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The clock struck one exactly and there was a knock at the door of my spacious office. It was confident, firm, and absolute. The person on the other end knew what they were here for. My dog perked its head up and looked over at where the sound emanated from.
"Come in," I called.
It was Crystal Velcruse. She stepped inside and shut the door behind her quietly and gently. My dog wagged its tail and she went ahead and scratched it behind the ears. When she stopped it let out a doggy sigh and slumped back to the ground. Its tail hardly moved.
It demanded more pets. More.
"Miss Velcruse, thank you for coming. I had the time to skim your file and read a little about your semblance but I'm afraid our files leave a lot to be desired. I hope you can clarify some things for me. You're a precog? Correct?" I gestured to the cushioned seat across from my desk and I pulled up her file on my display.
"I am. I can see the steps required to succeed at nearly any task."
"I see. And what are your limits?"
"I can't see more than five minutes into the future. Give or take. I can also pose hypothetical questions and receive an answer from my semblance."
"So this is how you keep coming up with ways to beat your peers. This is deeply concerning to me. You are over dependent on your power. It wouldn't shock me if you were using it around the clock. Does it work for social situations?"
"Yeah it does. And yeah. I use it a lot. It's hard not to. It's so tempting."
"But it didn't give you a means to so much as touch me when we spared."
"No. There wasn't a way to win."
"It left you floundering and dramatically weaker. It greatly concerns me because you may well come across monsters you can't beat either. Do you know what you should do in that case?"
"Not really. It never came up in my training."
"You should run away Miss Velcruse."
There was a beat of silence.
"Run away? Just give up?"
"Winning does not always mean fighting. Sometimes surviving is the best you can hope for. Should you throw away your life and the lives of everyone you could one day save by dying pointlessly? This is the hardest lesson for me to share and often the most difficult to grasp. Save yourself. Flee. There will come times that you cannot see a way to win. In those times you must come up with a way to escape. I want to continue working with you. This over dependence on your semblance must be addressed and I'm in a position to help since you cannot see a way to beat me. You have an extreme ability. It would be shameful for you to throw it away along with your life in a battle you know you cannot win."
"I understand. It's just… I'm supposed to be a hero. What kind of hero am I if I run away."
"A clever one who lives to fight another day. If you die you throw away the lives of everyone you could have saved. I outlived my whole team and went on to kill more murderers than anyone else in my generation. If I would have fought to the bitter end when Beacon fell that wouldn't have happened and everyone I have saved would have been forfeited."
"You fought in the battle of Beacon's fall? You attended school here and had a team?" She asked in a little surprise. Was she just feigning surprise and seeing into the future? I wasn't sure. I couldn't be.
"I did once. They're all dead now. I'm the only survivor because I ran away from those battles I knew I couldn't win. I also got lucky more than my fair share of times though I wouldn't say that I'm particularly fortunate."
"What was your team like?"
"There was my partner: Pyrrha. She was lacking confidence in some ways but she was so firm in others. She was the first person to really believe in me and help me to be where I am today. I would be dead if not for her kindness. She was nearly unbeatable in our classes, not unlike yourself. There was Ren who was quiet and an excellent chef. He always had something meaningful to say. Nora talked enough for the both of them. She was a chatter box but she had a peculiar wisdom. She could read between the lines where others couldn't. Let yourself be yourself with your team. Trust them a little. You may find yourself willing to share the details of your power with them. You may not. In the end they can be your family if you let them. Don't graduate with regrets. You're too young for that."
"What about you? Do you have regrets?"
"Too many to count. I've killed a lot of people. Some of them were just in the wrong place at the wrong time and I had the power to destroy them so I did. You will have that power as well as you develop your abilities and semblance. You have enormous potential. You should learn from my mistakes and be better than me. There have been dark days in my life that I regret now. Days I wished never happened. But they did. There's nothing I can do about it now but desperately try and share the little wisdom I have with you and your peers. Let yourself make friends. And not just with your own team. You still have time to be a child."
"I'm making friends well. My power helps. Team RYPP and my own team are fairly close. So far I'm settling into Beacon nicely. But I just can't figure out a way to beat you. It's like a chip in my mind nagging at me."
"Train hard and one day you'll catch up to me and perhaps even surpass me. Your semblance is incredibly powerful. You have time to catch up. Don't rush yourself and enjoy the days that come. I want to set up a weekly time to train with you to help you out. Is that alright with you?" I asked.
"It is. And thank you Professor. Your insights are more than helpful."
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I was getting ready to pack it in for the day when there came another knock at my door. I didn't have another appointment so I wasn't sure who it was but I called out for them to come in anyways.
It was Rosé that opened the door and stepped inside.
"Miss Gainsborough…"
She pouted at me for a moment and reached down and scratched the dog's belly. The animals got excited to see her. They were good friends. It started panting and rubbing its body against her legs in enjoyment. She patted its side as it rubbed against her waist.
"You don't have to address me so formally when we're alone, Professor Strife."
"Would you prefer that I call you princess? Your highness?"
She glowered at me and I chuckled a little.
"How are you settling into Beacon? We haven't had a chance to talk since before term started," I went on headless of her glare. She looked away for a moment and unfurrowed her brow in quiet contemplation.
"My team is fine. My partner is a competitive bitch but she's my competitive bitch. We get along pretty well after the first day of classes. Peach says it's because we were so similar that we were fighting in the first place. Peach is funny but a little over the top sometimes. She's confident in herself and her body and Yuma is shy and a bit self conscious but she talks enough. She isn't quiet like you might expect from someone so nervous. We get along well with Team CMAD. I have real friends who don't really care about my position beyond teasing me for the first time. It's nice. It's what I had hoped for when I wanted to come to Beacon."
I reclined in my seat and listened to her talk. We weren't just Professor and Student. We were friends of a sort. There had been a time where she kept me in check. That had been good for me. Now the school kept me under its thumb and that's where I remained. I didn't take a break from it. I tried to be patient but I was.
"Why did you go after Merlot? My team and I were talking and we realized you went to a laboratory with three out of the four of us. What's really going on?"
"The outlook is bad. But I suppose you deserve to know in some small way. We are friends of a sort…"
"Of a sort," she repeated.
"Merlot is… he was… it's a touch complicated. He did experiments. On me."
"On you?" She looked pretty out of it - as though I pulled the carpet out from underneath her. She scratched the dog mutely while staring off into space next to my head. "Why?"
"Like I said I can't trust him so I don't really know. That's a serious problem. He is likely to try and kill me. The plan is still to find him and destroy him. He has to be stopped and his experiments need to have an end put to them."
It all came rushing back at once. Me killing Ren and Nora. I dropped my pen on my desk and rubbed my forehead.
"You don't deserve that. I refuse to accept it. You're not just some experiment."
"Rosé, you know some of the awful shit I've done. This is karma." I felt like an ocean as still as a lake. I reached into myself and looked deep within. There was Mother built up behind enormous walls of solid rock. Behind that she hid herself and my sisters from my fear which threatened to consume us all. It was a double edged razor that bit both ways. It went up the tree to the roots and trunk where my Mother resided.
"It can't be…"
"Why not? I was grown from some donor tissue in an incubator. I'm genetically modified."
"Is that why you're so strong."
"Possibly. Probably, even. But at the end of the day I'm a petri dish.
"Stop saying that, Cloud. You can make it through this."
"Be reasonable. That's why shutting down Merlot's work is so personal to me."
"This isn't how I wanted this conversation to go…" she murmured. "Not at all. I didn't want this. I like how much you trust me but couldn't there have been something else?"
She was in the bargaining phase. She was a little in denial as well. She wanted to find a way to help me. It was impossible, however. That had burned Ruby too. She also wanted a way to save me from Mother. She never found it though. That didn't stop her from trying. I sighed a little at the thought of Ruby. I missed kissing her. The memory brought me back to days out in the Anima countryside when it was just the two of us. Like a cell dividing we were split up and I had no idea for how long.
I missed the way she would pull me down towards her gently yet insistent. She had wanted me. I could feel it in her movement. I wonder if she desired me still. Even after everything I had done. I found this happened all the time.
If she really knew what I was like wouldn't she be disgusted? Rosé sort of knew and I liked to believe she wasn't repulsed. Her presence here proved the contrary. She sought me out for an evening chat and not as her Professor.
Little Ruby Rose… I missed her tiny form. It had been months since I had seen her. I've lost her. I've lost her. I've lost her. That raked at me. I found that this happened all the time. I would think about one of the two of them and how they probably shouldn't love me and I would get depressed. Weiss was smart. She should be able to see through my bullshit and spot the fool's gold inside. But she never did. She believed that I was something genuine. And from their letter they missed me. They really missed me. That was a struggle to believe. They had each other. What did they need me for? They didn't really. Surely they would realize that at some point. They didn't need me. It hurt me to think it but it was the truth. What should they want me for? Did they miss my body the way I missed theirs? But from their letter they did. They wanted me back with them. They didn't want me to feel alone. I didn't know what to think.
In some aspects of my life I was incredibly unlucky. I mean, look at my team. But I had two beautiful girls- no, women who loved me. That was heart stopping and jaw dropping. It was a great source of comfort to me at the same time it gave me panic attacks. Who wouldn't panic a little? I certainly would and was. I had twice as many people to disappoint as a regular man. Plus there had been whatever I had with Pyrrha. Walks through Vale with just the two of us had new meaning in the context of that final kiss. What was she to me? What would she have been? I wanted to know. Frankly, I deserved to know. I had put Cinder in the dirt but I still had no closure where Pyrrha was concerned.
"So what?" Rosé asked me.
"So what that I'm a runaway baking soda volcano?"
"Yeah, so what? Do you want to die."
"No. I want to live. I want my dreams." I wanted Ruby's family. I wanted that. "But there is no sense in deluding myself. And no sense in you lying to yourself either. You have to come to terms with the fact that I will one day be gone." Salem would probably get me.
Rosé chewed her lip and wouldn't look at me. Red walked excitedly up to her but she ignored it, she was so deep in thought.
"There has to be something I can do…" she trailed off.
"Why?" I asked. "Why is it so hard to accept that nothing can be done? I want to-"
"Be ripped apart by monsters or men?" She demanded with some heat.
"Yeah. Actually. At least with monsters or men it'll be fast. Can you really blame me?"
She was silent for a long time. "This isn't over," she said at length. "I'm not giving you up just like that."
"You're a fighter. I wish that you could let me go. You're not the only one struggling to give me up but it'd be better for you that way."
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-WG
