Sun had one simple solution to everything wrong in his life; dull the pain every chance he had.

Drink it away to the best of his ability. He planned to keep doing that, but Ruby intended to stop him. For reasons still vague to him in his moment of selfishness, he didn't understand. Didn't care. His attempts were thwarted at every turn, and he went to great efforts, that was for sure.

Ruby had searched the house from top to bottom, clearing the home of any beer, liquor, and wine she could find. Finally, thanks to her persistence, there was nothing left for him to drink away his sorrows. She was hyper vigilant, like a woman on a mission, but that was perhaps because she found this to be the hardest mission of her life.

The man in front of her tirelessly searched for a drink. Sun lifted an empty bottle in a vain attempt to lick out the insides. "Fuck." He snarled, slamming the glass onto the floor when it proved fruitless. All he could taste was water. She even rinsed out what little remnants might be inside. He grabbed another, only for the pattern to continue. Another still, and his frustration mounted. "Goddamn it!"

"Sun," Ruby sighed softly. "You aren't going to find anything."

"Oh yeah?" A bitter growl left his lips. "And whose fault do you think that is?"

"You can be angry all you want." Ruby said softly. "I'm not going to let you drink. Sit down and eat your breakfast."

"I'm not hungry."

"I don't care, you're going to sit down, and you're going to get some real food into you."

"Fuck off."

"Sun!" Ruby hollered. "Sit down!"

Ruby didn't know what to expect in all of this, or what might be achieved by forcing Sun into sobriety. She had no way of knowing if she was truly helping him, and she doubted that she would be strong enough to fight him off if he turned violent. Sun was a hunter, same as her, and that would always be different than fighting off Grimm. She locked his weapon away and hid the key to the compartment, but aura itself was powerful, and Sun was a Faunus.

Physically, he was superior to her in every way expect for her semblance speed. If he retaliated, Ruby knew it would get dangerous, and she had been on the receiving end of aggressive hunters before. She knew their dangers all too well. She was teetering on Sun's emotional edge, and she knew it. This was a careful dance she knew to play, and she treaded with great caution.

Ruby had even called her uncle for advice, but that didn't help either. Qrow had never been the sort of man to rely on conventional wisdom. His methods were solidly, wholly, inappropriate. As an adult, she realized his instability for what it was. After all, no man in his right mind would train a child to wield a scythe the way he had taught her to. It was frightening really, when one took the time to think about it.

His training sculpted her into a child able to kill Grimm, and laid the foundation for that child to grow into a woman able to slay the largest, most deadly of beasts. Still, the arguments of success aside, that didn't change the heart of the matter.

At fifteen, she really had been just a child. A little girl, and nothing more. Qrow, though a loving uncle, was also something of a madman.

Now, she wasn't joking herself.

All of Beacon's students were merely children at the end of the day, and Ruby now knew the extent of Remnant's situation. Of her own situation as a huntress. All of the schooling in the world couldn't possibly have prepared her for the aftermath. The quiet moments after her blade was put down. The moments when the crackling firelight was the only thing keeping her warm. She had grown used to solitary missions after graduation, for reasons that were entirely personal.

Entirely her own.

Something as domesticated as doing the dishes was completely alien to her. Ruby never once lifted a finger for domestic duties. Her missions kept her away, so staying in one spot like this, bogging down her mind with concern for another…those emotions were childlike things to her. Fragile. Tender. Things that, if she were honest, she hadn't allowed herself to feel in a long time. Scrubbing a pan was mundane enough that her mind could skitter to the darker places.

And that, honestly, was more uncomfortable than anything else.

With her clothing rolled up and away from the dish water, evidence of her job, her past, marked her. Then again, all good hunters had an imperfection or two to show for it. An old training injury. A mission gone wrong. Something, anything, to prove they'd survived. Ruby, if anything, had taken after her uncle in more than just combat. She had adopted plenty of his ass-backwards, lunatic, convoluted reasoning as well.

She was a survivor because she pushed to be, because she demanded it. She was going to live her life. The world was not going to trample her underfoot. As her uncle said, it was that simple, and, it was that difficult.

"Sun…" Ruby took a hard breath. "Sit down, and eat. Please, just do as I say."

He did, eventually, sit down.

Sun looked up from his place from the table. He hadn't said a kind word to her all morning. After waking up in his bed, sobbing into his dead wife's pillow, what was he supposed to say? What kind of apology did he even give? What did he say as a consolation? What excuses at his pathetic attempts to pull himself together? He was clean now. Dressed. Sitting upright with a pounding in the back of his skull.

Yet, for all of this, they both knew he was the furthest thing from okay. "What do you want from me?" He asked.

"I need you to eat." She pressed for what seemed the thousandth time. "I don't care if it's just the toast, but it's got to be something."

He looked down at the spread. It was a typical hiker's meal, with a bit of added luxuries. Oats made with milk instead of water. Bread slathered with real butter. Not that spray on garbage that could withstand the elements. The scrambled eggs were real, not freeze-dried. The fruit was fresh, not canned. A meal that over a fire with his team members would have warmed his belly.

A meal like this would have made him the happiest man in the world a few weeks ago.

Sun just wasn't hungry, and picked at a slice of toast with the same disinterest someone might give a moldy hunk of bread. "Thanks for worrying, but don't waste your time on me, Ruby. There's no point." Sun said slowly. "I'm not worth it."

Ruby sighed, all of the hard lessons coming back to her in ways she didn't want to recall. Flinging the suds off her hands she reeled on him, grabbing the chair he sat in. With her semblance and raw strength, she flipped it to face her, jostling him around in the process. "That's not your call to make." She said quietly, tapping his nose with her finger. "If I want to waste it, that's on me." She handed him the plate of toast. "Eat it."

"Not hungry."

She gently grit her teeth, sighing hard and long. "We're not leaving this table until you do."

His eyes fell to an old gash along her wrist and thumb. A wound from her own scythe by accident. A training wound, or so she said at the time when she was bleeding all over the sparring room floor. The years were dusty now, but he frowned. "Was that…really an accident…back then?"

"Sun, I use a scythe. If I wanted to hurt myself, I could do a lot better than that." She frowned, her thumb on her other hand running along the scar. It was truly an accident. All the more reason scythes were known to be one of the most dangerous weapons to use. They bit back at their master if mishandled. She didn't handle it with care, and it reminded her of just how deadly it could be. That was all there was to it. "Sun, do you know why I use a scythe?"

He shook his head. Of course he didn't. For as much as Ruby talked about her scythe, it was all superficial. Modifications, combat, the color…things that were, at its core, very impersonal.

She turned back to doing the dishes. Part of it was the distraction, the mindless action of scrubbing down pots and pans. "I use it, because I don't want to forget what it means to be a huntress. To other people, it's a job. To me, it's a way of life. The way I saw it, scythes were super cool, but also, super deadly. So is being a huntress. If I could master one, I was just that much closer to being the sort of person I wanted to be."

"That so?" He asked, almost rudely. He didn't mean anything by it, it was just the way it slipped out.

"It is." Ruby said, not letting his bad mood get her down. "I came out of Beacon all banged up, though. Maybe if I had a sword, I wouldn't have messed up so much, but anyway, I don't regret that scar."

"Yeah, well not all of us are like you, Ruby." Sun replied. "We don't romanticize our job. Or make it more than what it is."

She pressed her lips, dried her hands off again, and fished in her breast pocket for a lighter she kept on hand. One of the many tools a hunter carried on principle. This was black steel, with her emblem etched into the middle. It was a graduation present from her uncle. She wore it over her heart, both as protection, and as a reminder. "Then burn it." She said. "If it means that little to you, burn your license, and don't look back."

But Sun didn't move. He just watched the flame.

"Well, are you going to do it?"

"No."

She closed the lighter, putting out the flame. "That's because it means something to you." She turned back to the dishes. "Remember that."