Yang Xiao Long was not an angry person. Hotheaded, yes. Stubborn, snarky, arrogant in the face of both danger and authority, yes. Despite these character traits, years of martial arts training at the hands of her father, coupled with the fact that her semblance fed off of her aura in no small way, had taught her the merits of keeping a cool head. In her opinion, she wasn't an angry person at all.
At this moment and time, however, Yang Xiao Long was very, very angry. And the reason for that anger was staring at her, slack-jawed, as she stepped through the ruined threshold of what used to be a classroom doorway. A red-headed beauty with bronzed skin and shimmering emerald eyes, the Invincible Girl stood a full four inches taller than Yang, but the shorter girl positively towered over the amazon as she grabbed the front of her uniform.
Pyrrha Nikos had hurt Ruby Rose. Yang could feel the flames of her semblance weaving their way into her golden tresses as she glanced at her sister's bloodied face, and her blood sang. Crimson eyes snapped back to the champion and bored into the taller girl's gaze.
"You. Me. Three o'clock. Training room." She managed to snarl, her right hand shaking with the effort of not throwing a right cross then and there. Angrily, she twisted her fist into the uniform still clenched in her left hand and yanked Pyrrha down to her height. "If you don't show, I'll be angry."
Message delivered, Yang made sure to firmly but gently grab hold of Ruby's wrist and stomp out the door, her eyes changing back to their usual lilac hue only after she had escorted her sister back to the dorm room they shared.
"That was a little much, Yang." Ruby pouted indignantly as she finally tore free of her sister's grasp. She stomped her foot and crossed her arms, too upset over her sister's actions to worry about acting like a child. "I wasn't even hurt!"
Yang sighed and snaked an arm around her younger sister, pulling her close. "Ru, you're bleeding."
Ruby hmmph'd and tried to struggle out of Yang's one-armed hug, feet kicking and arms flailing as she thrashed. After a few moments of futile struggling, she sagged and heaved a great sigh. Watery silver orbs found their way to Yang's gaze and held her there. If one thing could melt Yang's stubborn heart, it was her sister.
"Why did you have to embarrass me like that?" Ruby's voice shook slightly as Yang realized she was struggling not to cry. "She was being really cool about it, even if I couldn't understand what she was saying, and she seemed really sorry."
"She hurt you, Ruby!" Yang couldn't put any real heat into her words, not with those sorrowful pools of silver gazing balefully at her. As it was, she let the crimsonette escape from the one sided hug, and the younger girl wrapped her own arms around herself protectively.
"I walked into her, Yang. It was my fault, and I should be allowed to handle my own mistakes." A few tears had begun to make their way down Ruby's cheeks, and she brushed them away hurriedly with a sleeve. "You made me look like a baby in front of Pyrrha Nikos, to boot!"
"I just worry about you, sis. It's my job to protect you." Yang's voice was firm on this matter. After all, she was the person who took care of Ruby. As far as she was concerned, Ruby's safety would always be a priority of hers.
"Is it your job to ruin any chance of me making friends, too, Yang?" Ruby's voice broke and the waterworks really began, fat teardrops creating new grooves in the dried tracks on her face. "B-because aside from our teammates, everyone's too afraid of you to even talk to me!"
Yang was taken aback at the sudden anger radiating off of the crimsonette, unused to anyone speaking to her like that, much less her sweet baby sister. "Rubbles, you have plenty of friends. What about Blake?"
"Blake's the only real friend I have outside of our team. Anyone else that I talk to is only nice to me so that you don't kick their ass!" Ruby's anger was tapering off now, the young girl unable to keep the feeling alive in her chest for very long. "Do you know how lonely I get, Yang? Everyone else who goes to this school is at least two years older than me, and that's difficult enough to deal with without you harassing anybody who speaks to me."
"Ruby, I-"
"Just forget about it, Yang." Ruby sighed dejectedly, shoulders slumping. The younger girl flopped onto her bed dejectedly, burying her face in her pillow. Her next words were muffled, but still painfully clear to the blonde. "Leave me alone. Everybody else does."
...
Ruby could hear the door close behind her sister as she left the room. Peaking over the pillow she had hidden her face in, she made sure that Yang had actually left before sitting up and sighing to herself, rubbing at her aching eyes.
Ruby had been so excited when the day had started. She was going to ask Pyrrha Nikos, the Pyrrha Nikos, to help her with her combat training. Yang would have been the obvious person to ask, but Ruby couldn't learn anything from someone who used a combat style that was essentially plowing through every threat with brute force. She just didn't have the aura reserves or the build for it.
Pyrrha, however, used a combination of deadly skill and carefully applied force to defeat her foes. Something that Ruby could greatly benefit from, wielding the weapon that she did. And so she had set out to find the crimson-haired warrior, and was lucky enough to stumble upon her in the hallway!
Well, stumble into, at least. She had to admit, her nose was a little sore from where she had faceplanted into Pyrrha's muscled abdomen, but she deserved no less for flitting through the hallways like a distracted hummingbird. And then Pyrrha had picked her up, made her feel so tiny in her arms. She had had to look everywhere but the amazon once they were in the classroom, because the older girl was so unbelievably pretty that Ruby wouldn't have been able to tear her eyes away from her.
On top of that, hearing Pyrrha speak in Mistralian had done strange things to her chest. It had made her feel all weird where her heart was, all light and puffy, and she felt like she couldn't listen to that voice nearly enough. After a few moments staring off into space and thinking about the redhead, Ruby came to a realization and cursed in a most decidedly un-Ruby like fashion.
If Yang was mad now, she was going to be absolutely livid when she found out Ruby had a crush on Pyrrha Nikos.
...
Unsure of what to say and hurt by the sudden turn of events, Yang made her way to the cafeteria. At least there she could vent her frustrations until she had an opportunity to really let loose on the person she was mad at. Making her way through the halls, she began to get worked up again just thinking about the things she had been told.
Pyrrha Nikos had walked straight into Ruby, practically bulldozed straight through the girl without a second thought. She hadn't even said sorry! And then after she had bloodied Yang's sister up, she had just ran off with her like some kind of old-timey kidnapper! What right did the Nikos girl have to hurt Yang's sister? So what if she was a famous champion, so what if her face was on a cereal box?
Yang didn't believe that it was an accident at all. She had fought Pyrrha before, and nothing that girl did in combat was ever an accident. Every move was either carefully planned or skillfully improvised in a flashy display of her combat prowess. Somebody who was that meticulous didn't just zone out in the hallways and happen to nearly break the nose of her only competition when it came to one on one combat.
Arriving in the cafeteria, Yang quickly spied Nora's shock of orange hair next to her fellow blonde, Jaune. Muscling her way through the crowd of people as much as she had to, which wasn't much considering she still radiated the anger she had built up on the way over, she practically threw herself into the seat across from her two teammates. The two looked at Yang and had opposite reactions to her mood.
"Who's the dead man walkin'?" Nora asked animatedly, having heard rumors that someone had hurt Ruby in the halls. Jaune, on the other hand, seemed apprehensive at having to try and minimize any collateral damage Yang would cause in pursuing her new vendetta.
"No one would ever intentionally do anything to Ruby, you know that Yang." Jaune tried to appeal to the blonde warrior.
"Everything Pyrrha Nikos does is intentional, Jaune." Yang shot back at him, earning a 'oo' from Nora.
"Pyrrha? I didn't hear that juicy tidbit in the halls!" Nora exclaimed, practically shaking in her seat.
"Oh yeah. She got Ruby in the nose pretty good, made her bleed and everything." Yang could feel her semblance chomping at the bit as she spoke, begging to be unleashed. "I told her to meet me at the training grounds after classes. I'm gonna knock her block off."
"I've gotta tell Ren! This is gonna be so cool!" Nora shot off like a bullet, intent on hunting down her boyfriend, knowing Pyrrha would be close by the gentle martial artist.
"I really don't think Pyrrha of all people would-" Jaune began hesitantly.
"Really, Arc? Do you honestly think one of the most talented fighters in this whole academy would let her concentration slip and just happen to nearly break my sister's nose?" Yang's eyes flashed a dangerous shade of red before reverting back to their usual hue. "No. It wasn't an accident. It was a calculated move to try and throw me off my game."
"I... I guess not. I don't know, Yang, I don't really know her well enough to say." Jaune conceded defeat, as was usual with his arguments with the blonde girl. He didn't deal well with confrontation, and Yang was nothing but a walking confrontation. She was more than happy to help him with combat training, but he wished someone was there to help him with his lack of confidence too. "Just... Could you try and talk to her or something? Try diplomacy for once before you try and put her through a wall?"
Yang winced as she remembered her incident the previous week with Cardin Winchester, where she had thrown him so hard he had destroyed one of the stone walls surrounding one of the campus' many gardens. In her defense, he had been picking on Ruby, taunting the girl for being friends with a faunus.
"I'll think about it." It was Yang's turn to concede now. She knew how difficult it was for Jaune to confront her, to confront anybody for that matter, and she did her best to make it easy on him when he did. "That's all I can promise, though. She hurt my Rubbles, that's not something I'll forgive easily."
When Jaune nodded and mumbled something about that having to be good enough, Yang was already scanning the room for any sign of the redhead she had threatened less than an hour prior. She saw Nora dragging Ren to a crowd of people, and knew that Ren would be the neutral officiator for the betting pool Nora was about to create. Following that line of sight, she locked eyes with the Mistralian amazon and gave her a slight nod, giving her fellow warrior the respect she deserved. She could see the determination in those green eyes, and knew that it was not Pyrrha Nikos staring back at her but the Invincible Girl.
A short nod was the response directed at her. Pyrrha would be prepared.
Good. Yang wanted a fight, and she was going to get one. And she was going to win.
AN: Here it is, folks. This is quite possibly the last chapter you're going to see from me for the better part of three months. I will continue to work on this fic as much as I can in the interim, but I am not allowed access to electronics during basic training. Once I am back, though, I plan on churning out as much as I can for this wonderful community!
I am going to explain a little bit because I have gotten one or two PMs asking about some OOC actions. Ruby is far more likely to curse or swear, not excessively mind you, because she is spending far more time with Yang than she would have in the show, them being partners and all. And we all know Yang speaks without thinking, profanity included in my personal headcanon. Blake isn't necessarily more open about her faunus heritage so much that she knows a leader of a team shouldn't be hiding so huge a secret from her team. This, coupled with the level-headed Pyrrha being thrown into the mix, has the side effect of working through issues a lot faster than when she was on team RWBY.
As always, feel free to favorite, review, follow, whatever you want to do! Just have fun doing it. I'm going to shamelessly direct you to Dongryn yet again, at the small chance that some of you haven't read their stuff. Fluff is abound, and that's just the kind of sappy story I like!