A/N: I own nothing. full stop. This chapter is a little short compared to the others, really its just meant to finish off a day in the life.
To Falloutguy111: Blake is being used as a perspective primarily because she can relate to Steele the most, but also because Steele and Adam are very similar characters with some small but critical differences. I plan to expand on that using the psychologists notes in the future, I could go on a multi paragraph character analysis on the team in relation to Steele and their approaches to life, but I feel like that is kind of unnecessary and can be expanded in story.
"What happened to you?"
Steele looked down at the array of scars across his torso, dozens of them he had no idea how he got, he only remembered the ones that nearly killed him. there was the line from where he had taken a burst from a Devotion, the giant ropes and pitting from where a Tracker cannon round had landed less than foot away from him- that one would have killed him if he wasn't behind a door, and there was a pair of scars the size of his armored fist where he had taken a burst from an XO-19 while in the middle of a jump. "witch time?"
That was not the right question to ask if the reaction of the nurse was anything to go by. "Medical. Now."
"I'm fine. Look, nothing but scars." He didn't get a chance to argue further as Yang simply grabbed him by the shoulders and picked him up.
"that's right, you're nothing but scars. The nurse is right, this is for your own good." he tried to struggle but she was far stronger than he anticipated and was unable to shake himself loose from her grip. He was sure that they made a strange sight as Yang carried him to the medical wing kicking and trying to swing free. It was less that he didn't want a medical exam, then that he didn't want to deal with the memories that would be brought up, exams meant questions and questions meant dealing with his history.
He stopped fighting it once he had been forced to sit on one of the beds, they had won and he was already here, continuing to fight it was a bad look and would be fruitless. All in, the exam was fairly standard, the nurse poked at a few of his scars, checked his breathing and blood pressure, his range of motion, he did a few light calisthenics under her direction, she checked his stride, and took some blood samples. The deviation came when she decided to run something like an MRI, apparently the people of Remnant didn't have X-ray machines, so the MRI had replaced it as the standard for medical imagining. The nurse had decided he needed some imaging done after he reported some sensitivity in a few of his more dramatic shrapnel scars.
Turns out he had a pile of shrapnel still stuck in him, it must have been recent for the bits to still be in him, it must have happened while he fought through the IMC forces on the way to the portal. The fact that he hadn't noticed the hit was impressive considering its size, adrenaline was a hell of an anesthetic. The nurse didn't wait to schedule surgery, perks of attending a combat school where injuries could be expected. He was on a bullhead to Vale general hospital a few minutes later and was fully under for surgery in under an hour.
He had never come out of surgery feeling so good, Aura was a damn blessing, he didn't even have a scar from being opened up and he had only been under for around two hours. The surgeon was fast and skilled, and the shrapnel was fairly large. It wasn't all good news though, while they were pulling the shrapnel out, they had noticed a significant amount of complications caused by the stims in his Pilot kit. Most of his organs were aged way past what they should be, on the inside apparently, he looked like he was in his forties. He wasn't quite sure how the stims made him heal so quickly, but there was no way it was anything else that was running through his system that would have that kind of effect. It wasn't something that would have concerned him before coming to Remnant, Pilot Regeneration would have undone that kind of damage, but without the reassurance of that kind of medicine he was more than happy that he had a simulacrum waiting for him to inhabit.
The other bad news was that he was being referred to the school phycologist, apparently, he displayed reactive, hostile, and aggressive behaviors, someone had told the nurse that he was suffering flashbacks, cause that got brought up as well. There were also some very pointed questions about the augments that were still forming, what ever the injection was supposed to do to him seemed to be working though he didn't think he was seeing the benefits yet as they weren't complete.
When he managed to fend off the doctors and make his way back to Beacon classes were ending and he was in, frankly, a bad fucking mood. He was planning on heading to the locker room, grabbing his guns, and spending some time on the firing range, then some time in the gym beating the shit out of a bag. That plan abruptly changed when Ruby tackled him from the side and basically dragged him to the dining hall for dinner.
It was hard to stay angry when you were dealing with someone so damn wholesome. Ruby was freaking out about just how awesome his fight with Pyrrha had been, apparently having forgotten her worries from earlier. It was good to just spend some time chatting with her, she just couldn't help getting excited about things. Sitting down with the rest of the team made him a little apprehensive, but they were willing to take the fact that he was sitting with them as confirmation that he was fine. The most he got out of the team was Weiss commenting on his ammunition project, smug as shit she was. "Still think that the slipstream rounds are unnecessary?"
"Yes, I do, faster bullets wont change anything on the DMR. Hypervelocity rounds are much faster than anything I used in the match, making the fastest round in existence faster won't have any practical effect; its purely academic." Weiss was not impressed with his answer. They had been having this argument since they had started working with Ruby to design his advanced munitions for the DMR. Weiss had proposed a round that would utilize time manipulation to make time move faster around the round, this would allow the round to travel faster but would not increase its velocity. The issue was the DMR rounds were already so damned fast that Steele didn't want to go to the effort for no observable payoff.
The team had a good laugh over it, familiar as they were with the recurring argument. Conversation started back up, catching him up on the other fights; Juane had gotten his shit kicked courtesy of Cardin, Ren had lost his face off with Ruby, some random he had never heard of narrowly beat Russel. Steele brought the conversation around to a topic he was slightly confused by. "So… we have what? Two days off? In a row? I get having rest days, but what do you do with two whole days?"
The whole team gave him a look, somewhere between shock, pity, and confusion. Yang though seemed excited. "Oh Yes. Two whole days to slack off and have fun! Oh, this is going to be great, we can show you all the cool places to hang out and all the good shops in Vale." That seemed be the signal for them to make their way back to the dorm, they hadn't even been settled in for more than a few seconds before Yang and Ruby had broken out their gaming set up. Steele had seen set ups like it back home with some of the grunts, he had even joined in on a few games similar to what Ruby and Yang were playing, some 2D fighting game that was somehow loud enough to be heard over their overly dramatic shouting.
Steele sat down on his bunk to watch, a flex of his Aura bringing his guns to him so he could clean them. Blake had quite literally curled up with a book, somehow able to read while the sisters did their best to invite a noise complaint. Weiss seemed to be going over notes from the week, holding a cup of coffee that Steele had no idea where she had gotten it from.
The rest of the night was quiet-excluding the sisters- a short gym session rounded out Steele's evening before turning in for the night, by the time he got back Blake was the only one of them still awake. The title of her current book was eyebrow raising, he didn't know that she could be so bold as to read that in kind of novel in the open; not that he could blame her, lonely nights for a Faunus in hiding he guessed.
He woke with the sun, and Ruby's whistle. A groggy "what the fuck?" was Steeles only reply as he fell out of his bunk, looking up to the whole of team RWBY standing around him. "Shopping! You need clothes and supplies; we know the city. Hurry up or we're going to miss the airship!" Steele worried about what he had gotten himself into.