The Penny-Whitley content might be a bit jarring, but I wanted to hook up the punchline of the "Penny called the comedy movie she watched a documentary with a straight face" joke while people still, you know, actually remembered it. So, just to recap, she knows that they're not, but she calls all the movies she watches with her dad "documentaries" because it's a cute little in-joke they have together about how if Penny is a laboratory-made child, then literally ANY movie is helpful education for her because she didn't have a natural childhood in which to watch them. Hence, they can both claim their father-daughter movie-night bonding as "teaching Penny" with "informative videos about Remnant" and "catching her up to normal people her age" when they both damn well know that they're just watching fun movies together for the hell of it.
Nora liked to consider herself a mostly-reasonable person –and a mostly-reasonable person would be over the moon about learning that a friend of hers had come back from the future. It didn't matter how bad the future had been, there was so much cool stuff to know, so many inside jokes that Jaune had that she hadn't discovered yet!
Obviously Nora had to grill him on the trip to Argus.
She hung over the edge of his bunkbed like a particularly buxom gargoyle, pelting Jaune with questions as she excitedly kicked her feet through the air. She'd called dibs on the bunk below for her own, so she didn't have to worry about catching anyone in the head as she kicked –Pyrrha was staring somewhat worrisomely out the window with thousand-yard eyes, and Ren was taking apart and cleaning StormFlower in the jerky, icily controlled manner that let her know that he wouldn't appreciate any interruptions. It was his aggressively "rather be alone in my own thoughts" set of movements, and Nora knew better than to break in on his train of thought.
"So what was it like walking across Anima with me?"
"Uh- stressful." Jaune said, blinking a little uncertainly at Nora as she teetered gently on the inch-thick verge, supported only by her muscular arms. "Not- not you, just… everything. Beacon had just gone down and we didn't really know what we were doing, so we just… we were in way over our heads a lot. It did help us grow, though."
"Ooh, ooh! Did we kill any super badass Grimm?"
"Uhhhhh…" Jaune's eyes slid aside as his smile tightened. "W-we killed a Geist that had taken over a really big pile of rocks."
Nora narrowed her eyes.
She leaned closer.
Jaune leaned away, looking nervous.
"Are you mollycoddling us again?" Nora asked suspiciously, peering at Jaune's face with as much intent as she could muster.
"Um… we did go through Kuroyuri, and… ah…"
There was a loud, grinding, unhealthy click from Ren's bed as metal parts stopped moving on entirely the wrong sequence.
"Anyway, super-dead! That Grimm was super dead." Jaune continued, his voice stretching higher as he very clearly sensed the semi-murderous emotion radiating from the lower bunk opposite. "We all worked together to kill it –me, you, Ruby, Ren. Me and Ruby pinned the arms, you jumped off a building and slammed the horse head into the ground with your hammer, and then Ren, uh chopped its Imp head off."
His voice squeaked nervously.
"Ah, I mean, actually he cut the arms and then the head off, but, you know, whatever. He killed it dead. Super dead."
"Aw hell yeah!" Nora cheered, swinging her weight almost entirely on her clenched hands as she kicked her legs in the open air. "Take that, stupid giant Grimm! We worked together as a great team then, huh? What was our name?"
"That was actually a bit of an argument!" Jaune laughed gratefully, some of the tension easing out of him. "Nora said- you were like, there were three of us from JNPR and only one from RWBY, so we should be JNRR, but Ren was arguing that it wasn't a color, and we were working with Ruby to help her out with her goal, so it should be RNJR. I thought JNRR sounded cooler, myself."
"Annnnnd?"
"And it ended up RNJR." Jaune admitted with a sigh, and Nora groaned, swinging out almost horizontally as she clenched her hands and stiffened her legs, falling back as her knees smacked against the bottom of Jaune's bunk.
"Ugh, no fair! How come we didn't do a majority vote?!"
"Four-person team, it wouldn't work." Jaune replied.
"…what Grimm are you two talking about?" came Pyrrha's shy, uncertain voice, and Nora saw brief panic in Jaune's eyes before they locked on hers, questioning.
"Uhhh…" This time it was Nora who wasn't sure if she should answer. She dropped her legs, twisting to look over her shoulder at Ren, who was fiddling almost angrily with some of StormFlower's parts. "Ren?"
"Nuckelavee." he said shortly after a few seconds. "It was a Grimm that killed my parents and destroyed our village after I met Nora."
"We were kids." Nora offered. "We only survived 'cause Ren unlocked his Semblance."
A complicated mix of emotions danced over Pyrrha's face. She obviously wanted to ask for more information, but she also knew that Ren's Semblance allowed him to mask negative emotions and it was generally considered quite poor form to ask people about their traumas –especially when you were traveling. Negativity attracted Grimm, after all, and they were on a passenger train.
Nora reflected thoughtfully that Pyrrha was kind of out on a limb here. Nora and Ren were together (together-together, a part of her whispered as she remembered the image of that kiss in Atlas), and they'd come with Jaune on his adventures in the-timeline-that-wasn't, but Pyrrha… Pyrrha didn't have that connection. Her time with the team had ended at Beacon, and everyone had moved on without her.
"What about you, Pyrrha?" Nora asked brightly, starting to swing her legs again as she hung from the edge of Jaune's bunk. "Anything from the future you wanna ask?"
"Oh, um…" Pyrrha fiddled with a lock of her hair, her eyes averted. "Were we… were Jaune and I… a thing?"
"Ehhhh…" Nora winced at the uncertainty in Jaune's tone as he dragged the sound out. "I mean, we were- kinda? It was, um… I didn't exactly notice you had feelings for me until the Vytal Festival, and then, um, well. That happened."
'That' being a very wide gulf of very intense traumas and disasters.
"W-when you shoved me into a locker, that was the first time that we. Um. Kissed."
A slightly uncomfortable silence fell over the train compartment. Nora curled her toes in her boots a few times. The whole situation was a bit weird, but the most uncomfy part of it was definitely how to approach their changed relationship dynamics.
Jaune was, technically, two years older than them: he'd been making decisions for the rest of the team without their knowledge, and while they were almost unilaterally good decisions, that still rankled. Jaune had manipulated them and nudged them onto paths of his making, and even if Nora liked him and trusted him and was friends with him, that didn't mean that the knowledge of what he'd done felt good. It was uncomfortable, but not enough to actually cause problems, just… grate, a little bit.
Blech.
The worst type of problems were the persistent discomforts that wouldn't go away or develop into something serious.
Nora racked her brain for an appropriately goofy non-sequitur to change the path of this conversation, but Jaune, who had apparently been studying her methods during their years on the same team, beat her to it.
"…I wore a dress for you at the Vytal Festival dance, though."
"You –what?" Pyrrha spluttered, flailing her way upright as Ren looked up from StormFlower with a blink.
"Ah, well." Jaune grinned sheepishly, his cheeks turning red. "I, um, wasn't very good at- okay, nobody make fun of me, but I was very socially awkward and didn't quite catch the fact that when you said that no guy would invite you to the dance, you were hinting that I should do it, so I, uh… kinda… skeptically told you that if no one asked you, I would wear a dress. And, well…"
"No one asked?" Nora said, delighted.
"Nope. And an Arc always keeps his word."
Another silence fell, but this one was startled and flustered rather than awkward and stiff, and Nora's eyes slid back and forth between Jaune and Pyrrha as they both began to blush.
Processing… processing… ding!
"Welp!" Nora said loudly, and let go of the edge of Jaune's bed, dropping down to the floor. She crossed the distance quickly, seizing Ren and hauling him up before he could do more than clutch at all the parts of his half-disassembled guns. "Me and Ren are going out for mimosas!"
"Uh, Nora-"
"What are you-?"
"Nope!" Nora chimed. Ren knew better than to fight her or say anything as she tugged him through the door, and instead focused his energy on keeping all the tiny parts of StormFlower from falling to the ground. "We are going for mimosas."
She banged her fist against the exterior keypad once she and Ren were outside, making the compartment door slide shut behind them.
There was a moment of silence as they stood outside the room: Nora could very well imagine Jaune and Pyrrha blinking at the closed door.
"You do know mimosas are cocktails, right?" Ren finally asked, still with his arms full of his disassembled weapons and cleaning kit. "We aren't actually allowed alcohol yet."
"Yeah, and in case you can't tell, they're about to talk relationship stuff." Nora jabbed her thumb behind herself at the room. "Super private personal relationship stuff. You wanna be in the middle of that?"
"I do not."
"Right, so let's head to the buffet table and rustle up some grub or something." Nora agreed, grabbing his sleeve and starting to tug him in the appropriate direction. Ren, wise man, followed silently as she led him to the dining car, picking a corner table for himself to finish reassembling his weapon as Nora heaped her multiple plates high with all the ingredients for the largest series of sandwiches she could manage. She plopped down beside Ren when she'd finished the grand assembly, and started crunching away eagerly, knowing that she needed the leafy greens wedged between the slices of meat and bacon to keep her strength up.
Ren let her fill the silence with her unabashed munching, his fingers moving carefully and precisely as he oiled gears and polished components, gradually taking his weapons apart and wiping out the least little speck of dust or dirt in every single piece. It was a slow, methodical, peaceful process, and Nora basked in the gentle ambiance beside her as she busily wolfed down her lunch.
Still… unaccustomed thoughts haunted her, and Nora eventually found herself lowering her latest sandwich and staring meditatively at the crumb-strewn plates in front of her.
"What do you think about… all this?" she asked Ren, her voice much more subdued than normal. "I mean, what do you really think?"
Ren was silent for a moment. Then-
"I think that it doesn't matter what we think." he said, calm and steady. "Whether we see this as some kind of betrayal or manipulation, or if we accept that RWBY and Jaune truly acted in our best interests –it doesn't change the fact that all this happened. Or what's going to happen."
Oh, yeah.
Nora's free hand curled into a fist beneath the table. The Fall of Beacon, the Cinder woman that killed Pyrrha infiltrating the school –Nora was gonna pop that scheming bitch's skull like a grape with Magnhild the second she saw her, and damn the consequences.
Ren continued to rub his polishing cloth along one of StormFlower's detached sickles, not looking up.
"So I think it's less important to focus on how we feel about what happened, and rather focus on what we want to do now." he continued. "I…"
The smooth, circular movements of his hand stopped as Ren's voice trailed off, a rare uncertainty filling his tone.
"The things we saw in Jinn's vision." Ren continued after a moment, swallowing slightly before he resumed his work. "What did you think about them?"
"I think it's a lot of deep shit that we can't afford to back out of." Nora said, slumping back and automatically making to put her boots up on a bench that wasn't there. She instead made do with the seat of the chair opposite, crossing one ankle over the other. "Honestly? Seems like it's way above our paygrade, but Yang's right. You really think we can wait on the sidelines for all this, now that we know everything about Oz and Salem and the rest?"
"No." Ren's eyes might look calm, but Nora had been with him for years. She could see the turmoil hidden inside those magenta depths, the tenseness in his shoulders. "But we aren't ready. I'm not –repeating myself from… before. We really aren't ready, this time. Jaune's been doing his best to improve our skills, but we're still just trainees. The academies have a four-year curriculum for a reason, and there's no way we can take on those kinds of enemies when we're just 17."
"So we train harder." Nora said. "Maybe we can't get as good as we were, but we can get better than we are now."
Slowly, carefully, she placed her hand atop his wrist. Ren didn't shake her off.
"We saw that with the others too, remember?" Nora asked with a ghost of her usual chipper smile. "Doing nothing is just about the only way to ruin everything. We just gotta keep moving forward. If we make mistakes on the way, we'll try to fix 'em. If we trust the wrong person, we'll try to salvage what we can. And if we die? We die with our boots on."
"-and then Adrian started wailing to distract the guards."
"You used a baby to help you in stealing an Atlas airship?" Nora asked Weiss as they clattered down the hill, delighted rather than horrified.
"Adrian was a toddler at the time, thank you very much." Jaune sniffed from his place holding onto the overhead strap of the rail car.
"You know, I could swear you told Saph that 'I am not a baby! That is a baby!' and pointed to him when you said it." Yang teased, leaning out slightly to grin at Jaune as he pulled away.
"He was like three! That's practically the same thing!"
"And it wasn't our idea anyway." Weiss interjected. "Saphron was the one who taught him to do it."
"I still wanna know how or why she trained her child to cry on command." Blake muttered wryly under her breath, ears flicking up and down as she strained to catch the sounds of the city and scan them for danger.
"If he is –was– three or so at that time, wouldn't he… be less than six months old right now?" Pyrrha asked uncertainly. "Or maybe even not born yet? Are you sure it's a good idea to stay with your sister and her wife?"
"I called ahead, and she sounded fine with it." Jaune said, scratching his cheek. "If not, we can try to find a hotel or something. I'm not sure your parents would be cool with hosting nine people."
He coughed as Neo –disguised with black hair, green eyes, and a short black dress– planted an elbow in his kidney.
Eight at most. Seven once the Schnee leaves.
"Right, yeah." Jaune wheezed, bent almost double as he rubbed the place where she'd hit. "Speaking of, when are you going back to Vale?"
Once I see you have a base and aren't going to get mobbed on the street.
"That's fair." Ruby hummed, rocking on her heels a little as the tram car continued to descend down the rippling slope of the hill. "Make sure you be careful going back, though. Weiss gave you her bank account details, right?"
Neo nodded, a certain cruel amusement dancing in her Semblance-altered eyes. Ren wasn't entirely certain that the money Weiss had withdrawn from her weekly allowance would still be filling her bank account by the time they returned, but he had to reluctantly trust to Neopolitan's practicality. As fun as it would probably be for her to wring Weiss's impressive account balance dry, that money was a group fund, to be used for emergency bribes or the purchase of safehouses –and as such, something that Neopolitan and her partner might come to directly need far more than any of the people at Beacon.
Ren liked to think that he and the others had at least a veneer of respectability that would make would-be arresters hesitate, but then, that was probably because everyone moved carefully when Hunters were involved. It was considered deeply unwise to try and arrest someone with a Semblance unless you knew exactly what it was and what it did, and even then people were deservedly cautious.
But thinking of that just made him think, again, of his team leader, and Ren frowned in a way that Nora might call brooding as the tram car they were all riding made its way through the city. It was true that their emotional reaction was less important than what decisions they would make going forward, but-
Ren didn't like being lied to.
And whether it was a lie or a deception, Jaune had deliberately misled him, Nora, and Pyrrha. That fact was absolutely inarguable, and Ren didn't like that either. Even if he had not fallen from the Central Location as the others had, he was still their friend. Ren did not like being relegated to second priority, being treated like a component in their plans that had to fall into a certain place in a certain way, rather than their friend and ally that he truly was.
Of course, it wasn't exactly rational to expect Team RWBY and Jaune to immediately tell Ren and the others that they had come from the future and needed their help –but emotions weren't rational. Jaune, at least, had enough knowledge of Ren's background to prove to him that something sketchy was going on: Ren and Nora hadn't told anyone about the destruction of his village, and even if Jaune was an absolute stranger at that point, well, truth could be more ridiculous than fiction.
If a stranger came to Ren and told him that they knew his Semblance, the name of his weapons, where he was from and what Grimm had destroyed his village –then told him that the reason they knew this was because they were from a future where they were close friends and teammates with him, well, what else could Ren believe?
He was, as he'd apparently said before, an orphan from the middle of nowhere, and Ren's Grimm-masking skill was still very limited. What was the point of digging deeply into his history in order to create the fabrication of knowing him so well? What value did Ren have that invited such ludicrous effort in weaving a lie?
To be brutally honest, there was none. There was none then, in that future of a storm-streaked Atlas sky, and there was none now. Ren was a skilled Huntsman, but a single skilled Huntsman was all he was. He had no unique, world-shaking traits to mark him.
So the only reason for someone to tell him such a thing, that they knew him intimately from the future, would be because it was true.
And Jaune and Team RWBY could have done that, could have set irrefutable proof of knowing Team JNPR before their eyes and let logic do the rest. They had not, busy being wrapped up in their own frantic plans, and Ren was not sure if he forgave them for it.
Of course, as he'd said to Nora, their feelings and their reaction to this momentous news was far less important than dealing with the future laid ahead. Ren wasn't –he should probably start to keep an eye on himself, remember that attempting to hide and bury all his emotions was a bad idea, as exemplified by his frustrated outbursts and distance from his team in the future. But all the same, that was a habit he'd had for a long time, and right now, it was still Ren's habit to try and detach himself and think things through with cold, firm logic.
If he did react with anger and fury, let loose his simmering feelings of betrayal and turned away from Jaune and the others –what then? They would lose a valuable fighter for the disaster ahead, someone who knew and understood the threat barreling down on them. If he contented himself with sharp comments and sullen glares, that would sow discord amongst the group as Nora rushed to take his side, which was potentially even more dangerous than just turning away from the fight as a whole.
No, Ren could not afford to truly vent his emotions to Jaune and the others. He'd keep his mouth shut and his eyes ahead, no matter how unhealthy it probably was, and let time smooth over the simmering hurt. His friends hadn't deceived him with malice, and that was what counted.
In fact, if Ren was feeling particularly charitable, it made sense for them to double-check with Jinn before telling their friends anything. After all, while they may know of the future, they had no idea how they had gotten to this point, and that was bound to come up in the startled flurry of after-questions once they told their story. It was probably quite wise to wait until they held all the cards before laying them out on the table.
Probably.
Emotions, as Ren had mentioned, were not logical, and they certainly didn't care about probable wisdom.
Huntsmen reacted to such things differently than civilians, he supposed. If this had been a normal group of people, there probably would have been all sorts of shouting and accusations and carrying-on from him, Nora, and Pyrrha when the truth was revealed, but they were all Hunters, and they had been trained from the moment they indicated an interest in that field to deal with their emotions differently –especially the negative ones.
If you were angry or distraught, you took a step back from it. Hunters were taught, exhaustively, to compartmentalize that raw negativity and set it aside, to deal with later. No emotion was so urgent that it had to be dealt with in the here-and-now, especially on a mission. You folded it up and packed it away, and while it never left, you shunted the emotion to one side so that it was no longer your main focus.
So while everyone on Team JNPR had been upset when the truth was revealed, habit that had been turned to instinct instantly took over.
Was it safe to vocalize emotions here? No, they were out in the wilderness and they might attract Grimm outside the crack in the mountain. They should push it down, leave it for later.
Should they react emotionally to all these revelations? No, the mission wasn't done, they were still at risk from Salem and her forces. They needed to hold it together until things were finished and their enemy was defeated. Then it would be safe to emote.
Effortlessly and without thinking, Ren, Nora, and Pyrrha had all quickly defused the metaphorical bomb of their reaction to RWBY and Jaune's news, and of course, the more they talked and reasoned and thought, the less explosive that reaction got. They calmed with time and logic, and while they didn't abandon their initial knee-jerk feeling of hurt and betrayal, they did mute it to manageable levels that could then be dealt with constructively. That was how Hunters were trained to handle extreme emotional reactions.
After all, loss of emotional control was the number-one enemy when fighting Grimm. You could be the most powerful and well-trained Huntsman that the world had ever seen, but the second you let your own emotions get the better of you in a fight, your skill started dipping by the second. There were stories by the handful about famous Hunters who had gotten overconfident, then gotten injured, and their resulting panic and shock had drawn a Grimm horde to wipe them out. Ren had long ago lost count of the number of tales he'd heard about a cocky Hunter who'd lost a partner to the Grimm, or a friend, or a loved one, and had then gotten themselves cut down as well by the following emotional turmoil.
No, a wise and successful Huntsman was controlled under any and all circumstances, any and all provocation. Controlled, calm, centered, focused. That was the ideal that Ren strove for, and it was an ideal that he did not intend to abandon, even after everything he'd seen from himself in the future.
Including the kiss with Nora.
Ren squirmed his shoulders a little, before letting out a long, silent sigh. Neither of them had mentioned it, both carefully not-talking about that moment in Atlas when Nora's image had grabbed him and-
Well.
Ren wasn't sure how he felt about that. Controlling your emotions was quite a bit different from handling them, as he had recently learned. He and Nora were… well… it was hard to think about, even harder than it was to talk about. It was like- like thinking about the relationship between his right and left hands. They were always there, they were always together, and so dealing with them as separate entities was… weird. It almost felt unnatural.
Still, Jaune had been discreetly trying to push them out of that mutually codependent relationship for some time now, and Ren had to wonder –how much hadn't Jinn shown? How much did Jaune know about his and Nora's relationship in the future, how they had changed and what had happened with them in the fallout of that kiss? How much didn't Jaune say, for fear of indiscretion? Just how much was he politely not mentioning, out of courtesy for Nora and Ren's privacy?
As their tram car rattled down the hill towards their destination, Ren made a mental note to corner his leader and interrogate him about that at some point.
And Jaune still was his team leader. Ren had no shame in admitting that. The one thing, the absolute and only thing that he could trust from Jaune beyond a shadow of a doubt, was that Jaune was a dedicated Huntsman. He was courageous, loyal, warmhearted, and had a firm grasp of strategy. Not one single element of that had changed in all that Ren had seen in Jinn's visions. Two years may have gone by, but they did not change Jaune's spirit, the core of who he was. No matter how many seemingly insignificant personal details Jinn had undoubtedly skipped out on, no matter how Jaune may or may not try to manipulate Ren and the others, Ren still knew what kind of a person he was.
He could trust that.
He could put his faith in that, as any team member would in their leader.
He shook off his thoughts and took up his bag as the tram car slowed and everyone in RWBYJ started shifting, gathering their own things. The nine of them were quick to step off when their stop came up, Ren and the others placidly following RWBYJ's lead as Jaune stepped to the front, ostensibly guiding the others towards his sister's home.
"You grew up in Argus, didn't you?" Ren asked of Pyrrha as they strolled along, and she gave a short nod. Her green eyes were on edge, flicking from side to side and wincing slightly whenever someone's gaze lingered on her a little too long. Ren adjusted his pace so that he stood between Pyrrha and most people on the street, and received a grateful nod accompanied by a somewhat sheepish smile. Nora saw what he was doing, of course, and seamlessly moved to guard Pyrrha's other side, flanking her like an honor guard as they used their bodies as a screen between her and any potentially rabid fans.
"I trained at Sanctum." Pyrrha sighed, the tension in her shoulders easing a little as they did this. Ren and Nora shared a conspiratorial smirk. "Everyone was somewhat disappointed when I chose Beacon over Haven, but I'd experienced some of the favoritism here, and it wasn't to my taste."
"Well, we're glad to have you." Ren replied.
They kept up this conversation as they moved through the streets –talking about nice, commonplace things. Where Pyrrha had gone on her days off, or after school. The gardens and parks she had enjoyed. Occasional days on the beach. Weapon shops and Dust stores. Nothing about the friends she'd made or the time they'd spent together, but then, Pyrrha had already told them about how her rise in status had created problems for her.
They continued this chat all the way to the front door of Jaune's sister, who opened it to reveal herself as a blonde woman with hair several shades darker than her brother's, but with the same deep blue eyes. She was shorter than Jaune, too, despite apparently being the older one, and wore her hair long, down her back. There was a gold wedding band on her left ring finger.
"Hey!" she chimed happily, apparently not at all put off by the crowd of eight (nine, counting Neopolitan) people on her doorstep. "Jaune said you guys would be here today! Come on in!"
She waved them inside the house, stepping aside, and Ren glanced back as he ascended the steps at the back of the group. Neopolitan was standing across the street, and as their eyes met, she smirked and touched a finger to the corner of her eye, before pointing at him. Ren wasn't entirely sure if that was a sarcastic salute or a reminder to watch himself, but nodded to her curtly before turning and entering the house. He knew that Neopolitan would leave once the door closed behind the last of them, and he was more focused on making a good impression on Jaune's sister.
The house he entered was narrow, but tall, squeezed in amongst the other buildings with barely enough room for a kitchen and stairs to one side of the front hall, which ended in a living room that let directly out into the backyard. They all set their bags down at the side of the front door, and there was a flurry of greetings between them and Saphron Cotta-Arc, as well as her wife, Terra.
Terra was a darker-skinned woman with black hair and orange glasses that slid low on her nose, currently leaning against one of the huge cream couches in a state of advanced pregnancy –which answered the question of whether or not Jaune's nephew had been born yet. Terra seemed as pleased to meet them as her wife, though she had that somewhat harried aura that many pregnant women seemed to possess.
"You really came all the way to Argus for little ol' me, huh?" Saphron teased her brother as they all got settled in the living room, pulling on his cheek as Jaune flailed indignantly. Ren smiled with the others as they snickered, but he was distracted by a picture on one of the well-crammed bookshelves that ringed the room. It was of another living room, he thought, with blue walls and a wooden floor, and eight children crammed onto an overstuffed red couch.
All of them were blonde, and most of them seemed highly energetic, with one girl in an orange shirt sitting upside-down with her legs against the back of the couch and her hair hanging down over the base. The two seeming-twins with matching outfits and ponytails beside her were hanging off the edge and one arm of the couch respectively as they made silly faces at the camera, and another girl with one tooth missing was actually standing on the couch with her foot on the opposite arm and a hand over her eyes as she looked off to the right, taking the pose of an explorer searching for adventures.
The only calm ones seemed to be a tiny girl standing primly before the couch and adjusting her bottlecap glasses with one finger, and the girl that seemed to be the oldest, since she was standing behind the couch and was still on level with the girl in a purple jumper perched on its back –Saphron, Ren was willing to guess, based on the color of her hair and her infectious, eager smile. And, of course, there was Jaune, sitting in the center of this chaos with the tallest girl's hand on the top of his head.
Jaune's short blond hair was bunched into two clumsy, uneven pigtails with cyan bows, and he held a sign that simply said HELP as he stared at the camera with world-weary eyes. Ren wouldn't swear to it, but he almost thought that there were bags underneath them, despite the fact that Jaune couldn't be more than five, since he was the youngest of eight and the girl behind the couch was the only one who looked to have hit puberty.
Ren had to chuckle a little over that.
Still, he looked away from the picture and paid attention as they began to talk. Seeing Jaune as a kid had reminded Ren of something important, and he paid close attention to his friends without trying to look like he was doing so, noting down what he saw. Not with Jaune, actually –not right now, not yet– but with Team RWBY. In this timeline, at least, they'd never met Terra and Saphron before today, and they wouldn't be meeting them again for a good long time, if ever. There was no reason for them to pretend to be like their old selves, to be anything except what they were, and Ren wanted to pay close attention to that.
It was one thing to know that a person's core was the same, but a lot could, would, and did change in the period of two years, especially for Hunters. Especially for Hunters who had endured the kind of trauma stirred by the Fall of Beacon. Perhaps Ruby still was passionately devoted to becoming a Huntress, but what if her definition of what it was to be a Huntress had changed? Would that not slowly change her pattern behavior and then, eventually, her mindset? Jinn had told them about the kind of large, overarching threats that the future would hold, but she was understandably sparse on the personal details about Ren's friends, and he wanted to get their measure, with or without his evolved Semblance.
He was liking what he saw.
Jaune and the others had dropped their façade, but Ren was pleased to see that the façade had been pretty light to begin with. Jaune didn't curl in on himself as much, didn't stammer or falter when someone challenged him. Whether he realized it or not, the stance of his shoulders was firmer, his gaze more level, now that Jaune wasn't pretending to be an inexperienced 17-year-old. But he still reacted the same way to Saphron's teasing, still winced when others made jokes at his expense, and he talked in the same rambling, excited manner when the conversation passed into his corner.
Ruby had changed as well, but like Jaune, the change was subtle. She had dropped her own excited, overeager mannerisms, and… matured, if that was the right word. There was something calm and steady in her eyes now, tempering the shining, almost naïve light that she had once had. Her enthusiasm when discussing team weapons was not feigned when Terra and Saphron asked about Beacon, and it was very familiar to Ren. What Ruby had been hiding was the experience she had gained from her adventures: some painful, some harsh, and some merely bittersweet, but all things that her fifteen-year-old self wouldn't possess. That was all. Nothing else had been feigned.
Weiss's change was a lot more visible: she was softer in so many ways, dropping the harsh glares and icy sniffs of her former attitude like they were a shabby coat. She wasn't sharp and foreboding anymore, she was much… easier in her manner, much more relaxed and part of the group. The casualness with which she offered to help make tea for Terra and Saphron would have been shocking to Ren a week ago, as would be the way she quietly laughed and smiled with the others. Weiss had always made it clear that she attended game nights on sufferance, refusing to admit it whenever she got into things or was caught in a smile… but looking back, Ren realized that those had been cracks in her façade, which was nearly transparent if you looked in the right ways and knew enough about her.
Blake was the one who had simultaneously changed the most and the least. Ren now knew that if things had properly gone the way they once had, this would be the first that he learned of her Faunus heritage, but Blake had pulled off her disguising bow sometime before initiation, and so as far as Ren and the others were concerned, her feline ears were a natural part of life at Beacon. She had the least to hide, since there was no one at Beacon to notice her change in personality, but she was the one who had changed the most: compared to the girl Ren had seen at the beginning of those visions, Blake seemed so much more centered now, calm and effortlessly confident in herself.
Like the others, Yang had pulled a happier, more reckless attitude to cover her changes in personality, trying to mimic with limited success –because experience had won wisdom that none of them were willing to abandon– the person she had been at seventeen. Her physical change was more obvious –the missing arm that was now whole, and that was what Yang seemed to have the most accidents with. Yelping when her elbow hit a corner, hissing when she cut her finger… Ren remembered dozens of little incidents that now stuck out painfully in his mind, times when Yang seemed oddly clumsier with one hand, one arm, than the other, when accidents that she didn't even react to on one side made her jump when they happened to the other. Now he knew why: Yang had still been getting used to an arm that was no longer numb metal, and every sensation she felt through it had come as a shock.
What was most reassuring, though, was that even though Ren was noticing all sorts of little tics that Jaune and the others had dropped, he was also noticing that they were all surface tics. The only thing that they had consistently hidden was the fact that they acted older than most people would give seventeen-year-olds credit for –and Blake, whose family or friends would have no way to hear of her change, didn't bother hiding her increased maturity at all.
His friends didn't change now –they had just stopped hiding a truth from him, and they looked far happier for it.
Some of the weight fell off of Ren's shoulders, a burden that had been intangible until he realized it was gone. Jaune and the others may have lied, but –they were still his friends. These were still the same people that he trusted.
He was in a much more positive frame of mind when they retired for the night and he, unsurprisingly, found himself called into a meeting with the others in one of the slightly-cramped guest bedrooms. Ruby and Yang both had to sleep on the couches in the living room, at least until they left or got some proper camping supplies.
"Neopolitan should be on her way back to Vale, and she'll call us when she gets there." Ruby said, resting her chin on her folded arms. "And Weiss'll head out after we get camping supplies, but…"
"We need to figure out what we'll do while 'camping.' Right?" Pyrrha asked, a certain hardness in her eyes. She wasn't angry, but this was a serious meeting with potentially fatal stakes: she had her professional mask up.
"Right." Jaune nodded to her. "Me and Ruby know about the Grimm on the route we took through Anima, but we need to think about how we're going to deal with all that."
"There's the Apathy at Brunswick farms, on the way back from Argus." Yang said. "That place is a deathtrap –unless you know exactly what to look for, it'd be way too easy for people to wander in to try and take shelter, but never wander out again."
"I don't know." Blake said, twisting a lock of hair around her finger. "The bodies there were… it's hard to tell how far the decay went. Their eyes were gone, but the flesh looked… mummified."
"So what, you're saying that… the Apathy won't have shown up yet?" Nora asked hesitantly. There was a general shrugging from RWBY, though Ren took some perverse pleasure in seeing Jaune as clueless as the rest of his team for once as JNPR exchanged bemused looks.
"The canned food was still good." Ruby said after a few seconds.
"Ruby, canned food is meant to last a long time." Weiss pointed out with a short sigh. "I suppose we can stop by the farm and check, but I don't think a stern lecture would be enough to stop that idiot Bartleby."
"He wanted to save money, right?" Ren asked, taking a moment to sort out his memories of Jinn's vision. "We do have emergency funds."
Everyone looked back towards Weiss, who blinked, then sighed and rubbed her forehead.
"My allowance is obscene, but that kind of expenditure is another level of ridiculous." she said. "And it's not infinite –my father's going to cut me off eventually, probably sooner rather than later, since I have no doubt he's monitoring my official bank account and taking note of the fact I'm making consistent withdrawals without receipts. I just hope he thinks that I think it's some form of petty rebellion, spending my allowance in cash that he can't track."
"Weiss, people's lives are at stake." Ruby said, frowning a little.
"Oh, I can definitely give them enough money to bail out their estate in the short term, but if they're going through that many hardships like Maria said, it might only be a stopgap." Weiss said briskly, her tone becoming businesslike. "And we can't afford to keep feeding them the money we may need to keep ourselves alive."
"So we give 'em some of Weiss's allowance, and a buncha self-help business pamphlets at the same time." Nora drawled, making several of them choke out a laugh.
"Okay, but seriously." Jaune said, still snickering a little as he took a deep breath and looked towards his team. "We stop by Brunswick, take care of whatever we find there, and then work our way back through Anima like Ruby and I did after Beacon fell. We can really push our skills and train that way, the way we need it: in the field."
"What about the Nuckelavee?" Ruby asked.
"We kill it." Ren answered shortly, drawing everyone's attention. He held their eyes steadily, trying to choke down the ancient, red-hot rage that still welled up in his chest at the memory of the creature, and the tremble in his hands, trying to show that he was in-control and competent. Ren had power now, the power of Huntsman training and his own skills, and he would not allow the murder of his parents and the butchery of his home to go unpunished.
"We try to get Team JNPR up to the skill level where they can kill it on their own." Yang said after a moment of respectful silence. "We stand back, and jump in to help you guys once your Aura breaks, or if it looks like you really need it."
Ren could accept that answer, and his clenched fists eased a little.
"So basically, we go on a murder-trip." Nora said brightly, swinging her legs a little from where she sat. "Slaughterin' Grimm across Anima, training ourselves to be stronger, learning to work together as two teams of total badassery. Well, team and a half, since Weiss'll be in Atlas."
"Pretty much." Blake said with a shrug.
"I think we should be careful about- about letting people know that we helped them." Pyrrha said carefully, making eye contact with the RWBY and Jaune. "You've been cautious so far, and we don't want to ruin that by getting a reputation in Mistral for being extremely skilled for our age. I mean, I already am, but… the enemy expects that. The longer they underestimate us, the stronger we can get without interference."
A cold chill slithered down Ren's back, like a blade laid along his spine –Pyrrha had just voiced an unwelcome reminder of the danger that they faced. They could operate almost entirely unimpeded so far, because Salem and her cohort didn't know that Ruby and the others knew so much, that they were already preparing to counter her moves.
Ren thought of his skill level, and then he thought about being ambushed by any one of the men and women under Salem's sway while he and the others were out trekking across Anima. It was a sobering thought, especially when, if you considered things under the harsh light of reason, it became clear that Ren and Nora were currently the weakest out of the entire group. Pyrrha may have been without the two years of intensive fieldwork-training that RWBY and Jaune had endured, but she was a prodigy, a natural fighter.
Ren and Nora… weren't.
They were the weak link, so unless or until they worked to become fighters at the same level as their friends, they were the ones most likely to fall.
Losing Nora like they had lost Pyrrha…
Ren's hand moved without his permission, swiftly and silently moving to take Nora's, laid on the cushion beside him. Uncharacteristically, she didn't say anything in response to a touch that he had initiated, but he felt her palm turn up under his, matching his instinctive clasp of her hand and tightening her grip as she wove their fingers together.
Ren refused to lose Nora. It seemed that she felt the same way.
And for now?
That was enough for him.
"Reporting for duty, Weiss-my-friend!"
Weiss kept her tight smile on, seeing Penny's green eyes flicker excitedly at her from behind her Scroll.
"Hey, Penny." she said, trying to keep her expression anything but wan. It had been getting easier to see and interact with Penny… but then, what Jinn had shown them, and Weiss had to swallow down her gorge as she thought of Penny's freckles standing out starkly against her paling face as blood pooled beneath her and-
Weiss's nails bit into her palm as her fist tightened and trembled in her lap. She had to focus.
"The others are getting ready to go on their camping trip, but… I believe I misjudged how much we would be roughing it." Weiss said, trying to capture the annoyed, haughty twitch of expression that she had seen on so many of her fellow Atlesians. "So I intend to spend the rest of my break in Atlas. However, I was wondering, since I'm already in Argus… would you like to help me out with something?"
Penny gasped in excitement.
"Anything!" she chimed without hesitation.
"My brother, Whitley, and I… well, our family situation isn't the best." Weiss admitted, dropping her eyes. "There's a lot of pressure, and Jacques isn't exactly… suffice it to say, he's not the father most people would wish for. My sister Winter managed to get out of the house by attaching herself to the Atlas Military, and I managed to get out by applying to be a Huntress at Beacon, but our younger brother Whitley is… stuck."
Penny looked concerned, and Weiss tucked a strand of hair behind her ear.
"Some of that is my fault." she admitted. "I should have been thinking of him and not just myself when I left. And… I'm doing my best to counteract that by trying to strengthen the bonds between the three of us. However, my father doesn't exactly approve of this, so I can't visit Whitley directly. Could you come back to Atlas with me, and help lure him out of the manor, and we can meet at your father's home? He's a respected scientist, isn't he?"
"My father has the personal ear of General Ironwood!" Penny said, and made an inference Weiss didn't necessarily expect out of her. "So your father will not at all be unhappy that his son is visiting us!"
Weiss blinked at her, and Penny, showing further acuity, caught the look and grinned, giving a jaunty salute.
"Ilia has been teaching me social nuance!" Penny said, sitting back in her chair and folding her arms proudly. "As well as how to discuss socio-political questions and the proper sleepover etiquette."
Oh dear gods, Penny was getting taught complex social skills from an ex-White Fang member. Weiss tried to stamp out her initial surge of horror, remembering that Ilia wasn't necessarily wrong in a lot of her opinions about Atlas, however unflattering they may be. And it was good that Penny was getting real, solid, down-to-earth opinions and perspectives, especially when they ran counter to the Atlas Military environment she had been raised in.
"Yes, well, could you fly back to Atlas and help me pry my brother out of the manor?" Weiss asked, trying to look plaintive. "We can talk a lot easier at your father's house than we can over the Scroll, you know."
Penny's gaze sharpened a little. Her chipper demeanor often disguised the fact that she was no fool: Penny understood cause and consequence as well as anyone else, and she only lacked the years of real-world experience to mold her into something formidable. She had been raised, for what few years she had existed, as a military project.
She knew code-talking when she heard it.
"Absolutely!" Penny said with a sunny smile. "I will be at the Schnee Manor within 48 hours!"
"Well, you don't need to do it that fast-"
Too late: Penny had already hung up, and Weiss gave a bemused smile and a shake of her head as she ended the call on her Scroll. She just hoped that Penny arranged some form of warning before she descended on the Schnee home…
…as a matter of fact, Weiss should probably message Whitley and let him know that he would soon have company.
Penny was mimicking General Ironwood at his stiffest as she was buzzed into the Schnee estate and the ornate metal gate opened for her, looking around with wide eyes as she walked into the vast courtyard. She noted the ornate sculptures scattered about with a curious tilt of her head and a quick scan with all her audiovisual systems. Goodness, this was all a bit much –and none of it was any fun. By her estimate (based on the visual weather degradation), most of these sculptures and whatnot had been here for over a decade, and yet, none of them seemed like they'd be any fun for children to play on.
That didn't make any sense at all, and Penny felt an uncharacteristic frown twisting her mouth as she marched up to the front door. Weiss had said that her father wasn't very good at his job, and already Penny was seeing evidence to corroborate that. Still, politeness was important, and Penny rang the doorbell and arranged her features into a pleasant smile, stepping back and tucking her arms behind her back as she bounced on her heels.
Ilia says people from Atlas waste a lot of resources to show off. Penny thought, her eyes flicking over the not-garden that surrounded the gigantic marble manor. It was a troubling thought: did General Ironwood waste the valuable resources available to him as an academy headmaster and military leader? Penny had been in Atlas a lot –she remembered that she'd seen some of that extravagance before, though rarely in the military itself, and now the memories bothered her. Penny still had a lot to learn, and the documentaries she and her father watched couldn't tell her everything –would she have internalized and accepted that profligate wastefulness as something normal, if no one ever pointed it out to her?
She shivered as she waited on the doorstep. What a chilling thought.
The door clicked open, and Penny gave a smile and a wave to the balding man who had opened it for her.
"Ah, welcome, my dear!" he chimed, waving her into the large front hall with more friendliness than she would've expected from Weiss's father. "Come in, come out of the cold!"
It was odd, Penny thought as she stepped inside gratefully, looking around at the huge room as he closed the door behind her –Weiss didn't bear a lot of resemblance to this man, whose hair was a dull auburn and whose eyes changed color as he turned to Penny again. In fact… oops.
Penny didn't have the blood to blush, but her internal fans did whir a little quicker, regulating the increased flow of heat, as her biometric scans came back and reminded her that it was genetically impossible for this man to have fathered Weiss. Still, what kind of father didn't come to send his son off on a playdate? Was this man a servant?
"Klein Sieben, at your service." the man said with a slight bob of his head. "And you?"
"Penny Polendina!" she replied brightly, straightening her shoulders and smiling at him. He seemed quite friendly, and Penny liked him almost immediately. "I'm here to visit with Whitley Schnee and ask him to come visit my father's pharmacy!"
"Well, between the two've us, it'd be good to get him out of the house." Klein said gruffly as his eyes tinted red, before he nodded to her. "You wait 'ere then, I'll go get 'im."
"Okay!"
Penny mentally noted Klein down as a good person to know on the inside of the estate –more advice from Ilia, who said it was always important to be on friendly terms with at least one person for every new place that Penny went.
She did tilt her head a little as Klein chivied a boy probably only a few years younger than Weiss down the grand staircase, the boy grumbling slightly as he went. His hair, eyes, and skin were all very pale, matching Weiss's description, and he wore a mixture of white and dull navy blue for his extremely formal attire –a dress shirt, slacks, and vest, with pops of color in his black tie and black folded handkerchief in the breast pocket of his vest. He was tall, taller than Penny when Klein finally nudged him into reaching distance, and he looked down on her from that height with a grumpy expression.
"Right, well, you two enjoy yourselves, and don't cause any trouble." Klein said, patting one hand onto Penny and Whitley's shoulders respectively. "I've got to go answer a call from the master, but you can still ring me up if you need anything, whether it's before or after you leave."
"Very well, sir. We'll see you later!" Penny said, waving to him as he left, before she returned her attention to Weiss's brother, who hadn't moved.
"Whitley Schnee." he said abruptly to her, with what sounded oddly like distaste. "I assume you're the errand runner my sister sent me?"
Penny didn't let his tone intimidate her, and swung her arm up, giving the boy a cheerful salute.
"Salutations! My name is Penny Polendina, and I'm combat ready!" she introduced herself, providing a bright grin into the bargain.
"So you're… training to become a Huntress?" Whitley guessed. Penny nodded, but then Whitley huffed and folded his arms. "How uncouth."
Penny blinked and tilted her head, lowering her arm back to her side.
"To be uncouth is to lack in good manners, refinement, or grace; or to lack sophistication and delicacy in one's speech." she recited. "Under those definitions, I cannot understand how this label is applied to Huntresses."
"Your services are unnecessary in the kingdom of Atlas." Whitley sniffed. "There is nothing a single idiot with a sword can do that the Atlas Military cannot."
"Also incorrect. Covert missions, single-man infiltrations, and Grimm hunting are all better if carried out by a small unit of four people or less that have great experience in that field." Penny chimed enthusiastically, making him groan and pinch his nose. "Hunters, Huntsmen, and Huntresses represent a more nimble and concentrated form of defense than a larger military, and are necessary for this reason."
"I see that you're just going to take everything I say literally." Whitley muttered, flicking his hand away from his forehead a little in exasperation. "Ugh, fine. If we're stuck together the whole day, we're stuck together the whole day. You can acknowledge at least that Atlas has no need of Hunters, since we have the finest military in the world."
"But what about other kingdoms?" Penny asked as she remembered Ilia's lessons, a furrow appearing on her brow.
"They can take care of themselves, or requisition us for aid."
"Calling in foreign military aid for a local problem results in actions of conquest or colonization six times out of ten." Penny recited from her memory banks. "Atlas would very likely begin to exert political pressure on the kingdom that called them for aid in order to extract favorable deals and treatment."
"So?"
"We are at peace. Political jockeying for supremacy between allied kingdoms should not take place."
"Well, they do." Whitley scoffed. "Really, how can you possibly be so ignorant when you're Professor Polendina's child? He's one of the foremost scientists in the kingdom, and has the personal ear of General Ironwood!"
Penny blinked at him again as there was a moment of silence.
"That is my father's job." she explained, trying to speak slowly and calmly so that she could be better understood, since there had clearly been a miscommunication somewhere. "When he is not working, we spend time together, and we do not talk about his job."
Now it was Whitley's turn to blink at her, nonplussed. Penny cocked her head.
"What does your father do while he is at home?"
"He trains us, teaching us lessons on how to take over the Schnee Family and the SDC." Whitley said, recovering his haughty demeanor quickly. "We are provided with a variety of tutors and are expected to give a daily report on our progress to him or one of his secretaries."
Penny furrowed her eyebrows and leaned closer to him, and Whitley bent backwards uncomfortably as Penny's face hovered a few inches away from his own, her green eyes squinted in a fierce scowl of concentration.
"That does not sound like being at home." she finally pronounced. "That sounds like it is a job."
"Well, it's not!" Whitley blurted in frustration, before blinking and hastily composing himself, stepping back and smoothing over his expression as he folded his arms behind his back again, as though he was impersonating a marble statue. "A-ahem, anyways. It's no business of yours what I do at the Schnee family estate, any more than it is mine what you do at your… home."
"Father and I watch movies." Penny said. "He says it is to teach me about the way the world works, because I… did not have the childhood to learn, but I know that he's lying. He just wants to watch movies with me."
She looked around carefully, then edged closer to Whitley to whisper. He didn't lean away this time, though he still looked slightly nonplussed, perhaps slightly afraid, like someone was approaching him with a substance he couldn't quite identify but definitely didn't trust.
"We call them documentaries." Penny whispered conspiratorially. "That way he can show me as many movies as he likes and no one can say I'm not being educated. What does your family do to bond?"
"We don't bond." Whitley said, sounding scandalized. "It's not proper for the Schnee- it's not what we do."
"Forming social bonds between oneself and a parent or caregiver is crucial during one's adolescent years, as it is an age of great transition and adolescents do not have the life experience necessary to create their own effective emotional or logistical support." Penny told him wisely. "Did you know that neglecting this emotional connection is a category of parental abuse that can be legally prosecuted?"
"My father does not neglect me!" Whitley burst out again, his pale face going red, before he coughed and hastily composed himself again.
Penny consulted her memory banks for ideas. The psychology manuals that she'd been programmed with said that pressing the issue at this point was a bad idea, because Whitley had sunk too much emotional investment in this personal fiction, so she should change the subject.
"Well, that sort of argument is not what I am here for!" Penny announced loudly, and seized his hands in both of her own as Whitley jumped. "Whitley Schnee, I am to take you out for bonding activities to strengthen your social network, which means you are coming with me to my father's house!"
She dragged him out the door as Whitley yelped and flailed, mentally congratulating herself for taking both Weiss and Ilia's advice. Sure, Penny was still a little rough around the edges when it came to social situations, but she was learning! With his formal clothing and haughty mannerisms, Whitley was obviously a socialite, so he surely would have told her if she was behaving oddly!
Penny couldn't wait to spend the rest of the day with him, and she also couldn't wait to talk with Weiss about how much progress they were both making.