I said this would probably be continued when Hollow People was finished. That absolute beast of a fic is now complete, so here we are.

Wilt and Scatter

"I've got it!"

Ruby sped after the fleeing alpha beowolf, heedless of her teammates' cries to stay with the group. Alphas were worth so many points for their midterm. Professor Port had said they were each forty! That would bump them up to a perfect score!

Wait. Had he said forty? Or thirty? Or maybe fifty?

Her doubts had her narrowly dodging a sudden low branch, only for her to smack into another. Winded, her semblance's petals mixing with the brilliant red leaves of Forever Fall's canopy, Ruby reoriented to the Grimm's path. She tensed and then threw herself back into her semblance's embrace.

That alpha was so dead.

Adam frowned at the message on his scroll. His curt response to the initial—asinine—command had only earned a reiteration of that order. Now it was outright an order rather than an order disguised as a request between friends.

As if he would ever be friends with the wretch that had subjugated his branch with powers no human had ever demonstrated before.

Have his camps completely removed from Forever Fall by sundown? This had been a staging area for those moving between Vale and Mountain Glenn for weeks, and now she had decided without warning that this was no longer acceptable? Even though there were rumors about the SDC seeking to try to use the tracks here for another shipment? Because they were, in fact, stupid enough to think lightning—or in this case, the White Fang—wouldn't strike the same place twice.

He felt like a puppet on strings.

In contrast to the storm within, he gave his men the order to leave with utter calm. They could not know of the frustration simmering in his chest. As far as they were concerned, this was a burden to be waited out. To them, Adam had things under control. Like always.

Seeking fresh air away from the bustle of the camp, he made it no more than three steps before his scroll buzzed. He took the call.

"What?"

"Sir! There's a girl in a red cloak approaching the camp—she broke away from the class you asked us to keep an eye on. Looks like she's chasing a Grimm."

The Grimm was probably drawn to the discontent of this place. He could wield his charisma as much as he liked, but the inconvenience of being jerked around by a human was wearing on them all.

He had asked his men to watch that class on the off chance it wandered too close to them. Now, it seemed, his caution had been warranted.

One particular detail in the report stuck out: a girl in a red cloak. How many huntresses—in training or otherwise—wearing red cloaks could there possibly be in Vale? It was a gamble, but if it could prevent Beacon's wrath from crashing down on them before they were ready, it was one worth taking. "Pull back and assist with relocation. I will intercept."

"Sir? But…"

"I will intercept. Tell me her exact location."

He heard the Grimm first. Tearing through the trees and sending splinters and crimson leaves in every direction, it was as loud as a train. He leaped up to a low branch and jumped off it to reach one a bit higher. A thought struck him and he swiftly shed his mask, pocketing it inside his jacket. He had to blink a few times to adjust, and then rub his face when the sensitive skin there reacted to suddenly being exposed to the breeze.

Three…

Two…

One…

A black and white blur roared through a gap in the trees. Adam fired Wilt. The pommel slammed into the alpha beowolf's mask, stunning it and turning its inelegant sprint into an inelegant skid. He kicked off the tree after it, snatched the spinning blade out of the air, flipped, and buried Wilt up to the hilt in a gap between the bony plates spotting the Grimm's back.

It let out a weak roar of indignation at being taken out so easily and went limp. Adam yanked Wilt free, flourished it, and sheathed it. He jumped off the disintegrating Grimm and landed in the same moment a bundle of rose petals erupted from the canopy. The bundle dove to the ground and coalesced into a familiar figure.

Adam's memories of that night were hazy, rendered spotty and thin by the migraine's relentless influence. Even so, he recognized the cape, the black dress, the boots he'd spent so long staring at while she half-dragged his semiconscious self through the streets.

The young huntress straightened up. She was breathing hard and had a red, boxy rifle in her hands. No doubt a weapon that could change shape judging by the extra pieces. Her silver eyes found Adam's and went wide, then narrowed slightly in confusion.

"Wait…you're that guy!" Wide again. "You have horns! I-I mean I kinda figured they were horns? But at first in the alley when the light was, y'know, for my eyes and they really just looked like more dark spikey points in your hair, but then when we made it out onto the street I could tell they definitely weren't just hair! But you had a migraine and I felt pretty bad about just staring so I didn't want to ask—"

He held up a hand and she stopped, realizing only after doing so that she was short of breath. "Enough. What are you doing here? Aren't you too young to be hunting Grimm on your own?"

Sure, when he was her age, he'd been a child prodigy and more than capable of defending himself and others, but that kind of talent wasn't common. And this child looked even younger than he remembered from that night; the daylight was doing her no favors.

"Er," she let out a nervous chuckle, "I'm not alone, I mean, not really. I just figured I could get us some extra points if I chased after that alpha. You think he'll still give me credit if you killed it? It's for the practical—um, the practical half of the midterm exam for my class. We have to kill Grimm. Well, do you?"

"Probably not," Adam hedged. "Just say you killed it."

"What? But you're the one who—"

"It's not my exam."

"I guess so." By her expression, she just wasn't going to take credit. The honest type. How annoying. "Well, that's what I'm doing." She rocked on her heels and cocked her head a bit. "What are you doing out here? It's pretty far from the city. You're not alone, are you?"

"I'm not, no. I'm with my friends. We were…expecting our supplies to come this way, but our partners ran into difficulties and they chose an aerial method instead. We're moving to meet them."

"Oh." Her eyes drifted to the forest behind him. He resisted the urge to look. Surely she couldn't see anything; they were a fair distance from camp. She still hadn't stowed her weapon. His cover story was pathetically weak. Would she call him on it?

"I wanted to tell you something last time," She said into the silence. "I, um. I really like the rose on the back of your coat."

Of all the things she could have said, that was the last one he expected. "My emblem?"

"That's your emblem? You have a rose emblem too? That's so cool!" And just like that, the tension in the air was washed away by a flood of her enthusiasm. He could practically see her eyes light up. "I mean, mine's based on my mother's so it's kinda sorta inherited but not really because it's really my own thing but it's also an homage to her y'know? But if yours doesn't have a backstory that's totally cool! I just think it looks neat, like, how many different people with rose themes are out there? And we both wear red and black too which I was also going to bring up that night but it wasn't a good time probably and I"—she deflated—"I'm totally rambling right now, aren't I?"

"A little," he acknowledged, a bit surprised to find a small smile on his face as he spoke. There was something unnervingly endearing about her enthusiasm. "You also have a rose emblem?"

"Yep!" She angled herself and pushed her cape back so he could get a clear view of the silver buckle on her belt. The gleaming rose next to her ammo pouch caught every ray of light breaking through Forever Fall's shifting canopy. "No stem, though."

Intrigued despite himself and well aware that he still had stalling to do, Adam leaned against the tree behind him and crossed his arms. "When we first met, I saw rose petals for a moment. There's also the matter of how you were chasing the wolf. I thought I was hallucinating back then, but…?" he trailed off in a clear invitation for an explanation—one that she was all too happy to give.

"That's my semblance! I can go really, really fast."

He cocked his head. "Faster than a huntsman boosting their speed with aura?" In other words: did she have burst speed greater than his, and could she get around him if he had to stop her?

Oblivious to the implications of his question, she readied herself. "Just watch."

He raised an eyebrow she couldn't see, but that unimpressed expression cracked when she threw herself forward and was almost instantly behind him. A rose petal, one of dozens, floated on the breeze in front of his face. He started to turn, but she was moving again, a red blur on a backdrop of red leaves. In front of him, behind, above—he kept up only by anticipation rather than tracking her exact movement. A powerful wind rocked the clearing that threatened to become a cyclone if she willed it to.

A scant five seconds after it started, her demonstration ended. She coalesced where she'd began, breathing a bit harder than before, rose petals settling amid the fallen leaves around her, but a smile on her face.

"See? Really fast."

Faster than a huntsman boosting their speed with aura. He could perhaps match her speed to cross a short distance, some dozen yards, but beyond that he would have a greater chance of tearing his tendons apart than keeping pace.

"There was actually one other thing I was curious about," she admitted while resettling her cape's hood. "I'm—I'm a bit of a weapons geek and I've never seen a design like yours before. It's pretty simple looking. Not as much as another guy I know—he's got a sword too—but still pretty simple for a huntsman."

He frowned. Simple was good; simple minimized the odds of a malfunction mid-fight.

"Not that that's a bad thing!" she quickly tacked on, probably seeing his reaction. "It's just, the guy I mentioned uses a sword and shield, so is yours different? Does the sheath turn into a shield?"

Did Blush…turn into…a shield. "No."

"Oh. Then a rifle, right? Probably should've guessed that first, the magazine and trigger and all. That's cool! Mine works as a rifle too!"

She held up the red block in her hands that Adam would define as a "rifle" only by the loosest possible definition. He could, at the very least, appreciate the color.

"This is Crescent Rose. It's better for sniping, really—I don't see a scope on yours, so that's a difference. And your magazine doesn't look like it would fit the caliber that mine uses. Um, it can shoot Dust rounds! I really like using gravity Dust, but it's been pretty hard to find lately, I mean, like every kind of Dust, so I've just been making do with what I used to do before my dad let me play with Dust and use the recoil to catch people off guard." Most of her words flowed right past Adam. The question at the end of her rambling did not: "Do you have a favorite type of Dust to use?"

"No."

"O-oh."

He hadn't yet gotten the all-clear from his people, so he sighed and grasped for the simplest and least invasive explanation that wouldn't make her want to wander off and stumble upon their hidden operation.

"It's unreliable, unpredictable, unstable, and prone to an inconsistent supply."

She pursed her lips. "That all makes sense, but what do you do when you can't get through a Grimm's armor?"

"What do you do when you run out of your precious ammunition?"

"Well, if I still had standard rounds, I could use recoil to…" she brightened. "Oh, but no bullets at all? I'd use my semblance and gravity."

"Your semblance and gravity," he repeated in a skeptical bid for her to explain. How would gravity help a gun that had no bullets? A little speed from her semblance wouldn't make a difference.

Her "explanation" turned out to be transforming her chunky rifle into an absolutely monstrous scythe. She brandished it out to one side. Its wicked blade sliced a half foot into the earth and even then, the back of its blade came up nearly to her head. A beastly amalgamation of black and red metal plates, hidden mechanisms, and sharpened steel that gleamed in the sun, the scythe was a thing of hubris.

It was also, and he could not deny it, a thing of beauty. The red and black? The wicked blades on one end and sharpened point on the other? And, if he was interpreting the scope, magazine, trigger, and barrel arrangement correctly, it could still be fired as a rifle even in that form. A sniper rifle of devastating caliber. Truly, she had taste.

"Gravity and your semblance," he repeated. "Right."

Using her semblance to get above her opponent, then letting gravity do the work of building up the momentum required for that blade to shear through anything in its path. Beautiful in its simplicity.

"What about you?" she asked. "What do you do if you don't have bullets and your sword can't get through?"

He glanced down at his own weapon. Compared to hers, it was rather quaint—but, in his eyes, all the more lethal. "My semblance increases my cutting power," he said. Not answering was not an option without raising suspicion, but he could at least keep things vague. "My opponents' defenses have never been an issue."

Whether those defenses were bone plating, metal armor, or aura, they would all wither away.

"Oh, can I see?"

He hesitated. She'd demonstrated her semblance for him, but…his was different. Moreover, they were enemies; she just didn't know that yet. He shook his head. "There are conditions that must be met and that won't happen here."

"Aw. Well, that's okay."

Her disappointment tugged at a chord in his chest, much to his own annoyance. He found himself adding: "It does create petals on contact. They tend to wilt quickly, though."

"What? That's so cool! How many? Wait, no, that's not what I wanted to—do the petals change color based on what you cut? Does it matter if you use a different kind of Dust in your sword? Or if you're cutting through, like, metal or wood?"

"The same color every time."

"My semblance changes color if I'm carrying someone else. Like, if I grab my sister, I'll get yellow petals." She flicked her wrist and that monster of a scythe folded up even more compactly than it had before. She stowed the result in the small of her back—where it must've rested all those nights ago in their first meeting. "I kinda thought about carrying you like that when we met, but I'm pretty sure a migraine wouldn't go well with turning into a bunch of petals or moving really fast."

"Probably not. Do you carry people often?"

"No. I mean, more than I used to, 'cause training. My sister's the hardest to carry because she's the heaviest, but Weiss gets really sick if I do it for too long, and Blake tries to hide it but I can tell she gets sick too. It's fine, though. I used to get sick, but the more I did it, the less that happened. It's like how we all have to work with Weiss to get used to her glyphs so we don't hit walls and stuff. Practice makes perfect!"

Every word out of her mouth past Blake had washed right over Adam without leaving any impact at all. Blake. What were the odds? He'd known she was somewhere in Vale; he would've heard about it if she'd left the kingdom or, gods forbid, dragged herself back to beg forgiveness from her family in Menagerie. He'd also heard rumors that a black cat Faunus had been spotted at Beacon, and even more rumor that her name was Blake.

He had tried to dismiss all of those rumors—all of those reports—as hearsay. Speculation. Wish fulfillment.

And yet.

"You said your sister turned the petals yellow," he said slowly. "What about the other two?"

"Oh, Weiss turns them white. Blake makes them black."

The color of this girl's semblance's petals wasn't anything definitive, but if she turned them red, the petals' color probably had something to do with either clothing or aura. Either way, it would make sense for his Blake to turn them black. Again, not for sure, but he saw no reason not to operate under the assumption that this girl's Blake and his Blake were one and the same.

It wasn't only Blake's name that had piqued his interest, of course. Weiss did too. Everyone knew the Schnee heiress was at Beacon. What were the odds of him running into someone on her team? What were the odds that Blake was on her team?

Although, he'd heard no reports of violence against the Schnee. Surely Blake wouldn't be able to stay silent in her presence. Surely she hadn't grown that soft.

He'd made a point to ignore or downplay reports about Blake up until this point. Trying to block thoughts of her to focus on the here and now, a task that became harder with every day that Cinder's searing hand remained at his throat. But now that an opportunity for information about her had fallen into his lap, he couldn't look away.

"You aren't bothered by my horns, are you?"

"No. I think they look pretty cool, honestly. They match the whole," she gestured at her head, "spiky thing you've got going on." She went red. "That wasn't rude, was it? Sorry."

"It's fine." It wasn't what he wanted to pursue. "Do you know many faunus?"

"Um, not a ton. There weren't many where I grew up. Oh, but Blake's a faunus! She's got cat ears."

So she wasn't hiding them under a bow, at least not around her teammates. "I see. And you're friends."

"Yeah, I…I think so. I think she thinks so, too, and that's what matters, right?"

Any further questions about Blake without directing her attention elsewhere would make this whole conversation too suspicious. He switched angles. "Teammates, too?"

"Yep."

"One that you left behind to chase a beowolf. You shouldn't abandon your squadmates."

"Well, sometimes the leader's gotta do things that are more dangerous. We need the points for a good score. Weiss and Blake tried to help me study for the written exam, but that's just not what I'm good at. But I can fight. Lead by example, right?"

He thought about Cinder. The fire flickering around her eyes. The smoke in the air. The bodies behind her.

"Right." His scroll buzzed in his pocket. Most likely, the all-clear. He closed his eyes briefly and took a deep breath. "Either take the points for the wolf or don't mention it at all. I doubt your teacher or teammates would enjoy knowing you spent so much time talking to a stranger."

She froze. "It's been so long. They've gotta be worried." She blinked and peered at him. "A stranger. Wait, we never introduced ourselves!"

He cursed himself.

She brought a hand to her chest. "I'm Ruby."

Though it went against what any amount of caution would dictate, he had to answer. It would be far too suspicious to just shut her down. Fortunately, she'd only given her first name, and his first name was common enough that he wasn't worried about any immediate connections.

"Adam," he said.

She stuck out her hand. "Nice to meet you, Adam."

He stared down at it. Compared to carrying him, shaking his hand was nothing. And yet it was so much more. This, he was doing of his own volition, not because his traitorous brain was waging war on itself and rendering him too weak to refuse. If any of his men saw this…

If any of them saw this, they would just see it as him maintaining his disguise and shielding the camp from discovery. Yes. That was all.

Her hand, when he shook it, gripped his with the strength he expected of a huntress-in-training able to wield a weapon of Crescent Rose's size. "Likewise."

The sentiment was, to his own surprise, genuine.

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