memories chasing the phantom Ruby away.
Blake stepped back, placing a kiss on her forehead as an apology for her actions, simultaneously telling her a whole bunch of other things with her hesitance to do so, the quick dilations of her pupils, and the minute fidgeting of the deadly forearm ribbons.
"You're forgiven." Blake's ear immediately popped up at full attention, wiggling ever so slightly, happy she could get the message across. She had had no reason to fault Weiss for her dark levity, trying to make the best of their situation while also trying to extract information from their spy, their only real connection to the outside world during their isolation. "I loved her too." She quietly murmured, booping Blake on her nose on the way to picking up her scattered work from the floor. "What made you finally crawl out of your secluded hole?"
Blake removed her trusty scroll, swiping open the dreaded report from Qrow. Despite him having an innate trust in the wireless global communication system, he was paranoid enough to encrypt the message on top of the built-in program, not a tactic he'd employed until now. The shift to wartime paradigm didn't escape her eyes.
Weiss glanced over the offered scroll, a tired sigh escaping her lips as she fished around for a file within Ruby's box, removing a document and staring at it accusingly before circling a subsection angrily with a highlighter. Blake read the first few words upside-down, deciphering keywords related to the activation of wartime paradigms and increases to Vytal security, all nestled under a larger section relegated to a contingency plan if a Maiden ever fell into the wrong hands.
Blake took back her scroll, moving around the desk again and locking a hand on Weiss' wrist, gently tugging her from her seat. She didn't say anything as she pulled her into the hallway, Rei bouncing behind them and getting tangled in their legs.
She shoo'd the pup away, Yang's name sending her into pursuit mode, nose sniffing out the almost dead trail leading down to the depths of the castle. Weiss continued to let Blake drag her along, not entirely sure the surreal experience of following a Grimm to Yang was real, or whether this was a sleep-deprived hallucination brought on by Ruby's death.
The brisk dry cold made her aware this was real, the rough-hewn stone of the deepest levels sending shivers up her spine despite her being a Schnee and her short stint in the northern regions of Atlas. Rei didn't seem affected by the cold at all, her incorporeal form shrugging it off, but a glance to Blake's arm forced her to facepalm, creeping warmth racing along her limbs as she reached into her core and activated Yang's core fragment.
She didn't need to see the smile on Blake's face to know she was internally laughing at her, a return squeeze on her hand telling her more than anything. As stupidly dangerous as Project: Chimera was, she'd happily go through the mind-blanking pain again if it meant she could have a piece of her teammates with her at all times.
The darkened stone corridor eventually led out into a pristine hallway, so white and clean it made her want to scrub her eyes lest it remain burned into her corneas forever. She knew where this hallway lead to, but she'd only ever taken the elevator to get here, bypassing the winding and hidden passageways she didn't even know about.
During the years of Jacques Schnee, the lower levels of the Castle were relegated to hangar space for his private aircraft, but Yang has completely obliterated any resemblance to a hangar as her namesake dictated, leaving only the thick rolling doors to the bleak outside.
Scattered around the hangar were workstations and computers borrowed from inner-city SDC labs. Her scientists and engineers had thrown a helluva fit when Yang had come calling for Serenity and usurped their leadership and equipment, moving everything to under the Castle. They had quieted down after she'd reassigned them to experimental renewable energy technology and granted them a larger budget.
After siphoning the Faunus 'workers' from her mining camps, she ran into the problem of a huge income deficit, the expenditures of her company rapidly draining any stored funds. Automation had only partially solved the issue but frequent breaks and parts replacement, along with specialized equipment, required more funds than she had initially set aside.
Her big savior had come in the form of Ghira Belladonna chasing ideas of how to deal with the sudden influx of tens of thousands of Faunus. All of them might've barely had space with housing being constantly constructed, but many of them had nowhere to work and know nothing outside the world of mining.
She'd quickly hired many of those seeking employment back, restructuring her labor laws to guarantee safety and giving them livable wages and improved housing on-site while also allowing Menagerie appointed inspectors to periodically come in and make sure she wasn't following in the footsteps of her father.
Some disgruntled Faunus within Menagerie had cried abuse when her initial offer to reopen the mines fully had come through, most of them coming from the far-right militarized Fang supporters, but months of transparency between the SDC and Menagerie had smitten their arguments away, the two entities relying on each other to remain in good standing and afloat. Blake had quietly ensured the entire operation remained out of the news media, personally ferrying letters and contracts between the isolated island and Weiss while at Beacon.
Moving through the mess, Weiss started calculating the absurd cost of some of the extravagantly expensive pieces seemingly laying about with no rhyme or reason. She hadn't expected Yang to put such a dent into her funds while completely an essentially complete aircraft, the only real pieces missing being armaments and shielding, both of which had already been manufactured to her specifications and only needed to be installed.
Yang either didn't notice them from her spot working with a few wires within the interior fuselage, or she was ignoring them until they got closer. The classic bullhead frame had long ago been reshaped into a slimmer profile with the side doors sealed and the rear ramp installed, suited for the deployment of a first response team, sacrificing its larger fuselage and cockpit.
Her RAPIER engines had replaced the twin conventional jet engines, being moved from the ends of the wings to the back, twin rudders sticking out from their tops for greater yaw and pitch control. Its high aspect, high constant wings had been entirely redesigned into high ogival downswept deltas with foldable wing tips, screwing up its low-speed aerodynamics, but greatly increasing their control at the high speeds the RAPIERs could achieve at full burn.
The drop in control was countered with efficient turbines fans to enable quick drops from hypersonic mode and into battle mode, all of their weapons rendered useless while in the former. It allowed the craft to strafe in the same way the bullhead could, able to provide cover fire and greater maneuverability within tighter spaces, further increasing the near indomitable firepower Team RWBY could already bring.
They'd spared no expense on fully outfitting the first Serenity, but Yang was taking it to absurd levels to the point where there was a spare GAU-8 Avenger lying disassembled while the main one was already installed into the nose, and the only reason they didn't have two was because the sheer recoil would make the craft unflyable. There were dozens of other pieces of classified Atlesian weaponry lying around, making both of them wonder what exactly Yang had had to do to obtain those in less than two days.
A loud bang followed by an even louder expletive came out of Serenity, the monochromatic duo sharing looks of unsurprise, walking up to the lowered ramp and waiting for a Yang to stumble out of the black smoke. A self-satisfied duo awaited their last remaining teammate, Yang eventually coming out while coughing acrid smoke from her lungs, black soot and grease smeared across her face.
Bright crimson speckled with amethyst dared peek through all the dirt on her face, a dirty rag trying and failing to remove it, only succeeding in spreading it around and worsening the problem. She stopped at the bottom of the ramp, blinking the irritant from her eyes and then blinking again as she took in two people she hadn't seen in a while.
They were only slightly concerned when she started chuckling, a few quiet ones escaping before devolving a more normal laugh and then blowing up into a full-blown hysterical cackle, Yang taking to leaning against the craft after she failed to catch her breath and eventually leaving her hiccuping like a demented seal.
"Oh Blake, you've really outdone yourself this time." She clapped a few times to get rid of the soot on her hands, reaching out to the both of them to point accusingly. "I didn't know you could clone other people! Is this something you could always do or is this because of Chimera?"
"I'm real you idiot!" A misplaced wrench flew from the air and nearly hit Yang on her head, a small glyph appearing to deflect it before spiraling away into non-existence.
"Yeah, alright. Blake, I know you know enough about our mannerisms to copy any of us so just drop the act, give me my food, and go back to hiding in your room." Yang's acerbic words had the two of them sharing deadpan looks, her hard head itching for a fight after two days of non-stop work, ignoring Blake's earlier and different visits.
"If you used your head every once in a while you might've noticed Blake hasn't 'copied' me until now." Weiss bantered right back, more preoccupied with wondering how Yang had manifested an automated glyph defense system so quickly.
"You spent two days bringing me food with no reaction. I figure you're taking a different approach to distracting me from…" She didn't need to finish her sentence, the still unspoken event haunting their thoughts and dreams.
"I'm here because Blake dragged me from my office after learning Cinder succeeded in tracking down Amber and stealing her Maiden powers." Yang's red eyes narrowed in suspicion. She moved slowly to a workbench, removing the rest of the grease from her hands with a dirty rag.
"So?" She carelessly threw the rag aside and searches through her electrical components until she found what she needed. "The little girl got killed, big whoop. Nothing we can do about it."
Weiss furrowed her eyebrows, unsure of how to proceed against her nonchalant attitude. A few black shrink tubing found their placeholders in between her teeth as she continued rummaging through the box, making an increasing louder racket.
"We need to discuss how we proceed with our plans."
"The plan hasn't changed." She wiped a couple beads of sweat from her forehead, fixing her short ponytail to keep the hair from her face. "Whatever Ruby had planned is still there and I still have enough faith in her to continue with them. Unlike her wife it seems."
Blake refused to let her words get to her with nothing more than a small twitchy smile to betray she had heard her. A venting Yang was a healthy Yang, despite the misplaced hurt she was trying to inflict on her teammates.
"You're angry," Weiss stated, a not-so-pristine eyebrow raising in mock surprise, arms crossing to convey her annoyance.
That seemed to snap Yang from her taunt calm, crimson eyes suddenly boiling with molten iron and the air around them rising a few degrees, shimmering from the heat produced around her.
"Of course I'm angry!" Whatever small tidbits of hardware were scattered around her workbench or on the floor were sent flying off from the Aura shockwave. "You come here after only two days, thinking you can simply change around Ruby's plans? TWO DAYS! And you're willing to throw away what she built and worked for!"
They planned to let Yang vent, her volatile Aura posing a large threat despite them sharing a fragment, until she was done but Blake was forced to intervene when the floor underneath them started to shake, pieces of the rough cut stone ceiling falling around them. A clone was dispatched to get close and stun Yang from her anger, Blake knowing she could get gruesomely burned if she actually tried to punch her. Much like her mother, uncle, and bloodline before her, the Branwens were intensely passionate creatures susceptible to the basest of the raw emotions, mostly manifesting as burning rage.
A punch soared from the flying clone, intent on slugging Yang on her right cheek and snapping her from her stupor, but even before the burning cloak could dispel her, a glyph instantly appeared from shimmering invisibility, breaking her wrist and forcing an early dismissal. The real Blake grimaced, silently observing the phenomenon of the automatic defense, Yang seemingly unaware the threat to her had even been there in the first place.
"Calm down before you tear our home down." Weiss had moved closer to Yang during her musing, a wrapping of glyphs protecting her from the rampaging heat. "I loved her too, you idiot."
"You have a funny way of showing it." Her ice blue eyes peeked through the dense array of glyphs in front of her, gazing at the crimson eyes wavering behind the heat shield, able to make out the subtle tears leaking out only to get instantly burned up and disappear.
"She had this planned." Yang stared right back for a few moments, the heat gradually dissipating until she was left open the world again, the glyphs following soon after. She almost immediately demanded proof of her words, eyes still burning a harrowing vermilion, making them both wonder if they'd ever return to the brilliant amethyst they so loved. Weiss responded softly, telling her the paperwork was upstairs in her office, getting a disbelieving grunt in return, annoyed Ruby had left her Will in her own hand rather than digitized.
"I trust her enough to have had everything planned, and if she didn't, then I trust you to lead us through the rest." She caressed Yang's cheek softly, her anger slowly abating with each stroke. Stepping forward, she wrapped her arms around her neck and enjoyed the ambient warmth she always gave off. The defensive glyphs didn't pop up this time, making her wonder how their sentience could determine threats to Yang, or why it even chose to manifest.
"You're an idiot." Yang briefly nuzzled her cheek against Weiss' temple, the rolling storm of anger dissipating from within her soul, the dark and stormy crimson dulling to a quiet and mullish maroon, the color of her wife's favorite port. "But at least you're MY idiot."
She already knew Blake was massaging her temple and dragging her face down at the fluffy scene without having to glance over, the Faunus peeking through two of her fingers with a near indiscernible smile. Yang released one arm and beckoned her forward, a black blur shooting forward with a girly giggle before impacting into them with enough force to topple the lot of them and leave them sprawling on the dirty floor.
A barrage of laughter escaped all of them as they realized the absurdity of their situation: laying around in the lowest hangar of now their Castle in front of an almost complete Serenity while trying to work through Ruby's death, all the while Cinder and Salem remained oblivious to the shit-storm waiting for them come the Vytal Tournament.
Despite them losing their leader, they had all the trust their new leader, Yang, would lead to them to the mission finish, finally ending this toiling war with Salem's faction to bring in some measure of peace upon Remnant. Ruby might not have made it to see the end of their mission, but each of them had the drive to see it to the end, vowing to either see Ruby in their form of the afterlife or retire and see peace reign until they were called to answer the next crisis.
"C'mon, lemme show you what I've been working on." Yang pulled the both of them back to their feet, dragging them into the fuselage, brushing aside the errant smudges of soot bedecking the faux leather upholstery, a heavily damaged fuse box bolted within the inner framework where dozens of wires sat sparking with wasted power.
A couple of fuzes littered the ground right underneath it, pinning a schematic with wattage, amperage, and ohm scribbles, Yang's messily scrawled calculations denoted with even messier cross-outs, the correct arithmetic still escaping her.
A woman who had to check what 22 was with a calculator, and she was somehow in charge of building an experimental craft with an estimated worth of half a billion Lien and the ability to travel to suborbital altitude and lay waste to a landscape before leaving with a bone-chilling screech, mutually exclusive.
Serenity was a flying dream with a fundamentally unsound mechanical and electrical engineer, a dangerous aerospace engineer responsible for their bleeding edge hybrid engines, and a computer scientist with a stubborn enough mindset to lock the CCTS tower down behind a virtually indistinct server and craft a sentient AI to pilot and administer Serenity.
Yang had kept Serenity identical to its first iteration, the same collapsible cargo netting seating allowing for expended room for their two motorbikes or a single quad. The upper header area had secured netting to stash their go-bags and other affiliated gear, usually reserved to copious amounts of Dust or ammo to keep them supplied in the heat of battle.
Heavens, hell, and Neo only knew how much Dust Yang alone went through as a catalyst for her matter deconstruction if no other energy source was available, and not even they knew how much Judgement had cost them, potentially leaching off of their life cost to compensate.
For nothing could be gained without first having sacrificed for it, and Aura was a particularly vicious force when it came for its due, far more destructive than Judgement and on par with Annihilation. Yang had taken her genetic weapon and expanded upon it to take advantage of the law of conservation of energy, not even lacking the energy material necessary to send the planet into hellfire when the planet itself could serve as the fuel source in its own demise.
The rather pristine cockpit caught their attention, no evidence of any work being done on the console, taken from their memories and applied near perfectly save for a flat floor-parallel screen molded into the center console. Already the cockpit frame had been shaved down to almost half of a bullhead's standard size in order to further slim the craft profile for Weiss' RAPIER engines.
"Somewhere in between skydiving off the mountain into the snow, redecorating one of your training rooms, and hand-painting our ship a new name, I decided to give the ship's AI a personality." Before Weiss could protest against changing their child's name without either of the other two's input, Yang slid a finger across the screen and activated the high-speed rotating lasers underneath.
The console lights powered on, a warm hum permeating the fuselage as the embedded turbine spun up and prepared for vertical takeoff. The standby lighting flicked off, a typical arrangement to preserve military personnel's night vision unless overridden, but a familiar figure appeared as a hologram and lit up the cockpit, choking off her response.
She poked the hologram, the blue laser figure molding around her finger and trying to bat it aside, but the permeability failed to make anything move. Blake didn't poke the figure like she did, choosing instead to lean forward and inspect the meticulous detail Yang put into this miniature model, unable to find anything out of place from the collapsed scythe to the grey vambraces.
"Serenity never really meant anything to us, and I figured she deserved to be remembered better than just a name on a stone." Yang lowered the center console and blew up the figure, secondary and tertiary cameras opening up from hidden compartments and adding color until their late leader stood in her flickering three-dimensional glory.
"You… you…" Weiss whimpered quietly, unable to look away from the realistic image. Yang was left blindsided with nothing more than a blast of moving air to warn her of an incoming Faunus, Blake clinging to her back with hiccuping sobs escaping periodically. They were rare enough to make her freeze, dry and raspy from lack of use.
She didn't need to know Blake was thankful she had gone through the effort of sculpting Ruby as a hologram in order to give them all a sense of familiarity for the debut of their new airship, at least, that was her personal reasoning. Blake and Weiss knew her far, far too well to think she only did it to fill an emotional hole in the team, knowing she'd lock herself in the cockpit and throw out-of-domain suggestions and questions at the already exquisitely programmed AI.
They already knew she wouldn't get anything worthwhile from the AI, her programming limited to managing the ship's weapon armaments, interfacing with Beacon's computing network, and serving as Ruby's replacement for the bureaucratic nightmare that was paperwork. With the real Ruby not there to steal/do their paperwork, there was no way they were actually going to get any of it done without at least a programmed facsimile there to 'encourage' them, or do it for them.
And yes, Blake was extremely talented when it came to cranking out raw code and manipulating data, but actually putting together a competent AI to do more than Serenity's original parameters would require possibly years of additional work.
"You renamed her!?" Weiss was dangling out from the side cockpit window, legs locked up against the top frame to keep her from slipping out, yelling for her voice to After a short struggle against gravity, she pulled herself back into the cockpit and turned on Yang, face red from hanging upside-down. She couldn't see Blake from behind Yang's blonde mane but could hear her soft, but strangely thankful sounding cries muffled through her human teddy bear.
"We are so not calling her the Ruby Rose. That's an insult to her memory." Weiss stamped her foot, trying to squeeze by Yang to go and rename the ship to something more proper and less degrading.
"You mean you don't want to ride the Ruby?" Weiss stopped her attempt, head snapping sharply to blink rapidly, looking quite unsure whether she had heard correctly. Whatever terrifying mixture of laughter, grief, and gratefulness plaguing Blake was wiped away with the idiotic pun, the human backpack pulling on Yang's ear as punishment.
It was crass and raw, exactly as expected from the team juggernaut. It was her way of working through their leader's death, no longer really stuck on dealing, but finally moving to implement their plans, even adding on to ensure their success.
Blake felt the hole in her heart heal over slightly as Weiss ripped into Yang for her habit, getting a return banter about how 'punny' it was. The twitch in her eye was cuter than anything, Yang laughing it off and ruffling her hair, all the while carrying her around like she weighed nothing.
It was comforting, know they could still work together and hadn't yet completely self-destructed from Ruby's death. None of them had run away yet, ran into the bottle, or really ignored their reality, choosing to lock themselves and focus on productive work as a form of honor. The large scar on her soul would heal eventually, just as long as she had her team.
She could feel Ruby smacking her on the back of her head for the sappy moment, Yang smiling as she felt Blake grin wryly against her neck. Weiss stopped being petulantly angry once she realized nothing she was saying was getting through, a stupid smile gracing her face, and she knew, somehow, they'd be okay.
Never in his life had he seen Ozpin lose it, not in the absolutely cathartic and silent manner his office lay in shambles. Sure, he didn't go postal like any other high strung bureaucrat with a bevy of paperwork littered on the floor and lines of recreational stimulant ready to snort from his desk, but he sure didn't like to keep it in.
His liquor cabinet was decorated with more open bottles than he believed could fit within, spread across the mirror top. More bottles sat strewn across his coffee table, and one bottle of chocolate liquor rested by his side as he sat slumped within his seat and looked over one nondescript sheet.
He barely acknowledged him entering his office suite, rotating slowly back and forth in his seat while frowning and trying to set fire to his paperwork. On top of his evolving alcoholism, his tabletop monitor desk had several concentric cracks across its surface, a testament to how destructive Oz could get when provoked.
Poor desk.
"You wanted to see me?" Qrow snagged one of the many stray bottles, briefly looking over the label and noting it cost several thousands of Lien and taking a seat on the destroyed desk just off to Ozpin's side. He'd been at the mercy of two ex-lovers with enough tension between them to cut with a dull spoon pestering him with questions ranging to what he knew about Ruby and what he'd been up to over the last decade, and had only managed to leave their tender mercies for this meeting.
"Read." Ozpin picked up the paper and gave it one more glance before handing it over, sinking back into his seat to close his eyes and massage away a headache. Qrow took the paper and read over the title, picking out Ruby's signature as well as noting her handwriting.
The title of 'The Lucifer Protocols' already had his other hand clenching onto the table edge, the old Bible reference promising an untold amount of fuckery similar to the way it had originally been responsible for dozens of wars and billions of lives lost centuries ago.
In his opinion, the old book was worth more as a fantasy novel than as the core of a religion, but he had fully read over the text as part of his short stint as a college student for an ancient literature class. His short essay on the creation of the planet had initially been a self-imposed challenge until he ended up gathering all of his university's copies and burned them in the quad.
That'd been the end of his time as a student, unsurprisingly.
The first lines were nothing more than dense legalese denoting Ruby's rank and final executive order, but the next lines had his heart leaping into his throat and his Semblance spilling out of his body to pool down around his feet. Ozpin gently pushed the coalesced shadows around him, his bright Aura repelling the creeping miasma.
"This…" He gulped heavily, giving Ozpin the sheet back only for it to spontaneously combust, taking the damning orders and making sure they never saw the light of day.
"Ruby," Ozpin started, heavily dragging himself from his seat and stretching his limbs while he walked over to the panoramic window and gazed over onto his district, thousands of civilians milling out and about outside his vision range, unaware of the turmoil sitting just under the veil of Beacon's security. ", wasn't a good Hunter, but everything she did was for Remnant and her people as our selfless Commander."
"This is beyond any sort of cover-up I've ever had to perform, and you're asking me to do this to my own daughter, my late Commander." Qrow stole the bottle and easily emptied out the rest of its contents, hoping to blackout the last minute of direct orders. "You can still override her orders as the current Commander."
"Not my decision anymore." He looked over to see what he meant, eyes catching on the silver emblem flying between his fingers. It'd been cleaned from its sooty appearance from the last time he saw it. "You may not be an S-rank on the field, but I'd sooner let the Grimm overrun Vale than make your sister our 5th Commander."
"Than may God forgive me for my sins." He caught the silver emblem, getting lost in her own face appearing on Remnant's moon. He had deep shadows under his eyes, his skin looked gaunt and pale, and his beard looked more scraggly than ever, but it was still him underneath it all.
"I wouldn't be so afraid of God." Ozpin replied glibly, patting him on his shoulder in a show of mocking support as if he knew God himself. "I'd be more afraid of what the rest of Team RWBY will do once they learn of the Lucifer Protocols."
"You mean they don't-" Whatever color he had remaining on her face got sucked into the ever-growing dark pool at his feet when his Headmaster shook his head. No bottle was close enough for him to grab and he couldn't muster enough strength to move across the room and find a decent one. "May God have mercy on me then."
"God left the building years ago Qrow." Ozpin took the silver emblem and pinned it to Qrow's shoulder, stepping back to take in the form of his new Commander. He continued smiling infuriatingly, a silver glow permeating from his warm brown eyes. "But yeah, start praying."
Suddenly being shoved from stark blindness and rupturing chest pain into renewed sight and a permanent feeling of transcendence made this entire situation feel akin to the one time Weiss had spiked her strawberries with a hallucinogenic and she had spent the next few hours on a good trip.
Death wasn't a topic she had ever studied, only accepted as a fact of life, but even she was fairly sure her consciousness was supposed to cease, not end up seated in front of a steel table with an empty chair opposite her. The room around her repeated in an infinite series of reflecting tiles, shooting off into the distance until they disappeared into oblivion.
Taking a moment to take in her bearings, she looked over her form to catch any discrepancies she could remember from the time she could still see what she was wearing. Her hands weren't clean and unblemished as she might've suspected in her afterlife, no doubt her form taking from her memories and choosing the most comfortable body, clothes from her time as Vale's Commander wrapping her and Crescent Rose resting clamped to its holster.
What really interested her was how she could see again, and believing this was simply a construct of her mind quickly went away as a bowl of ice-cream materialized on the metal table, the steel of which she wished was more polished so she could see herself in it. She shoved the thought aside, the question of whether she still had her natural silver eyes or Rei's glowing vermilion deemed mute as a multi-coloured blob of mirror shards combined and revealed a familiar associate.
"Surprised to see me?" Neo's voice, at least the one she used for this afterlife simulation, didn't match what she imagined it to be at full strength. She sat with her legs crossed as she reached for the untouched bowl and started to the devour the ice-cream with speed comparable to her and cookies. "I did promise to save you, but your body didn't make it."
"And why would little ol' me interest you?" She posed the rhetorical question, willing a bowl of strawberries to appear in her hand and getting a vicious grin in response. She was playing Neo's game right now, stuck in a construct with no obvious way out, and at her tender mercy.
She might not have planned to die before the Vytal Tournament, but her plans could still be salvaged, potentially to a greater benefit than initial planned. A similarly ravenous grin formed on her face, a timeline of events forming in her mind with dozens of permutations cycling through the worst possible case scenarios without even counting the rest of her team's interference.
Her endgame had only just begun.
AN: Shoutout to Hellwyrm. Had to quickly take this chapter down due to formatting errors. And drop me a review to let me know what I can work on and how to improve!