AN: Yes, it's been too long. To be honest, I wasn't sure I would ever update this fanfic again. But circumstances have changed, not all for the better. I am writing this as part of a commission to help pay for a new laptop, since I am currently in between jobs at the moment and have been battling with depression, and the screen on my laptop is so fucked up that as we speak half of the monitor looks like a bad CCTV security feed. So, with that in mind, I bring you this latest chapter, and I will let you know that the next one will not take a short eternity to write. With that also being said, if anyone happens to enjoy my writing and would like to help support me, I have a , a donate link, as well as a discord server. I am taking commissions as well, and as of the time of writing this I am approximately half-way to getting a new laptop commensurate with my old one, although any level of support can help.
I would just like to emphasize a few other things as well: This fic is operating off an AU of canon as it was back in 2018 or so. The events of season 7 and 8 have revealed some lore details that are, to a degree, irreconcilable with what I've written down so far. Specifically, the character of Dr. Polendina comes to mind. It might seem like a minor detail, but I will eventually be intergrating the canonical doctor back into the story, because I personally believe that proper representation of POC is important.
In some other cases, canon will be ignored, and in others, altered. It may not always be perfectly neat, but I ask for patience and understanding. Enjoy, this is long overdue.
Yang listlessly swung from a tree as she considered the horizon, her legs curling around the bark of a branch to hold herself in place as the rest of her body remained upside down.
It was a boring day. Mom was out on a mission, Dad was tending to Ruby, and Yang was essentially left to her own devices.
She was…four, now? Time worked funny for her, or so Dad had explained to her. But Yang already had a grasp of things that still surprised her parents whenever she talked, or had to listen to her recorded school lessons, or talk to the tutors that Uncle Ozpin arranged to come to their house. Not to mention physically she was already 4' tall and showed no signs of slowly down.
She didn't really like any of that learning stuff. She was good at it, too good. There was no challenge in it, or any real need for her to study. When she read something, she knew it and remembered it.
This? Being outside, watching the clouds and sun move by, in all the colors that she knew Mom and Dad couldn't see? Feeling the pressure of holding on, the constant adjustments she had to make for wind speed or to relieve strain on the tree branch? There was something that appealed to her basic nature in that, the feeling of doing.
When Yang had explained it to Dad, he had looked surprised, but agreed to let her go outside more.
It wasn't like she could be hurt, anyway. Dad hadn't let her test it, but she had fallen once or twice from the tree without a scratch after sneaking outside when she was younger. After his initial hysteria, he had taken one look at her, shaken his head, and informed her to never scare him like that again.
He still got a look whenever he caught her intentionally falling, but she was sure there was some relief in knowing that there was no way she could casually get into a serious accident.
Not that Dad had outright said that, either. But Yang couldn't help but notice, even if she didn't want to.
It's why she went out of her way to avoid learning things. She already knew more than she wanted to.
Even the thought of thinking things through made her frustrated, but she couldn't stop. Doctor Polendina had explained it using terms even she couldn't grasp quite fully yet, but it basically boiled down to her brain being weird.
Well, duh. Her parents and everyone else knew she was different, but Yang lived it.
She tried to stop that line of thought, swinging lightly in agitation as she huffed in frustration.
Impulse control wasn't her strong suit, but Dad and Mom had insisted from a young age that she needed to keep a grip on her…quirks.
But they didn't get how boring it was.
Boring, boring, boring, boring, boring, boring, BORING -
She wasn't even quite aware of what she was doing, even as she did it. With a swing of her legs, she hauled herself up from where she had been hanging upside down and launched herself free and clear of the tree with a sharp kick.
Her hand shot out as she grabbed onto a nearby branch, flinging herself to the next, and to the next.
Yang laughed as she sought out each limb, her mind whirling with possibilities as she continued her mad treetop dash through the forest.
She hadn't done anything like this before. Her entire body reacted with the superhuman efficiency she had always known. Hand and foot struck bark with pinpoint accuracy, always applying just enough force to keep moving without breaking anything.
How the thrill of blood pumping faster through her muscles made her feel alive. The exhilarating combination of thought and motion. But then thought left her as she simply acted, and knew only the bliss of unbridled movement.
The trees whipped by as she moved faster and faster, until suddenly the tree line ended.
Her momentum bled off as she flew through the air, catapulting herself clear of the forest. "Woohoo!" She cheered, laughing even as she rocketed toward the ground.
A field stretched out before her over hill tops that crested gently like waves on the ocean, sheets of wild grain wafting in the cool island air, until one blonde cannonball crashed to the dirt.
Yang blinked as she stood up, shaking soil out of her long hair, wincing lightly. "Ow…oh." She said, both at the realization that the impact had actually hurt a bit, and at the sight of the small person-shaped crater she had left imprinted in the ground.
A flicker of something out of the corner of her eyes made her whirl around, only to catch sight of a black bird flying off into the distance.
Her body was tense, but she managed to reign it in, relaxing slightly, breathing deeply as the rush from releasing that energy wore off.
All at once, the sudden silence that had descended in the wake of her arrival was pierce by a low growl and rustling of grass as it parted in the wake of a predator.
Ruby Rose lazily flicked her hand, causing the color of a wildflower in her hand to change from blue, to red, and then lastly a kaleidoscope of color that glowed faintly, shifting subtly to an unknown rhythm. Such a casual display of magic – even though Ozpin had revealed some of his abilities years before - would have once caused Taiyang's jaw to drop. Now though, he had become used to such displays of arcane prowess, and instead merely smiled indulgently at his daughter.
Yes, caring for Ruby and Yang was not easy by any measure, but Taiyang also wouldn't have asked for it any other way. He had never given much thought to family until they literally fell from the sky, yet he treasured each and every day.
Still, he feared for their future, and was wary of their power. Ozpin had taken great pains to give the girls a normal life, even as Atlas attempted to decipher their genetic code. Dr. Polendina was able to give them only the roughest outline of how he expected the girls to develop, and the picture he painted was one that had led to Ruby and Yang's relatively sheltered childhood.
Eventually, they would have to be revealed to the world. It'd be impossible to not notice two giant women with the strength of a veteran huntsman growing up practically overnight. But by then, Ozpin was confident they would be able to handle themselves.
They weren't taking any chances though. Summer had stopped taking dangerous assignments for the most part, as had he. Qrow's job had gotten ten times harder as a result, but their unflappable teammate didn't complain about the extra work thrown to him. According to Ozpin, the sudden shake-up in his choice of agents had left Salem's followers on the back foot, uncertain as to how to proceed, which gave them some breathing room.
Ironwood had, however, pointed out that such a state of events might lead Salem to investigate the Xiao Long/Rose household, and had posted a rotating huntsman guard in town, along with footing the bill to turn their home into a fortress.
It didn't look like one from the outside, of course, but practically every single part of the structure had been reinforced with battleship-grade alloy, while a section of their basement had been converted into a panic room. Not enough to keep a concerted attacker away, certainly not if Salem herself decided to dirty her hands for once, but against one of her agents it might buy them some extra time and keep the girls out of trouble.
Taiyang would never have imagined in his wildest dreams that life would have become this complicated. But it was, in his estimation, worth it.
He blinked a few times, startled out of his thoughts as he saw Ruby's mouth twist into a pout, her eyes twinkling with a certain look that she only got when…
"What did you see?" He asked warily, already rising from his place on the ground, reaching for his weapon, not bothering to conceal his movements. Ruby and Yang were both far too perceptive to keep things from.
Ruby was silent for a tense minute before shaking her head back and forth, muttering to herself a little bit before the question registered. She blinked at him with wide eyes and began to speak. "Uh…Yang is fighting a dog."
Taiyang's blood ran cold. "A dog?" He asked, dreading the answer, even though he already knew precisely what had happened.
Ruby nodded. "A real BIG dog." She pronounced solemnly.
She then shrieked in an undignified manner as he scooped her up and looked at her with a serious expression. "Can you tell me where she is?" He demanded in a no-nonsense manner, heart racing as he felt sick to his stomach, limbs shaking as the worry settled in.
His daughter nodded frantically, pointing to a direction in the woods. He nodded and slung her around his shoulders, legs propelling him forward at a near dead sprint as Ruby clung to him.
He could only pray he wasn't too late.
The Warp shuddered.
The ripple went unnoticed by its denizens. The world from which the faint disturbance emanated was uninteresting in the extreme. The faintest whisper compared to the unceasing chorus of war/lust/madness/decay that rang throughout the stars from the aged carcass of that titanic star-nation, the Imperium of Man.
Such ripples happen constantly. The reverberation of events, plucking away at the strings of fate in ways that even dread Tzeentch could not, or would not, always account for.
No, the event that had spawned this miniscule disturbance could not even stir the most meagre, lowly chaos spawn to sniff out the cause.
On an unremarkable ball of primordial dust, hanging in a tainted nebula where the souls of an entire race of exterminated Xenos bayed relentlessly for the blood of the human race, an unremarkable man opened his eyes, and gazed past the veil, into the mortal cosmos. "Ah." He murmured, aged bones creaking as he dusted himself off from where he had slumbered. "That explains a few things." He sighed, weary and lethargic. The man grabbed a stick that lay undisturbed in the dirt, a length of carved, dark wood taken from a tree that had been felled before Man first stepped beyond their home world.
He rose from the wasteland, took one step, and was gone.
Taiyang arrived to find himself at a warzone.
Trees were uprooted by great force, with splinters the size of his fist littering the area in chunks. Gouges were torn in the ground, and…there. Blood. A small amount, but…
His heart stopped, and it took everything he had to remain upright. Gingerly, he reached behind himself to pluck Ruby from his shoulders and turned her around to face him. "Can you tell me where your sister is now?" He asked her, trying not to let any of the mortal terror he felt show on his face.
She nodded, and pointed over behind a particularly brutalized portion of the fields.
Although he knew that if Yang was truly in danger, Ruby would most likely have had a much more severe reaction, Taiyang couldn't help but be worried.
Grimm were a problem everywhere. Even bastions such as Vale and Atlas were not truly safe all the time. No area of the planet could be patrolled so extensively as to exterminate all aspects of the Grimm. They would appear sometimes literally out of nowhere, in a phenomenon that baffled experts and was a threat all the same. So while Patch was more peaceful than most places, it was still not safe for people to venture out alone.
He would be having words with Yang over this…
But as soon as the thought crossed his mind then immediately felt guilty over his anger. No, Yang would not have done this intentionally. And the last thing he wanted his child to be was afraid of him.
His thoughts drifted back to the night he had first found her, how the trek through to the sight of the crash had looked much like this.
There. All at once he ran at a dead sprint, Ruby flailing in his arms as he sat her down to the side as he scooped up Yang from the ground. His hands checked her for injury with clinical precision, and his hand came away from her matted hair sticky with blood. Probing with his fingers, he buried the shaking panic deep so he could make sure she was not literally dying in his arms-
Yang coughed once, twice, groaning in an undignified manner as she brought her hand up instinctually to her head. Tai's hand caught her own. "You're hurt. Stop moving." He said sternly. Or tried to, at least. It came out as more of a hoarse whisper.
"Stupid dog…" Yang coughed again, but did not move as Taiyang double checked her scalp. More blood, but…no wound. None that he could tell, anyway. Although…
He held her out a little bit so he could get a better look at her as a whole. She was looking up at him with a grumpy face, a few droplets of stark crimson drying on her cheek, as her lavender eyes glared up at him. She was so comically angry looking he couldn't help but snort.
"I was punching the stupid dog and then he disappeared!" Yang yelled at him, and Taiyang blinked a few times in surprise.
"…you fought a Beowolf?" He asked, because clearly, he must have misheard her.
He knew his girls were strong (at one point Yang had managed to lift Harbinger over her head, swinging it around before Summer had managed to take it away from her), and tough (falls that would have killed normal children left his with the faintest bruises), but this was in another realm entirely.
"A few." She admitted, and his terror came rushing back all at once. One Beowulf was bad enough. It was the graduation test at Signal, to be able to kill a Grimm without being injured or winded, before being shipped off to Beacon or other academies which quickly ramped up the difficulty.
Still…she was alive. Unharmed, no, but any civilian would have been torn to pieces by a single Grimm well before he could have arrived, let alone fended off an entire pack. Even huntsman trainees would have been hard pressed to escape alive.
The guilt he felt was overwhelming. He should have kept her safe, should have kept her at home, should have should have-
"Hey!" His head jerked back as Yang thumped him on the nose. She was clearly growing more agitated by the second. "They weren't that tough." That wasn't the point, but he also realized that staying here was not high on his list of priorities. Yang protested being carried furiously as he lifted her up in his arms, but he could tell her protests were more for appearances sake. He didn't comment on the fact that she clung to him tightly, or that Ruby kept one hand on her sister at all times as they began to walk back home.
Still, the curiosity was killing him. Why had she run so far away from the house?
"Felt right." The mumbled response startled him, as Yang shifted in his arms, already half asleep again as she nestled against him. Had he really said that out loud? He really had to learn how to control his mouth around the kids.
But the answer… and her actions. He couldn't help but read into it, and not for the first time, he asked himself the questions that continued to come to mind. Yang had been born into his family…but she had been made for something else. He didn't know what that 'something else' was, but he had a feeling that he wouldn't like the answer.
Half a world away, Raven was flying.
No…no, that was wrong. Not flight. This was something else.
She blinked, and in a swirl of shapes, she was somewhere else.
A dream? No…this was too real, then wha-
Colors in her mouth. Memories pouring from her mind in a cascade of unraveling only to then be put back into place.
The feeling was over in a minute, but a tinge of copper lingered in her mouth as she spat a wad of blood upon the dirt at her feet.
Dirt. The clearing her clan had been sleeping in was covered in grass… Her hand went down instinctively to her weapon. Air.
"Sorry." An aged voice said absently to her side.
She whirled around to face the voice, and blinked. His skin was a deep tan, wrinkled lines crinkling around the corners of his eyes, as long, black hair cascaded down either side of his head. His eyes were almond brown, with a tiny hint of something twinkling within them. The same kind of look that her teammates got w-
No, this would not do.
"Who are you. Where am I?" She asked directly, tensing as she glared at the stranger with an intensity that would have left most people pissing their pants.
For his part, the man merely shrugged his shoulders in a casual gesture. "We're in your mind. Or at least, a part of it." He waved a hand out in front of him, and Raven couldn't help but stare in disbelief. Her entire team was there, frozen in time, arguing over…something. This…she…
"This was the night you found the stasis pod. The night you found the first of my lost daughters." The man continued, as if what was happening was an everyday occurrence. "I wanted to see these events from your perspective. They have enlightened me greatly, and give me some small measure of hope."
Wait. What?
She turned back to face him, anger forgotten as alarm bells started ringing in her head. "You're her maker?" She couldn't bring herself to say…that name. Her name.
A thoughtful expression briefly flickered across the man's face, but it passed as he shifted upon his perch. "In a manner of speaking. The truth is…complicated. In a way, you could consider me an…uncle, of sorts. Her maker, her father, was…a flawed man. And in an effort to eliminate those flaws, he cast off the parts of himself that he thought made him weak and sought to leverage their strengths where possible. I am one of those parts of himself. When he first walked the lands of his birth, I was the one telling him to take the next step forward. When he sailed to parts of the globe unknown, I was the hand that steered the ship. But when all the lands were tread upon, and all the seas were sailed, he had to stay…and I had to go."
With a suddenness that belied his apparent age, he rose, one hand upon the staff at his side. "Still, I have one last duty now that my searching and waiting is over. The lost have been found…and they must find their way home to their real father. To that end, I have a task for you."
None of this made a bit of sense to Raven, who could feel her temper rising rapidly as she sneered at the strange man. "I don't know who you think you are, or if you think I'm really buying your bullshit bargain bin fantasy story, but you can't order me to do anything. I want nothing to do with any of this." It took every last bit of her self-control to not add 'motherfucker' to the end of that sentence, but she was angry, not stupid.
The look he gave her made her feel like she was being judged by every single person she had ever known. The weight of it was enough to make her freeze in place.
At first, it looked like he was going to scold her, before he took a deep breath. "I have been where you are now." He murmured. "I was born from fear. The fear of the unknown, and what would happen if I acted on my impulses. But if I have learned anything, it is the power of admitting one's mistakes. There is no one to impress but yourself. So don't disappoint."
He took a step to turn around, staff thudding softly against the ground. The sound made her jump as though a bomb had gone off next to her.
"You will return to Yang and Ruby and tell them that they must find their way to Terra." He intoned, before pausing, as if just remembering something important. "They'll most likely want to bring plenty of friends for the journey. It will be dangerous."
As he began to walk into the woods, Raven's anger got the better of her. "What the fuck is Terra? Who the fuck is Ruby?" She screamed in frustration, taking several steps forward to beat some answers out of this absolute basta-
Golden light blinded her, as she glimpsed the merest fraction of the Master of Mankind's power, reflected in the fragment of a fragment that stood before her.
The radiance seeped into her soul, as her delusions of grandeur crumbled, as paranoia and anger and selfishness bled away like a bile expunged from a sour wound. Raven felt unworthy and hated herself for it. But she could not even hold onto that, after a time. She was weak.
"Weak?" The being mused, and it shouldn't have surprised her as much as it did that he could read her mind. "Frightened…yes. Cowardly, yes. But weak? No, Raven Branwen. You are many things, but weak is not one of them."
"I ran." She whispered, eyes held shut. "I would have fucked up raising her. A baby…that was never the plan." Just one more thing she wasn't strong enough to do.
"Let me tell you a secret." He said. The radiance was reassuring, even though she knew instinctively that she could have been killed at any point during this conversation. "I am a horrible father." He confessed with a dark sigh. "But in my time, I have learned one thing. Do not let your fear of failure become a failure to act. You do not need to be perfect, Raven Branwen. You would run to the ends of the earth for the rest of your days rather than risk pain for yourself and those that you love, but that is not what you need to do. That is not who you need to be."
The light vanished, and Raven was able to see again. The glow of the false moon illuminated the man's weathered face one last time, as he walked off into the forest. Distantly, she could feel herself falling, as some last parting words followed her back to the waking world.
"Go to them. Warn them. Prepare them."
AN: This is probably not my best work, having been welded together from several attempted revisions, then duct-taped over with bad ideas and shoddy editing. But it might serve as the jumping off point for something better in future chapters.
As mentioned in the above part of the author's note, I am currently writing this as part of a series of commissions. I do not seek payment from anyone for merely reading my work, my stories will always be free to enjoy. However, needs being what they are, if you enjoy my writing, then I humbly ask that if you can afford it, consider contributing in whatever manner you see fit; either being a small donation, buying a commission, or some other arrangement. My discord server is also active still, and I will be posting updates there. Thank you for your time, and I hoped you enjoyed the chapter.