"How much longer is it now?"
Lie Ren thought himself a patient person. Without patience, one couldn't survive years of partnership with Nora Valkyrie and all her energy, eccentricity, and curiosity. Patience accorded just as nicely with Ren's own conserve-your-energy ethos.
But if Ruby Rose asked that question one more time, he'd have to counter-complain at her. He might even be forced to scowl. It took so many muscles to scowl. He didn't have the pep for that.
Thankfully, he wasn't the only one Ruby's questions were bothering. "It's only been ten minutes since the last time you asked," said Jaune Arc wearily.
"I know," Ruby said, and she had the grace to sound embarrassed. "It's just…"
"…you never went on trips like this when you were younger?" Jaune finished for her.
"It's not like we never left home," Ruby said, growing defensive. "We did! We went out all the time, around Patch."
"How big is Patch?" asked Jaune.
Ruby mumbled something that was probably a number. Ren couldn't make it out, but that was its own sort of answer.
"We'll get there when we get there," said Jaune, in a voice that undoubtedly came from hearing those exact words dozens of times growing up.
"I know," Ruby pouted.
"Which will be in another day and a half."
"I know! I just wish we could get there sooner."
It was an innocent thing to say, and Ruby had said similar things at the conclusion of earlier iterations of this conversation. This time, though, Ren noticed her moving a hand over her stomach.
He wasn't the only one. "Ruby," said Nora with a frown, "are you okay?"
"Just hungry, is all," Ruby grumbled.
"Well, it's actually a good idea to not be completely full when you're on the road," said Jaune, trying to put a brave face on things.
"No," said Ruby in a tiny voice, "I mean I'm out of food."
If the others felt as Ren did, the silence that followed wasn't the normal silence that follows the end of a conversation. It was the silence of stunned disbelief.
"You ate all your food already?" Jaune said.
"I guess I did?" said Ruby, using a questioning tone as she tried to wriggle out of her embarrassment.
Jaune was aghast. "Ruby, we portioned out the food so it would last. We knew we'd be ten days on the road between towns. How did you just plow through it?"
"Well," said Ruby, blushing and muttering, "sometimes at dinner, the food just wasn't filling me up, like the other night after the extra scouting I did, and I have been covering twice as much ground as the rest of you, so I… I ate a bit extra."
"A bit," Jaune repeated.
"Do you have any left?" said Ren.
"No," said Ruby, her face falling. "I ate my last rations last night. I didn't have any breakfast, that's why I've been so grouchy."
When no one responded to that, Ruby rushed to fill the increasingly uncomfortable void. "I'm sorry about being grouchy, I wasn't trying to make an excuse. Just… you know?"
"Have you ever been camping before?" Jaune asked, and Ren could see him trying to keep his voice as neutral as possible.
"Sure, loads of times!" Ruby said.
"On Patch?" Ren asked.
"Yeah, why?"
Because, Ren knew, Patch was a small island. Even if Ruby went camping in a "remote" area of Patch, she could still get back to home or town in a matter of hours—faster, if she used her Semblance.
It occurred to Ren, like a thunderbolt, that Ruby had never been far removed from food. She'd lived her whole life with the knowledge that food was close by and available. She'd never had to manage her food supplies, or worry about where her next meal was coming from.
She was so blessed.
This new life on the road was closer to Ren's life than Ruby's. It had to be a hard adjustment for a girl with that mentality and a hummingbird's metabolism. Even so, Ruby was usually more responsible than this.
Apparently Jaune felt the same. "You have to get used to not being full when you eat. You have to stick to your meal plan. A little hungry all the time is better than running out in the middle of nowhere."
"I am sorry," said Ruby, a bit testily. "I said so and everything."
"Well, sorry won't make there be more food," said Jaune, rising to meet her.
"Here."
Nora had interrupted the argument, speaking for the first time since it had started. As everyone looked to her, they saw she was extending a rations pack—from the way her backpack was open, one of her own.
Her mouth was set in a grim line, and she made no eye contact, but her hand was steady.
"Don't worry about it," Ruby said embarrassedly. "I'll be fine, promise—"
Her stomach grumbled.
"Sorry," she said with a wince.
"Take it," Nora insisted, shaking the offered food, and Ren simply could not believe what he was seeing.
Ren blinked, and Nora wasn't 18 and built like a brick outhouse. She was maybe nine and emaciated and ill. Her hair was so filthy there was no trace of the orange beneath. Her skin was tight against her bones and caked with dirt and ash. Her clothes were little more than tattered rags.
Despite it all, her face brightened as she caught sight of him. "Ren!" she said, voice barely above a rasp. "You're back!"
He nodded rather than waste words. "And I have something." He drew some bread from a fold in his own shabby clothes. "There wasn't much mold on it, I scraped it off easily."
"Nice," she said, her eyes fixed on it. "You're so good at this."
"Here." He extended his arm, offering her the bread.
Her eyes were full of longing—and she turned her head away. "You eat it."
Incomprehension reigned. He blinked his confusion. "Here," he repeated.
"You're the one out and about finding food," she said, voice barely more than a whisper. "I'm just lying here, sick. You need it more than I do."
"If you don't eat, you won't get better," he chided. He felt an upwelling of terror at the words, as if by saying them he was speaking that unbearable future into existence.
"If you don't eat it, you won't have the energy to get food tomorrow," she shot back. "You eat now, and tomorrow you'll find more, enough for both of us. We'll eat… we'll eat like queens."
Her voice had started in defiance, and ended in shakes and murmurs. He knew how she felt, he knew how she hurt, with the illness and her hunger both. There had been times when he'd insisted it wasn't his day to eat, despite the sick, gnawing emptiness, the fuzzy-headedness, the ache that wouldn't go away because there was nothing to fill it. On those days, she'd out-stubborned him until he'd accepted the food she so plainly needed.
He couldn't talk her down like she'd done him. He didn't know how.
"I'll be fine," she lied, curling up on herself a little more. "I'll conserve what I've got. I'll stay still and quiet."
Those words threw him into such a panic he had to turn his semblance on himself to try and tamp it down before he hyperventilated. Still and quiet—he'd seen children their age who'd gone still and quiet, and stayed that way, until they were too still, too quiet, like the bodies back in—
No, no, no, that could not be. Ren could not stand it, he couldn't live it. How could he fix this, though? He didn't have the words, so he had to act; and if he couldn't convince her, he'd have to meet her halfway.
Halfway…
He drew the bread back toward him, split it (it crumbled a little, stale as it was), and offered her half.
Her eyes turned back to what he was doing, filled with emotions he couldn't classify, emotions he tried not to let himself feel, that he could push down when they scared him but she had to just withstand. She swallowed. "But you need it," she said weakly.
"We both do," he insisted. "We're in this together."
She hesitated, even as her eyes screamed her hunger, and her nose flared as if trying to inhale the barely-edible bread. Finally she raised one thin-fingered hand to the bread. She didn't take it. Instead, she split that half in half, keeping a chunk in her hand, and pushing his hand back towards him.
The greater share for him, the lesser for her—but not nothing for her. It was the best he'd get.
"Together," she agreed. He nodded.
She managed a smile. Then the bread was gone in one gulp.
Ren blinked, and Nora was twelve and frightened and out of her depth. She was wearing a brand new uniform, which bore the seal of Refuge Combat School on the lapel. They were the nicest clothes Ren had ever seen her wear. She barely filled them out. The smallest sizes they'd had in stock were loose around her stick-thin arms.
She was hesitating, which was unlike her. He was used to her seeing a course and committing. If you hesitated, some other urchin would get the prize before you did, and then you didn't eat.
"Hey, newbie, you gonna serve yourself or not?"
Ren's head whipped around. An upperclassman was looking impatiently at them, and more behind were craning their necks to see about the hold-up. Ren's danger sense thrummed. Attention brought peril. They needed to get food and get out, before other people decided their share was up for grabs…
But when his head swiveled back, he saw the buffet line spread out before him, more food than anyone could eat, more food than he'd seen before in his life, and he understood why Nora had frozen up. This buffet was a thing that couldn't exist. His senses were screaming food at him, but his mind couldn't accept that this was possible.
Nora turned her head jerkily and looked over Ren's shoulder at the upperclassman. "And we can just… take as much as we want?"
"Uh, yeah?" was the richly condescending answer. "Whadja think?"
Ren watched as Nora struggled with the idea, as this impossibility worked its way through her brain. She turned to the food—so much of it, and it looked and smelled so good; both the quantity and the quality were overwhelming—
And she started shoveling it onto her plate. Ren was right behind her, his mind in synch with hers. They'd never had a chance like this, and they might never again. They would eat enough, right here and now, to last them for days to come.
"Whoa, take it easy!" shouted the upperclassman. "You know you can come through the line more than once, right?"
Nora whirled on him, her eyes popped wide. "We can?!"
And Ren smiled (had he? Or was he just remembering it that fondly?) at how absurd it was, at how the idea of their being offered more food than they could eat shattered her whole life experience to that point.
"Newbies," the upperclassman muttered as Nora, cackling, sprinted with her overloaded plate to a table near the emergency exit. Ren knew (or maybe just remembered) that she was about to stuff herself so badly she'd vomit much of the food back up. He didn't blame her in the slightest.
Ren blinked, and Nora was thirteen and there was more of her than there'd ever been. She was wearing exercise gear and standing at the very end of a line of similarly-clad combat school students. Ren had gone through this ordeal already, and was biding his time until Nora finished the same old drill.
Same old drill. Oh, he was so very wise to the ways of Refuge now after a single semester. It was a funny thought, almost enough to make him smile. Almost.
"…so then I said, Are you kidding? Of course I can bench it! And not only did I, but I punched out another three reps before she lost her nerve and took it back…"
Ah, yes. Ren remembered all of them getting in a bit of trouble for that. It seemed to Ren that the moment Nora had the means to be active, she couldn't help but be active.
It hadn't taken much for "still and quiet" to be banished from Nora's vocabulary. Just a little bit of food. Attitude wasn't the only change, of course—but the health evaluators were about to find that out.
"Valkyrie, Nora," said the technician in a dull drone. "The scale is set to your previous weight. Please step up."
"Sure thing!" she all but shouted, and moved onto the scale like she was trying to stomp it into the ground. The weighted arm shot up with a hard clang.
"Easy on the gear," the tech scolded, and with a frown he moved the scale's weight. And moved it again. And again.
Nora's grin seemed larger than her face.
The tech gave up and moved the largest weight, finally getting the arm to move. When he jotted down the final number, he froze in place. "You've upped your body weight by almost a quarter in six months," he said, scarcely believing his own words.
"You bet I have!" Nora crowed.
"That's not healthy," the tech admonished. "We see this a lot. When kids are able to eat as much as they want, they lose sight of how much they should, and…"
"You've got it all wrong," Nora interrupted. "I'm packing it all on as muscle!" She flexed ferociously.
The tech was unimpressed. "We'll see. Tell you what, I'll make a note here to check your scores for the physical test you're about to take. If I don't see a big jump in your performance, I'll have to bring this up with the faculty."
"Ha!" scoffed Nora. "So it's a bet? I'll take it. I say I'll knock a minute off my run, double my sit-ups, and triple my pushups!"
The tech's disbelief grew. Ren didn't blame him. When Ren and Nora had arrived at Refuge, they'd survived their first semester of combat classes the same way they'd survived on the streets: with tenacity, fearlessness, and a complete lack of restraint. Anyone they couldn't beat with a few seconds of berserker strength and low blows, they couldn't beat. They certainly weren't winning with strength, stamina, or technique, not with their physiques.
Then, they had food.
There had been some changes since then.
"The real question," Nora said, rolling right along, "is what'll you give me if I do? If I've buffed up enough that I blow away those scores, what'll you do for me?"
The tech rolled his eyes. "I'll buy you a dessert of your choice," he said.
Nora's eyes gleamed. "You're on!"
(She won that bet and mercilessly held him to its terms. The tech ended up having to pay for the most ridiculous ice cream sundae the parlor had ever constructed. Nora offered to share; Ren took two bites and threw in the towel. Nora finished the rest herself, and converted all that sugar directly into burpees.)
Ren blinked, and Nora was fourteen and sweaty and grinning. After the first hour of exercise she was finally starting to show some strain, but from her expression, this was the part of her workout she'd been looking forward to.
"Yeah," she crowed, "now I can really feel it! Can you feel it?"
"Mm," Ren said without gesture. He was working, too, maintaining his balance, staying in his poses for extended periods of time until his muscles screamed (while he would never).
She dropped down into a push-up pose, but held it steady. She looked up at him. "Stand on me."
His balance faltered a moment. "What?"
"You're working your balance," she said, the reasonableness of her tone at war with her words. "And I'm working my strength. Stand on me while I do pushups and we both get a challenge!"
He weighed his odds of successfully saying no. He didn't like them. Well, with any luck, one of the coaches running the gym would see them and put a stop to it. "Fine," he said. He took a tentative step onto her back. She grunted, but her body didn't budge beneath him. Feeling reassured, he rose up onto that leg and attempted to resume his pose.
"Ready?" she said, but didn't wait for a response. "Here we go!"
He nearly fell as she sank beneath him. She was right about one thing: this was a challenge.
"Now this is the stuff!" she said.
He couldn't manage a "mm" back at her.
"Can you imagine… us doing anything… like this… back in the day?" she said, working words in between her reps. "You know… on the street? A workout like this… woulda killed us!"
"Mm," he said, wobbling dangerously. Her form was good and she wasn't shaking despite carrying both their weights, but the motions of her exercise were still plenty hard for him to manage.
(Or maybe that was what he told himself when he was trying not to think about her point.)
"Well, not today!" said Nora with another push-up. "I'm not starving now! Hey, that works!" Down, up. "Not starving!" Down, up. "Not starving!" Down, up. "Not starving!"
An adult voice called to them. "Ren! Valkyrie! What's going on over there?!"
Ren hopped down instantly. Nora eased out of pushup position and looked up at him without a hint of remorse.
Ren blinked, and Nora was fifteen and giddy and weighed twice what she did when they'd arrived at Refuge. "Here we are!" she said. She threw open the door of the diner in the town outside Refuge. "Ah! Smell that? It's even better than the cafeteria!"
Ren felt that reasonable people could disagree on that, but he nevertheless followed her as she waltzed inside and picked a table (as usual, nearby the emergency exit). "Can you believe we're doing this?" she said, elated and proud. "Can you?"
"I can't," he admitted as he sat down opposite her. He looked pointedly at the school uniforms they were wearing. "I would have liked for us to have some clothes of our own."
"We'll get there," she promised. "It'll be a lot of fun to take you somewhere and play dress-up."
"I have ideas," he said. It was a typical understatement. He had an outfit designed already. He was just waiting for their savings to build up.
Refuge gave them a small stipend, which increased with every semester they stayed in good standing. There was never any question that they'd pool their stipends, or that they'd agree on how to spend it. Their first priority, after taking care of school supplies, had been to build up an emergency fund. That fund had finally gotten fat enough to make them both comfortable… which meant that, for the first time in their lives, they had disposable income.
Nora had insisted that they use it to go out to eat.
Trying to change her mind was like trying to talk down a rolling boulder. Ren hadn't tried for very long. It meant he'd have to wait for new clothes, but it also meant they'd be able to eat in a restaurant as paying customers for the first time ever.
"I also have ideas on what to order," he added, grabbing a menu for himself and handing one to Nora.
"Ooh, options!" cooed Nora. She cackled as she looked across the menu. "It all looks so good I don't know where to start! I might just have to order everything!"
"Mm," said Ren.
"Good morning," said a waiter, a weedy-looking kid only a few years older than them. "Have you decided what you'd like?"
Nora slammed the menu down on the table like it was a grimm she was slaying. "I'll have the Farmhand's Feast!"
"Good cho—" the waiter started, before looking up at her. His Adam's apple bobbed. "Are you sure?"
"I'm sure as I'm sittin' here, buster!" Nora said. "And don't skimp and give me small portions, I want the full order. Oh, and at least two choices of syrup! And extra butter!"
The waiter's hand danced as he recorded the order. "If you say so. For you, sir?"
"Sunrise Sampler," Ren said.
"Good choice," the waiter said. "If that's all, I'll be out in a few minutes."
With the waiter gone and nothing to hold her attention, Nora grabbed her place setting, took a knife in one hand and a fork in the other, and began drumming on the table.
Ren could tune that out, but it did make him worry about the table. Time for a diversion. "I'm still not sure why we're paying for food when we can eat as much as we want up at the cafeteria."
"Because it's, like, our food," Nora said. "Up at the cafeteria, they make food for everyone, and we just happen to be there to eat some of it. But this? This is us paying for food. With our money."
Ren nodded to meet Nora's expectations.
It didn't fool her. "Like," she said, making circular motions with her utensils that Ren found vaguely concerning, "it's money we earned, by being Huntsman and Huntress."
"We're not, though," Ren protested. "We're students."
"You know what I mean. This food is food we bought, so it's our food. It isn't food we get just for showing up. We got this money by sticking to school and kicking its butt, and now we can buy food with it. You can't be starving if you're buying food, right?"
Ren wasn't sure he felt that way, but he could see what Nora meant and understood how she was feeling. He turned his attention to a napkin and started folding it, practicing something he'd read about. He left Nora to her own devices. Hopefully, their food would arrive before she decided to stick that knife in the nearest socket.
It did. "Sunrise Sampler," the waiter said, placing an array of smaller dishes in front of Ren. "And if you'll wait right here…"
Ren looked over the offerings approvingly. Nora concurred, if her hiss of "Nice!" was any indication. It was a good variety, all in modest quantities. Unlike…
"Oof!... the Farmhand's Feast." The waiter had needed to get a tray to carry it all: plate after plate laden with eggs, sausage, bacon, ham, eggs, hashbrowns, pancakes, fried apples, possibly more eggs, and the tallest glass of orange juice Ren had ever seen. He didn't know what kind of farmhand ate like that, but presumably they did so right before hibernating.
"That's what I'm talking about!" Nora whooped, before giving a sharp look at the waiter.
"And the extra butter," he said, handing over a small plate piled high with yellow tabs.
"And?" she prodded.
"And three kinds of syrup," the waiter sighed, placing three different pitchers before her.
"Now that's service! Good job!" she said, and lifted two pitchers to pour their contents over the pancakes.
"Will that be all?" the waiter said, although his eyes remained on Nora, who was now carving into her stack of pancakes- a staple of Nora breakfasts at Refuge's cafeteria.
"A glass of water will be plenty for me," Ren said.
"Coming right up… ma'am, are you okay?"
Ren's head snapped to look at Nora. Nora had taken a bite of her pancakes and was slowly chewing it, even as tears rolled down her face.
"'m fine," mumbled Nora through her mouthful.
"Are you sure?" said the waiter with concern.
It shouldn't have been possible to cry and eat at the same time, but Nora had never let the impossible stop her. She swallowed. "We bought this, Ren. We did it."
"Uh… yeah?" tried the waiter.
"Sorry," Nora said, wiping at her face. "It's just... this is our food. Our food.
"And it's so good."
While the waiter looked on in bafflement, she went to eat another bite with the same reverence as if she was performing a holy rite.
Ren silently swore that he would learn how to cook pancakes if it killed him.
Ren blinked, and Nora was seventeen and exultant, with a body chiseled from living marble. They had arrived in the field to do their pre-Vytal mission with a Huntsman, and had drawn Professor Peach as their supervisor.
"Push on!" she called, gesturing sharply with her weapon. She had described it as a mace; Ren thought it looked more like a scepter, and he couldn't imagine how it was weaponized. "The other half of your team is nearby, but they have their own sector to clear."
Nora barely kept from rolling her eyes. Ren sympathized. He'd gotten comfortable with Jaune and Pyrrha's presence, and he liked them a great deal, and he was proud of how far their teamwork had come... but reverting to the old Ren-and-Nora patterns was as easy as falling.
"Don't think I'm here to make your job easier," Peach said sternly to Ren and Nora. "Huntsmen have to deal with distractions of all kinds at all times! Try conducting a civilian evacuation some time with civvies complaining every step of the way! It's a real challenge, trying to keep their negativity from calling down every grimm in a fifty mile radius!"
"Pfft, no problem there," said Nora, though she didn't take her eyes off their surroundings despite the nonchalance of her answer. "Rennie and I are built for that kinda mission!"
With his semblance, that was true—though he never would have made such a boast, lest he antagonize their teacher. Sure enough, Peach did not seem to take kindly to Nora's confidence. "That's the kind of hubris that gets Huntresses killed. Let's see how well you keep your situational awareness while I'm firing questions at you!"
"Bring 'em on!" said Nora brashly.
"Why do you want to become a Huntress?"
Nora laughed. "That's the easiest question you could have asked me! Why do I want to be a Huntress? It's worth three square meals a day, and I get to blow grimm to hell! That's literally everything I ever wanted from life!"
The blunt honesty seemed to concuss Peach, as Nora's words had done to so many others. Peach looked to Ren, seeking confirmation, and Ren, used to this routine, just nodded.
Peach didn't ask many questions after that.
Ren blinked, and Nora was eighteen and tempered. Ren's trip through his memories must have been close to instant, because Nora was still holding her rations pack out to Ruby.
"Really?" said Ruby, though her eyes tracked the rations pack closely. "But then won't you be low on food?"
Ren saw how Nora's throat constricted. "I've run on low rations before," she said, with a quaver in her voice maybe only Ren heard. "I can stretch what I've got. I'll manage."
Ruby still hesitated. Her silver eyes went to Nora's face, but Nora's expression was fixed in stone. After several seconds, Ruby smiled in her usual bright, irrepressible way. "In that case, thanks, Nora! You're the best!"
Ruby reached to take the pack. For a moment Ren thought he saw Nora's expression flicker, thought he saw all the Noras of the past looking longingly at the pack, and for a split second her grip on it tightened to hold it close. Then it was over; the pack was in Ruby's hand, and Nora was staring determinedly down the road.
"You've got to make this one last," Jaune chided Ruby. "There truly isn't any more until we make the next town."
"I will, I know, I'm sorry. I'll pay you back Nora, and I promise I'll do better next time!" she said with her perfect sincerity. "This will never happen again!"
Ruby was looking at Jaune. She'd moved on. She didn't appreciate the gift she'd been given, or the sacrifice that had just been made. It wasn't her fault; she was ignorant. She didn't know what food meant to Nora.
Ren did.
His gaze lingered on Nora, who soldiered on resolutely, conserving her motions, saying nothing. Still and quiet.
A silent tear hit the road at his feet.
End