He still remembered the day he met her, the day his luck finally changed.

As a reward for her amazingly high Signal Academy entrance exams, Tai had brought Ruby to a pet store to pick out any pet she wanted. Yang and Qrow had tagged along, and while Tai was trying very hard to drag his kids away from the violent and dangerous animals on offer, Qrow was having fun encouraging his girls to look at the deadliest semblance-mutated creatures he could find. Unfortunately, everything looked cute as a baby, even a monster that would be bigger than a house when fully grown.

"Look, Ruby, this one's looking at you!" Tai pulled Ruby away from a Wolf pup already twice her size and tried to get her to look at a much smaller dog, like a Corgi.

"Look, Ruby, this one's looking at you too!" Qrow caught Ruby's attention and pointed out a massive and poisonous snake in a car-sized glass container. Its label claimed that the snake's species was "The Incredibly Deadly Viper".

"Woah, cool!" Ruby rushed over to the viper and pressed her face up against the glass, terrifying it.

Tai silently pleaded for Qrow to stop with his face, but Qrow just shrugged. It was only a matter of time before his bad luck Semblance made something unlucky happen and broke all the glass, freeing all the animals. So he might as well have his fun before that happened.

"Come on, Ruby, look at how sad this puppy looks!" Tai asked, pointing at the dopey and cheerful Corgi soon to be known as Zwei. "Don't you want him?"

"I do I do I do!" Ruby insisted. "I want all of them!"

"We only have room for one pet," Tai reminded her. "A small one."

Ruby broke away from Tai and kept looking around, bouncing off the walls as an excitable bundle of rose petals.

And then, something caught Ruby's eye. She turned around, and pointed through the building's glass window. Her family followed her finger and saw that across the street from this pet store, there was a coldly sterile, clean and eerie orphanage with a miserable boy slightly younger than her staring at her through the building's glass window with big, teary eyes. His hair was red and his eyes were redder, and not just from crying. Her family felt bad, but when they looked down at her heartfelt, touched, and eager face, they felt even worse. "Dad, that one's looking at me!" Ruby insisted. "We have to save him from the orphanage!"

"I don't know..."

"He's small just like me! I'll take good care of him and feed him and-" Ruby began.

Yang laughed. "Ruby, you know that's a person, right?"

"I know that!" Ruby pouted adorably. "But an Orphanage is just like a Pet Shop just for people and I want him!"

Qrow laughed. "That's one way to look at it."

Tai thought about this. His house had felt empty to him for a long time, but he doubted adding just one person could change that. And it's not like there was a stigma around adopting children in a world full of Grimm. He probably lost his family to the Grimm... Then again, there was a chance he was kicked out of his family for misbehaving. He didn't want someone like that in his house. So he'd have to go over there and talk to the manager to find out more about this child. "If we're getting him, then I get to choose the pet," He decided. He genuinely fell in love with that little Corgi.

"Fine! But please pick a puppy they're so cuuute!" Ruby squeed.

"Alright, I'll think about this... But I'm not making any decisions until I find out more about him," Tai decided, striding out of the store and crossing the street, entering the orphanage.

Qrow leaned down to his kids. "Are you sure you'll both be okay with this? If we're serious about keeping him, then he'll have to learn to be a Huntsman like me."

"That'd be so cool!" Ruby squeed, eyes sparkling like infinite diamonds. "I'm finally gonna get a baby brother!"

Yang shrugged. "I'm cool with it. He has red eyes, and my eyes get red when I'm angry. We could say he's our brother and nobody would know any better."

"Hey, bartender!" Qrow called to the pet seller, who was confused. "Sorry, force of habit. We're taking one Corgi to go."

"Thank you!" Said the pet-seller, who was an incredibly hot 20ish white-eared rabbit Faunus girl dressed in white and red. The mere sight of her was enough to make Qrow wish he was ten years younger and in this babe's age range.

"Where do you find these animals?" Qrow asked her.

"I get them from the animal shelter down the road." She explained. "My Semblance lets me rewrite animals to be stronger, faster, bigger, smaller, whatever I want. So I turn animals nobody wants to adopt into warbeasts any Huntsman or Huntress would love to have at his side! Even the smallest pets here will be huge when fully grown!"

Qrow grinned and decided not to tell Tai about this.

Tai emerged from the orphanage, with the kid in tow. As they entered the pet store, the family got a good look at the boy. Short straight red hair that ended at his shoulders and covered one of his cherry red eyes, pale skin, and an expression like a beaten dog offered kindness for the first time in his life. He was dressed in a normal red shirt and normal black pants and scarred and scuffed black shoes that looked like they'd seen a lifetime of use.

And when he was told who wanted to save him from his lonely orphanage life, he rushed over and hugged her. He hugged Ruby Rose tight, and if she was anyone else, she wouldn't have hugged back so quickly. And side by side, red next to red, they certainly did look similar.

"He lost his family to a Grimm attack when he was too young to remember anything," Tai whispered to Qrow, "He lived out in the countryside in the middle of nowhere. By the time the Huntsmen showed up to save him, he was the only survivor, trapped in some box. And the woman who runs the joint wanted to give him away to the first happy family they saw."

"Is he a troublemaker?" Qrow asked hopefully.

"No, they just really wanted him to be happy." Tai explained.

"They feel bad for me," The boy explained sadly. "But that's okay. My name's Blaze."

They noticed that he was still hugging her, tightly yet not squeezing, as if terrified of squishing her and terrified of being dragged away from her.

"What's your last name?" Ruby asked.

"I don't have one. The Grimm killed my parents and burned my farm to the ground before they could tell me my real name."

"Is that why you're called Blaze?" Yang asked. Her father and Qrow cringed.

"Yeah. The Orphanage lady thinks it sounds cool." He didn't seem bothered at all by what she said, as if he thought about what he lost all the time until it stopped hurting as much as it used to.

"Grimm aren't known for leaving survivors." Qrow said. "How did you survive?"

"I only survived because my parents put me in a really tough box. Some old thing from Beacon, that's what the Huntsmen who found me called it. They came to kill Grimm when they saw the smoke and they brought me here. I have a necklace from my parents, and that's all I've got. But it doesn't have any words on the inside, or any pictures."

He reached into his shirt and pulled out a steel cord with a gold heart-shaped locket on the end. It opened when you tapped the bottom, and its interior was blank and perfectly smooth. The two girls leaned closer to get a better look at it, and then Yang noticed something on his face. "What's up with your eye?"

"Which one?" Blaze asked nervously, backing away.

"The one your hair's covering up. Come on, EYE want to see it!"

"Oh, that one. It's... different." He turned away and hid it. "Please don't make fun of it."

"I won't, I just want to see! Come on, EYE promise I won't say anything."

He closed his eyes, pushed his hair away from his covered eye, and opened them to reveal that while his left eye was cherry red, his right eye wasn't cherry red, it was yellow.

"Well that's a let down. Mine are way more different," Yang noted, her eyes flashing to red for a few seconds as her hair ignited.

He leapt away from her in shock his back hitting a shelf full of fish. He calmed down, embarrassed. "Uh... Yeah, they are. But I think they're nice! Nicer than my stupid eyes that don't even match."

"Thanks, kid!" She ruffled his hair like a dog, and he melted into her touch like a puppy that needed more patpats.

"Don't call your eyes stupid, I think they're neat!" Ruby insisted. "One red one and one yellow one. That's cool! It's like you have two different-coloured guns, but they're eyes! What's your Semblance?"

"I don't know." He said sadly. And then he noticed the weapon at Ruby's hip, and became less mopey. "Woah, what's that?"

"You like her?" Ruby gasped hopefully. She unfolded her weapon in the middle of the pet shop and spun her weapon around, accidentally decapitating a statue of a giant lizard before stabbing its scythe point into the ground. The head of the lizard fell on Qrow's foot, hurting him a little, and he decided to leave the room before anything worse struck.

"She's beautiful!" He squeed, stroking the side of the blade. "I love her already!"

"She's also a gun!" She boasted.

"Show me show me show me!" He squeed. "I don't have a Semblance but I've still got aura, shoot me in the face!"

"No, not in here!" The pet store's owner insisted. "Not after the last time someone fired a weapon in here!"

"Aww," The two kids awwed in unison.

"I love weapons," Blaze admitted to his new sister. "I swear I'm not weird, I don't love fighting way too much like a crazy person or something, I just think swords and guns are really really cool! I grew up hearing stories about the best hunters ever, and the super cool weapons they used! I always wanted to draw them but I didn't have any pens or paper."

"That's okay, you can use mine! I built my Crescent Rose today at Signal."

"I want to make something just like it, so we match!"

"Thanks, but you should make the weapons you've dreamed of making instead. A weapon is an extension of its user's soul, after all! Hey, you can paint yours red so we can match in colour!" She offered.

"Yeah!" He smiled.

"You need a last name. Want to be Blaze Rose?" She offered.

"Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!" He looked like an overeager puppy about to soil the floor. Finally, he could have a family!

"Come on, Rubes, why can't he be a Xiao Long?" Yang asked.

"A what?" He asked, confused. "I'm not a show for anyone."

"That's my name. Yang Xiao Long," Yang stated.

"Yang... Yang Shwow Long." He attempted.

"Yang Xiao Long!" She insisted.

"Sand meow wrong." He attempted again.

"Okay, now you're just messing with me!"

He laughed a little. "Yeah," He smiled.

"You're annoying my big sister!" Ruby grinned, hugging him. "You're a real Rose already! By the power invested in me by me, I hereby christen you... Blaze Rose!" Ruby declared.

"Woohoo!" He threw his fists up into the air.

And that was how their destinies became intertwined.

Their family life was happy and sappy and best skipped before two hundred chapters of a perfect cute home life gives you super diabetes. It's like regular diabetes except the sugar granules in your bloodstream wear little capes made of more sugar before they clog your arteries and stop your heart. Over time Blaze came out of his shell of misery, becoming more of a fun and friendly little ball of energy. Whenever someone bullied Ruby and Yang wasn't around to kick their butts, he kicked their butts so bad that next time they tried to bully Ruby when Blaze was around, they ran screaming for Yang to protect them. Which was stupid because then they got beaten up by all three. The important part is that he was enrolled into her class at Signal, since they shared the same age and he had no idea when his birthday was, so she decided to share her birthday with him and give him half of her giant cake-sized cookie.

At Signal, he tried his hardest at everything to make up for his complete lack of natural talent in anything other than weapon-building. He tried way too hard and often injured himself, but he never allowed this to discourage him. Though he lagged far behind her in the speed and skill department, he never discovered what his Semblance was, and he was a mediocre fighter at best. To pay for his keep, Blaze got a job at a small and independent Dust store struggling to make ends meet in a world dominated by the Schnee Dust Company. This gave him more access to Dust so he could start crafting stronger weapons that required more Dust to operate. Many teachers were still impressed by his weapon-building skills, however, and encouraged him to leave behind his dreams of becoming a Huntsman and focus on becoming a professional weaponsmith. Still he turned them all down, even the one weapon-crafting teacher with connections in that industry. He wanted to fight by her side, after all. He wanted to fight at Ruby's side and save her life a thousand times to make up for how she saved his life from loneliness. He eventually built stupidly strong weapons he could barely use, and then he practiced with those. And in time, they both became skilled warriors and got sent to Beacon Academy.

Beacon Academy, where the buildings were big, the colours were bright, and some blonde kid vomited into a trash can. Yang immediately met her friends and left with them, leaving the young silver-eyed huntress and her cherryellow-eyed adoptive brother alone.

Ruby Rose looked the same as usual, and you wouldn't be reading this if you didn't know who Ruby was and what she looked like back then, except her hair was longer and spikier, having already gained its redder tips. And like her hair, Blaze had grown quite a bit over the years. He wasn't as tall as Yang just yet, but he was exactly four inches taller than Ruby. And while he wasn't exactly fast before, his current armaments weighed him down a little. He wore thick and shiny red plate armour lined with gold over an all-black tracksuit, but his hands were coated in fingerless red leather. His forearms bore gauntlets like Yang's though longer and thicker with extra-thick flame-shaped armour plates on the back, and they didn't work the same, or match each other when they were active. However, his left one was gold with red highlights and his right one was red with gold highlights, to contrast with his cherry red left eye and his golden right eye. He was no longer ashamed of his weird eyes. Yet despite these bulky forearm armaments, his main weapon was on his back, a mysterious red and gold rectangle that could be anything, yet it was notably a foot longer and thicker than the folded-up Crescent Rose on Ruby's clothing.

The two red siblings huddled closer to each other for warmth and strength in this scary new environment. Everyone else was scary and unknown, they looked like black silhouettes that could attack like Grimm at any second.

And then they started noticing everyone's weapons, geeking out over how cool everything looked! Except Blaze, in typical Blaze fashion, kept insisting that the weapons he saw totally weren't all that cool and his weapon was totally better than all of them and he could kick the butt of everyone here. Totally. What a dork.

Still, they hadn't moved. And they had to move some time. The non-blood-related twins looked to each other, and nodded. And then they walked down the steps, hand in hand, as they were both shy souls. When faced with scary new things, they moved closer to each other for comfort and reassurance. But at each other's side, looking at each other, they felt like they could do anything.

Except notice whoever just crashed into them, sending the trio into a heap of three dolts and some briefcases.

"What are you doing?!" A girl in white demanded.

"Sorry," Ruby apologized reflexively. Blaze didn't, he hated admitting when he was wrong. And he didn't think he was wrong since she crashed into them from behind.

"'Sorry'? Do you have any idea of the damage you could have caused? Give me that-" The girl in white grabbed a briefcase of dust. "This is Dust, mined and purified from the Schnee quarry!"

"Made with real Faunus slave blood, sweat and tears!" Blaze joked.

"Don't be ridiculous." She growled and started shaking a glass container of Dust in Ruby's face extra-hard, improperly secured and leaking because the girl hadn't grown out of being stupid yet. One day, she would be the best girl in team RWBY. But for now, she sucked. "And you! What are you, braindead? Dust! Fire, water, lightning, energy! Are you even listening to me?"

"That's right, dear," Blaze whispered, "Shake the dangerous and explosive substance in my sister's face harder. See where it gets shoved if you don't shove off."

"How dare you!" She started shaking the dust harder. "I will shake whatever I want wherever I want, whenever I want! What do you have to say about that, huh?"

"That's what your mom said last night." He said, enraging her.

Ruby inhaled the dust and sneezed, engulfing the Schnee Heiress in a sparking and frosty cloud of flames. It was a good thing she had aura, or she'd be as overcooked as the food Blaze couldn't cook right to save his life.

The dust container flew through the air and landed near the foot of some cool Faunus girl.

"Unbelievable! This is exactly the kind of thing I was talking about!" The ashen Weiss berated further berated the shy and helpless Ruby.

"Wait a second. You're Weiss Schnee, right?" Blaze asked.

"Obviously, you dolt!"

"Then Ruby, you... you just... Schneezed!"

The two redheads stared at each other for a moment. And then they burst into laughter, infuriating the enraged Schnee further.

"What the... How dare..." She tried, but they weren't listening. All the awkwardness and shame was gone, this had gone from a tense situation to a hilarious one.

"I'm Blaze Rose, this is Ruby Rose. We'll laugh about this in a week, want to be friends?" Blaze offered his friendship.

"Never!" She snatched her dust bottle from the approaching Faunus girl and stormed off.

"I promise I'll make it up to you!" Ruby called after Weiss.

Blaze nudged her a little. "You don't owe her anything, that dolt should watch where she's going when she's transporting so much dust at once. Doesn't she have a butler to carry her stuff, or something? It's like she's never pushed one of those carts in her life."

"That's probably true. I have to say, that's one way to resolve a conflict with someone like her," The Faunus girl noted.

"I've dealt with enough petty bullies in my life to know when you should threaten them, and when you should laugh at them." Blaze said sagely, watching the girl storm off. He looked cool, Ruby thought, because she had no idea that he was actually staring at her legs.

"If only all bullies were that easy to deal with," Said Blake.

"Hey, if anyone ever gives you any trouble, give us a call." Blaze smiled, patting his sister Ruby on the shoulder. "My sister's faster than the wind!" He bragged.

"And my brother really really loves beating people up!" She bragged.

"I just love winning, I swear I'm not weird! I don't LOVE fighting like a crazy person, that's ridiculous!" He grinned.

"I'm Ruby and this is Blaze. What's your na-" Ruby began, turning to face her, only to see that the Faunus was walking away.

He watched her leave and as she walked out of earshot, he said something to his sister. "Man, those two girls... I just can't decide..."

"You can't decide what?"

"I can't decide whose legs are nicer!" He grinned.

"Blaze!" She laughed, shoving him.

He laughed and shoved her back.

The two heard a girl's laughter. They turned to see a red-haired and green-eyed girl with an autumn-coloured set of armour. "I wish I had a sibling," Pyrrha admitted.

"Finally!" He shouted, surprising her. "Someone who can tell we're siblings, instead of assuming we're something else."

"Does that happen often?" Pyrrha asked.

"Like you wouldn't believe." Blaze laughed. "Hey, I'm Blaze Rose and this is Ruby Rose. I'm two for two today, want to walk away from us dramatically?"

"I could do that, but I think I'd rather try and become your friend."