ONE
The final day dawned bright, full of the kind of promise that gives such mornings the tinge of never-was, could-be possibility that told of a day to be remembered, if one looked and paid enough attention even while it was still going on. In the lonely house in the depths of the woods, three people stirred to life in the first hour after sunrise. The first was quiet because of age stealing away his ability to be awake and going immediately, until after he'd imbibed his first cup of coffee for the day. The second was quiet because her brain wasn't quite engaged yet, blearily brushing her glorious mane of golden-blonde hair into something resembling order
The third, well…
She rolled upright in bed, stretching, yawning, pushing her unruly mop of blood-red hair from her eyes, eyes more silver than the old and tarnished set of fancy cutlery sitting in a drawer in the kitchen, only to be brought out for special occasions. Then she saw her alarm clock, and the date above the time. Excitement ran down her spine like a lightning strike, and she jolted up out of bed as if shot from a cannon before blurring down the stairs as a swarm of rose petals. "Today's the day!" she crowed at the top of her lungs, spinning in place in front of her father, who groaned, not yet halfway through his coffee.
"Today's the day." he agreed, his tone making it less a celebration than it was a lament. Whether he was lamenting the energy with which his youngest was greeting the day or the impending emptiness of his home more was anyone's guess. "Got everything packed, Ruby?"
"Yep!" she affirmed enthusiastically, popping the 'p' with a grin fit to split her face. "I've got all of my clothes, my books, my tools, my ammo-"
"Remember to get your toothbrush before you leave, left a travel case for you in the top drawer by the sink." Her father cut in, and she bobbed her head in acknowledgement.
"-and my comics and my computer and all the other stuff I'm gonna need! I'm going to Beacon!" Ruby Rose was beyond ecstatic, clearly, lost in a haze of pure wonder and excitement that is rare in this world outside of the very young or the very lucky. Not three days ago, with less than a week before the start of her big sister's first year at that same school, she'd been perusing a Dust periodical in the back aisle of Dawn Til Dust, when fate, in the form of a particularly unlucky mob goon, had shown her hand and changed Ruby's life, granted her greatest wish.
"Ruby," her sister all-but-whined as she entered the room, her hair prettied up but still scrubbing her eyes with the heel of her hand, "we get it. You're excited. So am I. But lil' sis, you've gotta chill." The taller, older, blonder sister ruffled Ruby's hair gently, making the shorter, younger, redder girl reel back after a moment, shaking her hair out like a dog.
"Gah, seriously Yang, we're going to Beacon today and you expect me to be chill?!" Ruby protested.
"Yes, Ruby!" Tai and Yang chorused in near-unison.
"Besides, if you don't calm down for two seconds –" Tai began, jerking his thumb over his shoulder at the table behind him, where he'd laid out three sinfully fluffy waffles, fresh from the iron. One had a pat of butter smushed into the divots, drizzled lightly with maple syrup – clearly Tai's. The second was much like the first, only with a sliced strawberry atop it as well, just the way Yang liked it. The third was a confection of chocolate chips and strawberry jam with an unholy amount of whipped cream atop it. Ruby's dormant sweet-tooth sounded a five-alarm alert, and she vanished from sight, only to reappear at the table with fork and knife in hand. "-your waffle will… apparently be devoured." Tai said, shaking his head as the admittedly small amount of work he'd put into making the waffle flew apart in the way he'd become accustomed to ever since Ruby had started eating solid food. It wasn't that she was messy or even all that uncouth, it was simply that she threw the same energy into eating that she did everything else, with predictable results. "Well, that takes care of that, I suppose."
The Xiao Long family sat down to eat breakfast together; it seemed like minutes passed and suddenly it was almost noon, both of the girls putting the final touches on their preparations before Tai drove them to the airship dock for their one o'clock to Beacon. Ruby hummed to herself, putting the second cross on her cape, pushing the pin through that would help keep it and the cape firmly attached to her in a fight. With a satisfying, quiet click, the pin popped into place and she stepped back from the bathroom mirror to get a better look at herself.
Every Huntsman and Huntress had their own unique flair in their outfit, you see. Yang was all brash and bold and beautiful, and her outfit reflected every inch of that. Yang just wants to show off her… girls… Ruby glanced down, and not for the first time felt ever-so-slightly cheated by genetics. But I like the way I look, she thought, perking up. She'd always been pale as a sheet, no matter how much time she spent in the sun – which was, really, a lot. She loved reading and playing video games as much as the next girl – more than quite a few, in all honesty – but she loved practicing with her sweetheart, loved running through the woods and getting into trouble with her big sister even more.
It never showed in her complexion, though - which didn't bother her. It just gave her a good excuse for the outfit she had come up with. A black corset, lined with kevlar and steel-reinforced, lay over a black turtlenecked blouse, stretchy but tough enough to keep up with her. Her combat skirt was a wonderful, poofy thing of black with red crinoline, under which went warm black tights. Every lace, every tie on her outfit was red; even the soles of her boots were red, all tying the outfit back into the bright red hooded cloak she was fussing into proper alignment.
A little of Mom, a little of Uncle Qrow. All me.
Ruby smiled into her own reflection, butterflies churning in her guts despite her excitement, or perhaps because of it. She was happy to be going – her dream was coming true at last, and Beacon was the school for Huntresses. It felt like half the big names, the heroes everyone knew, had come from Beacon since it was founded. But she knew, knew, how painfully behind she'd be compared to the people she'd be sharing the school with. Those extra two years of education she was being jumped past might end up biting her, hard.
The last thing she wanted to be was a failure. I just want to be a Huntress. I can swing my sweetheart around with the best of 'em – but what about everything else? Yang says I don't need to worry, but her idea of prepared is, like, taking thirty minutes to look in the vague direction of a book before she takes her test – and the academics are what worries me…
Then again, Yang's getting in. It can't be that bad, can it? Somehow, that thought did absolutely nothing to diminish the number of butterflies currently inhabiting her stomach – in fact, if she were a betting woman, she'd say they took it as a cue to start laying more baby-butterflies somewhere.
Ruby sighed and looked away from the mirror, her eyes alighting on a boxy red shape in the corner. And here we are, she thought with a smile as she picked up her sweetheart, the piece de resistance. Twenty five kilos of steel and composite, lightened by gravity dust to something she could more easily swing about. Her masterpiece. Her Crescent Rose. Almost reverentially, she slipped her onto the magnetic catch on her lower back, locking her in place.
The girl in red and black tromped down the stairs, paused, walked back up, then back down again with her bags in tow, leaving them by the front door before she stepped outside into the warmth of an August noontime on Patch with a cheery 'I'll be waiting for you guys out here!' over her shoulder. Anyone who wasn't from there would call it 'mind-bogglingly, swelteringly hot', but for Ruby, it was quite literally Tuesday. Even in her black clothes and heavy cloak, it just didn't feel hot outside. Warm, sure, but nothing to write home about. She'd seen worse, and muggier. She moved over to the little patch of dirt that had been worn into the lawn by years of young Huntresses perfecting their fighting style, and put it to use one last time.
Ruby breathed in, closing her eyes for a moment, and dropped into the zone – that trancelike state of reacting without being reactive, action and thought synonymous. She reached back and twisted; twenty-five-kilos that felt like two dropped into her hand, a button depressed, a hiss of oiled steel against itself and the whirring of gears inside the frame. Ruby felt her sweetheart's balance shift and shifted with it, her fore hand – known at its day job as 'the left' – slipping down towards the haft that even now was extending outward, her right headed for the bolt. A curved blade, every centimeter as tall as she if only it were straight, clacked and clanked into position, formed out of many segments.
She took a deep breath, every muscle in her body tensing up. Then, the chords of her favorite Weiss Schnee song echoing in her head– one of her rock anthems, duh, this is a workout! – she stepped forward, and cut loose.
Up two pivot three pivot whirl –
Great scythes like hers and her uncle's didn't so much have a fighting style as they had a deadly set of dance moves. They weren't all power and rage like a normal polearm, not quick slashing and stabbing like a sword, and the less said about how different they were from something like a mace, the better. A scythe was all about speed and timing; you had to put your steel where the enemy was at exactly the right moment, or they'd either end up too far away – and thus be un-slashed – or too close, in which case you would be the one being slashed. Probably.
Crescent Rose's massive blade cut the air with a keening wail as she spun it up to speed, pulling it in closer to her body with each end-for-end trade of her hands, bringing the buttspike into play against an imaginary monster, the little dagger of steel on the opposite end having been one of her better ideas in creating her sweetheart. It gave her something to keep both sides of her swing arc clear with, which was always good in the middle of a swarm.
In her mind's eye she saw Beowolves and other monsters throwing themselves at her and vanishing under a hurricane of edged steel; she jumped to dodge imaginary claws, slamming the hardened tip of the scythe's blade through the skull of the imaginary Grimm and into the ground beneath.
Swing step up twist fire –
Ruby planted her feet on the back side of Crescent Rose's head, pulling the trigger on a loaded gravity Dust shot that sent her careening into the woods. She hooked a passing tree trunk, carving a deep gouge into it and changing her direction, chambering another round lightning-fast and firing it to boost her on her new course. Birds erupted from the undergrowth and scattered into the air as she passed by, adding their own squawking to the din she was making. Ruby giggled, boosting herself about the forest at high speed. It was hard to find a tree within a kilometer of the house anymore that didn't bear the marks of her passage, anymore, and this was why.
This is so much fun!
"Ruby!" she heard her dad call faintly. "Ruby, we're leaving now, come on!"
Ah, crud, I was hoping they'd take longer... Wait, no I don't! BEACON!
Burying her weapon in the dirt and stopping her headlong flight abruptly, Ruby turned and zipped off towards the sound of Tai's voice like a rose-petal comet, laughing all the while.
Ew, gross!
Ruby winced as her boot squelched again on the pavement of Beacon's central courtyard, having apparently missed a bit of that blond boy's lunch when she'd cleaned it off in the airship's restroom. I really, really hope he's okay, but ewwwww! It's in my laces!
She groaned, already thinking of how much of a pain it was going to be to get her boots properly cleaned out - and she still had to wear them until she knew where she was going to be staying! "Why today, seriously?" she complained aloud. Yang had already abandoned her for a gaggle of her Signal friends, too.
So here I am stuck in a place I'm not super-duper familiar with, and if I want directions I'll have to talk to people. The thought of talking to her soon-to-be classmates wasn't as terrifying as it once would have been - growing up out in Patch's woods hadn't done wonders for her social skills, and she just wasn't as enthusiastically people-y as Yang to begin with - but she still would have preferred a map.
I guess that, on the bright side, I can check out all the cool Hunter weapons while I'm lost!
Ruby perked up, forgetting for a moment about her squelchy, puke-y boots and Yang zipping off so quickly after they'd gotten on the ground. There were a lot of really cool weapons walking around, after all - unfortunately attached to people, or she'd have made their acquaintance already.
Sword-spear combo, looks like a gun barrel as the haft, probably a rifle mechashift? Ruby tried to surreptitiously scoot closer to the tall, strong-looking, pretty redhead carrying it. Something about her seemed familiar, but Ruby couldn't figure out why that was. Yep, definitely a rifle! Tri-shift is pretty hard, she must be a good smith - or know one, at least.
She peered around. Mace with a dust effect generator in the head, gravity-assisted war axe, bowstaff with bladed ends and... retractable bowstring? Yeesh. Not how I would have done that but it's still cool! Ooh! A middling-height strawberry blonde girl who looked like she was a second or third year student was chatting with her friends, and over her shoulder...
Oh my GODS! Is that a six-barreled Atlas Electric gatling cannon? And she's got it shifted to be a MACE? Ruby could imagine the roar of that particular engine of destruction already - she'd heard it in half a hundred videos. Automatics weren't really her forte, but everyone knew that gun by sound alone. That thing has to weigh like... seventy-five kilo main housing, twenty-kilo barrels times six... like two hundred kilos! Give or take! But where does she keep the ammo?!
Ruby was about a quarter of a second away from tearing off after the upperclasswoman and badgering her about that b-e-a-utiful weapon when yet another caught her eye. It was slung over the left shoulder of a girl about Yang's age, her hair as white as the driven snow. It was a longsword, a meter of steel with a forward-flared crossguard, almost w-shaped, a big round pommel on the end, seated in a silver-chased white leather scabbard. It didn't look particularly fancy, though it did look well made. The girl wearing it turned, and Ruby got a slightly better look at her.
She was pale - not quite up to Ruby's standard, but not terribly far from, either. A long, nasty-looking scar that had healed fairly well crossed over her left eye, giving her heart-shaped face something of a rogueish, tomboy look, which contrasted interestingly with the blue-white blouse she wore, which looked somewhat loose, breathable and maneuverable, the sleeves secured with a pair of light-brown leather bracers. The blouse was belted into a lightly flared knee-length skirt of the same fabric, and simple, practical heeled white boots adorned her feet. If she'd been any less skinny, she would have almost looked like a swashbuckling pirate gone legitimate, but as it was...
I'd give the outfit about a seven out of ten, Ruby thought with all the judgement a fifteen year old Hunter fanatic could muster. Way, way too much white for my tastes, but...
She's pretty. She pulls it off well.
And I kinda wanna know what other modes her sword has, if it's got any. Revolver in the handle? Split-fork railgun? Dust chambers?
Ruby realized that she'd let her speculation go on too long when the girl in white disappeared around a corner. Darn it! Ugh, I'd look weird if I ran off to go find her now. She sighed and moved on, her luggage rolling along behind her.
"Hey!"
Ruby turned and saw the blond boy from earlier, wincing internally. At least he found somewhere to clean up, I guess. "Hey." she said, raising a halfhearted hand in greeting. "You feeling better?"
"Yeah! I guess I just don't do well on airships. We got off to a bad start - my name's Jaune, Jaune Arc. Ladies love it! Or, they will, anyway... sorry about your shoes."
The rest of the day passed quickly as Jaune and Ruby ambled around the campus, chatting about this and that, and eventually the two found the Great Hall and parked their things in convenient, un-claimed spots. After dinner, Ruby was laying on her bedroll, reading the latest issue of X-Ray and Vav, when a great ruckus drew her attention, in time to see the last ruffling of another bedroll beside her.
"Looks like you managed to find your way around after all!" Yang said, flopping down on the sleeping bag next to her.
"Yeah, no thanks to you!" Ruby griped. "Just up and left me! I coulda been lost forever! I coulda gotten snatched!"
Yang rolled her eyes and gave her a look. "One, I knew you wouldn't get lost. You've got a giant landmark to navigate off'a, and the Great Hall isn't exactly hard to find. Two, I'd be more worried about the snatch-er than the snatch-ee, sis, or have you forgotten how you got in here?"
"I was joking." Ruby said, flopping her head back on the pillow. "I'm just, I dunno, a little overwhelmed. I'm actually here, you know? I've dreamed about it for so long, and now... well, here it is." she said, waving a hand about to indicate everything and nothing in particular.
"Here it is." Yang agreed. "New school, new start, new friends. It's gonna be great!" She punched the air, grinning. The grin quickly turned conspiratorial. "Speaking of new friends, make any?"
"Kinda? I talked with Jaune - the blond guy who puked on our shoes -"
"Him?" Yang quirked an eyebrow, looking vaguely nauseous.
"-yeah. He was super sorry about that, he wanted me to let you know. He was a little preoccupied before."
Yang sighed. "Well, no harm done. Not the greatest moment of my life."
"Nope! But he's not a bad guy." Ruby agreed. "Just not used to airships, y'know? But other than that..." she scratched at her head sheepishly. "I mostly just ended up staring at peoples' weapons."
"Color me not surprised." Yang said dryly, chuckling and catching the pillow thrown her way. "Seriously, they're going to be your classmates. One of them is going to be your partner for the next four years. You could at least go around and say hi to everyone."
"Yeah but-"
"Up up up!" Yang interrupted. "No buts. I love you, sis, I really do with my whole heart, but you need more friends than just, well, me, and Vomit Boy I guess." she said, turning her head to look at all their soon-to-be peers.
Ruby followed her gaze and tried to imagine being partners with any of them. There was... the redhead from earlier, who seemed really familiar for some reason. Oh, she has a shield too. Ruby watched her polishing the bronze circle for a moment. I know I've seen that before somewhere. But sword, shield, gun and spear... I don't think we'd compliment each other too well as partners, but I could be wrong. I'd have to see her fight.
There was Jaune, and he ran into the same problems as the redhead. Ruby was a fan of her own mobility, and he didn't look like he was all that mobile. Sure, he could probably wade in with his armor, his shield and sword and be really good at drawing Grimm towards him for others to kill, but...
Ruby spotted the white-haired girl, in a corner away from everyone else. A few white cases stood by her bedroll, embossed with the Schnee Dust Company snowflake. Just a sword... She'd have to be a mobility fighter.
She sighed. "I know, Yang. I just - how do they even choose partners here? Did Dad tell you?"
"Nope. Said it was up to fate. What he meant by that, I'm not really sure about, but I wasn't able to find anyone else talking about it on the Scrollnet either, so I'm guessing it's some super-secret Hunter thing." Yang said, pausing to give an outrageous wink to either the girl sitting against the wall facing her way, or the guy sitting next to her. Either way, both of them looked away, suddenly finding the floor and the ceiling extremely interesting. "Like some kinda secret society deal."
"Hooray." Ruby said, circling one finger in the air. "So it's not really even up to-"
"Hello?"
Both sisters shifted their attention to the black-haired, lithe, pajama-clad girl with the bow in her hair, who'd seemingly appeared out of nowhere next to their bedrolls.
Oh no, she's hot, Ruby thought. She stood there with a polite expression, golden eyes guarded.
"Sup?" Yang asked first.
"Hi!" Ruby said.
"Hey. I'm going to be reading for a while before I go to sleep," she said, gently shaking the book held in her hand, "and I just wanted to know if me leaving my candle lit would bother you two?"
"Nah, you'll be fine!" Yang reassured her, smiling sweetly. "I'm used to Ruby being up at all hours anyway. I'm Yang, by the way."
"Blake." was the simple reply she got in return.
"What are you reading?" Ruby asked curiously.
"I just finished The Man With Two Souls, and now I'm moving on to..." she peered at the book's spine for a moment, "The Last Wish. No idea what it's about yet."
"Are you a freshman too?"
"Yes."
"Well," Ruby said, patting her luggage. "I've got some books of my own! If you ever want to trade, I'm always down with reading something new."
A small, true smile flitted onto Blake's features. "I might take you up on that. Good night Yang, Ruby."
"Night!" the sisters chorused in unison.
When the other girl went back to her own bedroll, Yang turned to Ruby, grinning. "See? Two new friends in one day. You're on a roll!"
Ruby smiled. "Maybe I am!"
Welcome to Toss A Coin To Your Huntress. Enjoy the ride! Comments and constructive criticism are always welcome.