A/N: Oh my God I actually did it.

I mean, uh LOOK Maria's in the character tags now woooOOOO

Ahem. As anyone who remembers this former two-shot knows, I once mentioned an idea for a third part set during Dead End (V6C8) that would flash back to the opening of So That's How It Is (V6C4). And that's exactly what this is, though I also wound up writing Yet Another Episode-Nine-from-Oscar's-POV section, because somewhere along the line this fic went from "Oscar and Ozpin telepathically shouting at each other and having FEELINGS while literally just the entire rest of Uncovered happens in the background" to "character development hit Oscar like a very rude truck this season and boy do I like to pretend I know what's going on inside his head". On which note, since His Nibs actually deigned to drop us a line for the finale…literally, a line…I, uh. *sighs* I already have part of a fourth entry written. I wouldn't hold your breath on seeing it soon, because I have a seriously bad track record with updating and this fic is marked "complete" for a reason even though I keep adding more, but, y'know. It could happen. I mean, this did.

So here. Have this. As always, I do hope you enjoy—and to those of you who've already reviewed the first two instalments, thank you so much!

Strike the fool who leads the liar

Somewhere, Oscar realises, he's made a grave miscalculation.

Jaune is striding towards him with a dark scowl and an earth-eating gait, and time seems to slow as irrationally Oscar thinks oh gods, he's tall, he's huge as if some part of his brain has only just clicked on and remembered that he's fourteen years old and five-foot-nothing while shod. He tucks in his chin defensively—or perhaps he inclines his head so he can see the young man properly as he approaches, because remembering his actual dimensions has shaken loose the fleeting but distinct notion that he is six-and-a-half feet of broad-shouldered adult and in his brief confusion and rising alarm, his instincts are struggling to discern which version of reality is the most current and immediate. He has a heartbeat more to remember Jaune's also a bona fide Huntsman-in-training who just broke the wall before—

"How much longer can we even trust him!?"

Impact, the edges of knuckles and the heels of hands slamming into his sternum, his clavicle, his head bouncing sharply against the wall that his spine has just been roughly introduced to. For a brief moment, his feet leave the ground, and his cheek aches with phantom pain because in every other way he's right back there.

The others would later describe the exit from Jinn's dimension as a gradual shift. For Oscar, it was the flip of a switch. One moment, he was numb, looking down at Ozpin's (Ozma's? When had he changed his name?) crumpled form in the void, and the next he was staring at the inside of his own eyelids, kneeling in frigid snow that stung his flesh, eyes burning from the force with which they were squeezed shut.

Horror. Grief. Despair. Shame. Fear.

They were hard, heavy emotions, walloping him in the stomach with the force of physical blows, pounding through his heart and his head in time with his pulse. It felt like all the blood in his body was being throttled through tiny chokepoints in his veins and arteries. He realised he was suffocating, and tried desperately to pull air into his lungs, except right now they were Ozpin's lungs and Ozpin's chest was clenched and heaving. They couldn't breathe.

There were words—no, names looping through his mind, through Oscar's. Four of them, recited over and over in a litany of anguished prayer and an iron refusal to forget. Oscar knew he would never speak them aloud. Vowed it, wordlessly.

He felt dazed. Stunned. He was crumbling apart in fear and helplessness, buckling under the crushing weight of feelings first- and second-hand. He was falling to pieces dangling on wires while the knot that held them together unravelled into sharp glittering threads that cut and cut and cut. He couldn't even hear words. Only voices. One voice—Yang's. She sounded angry, furious, through the awful, hollow ringing in his head.

Eyes open, a flash of red. Ruby's voice. Soft, afraid. He thought Ozpin spoke, but maybe he was hearing inside, not with his ears. He wasn't sure. He didn't care. Eyes closed again.

The punch that landed squarely on his cheekbone (upper zygomatic arch and lower edge of orbital socket) startled them too badly for the pain to register, even though neither of them had activated their Aura. The brutal shock of ramming backwards against a rough-barked pine more than made up for the missed sensation, and their Aura snapped to work automatically, shielding them from the worst of the potentially lethal impact and going to work on the forming bruise (fractured bone and ruptured blood vessels, black eye within the hour unless treated) spreading over his (his?) their face. He finally looked out on the world and blinked back tears, ignoring the throbbing in his left eye.

Qrow.

Qrow hurt me, disbelief

and I deserved it, loathing

The tears wouldn't stop. The anguish in Qrow's voice made them worse. The matching pain in Ozpin's didn't, because Oscar wasn't the one crying.

He should have been afraid, being cornered by someone so much stronger and bigger than him. But Ozpin, towering over everyone for decades, had never thought of Qrow as big or intimidating, and so neither had Oscar. And Qrow—Qrow was their friend. Oscar simply didn't know how to be afraid of this man, even now. He had never seen Qrow so clearly and utterly devastated, with his eyes glassy-bright and bloodshot in a way that had nothing to do with the contents of the flask tucked against his heart.

So this, Oscar realised, was what heartbreak looked like. And this, the howling storm inside them, was how it felt to be heartbroken.

(A knife-sharp memory: a gravestone etched with Ruby's Summer's emblem; tears soaking into the collar of his jacket; saltwater drying on the pads of his thumbs; Qrow's young, grief-stricken face looking up at him, desperate for the guidance and comfort that everyone else was too shattered to give him.)

Now as then, Ozpin was too broken to break any further, even in the face of his dearest friend's despair. Instead he wavered and collapsed, like a toppled house of cards, like a kicked-over sandcastle. (He had learned to be strong when others needed it. No one needed him now. No one wanted him now. It was almost a relief.) All the little pieces once so carefully arranged in their mimicry of contiguity fell out of alignment and in an instant were swept away into a deep, dark corner of Oscar's mind, locked behind a glassy-smooth seal that slammed down like a bulkhead crashing into place, leaving Oscar alone with thoughts and fears and newborn traumas he'd desperately hoped weren't really his.

There's a touch of that same heartbreak in Jaune's eyes now, but it's only by the fresh memory of Qrow lashing out that Oscar is able to recognise it beneath the ugly rage that has hardened the lines of the young swordsman's face.

"Jaune!" he hears; Yang's voice, shocked, angry—for him.

"How do we even know it's really him!?" Jaune demands, and if Oscar were a little more jaded and a little less afraid (a little more like Ozpin), he'd have to struggle not to laugh at the irony. He doesn't know Jaune well—no matter how much he cares about them, he doesn't know any of these people well, and the absence of the phantom familiarity with them that Ozpin's presence once provided has only served to drive that point home for him—but he is absolutely certain that this is not who Jaune really is.

This isn't who any of them really are, and that's what makes Oscar shrink against the wall, cowering away from the fear and grief and fury that's possessed the kind soul who's hurting him.

"What if we've been talking to that liar this whole time—?"

"Jaune!"

He's never heard Ruby angry before. Not once. Not even in that terrifying moment at Haven when Weiss had nearly died. Then again, that's hardly a surprise; who would bother with words with their partner bleeding out on the ground? Oscar dares peek up to see Jaune's reaction; he's turned to glare at Ruby, and the younger girl is glaring right back. Jaune's gaze snaps back to Oscar, who flinches, trying to make himself smaller as if he isn't already the smallest person there.

Suddenly he's free, and Jaune is looking at him in absolute mortification, eyes wide with horror and glossy with new, unshed tears. For a heartbeat, the blond boy gazes down at his own hands, and then…he flees. Runs upstairs, slams a door behind him. Oscar can sympathise. He wishes he could lock himself away and feel safe again, feel right again.

Time, Ren demands coldly, following Nora as she stomps after her leader.

Space, Blake suggests, and inside of a silent minute, Team RWBY has vacated the living room, and Oscar is alone.

For a long moment, he just stands there and stares at his feet, listening as the sounds of their retreat fade away. He stays exactly where he is until his ears seem to ring with the quiet, and then at last he dares to look up. He finds himself meeting his own gaze in his translucent reflection in the sliding door.

"Guess it's just you and me, old man," he mutters, almost hoping to see his eyes flash gold.

Ozpin doesn't so much as stir.

"You know what? Fine." Oscar looks around the empty room, nodding to himself. "I'm going for a walk."

No one stops him before he reaches the door. No one comes when he opens it. He hesitates in the threshold for a moment, wavering. Should he tell someone he's going? Leave a note, maybe? He'd have to riffle through Saphron and Terra's things to find a pen and paper, though, and that seems rude…

And maybe Oscar needs a little time, a little space, as much as they do. It's been a solid year since the last time he was truly alone. Might as well take advantage of it.

(And maybe, Oscar doesn't dare think too loud, even though he's alone in his head for once—maybe he's not entirely sure he's coming back.)

It's little more than a fleeting fancy, dismissed with surprising ease after he's had a few minutes to himself, breathing in the chilly late-autumn air in a steady, soothing rhythm. No one gives him a second look as he walks the streets of Argus; it's a safe place as cities go, and there's hours of light left besides. Oscar instinctively flinches away from considering the other reason the adults around him seem unconcerned. And then he takes a deep breath, pulls the thought back, and examines it.

He is no longer a child. He has the face of one (mostly), and the stature (entirely, to his dismay), and there's still some growing up he has to do on the inside as well—plenty of first-hand experience he's still lacking in, and he knows there's neurological development that'll continue for years to come. Even with Ozpin's presence in his mind, his brain is still young. But he doesn't think like a child anymore. He certainly doesn't feel like one. And, he's begun to notice lately, he no longer moves like one.

There's muscle on his frame, grace in his step, a habitual caution in the way his eyes glance around, slow and subtle but watchful. His spine is straight, his shoulders back, his head high. Between his bearing and the weapon discreetly folded on his belt, the passers-by have likely taken him for a Sanctum Academy student. Oscar has to admit, glancing at a young man across the street who is most definitely the genuine article, he actually looks the part; he's even the right age. The only thing that's off are his clothes, worn-out and patched and never made of the right material for combat in the first place.

And for the first time, as Oscar lets himself become properly aware of them, they feel wrong on his skin.

Even if he's just going to become Ozpin one day, that's not anyone's fault. Not Qrow's or RWBY's, not Jaune's or Nora's or Ren's. Not Ozpin's either, really; he can't even honestly find it in himself to blame the original Ozma, desperate and disinclined to ask questions, unaware of the fate to which he was condemning countless generations of "like-minded souls". Oscar doesn't deserve this, he's sure of that. He never wanted this, never asked for this, and it doesn't matter—no. No, that's not right. It does matter.

"Tough," Maria had told him when he'd wailed over the unfairness. And it is. It is tough, tougher than anything Oscar's ever grappled with before.

And it's alright to struggle when things are tough.

Whether Ozpin ever comes back or not, whether Oscar eventually loses his individual identity or not, it isn't something he has any control over. What he can control is what he chooses to do now, and that thought—that resonates like nothing else. Choice. For the first time since he left his aunt's farm, he feels like he has a real choice. And he's pretty sure he's already made it.

To hell with destiny. Oscar wants to help those people back at the house because they are his friends, and he can't just abandon them. Not when he can help, and as much as he's become accustomed to feeling out of his depth, well, aren't they all? Even Ozpin had turned out to be making it up as he went along, and for this brief moment, Oscar finds a strange sort of comfort in that terrible knowledge. He doesn't know what exactly they need to do next, none of them do, but he knows they'll need to fight. And for better or worse, he's a warrior now, or at least he's been handed everything he needs to become one.

Everything except…

He slows, drawing to the side of the pavement and leaning a shoulder against the brick of the nearest building. He knows he left his pack under one of the guest beds. Qrow's, actually, though Oscar figures that if the man's going to spend his time in Argus as a one-man pub crawl, maybe he'll just take the bed and let Qrow pass out on the floor. (Part of him regrets the spiteful thought immediately, but his cheek feels hot with blood and Aura even though the bruise healed days ago.) When he checks, though, he finds his wallet tucked into a back pocket.

Oscar pulls out his scroll and pulls up a map to the shopping district. He finds three separate stores that specialise in combat gear for everyday Huntsman and Huntress wear. One of them is near a small grocery, and on a whim, he looks up an old casserole recipe Auntie had printed out and stuck on the fridge ages ago, checking the ingredients list. It'll be a nice thing to do for the group and for their hosts, and after all, Oscar thinks, it's pretty much impossible to stay mad at someone who feeds you good home cooking.

He pauses, running through that thought again. Kindness backed by ulterior motives.

That sounds…really familiar.

And then he shakes it off, because he's scrutinising his intentions in making a casserole, and this is definitely what Maria meant when she said he thought too much.

Oscar shoves the scroll back in his pocket and starts walking with purpose this time, feeling a smile settle on his lips.