Chapter 6: Destiny
November 9th, 823 VCS
Eighteen months ago.
Tears hung in the rim of Pyrrha's vision. She blinked them away, only for them to return. She couldn't escape her own feelings anymore than she could escape the choice that lay before her.
"I've always felt as though I was destined to become a huntress," she said, choosing her words carefully. "To protect the world…" She sighed. "And it's become increasingly clear to me that my feelings were right, but…"
She thought of the dying girl in the depths below them now, the face pinched in silent agony, frozen by awful science as death approached on silent feet. She thought of letting such incredible powers fall into the hands of a murderer, or into her own hands. She thought of the looks on the faces of Ozpin's inner circle—the stress lines, the tired eyes. She thought of why they'd chosen her, of how even those in command of the world still saw her as a list of her achievements.
She thought of saying yes. She thought of saying no.
"Her life would become intertwined with yours, the only question is…"
"…What's that gonna do to you?"
She thought of choice, and of consequence.
"…I don't know if I can do it."
Jaune stood. She heard him take a breath as if to speak, and started to turn and face him.
But then he paused, just a moment, and thought about his words a little more.
"I think you can," he said. She stiffened, feeling a familiar lash of anxiety, but then she whirled on him and saw his arms outstretched, a worried smile on his face.
"But… I don't know if you should," Jaune said, taking a step closer. "Pyrrha… I have no idea what's going on. You're talking about destiny, and losing yourself, and I don't know what any of that means! I can't see inside your head, but… I don't want to lose you. So…" He swallowed, desperation in his eyes, and gently placed his hands on her shoulders, as if terrified she'd shatter.
"So, please," he said. "Just talk to me? Tell me what's going on. After everything you've done for me, let me return the favor. Please?"
She looked at him. She saw the worry in his eyes, and something in her broke. She took a step forward, and he met her, pulling her into his arms as she began to sob, holding onto him for dear life as the world seemed to spin itself down around her. The two of them fell to their knees at some point, but it hardly mattered. She buried her face in his neck, hiding there, holding onto him like the last safe place in the world.
She felt his hand, hesitantly, rise to stroke her hair. She felt him swallow, nervous and scared, but not because she was powerful, or famous, or out of his reach.
"It'll be okay," he said.
She grit her teeth. "And what if it's not?"
"Then we'll make it okay! You and me, Ren and Nora, team RWBY, everyone else! Whatever this is about, the one thing I can promise is that you won't have to face it alone."
She laughed. "Do you know how rare it is for someone to offer me help?"
"Yeah. But it's still okay to ask." He pulled back, and his smile shined. "You taught me that, Pyrrha."
She looked at him, and for just a moment, she believed him.
She didn't tell him everything, but she told him enough to understand.
Qrow spat out his liquor when she brought Jaune to Ozpin's office. Ironwood tried to lecture her on 'opsec,' on trust . She stared him down without hesitation and clearly laid out her terms: She would do this, but it wouldn't be alone. Jaune would be there, and her team would be informed afterwards.
Ironwood steamed. Qrow and Glynda looked to one another.
Ozpin agreed.
Neither she nor Jaune said a word as they descended. They didn't talk much more as they walked down the long, dark hallway of the vault. The only thing of substance Jaune asked was "is it safe?" to which Ironwood replied "yes" and Qrow replied "not even a little."
Jaune gasped when he saw Amber, but didn't comment, hiding his horror with a hand across his mouth. He looked to Pyrrha, and found her gazing at the pod with a powerful determination.
As she stood before the device that would remake her, Pyrrha made more decisions. Most of them weren't relevant now. Things for the future. She only made two choices for that moment.
The first was to say she was ready.
The second was to turn to Jaune, look him in the eyes in what might have been the last moment of her life, and kiss him.
And then it began.
Cinder was reclining casually, studying the student records of Team CMSN's "competitors" and half-listening to some stupid argument between her two accomplices, when the power inside her body began to writhe.
It came on quick; a wave of dizziness, a spurt of nauseous confusion, and then a feeling so hot and hideous it obliterated all thought from the woman's mind.
Cinder staggered to her feet, and without speaking to either of her charges, ran. Whatever was happening, she had minutes to stop it, at most.
Pyrrha screamed as the dying girl's life poured into hers.
It was like standing in a blast furnace, bathing in molten iron. All the heat, and all the weight as well. She could feel it tugging at her in some kind of strange confusion, trying to reshape her into the body it knew.
She could feel her own aura resisting it. Fighting bitterly against the pull. Even as this alien soul tried to change her, she devoured it, tearing pieces of it away and taking them into herself. And at the core, the reason for it all. The glowing kernel of power that burned hotter than all the rest.
She took it, and two became one.
Cinder tore up the stairs from the basement, and burst through the doors of the disused warehouse on the edge of Beacon's campus. It was early evening, and the student body was milling around in their usual mundane chaos. Cinder rushed through them like a missile, injecting more and more aura into her limbs to push her body past its limits, ignoring the yelps and shouts as she knocked a girl right off her feet.
She could feel the source, a point that some unconscious part of her was desperately repelled from, while another was brutally attracted. The duality wrenched at her mind. Dimly, she recognized that she'd blown her cover, but that likely didn't matter anymore.
There was only one explanation for what she was feeling: Ozpin was doing something to the maiden's corpse. It didn't surprise her that he'd defile the girl—a man with that much power couldn't possibly have all the compunctions he put on for the public—but she hadn't expected him to make the move before the end of the festival, with every camera in the world still squatting on his lawn.
In any case, time was short. If Cinder could feel where the other half of the power was, it stood to reason that whoever had it could feel her just the same. The plan was as good as ruined; no sense in waiting around for things to slide further out of her control.
She turned a corner, ignoring the startled shriek as she crashed through a vaguely familiar quartet of students who failed to get out of her way. Two of them, a big man carrying a sword to match and some diva with a beret, lashed out to grab her. With a flick of her wrist, she scorched their hands and carried on.
The CCT tower lay ahead. The dual repulsion/attraction was fading, but Cinder could still locate the source—deep underground, a ways off.
She almost ran to the spot above it, but a moment of lucidity struck her. She sprinted to the tower, into the lobby, and into an open elevator car. Some big brawny idiot was standing there already, so she grabbed him by the chestpiece and hurled him bodily back outside. Shouts were beginning to echo from the lobby, so she lifted her scroll and triggered Arthur's virus.
The elevator doors slammed shut, and she examined the controls. Her scroll beeped, alerting her that there were hidden functions it could access. Including a floor far below where she stood now.
She snarled, and nearly stumbled as she sent the car down.
The girl stumbled out of the pod. The world lurched, each sound a scream in her ear, each point of light a spear running through her optic nerve. She shut her eyes, tried to just stand still.
She failed, her knees giving out as she pitched forward. Someone caught her, strong hands holding her, a familiar voice asking if she was alright. They said a name. They called her "Pyrrha."
It was her name.
It was not her name.
She threw up.
"P-Pyrrha!?"
The shock and concern in the voice startled her, and she looked up, in a haze.
He was familiar, but she couldn't put a name to him. She felt sick. She knew him. She knew she knew him. He was important to her. Who was he?
She swallowed the burning in her throat. Tasted bile. She'd thrown up all over his cuirass. She tried to speak, but her mouth wouldn't work. She looked up, into his eyes. Terror and worry gazed back, tinted blue.
She tried to steady her breathing. She swallowed again. She opened her mouth, then coughed, feeling another wave of nausea.
His name. What was his name.
"Pyrrha?"
"J-" She swallowed a third time, shutting her eyes tight, forcing herself to remember. "J-Jaune. It's Jaune, right?"
He hugged her to him, pulling her tight. "It's me," he said, his voice breaking with tears. "It's Jaune. I'm here, Pyrrha."
That name.
"Pyr… Pyrrha. That's me, right?"
The voice was so quiet, echoing in the dark space.
It was her voice.
It was not her voice.
"That's right," someone else said. She turned her head, and her blood froze in her veins.
"Ozpin."
The venom in her throat surprised her, but she was too angry to care much. She tore herself away from Jaune and stalked towards the wizard. She stumbled, caught herself, then stood. Fists clenched tight. She was taller than him—had she always been taller than him?
Her eyes hardened and her lips twisted into an unkind smile. It felt wrong, an expression that her face had never taken on before. "It's been a while."
Ozpin regarded her levelly. "Amber."
It was her name.
It was not her name.
She felt sick again, but this time she managed not to throw up. "What," she said, gritting out each syllable, "did you do to me."
It was her voice.
It was not her voice.
"Something that's never been done before. A miracle." Another voice. Also familiar. She turned to him, the fury in her eyes only growing. Ironwood.
"You," she said, quaking with rising fury. "What have you done. "
Ironwood's gaze was unyielding. "We saved your life."
"For a certain definition of 'saved,'" said another.
Her lips twitched up, seeing the old drunk leaning against the wall behind the general. A little of the anger faded for a moment. "Qrow… I'd like to say it's nice to see you again…"
"And I'd say it was mutual, but ah…" Qrow's eyebrows raised. "I can't say this is exactly ideal."
"You were attacked," Goodwitch cut in, standing off to the side with her arms sharply folded. "How much do you remember?"
She did not remember.
She remembered. She remembered bullets, and fire. The little girl on the road, a trap. She remembered battle. Remembered the fear in those red eyes as she prepared to finish off her foe. Then pain. Then defeat. Then HER.
The Woman In Red.
She hissed as the pain in her head overwhelmed her, dizziness rushing to claim her. She fell backwards, and someone caught her. She smelled vomit. She felt sick.
"Pyrrha! What's wrong with her, what did you do!?"
She looked up at the familiar/ unfamiliar boy.
"...who the hell is Pyrrha?"
He stared at her like she'd slapped him, horror tightening his hands on her shoulders.
The sickness exploded inside her, and she ripped herself away from him, falling on her knees as she retched onto the tiles.
"Jaune," she gasped. "I… I'm so sorry, I…" She felt tears rising, falling down her face.
He was at her side, holding her, pulling her up, supporting her. She leaned on him, pressed into him, held him and let him hold her.
Her name was Pyrrha Nikos.
Her name was Amber Autumn.
And then, she heard the click of heels.
The car reached the bottom. The door opened with a little "ding."
Cinder's heels clicked on the floor of the dark vault. The nausea was subsiding, but something new was taking its place. An apprehension she was not accustomed to.
She cursed herself for her own carelessness. The vault was obvious in hindsight; she should have looked for it earlier, at least confirmed its location. She could have even slipped in and killed the maiden months ago, drained the last of the power in the night and vanished. It would have made everything else so utterly, trivially simple.
But it was too late now. The apprehension grew and grew, morphing into genuine anxiety, the first she'd felt in years. For an instant, she was back in the stable, listening to the distant sounds of an argument she didn't understand.
She shook herself out of it with a flash of righteous fury. That wasn't who she was anymore. She was strong now, and she'd be stronger still, as soon as…
And then, Cinder saw her.
The girl. Tall, with hair like fire and eyes like… like nothing in the world, a green that seemed to pierce Cinder's soul and hook into it, tugging at the walls of an empty cavity. It was more literal than metaphor. Cinder felt a wriggling pain in her gut just looking at the loathsome child.
For a moment, they just stared. The girl's face turned to shock, then pain, then fear.
Then, abruptly, it was none of those. The girl's face twisted, and she screamed, fire dancing in her eyes as she broke from the boy holding her, lunging towards Cinder with uncanny speed.
So much anger. Cinder could relate.
She raised a hand, and blew the girl back down the hall in a wave of flame.
The others were readying themselves, Ozpin and his tin soldier, his witch, his wine-soaked crow, and some other child who hardly warranted the effort of description. It was the last who'd caught the struggling girl, holding her back as she glared at Cinder with those repugnant eyes. Her face was that of the little champion, but her expression held a different familiarity.
Cinder felt a spark of hatred lodge itself in the wall of her chest. "So that's what you did," she hissed. She almost had to give Ozpin credit—she'd never imagined he was capable of something so utterly cruel.
She didn't wait for them to react. She didn't try to fight. The wizard alone could destroy her, and the rest made it a hopeless endeavor. She'd missed her moment.
She'd failed.
She burned the elevator's doors away, burned its roof, and roared up the shaft on a cone of fire. The lobby exploded around her as she ripped her way through, ignoring the screams of the students and security guards as she set everything ablaze. Some of them still tried to stop her. She set them on fire.
She smashed through the doors, as fire alarms and attack sirens wailed into the evening sky. She ran, out across the grounds, out to the edge of the airship dock and leapt, screaming out her rage as she dove into the cold waters below.
An hour later, Emerald's scroll buzzed, but she and Mercury had already left Beacon. Their master hadn't been subtle with her exit, and they'd put the pieces together.
They pulled out of Vale entirely the next day, disappearing immediately except for Emerald, who quietly warned Neopolitan that their agreement was off. That night, Roman Torchwick vanished from Atlas military custody without a trace.
Adam Taurus screamed and raged at their betrayal, but in the end even his plans fell apart. Word of his plotting and instability finally made its way back to Mistral. He was recalled soon after, and the White Fang blended back into the shadows.
At Beacon, confusion reigned. Team CMSN's safehouse was found, though their motives for infiltrating and disrupting the tournament were never verified. "Cinder Fall" was no citizen of any major settlement, and investigation of her teammates turned up only two fragments of information; a Mistrali birth certificate that roughly matched up with Emerald's supposed age, and a rumor that the assassin Marcus Black had raised a son before he was killed. Of the quiet girl, known only as "Nix," nothing was ever determined.
Eventually, though, the Vytal Festival Tournament resumed. The singles round was reshuffled, with Yang Xiao Long exonerated and readmitted based on the testimony of several fellow students.
In the end, Pyrrha Nikos would defeat Yang to win the Fortieth Vytal Festival Tournament. The strange, but ultimately inconsequential events of the previous month were soon forgotten, lost in a haze of interviews and celebrations. Visiting students returned to their academies, and the world grew quiet once more.
Pyrrha Nikos stood in front of Ozpin's desk. There was a chair, but she didn't sit. Her back was rigid, her eyes shut tight. Her shoulders hunched, as she kept herself still.
"Please, relax," Ozpin said gently, concern evident in his voice.
"I can feel her," Pyrrha said. "She's in pain. She's angry. "
"I imagine she is. She certainly has a right to be. What you both are experiencing is deeply traumatic. Some would call it the stuff of nightmares. Of horror stories."
Pyrrha grimaced.
"...But it is what is, and you will adapt to it, in time."
Suddenly Pyrrha's eyes flew open, her mouth twisting into a snarl. "In time? She's out there Oz! I can feel her!"
Ozpin regarded the girl in front of him. "Yes. She is. But we know her face now, the way she fights, who she works with. She won't come here again."
The girl who was not Pyrrha glared out through Pyrrha's eyes. She sat down in the chair, trying to let her muscles unclench. "Losing the maiden powers felt like… like she wrenched open my ribs and took out a pound of flesh. This feels like you reached in for another pound and threw the rest of me away."
"Is it worse than death?"
"Who knows? But it sucks, Ozpin. It's misery."
"I'm sorry."
"You should be."
For the first time in memory, Ozpin's eyes drifted away. "I know."
Amber sighed, following his gaze out to the city of Vale, its lights glimmering across the bay. "This girl… Pyrrha. She deserves better."
"I agree."
"And you still did this to her?"
"Only with her consent. Pyrrha Nikos is a hero in the truest sense of the word. She understands sacrifice."
Amber stared him down. "Did she really understand this one?"
"Perhaps not. But she will, in time. She is stronger than you think."
"She should have her own life," Amber said. She looked out at the city again, the anger in her gaze giving way to a quiet exhaustion. "After today… I'm going to recuse myself. I want to let her continue to be the person she is."
Ozpin's eyes grew weary. "That may work for a time, but it won't forever," he said. His eyes didn't meet hers, his hands clasped together as he regarded them with an age-old sadness. "Sooner or later, you will begin to bleed into her. You may never truly be one person, but two souls cannot exist so close to one another without being changed. She will feel it, even if you refuse to."
Amber closed her eyes.
Ozpin let out a long, slow sigh, looking on the girl with two souls. "Have you asked Pyrrha what she wants?"
"No," Amber said.
Pyrrha opened her eyes.
"She's… gone," she said, stunned. "I can't feel her anymore."
"Not forever. It's not so simple to extinguish a soul. She's simply sealed herself away for a time."
"Why?"
Ozpin smiled, though there wasn't much humor in it. "To give you a chance to grow up."
Notes:
Whooo! And THAT is our divergence point!
You might notice that date at the beginning? Not gonna go into it too much, but I've devised a basic timeline for this AU. Year zero is the year Vale was founded, 823 is RWBY's first year at beacon, and 825 is the current year. Will probably keep adding dates to chapter headers as it makes sense to do so. Might even go back and retroactively date everything. Dunno! We will see.
Thanks to FriendOfYggdrasil and Sgt. Chrysalis for the beta. I don't think SeventeeFables got to it this time, but thanks to her too! And to Ickyickyvic for letting me dramatic read it to him! Which I guess is just an unconventional beta read actually?
And thanks to all of you for reading!