"I'm sure no one knew this, but Vytal's opening ceremony is this Sunday. And that means weapons-ready by Monday morning! The foundry will be available all weekend, but if you haven't finished reassembly by weapon check you'll have to fight without or forfeit your first-day exhibition matches. You know the drill by now: fill out the request form if you need any parts machined, talk to the TAs if you want to get a bench, blah blah blah. And with that out of the way… I've got nothing else! So go on, make it a good weekend, and happy Hallows!" The students didn't need any more prompting before stampeding out of their seats and into the freedoms provided by the international holiday.
She tried her best to not stare at the seat once she was alone in her classroom.
Someone had been sitting in it practically all day, but its emptiness during first period had felt like a punch to her eye every time she looked too far to the left. And for the rest of the day afterwards, just looking in its general direction would bring Ruby's mood crashing down from whatever highs it managed to reach and back into the muddy blackness of frustration.
Reaper was a good kid. Their sense of style and personal theme were… interesting in a way that made Ruby imagine she and Jaune had a kid for the sole purpose of forcing them to wear a combination of their old outfits. But Jade liked them, and anything else Ruby thought about them was made irrelevant by the unspoken second 'like' hiding between the lines. And she'd learned from her own experience how tenacious feelings like those could be.
She'd also learned a long time ago that life wasn't fair—but now Ruby's classroom was missing, not just a student but her daughter's smile too, due to an attack by a Grimm (one most students wouldn't ever see outside of a third year Grimm Studies textbooks) for the second time in barely two months. 'Fair' had headed out for cigarettes and started a bandit tribe in the intervening fifteen years.
Ruby needed an expert opinion on how to fight on life's level, and there was no better place to learn lessons about fighting, dirty or otherwise, than a world-renowned combat academy.
Especially an academy where her sister happened to be the premier combat instructor.
Making one last check that her own classroom wasn't going to explode if left unattended for a while, Ruby grabbed a chocolate stapler from Cinder's no longer chocolate desk, took a deep breath, and shot down the halls of Beacon at a leisurely, barely subsonic, speed.
The closed door to Yang's domain didn't slow her in the slightest, as she split herself into an ethereal gust of rose petals that poured through the nearest vents, through the maze of air ducts, out another vent and finally up from behind the bleachers, where they reconstituted one whole Ruby Rose at her favorite seat for watching students pummel the snot out of one another during Yang's classes on the rare chances she could take the time away from her own class.
There were sadly no such inter-student snot-pummelings to be had so soon after the bell. Instead she was surprised to see Emerald in full workout gear sparring against Mercury and getting her butt handed to her more than getting a balanced back-and-forth practice. Kickfriend McGee clearly wasn't going easy on her despite the years of deskjobbery dulling an instinct or two.
Just after a round where Emerald managed to get her arm free of a leg-lock but couldn't get the leverage to do more than tap out, a student Ruby didn't recognize slunk their way out of Yang's office and scurried towards the exit with their bushy tail tucked between their legs.
Before they were even halfway to the door, a small white something flew out of the still-open office door and caused Ruby to jump in her seat when it shattered against the wall barely a foot to her right. The student broke into a run after that and was out the door by the time Yang came stomping out of her office a few seconds later.
Just the woman I wanted to see Ruby thought as she sped her own way across the room and landed as stealthily as she could manage just behind her clearly-agitated sister.
Ignoring the rest of the context clues, she looked about on the verge of punching the next thing to get her attention into next week.
"Yang! Wa-"
Good thing Ruby knew how to duck really fast, then!
The punch thrown her way was playful, in Huntress terms. While her punches could vaporize Grimm—and most anything else when she was really angry—Yang had enough self-control that Ruby wasn't in danger of actually getting hurt. And it wasn't like Ruby's aura was so weak that she couldn't take a solid punch to the chin if she needed to. But there was a difference between 'survive the hit' and 'able to eat novelty chocolate with your sister afterwards'.
Yang looked around her outstretched fist with confusion at first. Her face broke into a wide grin when she looked down to see Ruby sprawled across the padded mat in a heap of rose petals.
"...Wanna talk about it?" Ruby finished, half-jokingly half-dazed. Reaching her hand out in an unspoken request for help.
Yang obliged enthusiastically, causing Ruby to giggle in delight as she was heaved up from her prone position into a twirling hug. "Heya, Ruby! Happy Vytal weekend!"
"Happy Vytal, sis!" After a spin or two more, Ruby was placed back on her own two feet. Still reeling a bit from the spin she reached out to prop herself against the nearest solid object and found it was plenty hard, but also warm and… ended up all-but-groping her sister's abs. Classy, Ruby. Reeeeal classy .
"If I didn't know any better, I'd swear I could hear a banjo playing right about no— woah !"
"Serves you right!" Emerald cackled in victory as his scream undulated several times throughout the cavernous space.
Ruby felt her sister's laugh start in her abdominals and then explode into raucous audio at whatever she was looking at. She couldn't help but join in herself when she looked up to see Emerald swinging him around by his ankles.
Their chorus of laughter briefly paused when she flung him face-first into the nearby (padded) wall before all four of them burst out laughing even louder.
The wall was built for impacts exactly like that from students, and it wasn't like a single throw was going to slow Mercury down either. He was already squaring up with Emerald for another round as Yang led Ruby into her office.
Ruby always liked Yang's office. It smelled like sweat, coffee, and sports drinks, and was filled by the comfortable undertones of well-worn leather and campfires that just naturally followed her sister everywhere and reminded Ruby of their shared childhood room. Two desks sat at opposite walls, paired with two workout stations just like their old beds had been in their dad's house. A cork board of mementos dominated the back wall, each one labeled with the name of the student who had donated it to the collection.
Scraps of cloth, hasty notes and beautifully written letters. This was Yang's coin armor. Her living memories of lives touched all displayed for anyone to see, and Ruby took her time looking over it for new additions and old favorites. Blake and Weiss loved bundling up on winter nights while Yang regaled them with stories of her student's adventures from abroad. It made Ruby a little jealous that Yang could hold their attention with just words like that sometimes, like maybe they didn't find her as interesting.
She put that fear to rest by reminding herself that attention and affection were two separate things, and that she was never excluded from their affections even while Yang grabbed their attention. A fact the three of them had needed to impress on her several times over their relationship, sometimes with tender kisses and sometimes with more forceful approaches.
But speaking of attention-grabbing… "What did you throw against the wall earlier? The white thing." Ruby continued her search of the wall without looking back.
An angry snort was the only answer for a few seconds before a sharp slam of fist-on-desk violence made Ruby spin around in a flash to see Yang hunched over the side of her desk, her blazing eyes doing their best to burn down the world.
Ruby stepped over to Yang, guarded by the unwavering faith that there was only one thing she needed in a moment like right now, and it wasn't space. "Yang?"
"She had—" Yang froze and took a sharp breath as Ruby started gently rubbing her back. Ruby hesitated to continue, afraid that she had misread the timing.
Or the best course of action.
Or, worst of all, her sister's needs.
"I'm sorry. You don't have to tell me if you don't want to."
"No. You're good. I…" Yang took a deep, shuddering breath. She finally let it out with a single humorless laugh. "Ha. You'd think we'd be done with the White Fang by now."
Ruby's brain stopped working for a few seconds as she tried to understand the logic to Yang's words.
White Fang.
White thing.
White… oh. OH !
"Idiot brought a White Fang mask to class." The temperature in the room rose, signalling Yang's temper rising alongside. "Thought showing it off made them look cool. Or tough. Or whatever ."
Ruby started rubbing circles in Yang's back again. "I'm surprised you didn't smash it as soon as you found out."
"I did. Merc caught a corner of the mask poking out of her jacket when she was leaving. " Yang stood up from her hunched position, her voice stopped shaking in rage as she talked more. "I just… why does it feel like it never sticks? Equal rights activists are one thing. Even the violent ones have their place sometimes. But within a few years of getting their message heard there's another extremist wannabe or copycat popping up."
Ruby hated that question. She hated it with a passion because both her and Yang already knew the answer, but it still kept being asked. And it needed to be asked.
Every month.
Every week.
Every day.
And the answer never changed. But it needed to be said. And every time she heard it, that answer made Ruby mad .
"Because the world keeps making them." The anger burned her up inside until she found something to squeeze so tightly her knuckles turned white. Ruby wanted to rage and punch and kick something until she stopped feeling like this. Until things stopped making her feel like this. Until she felt Yang's hand rubbing circles on her back and remembered why she was here.
"Unfortunately, the real world isn't the same as a fairy tale."
"Well, that's why we're here! To make it better."
The answer stoked the fire in her soul, but not one geared toward destruction. It was the same inferno that drove her to take a sabbatical from protecting people from the monsters outside to go to a university to get a teaching degree so she could come here and work her freaking hardest every day to make sure that some day that answer might finally change. "And we'll keep fighting until the monsters stop coming."
There was a thump behind Ruby, like a butt landing in an office chair from standing height without regard for either chair or occupant. "That speech gets better every time, Rube." Ruby spun around to see her sister slumped in her chair for just a few heartbeats before she straightened her back and began to swivel side to side absentmindedly. "But I don't need a 'friendship and hard work' speech here. Making the world just a little bit better every day with our blood, sweat, and tears is what we signed on for from the beginning… whether we knew it or not." Ruby could hear the long-smoldering resentment in Yang's voice just below the surface. She couldn't fault her sister for the grudge she held against Ozpin and the old headmasters—and might even hold one herself, even if she didn't like to admit it—but sometimes she was terrified by just how strongly Yang still felt about it. "But it doesn't feel like it sticks . Like, every few years there's just another Adam, or Watts, or Soot. We're doing our best for Jade and Brennen's generation. But what can we do about the people in ours who just don't want to listen?"
"I… don't know," Ruby admitted. Yang's rebuttal took any wind right out of her sails. She was asking a question Ruby didn't have an answer to. Not really. A kindergartener could point to any number of initial causes for violent crimes and extremist actions with their eyes closed. And the amazing effort by everyone behind the rehabilitation system responsible for Emerald and Mercury being able to live their current lives without fear just proved that there was hope for changing people. But when it came to why some just refused to change, Ruby just didn't have an answer ready. It wasn't a question Ruby had really thought about before.
Yang leaned forward and slapped her knees, her solemn mood seemingly forgotten as she stood. "Oh, well. I didn't think it would be that easy, anyway." She shot Ruby an earnest smile and a playful punch to the shoulder. "Wouldn't be much of a world-wide problem if a gym teacher and her genius sister could solve it in fifteen minutes. We'd need at least twenty-five and help from Blake and Weiss. But c'mon, I think both of us need to let out a little bit of steam before we head home." Yang tilted her head toward the door as she started for it.
Perfect! That's why Ruby had come down to see Yang in the first place—To get her frustrations out and go somewhere productive. The two of them were already shoving each other as they exited the office and headed along the wall towards the locker rooms. "You're not a gym teacher! You improve fighting styles. Teach grapples and disarms—"
" —Make them run laps. Manage the locker rooms. Have my office connected to the gym."
"Well… Okay, yeah. When you put it like that." Ruby ran a step ahead to grab the door, coincidentally turning to see Emerald currently tapping out of a full Nelson. "Emerald didn't tell me she was training again."
"News to me too. Came in around noon and Merc tossed her right in with the class." Yang gave a dismissive shrug as she led them down the locker room's entry hall. The funky smell of every locker room ever filled her nose as they approached. "She's been kinda aggressive all day if you couldn't tell by th—" Yang stopped mid-stride and held up the signals for 'hold' and 'quiet' just before she reached the end of the hallway.
Reacting on complete habit, Ruby didn't even think before her Huntress habits kicked in to fill in the details Yang had already picked up on. It didn't take her long to tune in to the sounds of what should have been an empty locker room. Instead of the usual background sounds and smells that Ruby suspected pervaded all locker rooms in existence, there was a familiar, but distorted, rhythm over top. It almost sounded like rustling cloth and muffled mo— Oh.
Ewwwww.
Yang just took a deep, disappointed breath and drooped her head down as she brought up a fist to knock against the doorframe loudly several times. A yelp of surprise followed, and then the sound of hasty movement and frenzied whispers soon after that. "I don't know who's in there, and I don't really care right now." Ruby could hear the humor in Yang's voice rise at the torment she was about to put the not-so-sneaky paramours through. "But whoever it is better hope I don't see them anywhere between the door and my locker. I'm sure Captain Hadal will appreciate a few volunteers to keep the Amity cleaned up during the festival."
The echoes of panicked whispering and rummaging resumed almost immediately, painting a picture of two teens trying to hide beneath a bench or closing themselves in one of the rocket lockers to avoid being seen by Yang. Ruby was in tears from holding back her laughter when Yang entered the locker room and took an immediate left turn into the teacher's aisles.
Ruby followed soon after, completely unable to breathe between silent rasps of laughter. She had forgotten Yang's locker was the closest one to the door, even before the visitor lockers, and would bet Lien the students had too in their rush to hide.
As she stumbled down the aisle towards her own locker, she alternated leaning against the bench in the center and the rock of lockers haphazardly. It was only a handful of steps but she nearly tripped on her own feet before getting even halfway and figured she should take a seat and let herself recover before anything more extreme happened.
It only took a few breaths to calm down enough to look back and see Yang in a similar state. They locked eyes and both of them realized they couldn't keep quiet as the whispers stopped with a meaty slap that could have been from a cheek on either end of a person echoed through the locker room. The laughter was explosive, cathartic, and it sent Ruby back over the edge of the bench, knocking her head into the locker behind her.
Pain flared first, causing her thoughts to jumble and her head to buzz. The soothing warmth of Aura made quick work of the pain, leaving her mind to reorder and… the buzzing hadn't stopped. That's never a good sign, Ruby thought with the semi-coherence of a recent knock to the skull. Before she could worry about it much more the buzzing stopped anyway.
Then it started again.
And stopped.
And started again.
Okay… That's a really weird sign. Ruby awkwardly shifted her legs from the bench down to the floor before righting herself and standing up to face the locker her head had impacted. The buzzing was still audible but was clearly not coming from her head. Which was good. But she was confused why a rocket locker would buzz like that. It was buzzing like a… scroll getting a call. Who would call a locker, though?
"Hey Yang, why is this locker getting a scroll-call?" Maybe the new models have a ringback or something when you're out of range?
"Is there a scroll in it?"
"Oh." Ruby input her override code and popped it open. Through the pocket of a long white robe, she saw the glow of a scroll's screen just before the call attempt ended and the pocket went dark. "That makes a lot more sense, doesn't it?"
Yang stepped up behind Ruby, her hand pulling out the scroll after a short struggle. "Probably Emerald's. Pretty sure that's her Hollows robe, and I don't think anyone else has used these today. She might want to know she's missed—" Yang held up the scroll so both she and Ruby could see the missed call message, "holy hell. Forty-three missed calls? She's been here like an hour."
"Way too many to wait." Ruby grabbed the scroll and kicked her semblance into gear. She was down the hall and back in the gymnasium next to Emerald and Mercury's mat as quickly as she could, not worrying about the mess of rose petals in her wake. "Hey you got—"
Ruby was interrupted by the sound of the gym's main door opening violently and a man with the signature red sunglasses of one of Junior's bodyguards all but collapsing through. "Emerald Sustrai?! Is there an Emerald Sustrai here!?"
Well whatever was going on, it seemed Ruby was too late to do much about it. But if Junior had sent a runner all the way to Beacon to find Emerald, It had to be important.
"That's me," Emerald replied.
"Boss… Beacon Tower… Reaper… Grimm lady…" he panted out.
Emerald wasn't waiting for the rest of the explanation, turning around to face Ruby. "Ruby?" she asked in a way that left no room for debate about what it was she was asking.
They needed Emerald to help with Reaper. The tower was halfway across campus, but Ruby had plenty of Aura to burn if it meant helping a student, a friend, and her daughter's favorite person all at once. Ruby didn't need to hear any more than that. "Merc, tell Yang I'll be back."
"Got it."
"Em." Emerald gave a solid nod of understanding. "Hold your breath."
A/N:
Big thanks to Shock Factor, and MellowYelloww for the betas on this one. My writing would not be what it is without them.
At last! the weird little arcs are coming back together! wondrous.
After the tone, please leave your name, number, and a brief message and I'll get back to you as soon as I can.
You're looking pretty radical today.
*beep*