The boy stayed still once, made a home for himself in an eclectic little village of coloured paper people that seemed to fall into a routine of near-suicidal action through inadequacy and idiocy, all the while showing a clear want to be reincarnated, to die. The boy would stop them, every time, every day.
He'd make them carry rocks so they didn't blow off in the wind, push them away from water at all costs, prevent them standing near the dam, prevent fires or anything else that could produce enough of a spark to ignite the whole village within a moment, preventing construction beyond 30 feet high where the wind torrent got too strong for the rocks to keep them down to the ground, and so many other policies of protection. And that's not even mentioning all of the individual policies for each of the paper people.
No matter how much it slowed his other pursuits they always mattered to him. He named them all, every single one of them, granted a name beyond their comprehension, names attributed to the people he once had in his life, before everything shifted and time ceased to make sense.
He spent years there, he found them just after the twins that fell through time, his only solace after the wretched events of that debacle. Entire years that he listlessly threw away, turning on his original goal of escape and back into himself, and the hero he was desperate to be.
Then the boy learned the hard way, every hero falters in his step. Heroes get back up when they falter, they don't let a bump in the road distract them from the road ahead. Lives are lost due to a hero's shortcomings, and there's no shame in feeling the error of your ways, seeing the consequences of your mistakes.
But it's the only way people can learn to be a hero, to keep walking the path of heroism until they can become what they need to be, to face the dark times ahead.
With time seemingly frozen in a standstill, and his past failures already haunting him far more than was the norm for his type of person, it was no wonder that when the tragedy struck, when his focus slipped for just a few seconds, and everything ended with a crack and a sudden geyser of water bursting from the dams walls…
It was no wonder the hero died, and in the place of a naive boy with a heart of gold, now lay a man. A man in a rage like no other, angered by his circumstance, angered by his incompetence, angered by his fate. Fate had stripped him of the only person to ever love him, and then it tore him down piece by piece as his world seemingly killed itself one by one.
The ones who did survive up until his departure from his homelands, those were the ones who kept themselves locked far enough away to never see within his heart beyond what he made public for all to see. Only a few people ever got below the surface, and those who did had to dig their claws deep into his chest to find out what lay beneath.
The woman of ice, who refused to abandon him even as every other connection in his life steadily died off.
The old crow, who's own bad luck had made them kindred spirits.
The steel which desperately craved to be real, only to have it stripped away by his hands at the last moment with no options left.
And the one who started it all, the one who made the journey possible for him,who made the journey of heroism bearable to walk. The lady of burgundy and bronze. He missed her, more than anything else.
That boy, that man, would give everything and the world for just a moment to be with her again before the end.
For just one moment of respite, of peace before his time came to a close.
He so desperately wanted that peace back, to be one with her again, to be whole again.
But it wasn't meant to be.
The man in the tower had filled her head with lies, with false notions of destiny and fate, they put the pressure of the entirety of her known existence on her plate and expected her not to fold like an omelette under the dense pressure.
Now, the man wandered.
Going back home, it didn't matter anymore. He was broken, once a pretty much useless tool forcibly ejected from his own reality and cast into another with no reprieve. That useless tool he used to be had but one positive to its nature.
He was malleable.
He was capable of being moulded in another's image into something great, anything really. A guardian, a warrior, a marksman, a scout, a leader, even a combination of multiple, or maybe even all of the above and more.
But it was no longer meant to be, any malleable parts of him left were hidden behind the years upon years of damage and grief. Now, he'd been moulded into the exact opposite of what he needed to be, of what he wanted to be.
For all of the skills he'd picked up over time in this wretched land of acres upon acres, the mortal attachments he'd long lost had destroyed any sense of drive to fight.
What did it matter if he could go back and save that world he once came from, he couldn't remember any of it any more, it meant nothing to him, it wouldn't fix his issues, repeal his sorrows or clear the fog of grief from his mind. The meaning behind the victory had been malformed by time, what once could have been the most triumphant moment of his entire life, the very moment his entire existence up until that point had been building towards. Now the moment would be just another fight, the cause would cease to matter to him, beyond the very few things he still selfishly clung to within his mind he could muster no heroism to save those not tied to his own mind. The naivety of inherent good was lost on him, and in its place was an inherent selfishness to cling to what was once his in a desperate attempt to cling to better times.
Just like his father had.
He knew now that he could not be a hero, could not be what the world he came from needed him to be. He couldn't even save a few sheets of paper flying loose in the wind.
It'd been so long since then, and the pain never got any lighter for him. Time never seemed to move, he hadn't gotten any older but he knew deep down that far more time than any human was meant to experience had come and gone a dozen times over by this point, at least.
The giveaway to his age was forgetting. He'd been forgetting things for a while now, faces, dates, places, names.
He'd already forgotten the faces of his sisters and parents, but even their faces had long disappeared from his memory. The people he'd travelled with during the end times, the general who turned on them, the children he'd chaperoned around.
All long gone.
His teammates of the past, whom he'd been practically attached to every single day for two years. Gone as well. The names and faces, only a vague visage remained.
All that remained were 3 faces.
The two women who'd ever given a shit about him.
And the woman he killed.
The scars still remained so fresh, and yet it'd been so long since those fated events had turned his life from tragic comedy to a nightmare beyond the mind of a child.
He'd been wandering for so long, he'd damn near forgotten his own name. His armour had been rebuilt countless times, he'd stitched it together from various bits and pieces he could scrounge and purchase from the only blacksmith he'd ever found within this place.
Damn good work she did, it had never let him down. Yet the rust got worse and worse no matter what she did to it, even stranger was that it never affected the armour's ability to move.
His sword and shield had been withering away over time as well, his blade had accrued so many chips over time that it was barely a blade any more. Just a shard of sharp metal with a hilt. His shield fared no better, it was so scarred and faded that his old symbol had worn from the metal.
His appearance had changed under all the armour, it too withered away akin to his arms, in stranger ways than expected.
The grey hairs had started a very long time ago, they'd begun setting in around the time the twins had their spat and either left or died, and they only got worse over time until they suddenly stopped like everything else did after the fall of the village of paper. His skin had become dried and flaky, wrinkles had formed into light crevasses and valleys around his eyes, and his skin tone had paled significantly since the introduction of a helm to the armour. The fatty tissue of his youth within his face and hands had been the first to go beyond the smile that once marred his face, the chub that once thinly veiled the bones within now atrophied away to reveal solid mass beneath.
One thing did keep powering through this sudden stoppage of his ageing process, new changes that suddenly started and ended before he could even notice it was happening.
Refusal to remove one's helmet for decades at a time does that to you.
His muted and matted hair had gained sporadic speckles of red, thick strands that wove within his hair and made their home within his, and his eyes had a striking splash of jade suddenly mark him, enclosing around the pupils.
It reminded him of her, of the lady of burgundy and bronze.
It reminded him of her, of the way her eyes shone that particular hue of green that seemed to only get brighter when she was happy. Of the way her awkward smile only peeked from beyond the veneer of her stage face once she got away from the crowds of flashing cameras and microphones jammed up to her mouth. Of the way her hair seemed to always look its best when it was let loose to flow in the wind. Of how she was always adamant to help others who could not help themselves, the first true hero he'd ever seen. Of the way she smelled of a fancy spiced perfume that she always doused herself in to hide the stench of combat before interviews. Of the way her gentle fingertips and calloused palms once contacted his in a soft miasma of overstimulation, and the sweet kiss that had followed, leaving the bittersweet taste of juniper berries on his palette, mere moments before that same person had met her end.
A feeling he only ever got one time, and never again.
Words cannot describe how much he yearned to feel her lips upon his again, his hand in hers.
He'd kill every single being within this wretched land, starting with the accursed cat, a thousand times over just to see her face, to hear her voice one more time.
He'd become the very worst creature this world could ever fathom just to smell her hair again, and he'd do it again and again and again ad nauseum because she was all that mattered to him.
She was all that he had left, a vague memory of sweeter times.
He'd wandered for so long that even he could no longer remember who he was. He remembered what he'd done. What he'd failed to do. The sheer lack of success that trailed after him, seemingly no matter what he did nor what the circumstance may be.
The man had a name, once.
A name that should have been worn with a semblance of pride, with the knowledge that he was he, and that no matter what changed with him, regardless of what happened, he was still himself.
That was no longer the case. It hadn't been for a long while now.
The few friendly creatures had to name him at some point, given his comings and goings across the acres, all the combat he'd seen against the various bizarre creatures that lived within these acres, and the people who'd witnessed the fights he walked into with reckless abandon.
Old Iron was a strange name, but for some reason, it seemed to fit enough to never bother him.
—-
In a blink, Weiss awoke with a scowl and a striking shot of unfamiliar back pain that almost froze her in place. She remembered falling into the void, the warnings of Ambrosius didn't really matter when your four closest friends had all gone headfirst into it beforehand.
She hadn't really expected to wake up again after falling into the void, but hey, she's alive and seemed to be able to move all of her body parts.
Weiss slowly stood, her vision still blurred as she tried to get to her feet and keep her head on straight. She couldn't figure out why there was sand on her clothes, and on her hands.
Weiss hated sand, about as much as she hated Vacuo. The way it was going to ruin her combat dress was bad enough, having to deal with the rest of her team's complaints would be even more torturous.
It was then that Weiss remembered that she had a team and Jaune to find.
She didn't have to look any further than turning to look at the ocean.
Ruby was fully passed out face-first in the sand, snoring as if she hadn't just fallen for Oum knows how long. Worryingly, Crescent Rose was missing from her rear. Ruby wasn't exactly the type to leave her weapon alone under any circumstances, even at the best of times it was only for a few hours before she could get it in her mitts again to tinker with or polish or… honestly anything besides not taking care of her baby killing machine.
Crescent Rose was in all likelihood gone forever if Ruby didn't have it under circumstances such as these.
Yang and Blake had managed to land on top of each other in a tangle of limbs, their faces roughly smooshed into each other.
Team RWBY was back together, but this visage wasn't exactly the norm anymore. Atlas had changed them all, for better or for worse.
Ruby was the first to awaken, her snoring abruptly halting as she jolted back to life in a moment.
Her eyes latched to Weiss' form before anything else registered in her mind.
"Weiss! You fell too!?" She exclaimed in a strange concoction of joy and shame. A stray tear seemed to threaten to fall from her face before receding back into her tear-duct while her face performed a similar action, trying desperately to hold in whatever was clearly upsetting the young redhead.
"Obviously." Weiss replied, her tone as blank as she could keep it, given the circumstances. Ruby's clearly upset mood was driving what little leadership skills Weiss had into overdrive as she quietly panicked at the lack of clear answers as to where they were, given the coastline looked vaguely Valean, however that would make no sense as they were headed from Atlas to Vacuo, and falling wasn't supposed to lead to Vacuo.
Weiss wouldn't figure out that The Ever After was not on Remnant in any manner, just a hair too late to brag about realising it first.
"I take it your fall was as bad as mine?" Weiss continued, a small smirk breaking the mask of smugness she usually wore for a moment, glad that her sisters had all made it together again through seemingly impossible circumstances.
The fact one was missing still worried her.
The thoughts of the duo were interrupted by a sharp breath and the sound of a shunt.
Ruby looked around in a blind panic for a moment, until her eyes landed on Yang and Blake who were no longer coupled together. Yang had rather blatantly panicked and slapped herself away from the situation, she only panicked further when she realised her arm was inexplicably missing and then she began trying to get everything and anything away from her with reckless abandon, swinging wildly in Blake's vague direction before managing to escape her grasp and then continuing to swing wild haymakers in a panic for another second, before briefly stopping as the adrenaline subsided and clarity quickly followed.
Blake rose too, once one of Yang's wild haymakers clocked her right on her temple, oddly sluggishly given that she'd typically get spooked by someone breathing near her, or smelling vaguely of dog. Her own panicked expression was marred by a jilted blank haze within her eyes that set every alarm bell in Weiss' head off at once.
Something was wrong with Blake, but she didn't seem injured, per se.
Sure, some telltale concussion signs from what little Weiss had seen at this point, but nothing concrete, and her aura appeared to still be active from what she could sense, so that wouldn't make a whole lot of sense. The fall couldn't have caused the damage, or they'd all be far worse off than a mere concussion. Even if Cinder managed to get a good hit in you'd be looking for burns, not blunt force trauma.
She noted that Blake's weapon was missing as well.
That made a four person team, with one and a half weapons. Joy.
"Good, we're all awake. Now, can anyone tell me where we are?" Weiss questioned, directing her gaze at Yang in particular, trying to keep Yang's mind focused on her and not the missing prosthetic.
In her defence, it worked a little bit.
—-
They'd been walking for only a few minutes down this convenient dirt path that sliced through a light forest of trees that none of them could recognise sporting oddly shaped trunks, branches and leaves, not to mention that one tree with fruits that had clocks on them. Already they'd managed to rule out every kingdom as their landing place, Patch and Menagerie had been cut out of the race as well leaving pretty much no other notable land masses on Remnant, meaning that either they were on some uncharted island, or perhaps even a continent. Or maybe…
Maybe they weren't on Remnant at all.
Weiss was drawn away from her ramblings when she realised that she'd somehow managed to meander away from her group while lost in thought, not exactly a good sign of her mental state nor theirs considering the path hadn't diverted from its straight line so far and it'd also yet to have branched out on other paths.
She'd effectively done a random turn and walked off into the trees.
She flickered her eyes around in a panic as her expression crumbled from deep in thought to confusion, and then to raw panic as the lack of familiar bodies sunk into her psyche.
She'd been in this alien forest for damned near 5 minutes and already she'd wandered off without even realising the gravity of such an error. This was usually Ruby's job.
She kept spinning and spinning, trying to catch even a glimpse of red, black or yellow.
Nothing.
She kept spiralling, kept trying to find something, someone, anyone really.
Hell, anything but this. Anything but being alone again.
Perhaps, this is hell.
Her panic was split away immediately by a glimpse of colour, one she wanted to see but certainly didn't expect.
Gold and red.
A figure, slowly meandering away from her in the distance, too far out for her to hear them move or make out any other features.
Whatever it was, it was at least humanoid which boded well.
The way it was moving, not so much.
An incredibly strong limp, and a hunched back that looked so over exaggerated it was giving her back pain just thinking about it, a strange hobble on their good leg, the left one if she was seeing things right.
It moved like an elderly man, yet it appeared to be in some sort of metallic armour. Well, she couldn't exactly tell from this far away but it was reflecting light her way from the sun, so that was something to go off of.
Then she blinked.
And the figure was gone.
Now, she could hear in the distance, someone calling her name.
Ruby. Blake. Yang.
Weiss didn't believe in ghosts, but she was damn-near sure this forest was fucking haunted.
She turned around fully, her back now facing where the gold and red figure had once been hobbling away and towards the voices she could hear, and presumably, hopefully, that meant her friends were there too.
She could only hope.
It took about a full minute of full-on sprinting as fast as her overly bulky yet lovely looking dress would allow her, the extra insulation that this stupidly chosen outfit was providing on this overly hot day within the land of wherever she was came back to bite her in the ass. By the time she managed to run into Ruby's arms and blankly paw at her until Ruby returned the damned hug she was already sweltering, huffing like she'd just ran a marathon and equally sweaty.
Hopefully her hair would survive alright.
Oh, who was Weiss kidding, she knew that her hair wouldn't survive long in a climate like this without appropriate equipment.
Like a shower. Those typically aren't found randomly in the evil hallucination woods.
"Weiss! Why'd you run off like that?" Ruby exclaimed with a strange tone. Not the kind Weiss was used to hearing during times akin to this, when another member of the team was under some sort of duress.
Maybe Ruby was just feeling out of it, maybe Weiss was still hallucinating.
She didn't care at the moment.
"I-I'm sorry, I got distracted… Thought I saw someone in the woods, but I… I was wrong" Weiss sputtered out slowly, desperately trying to suck in breaths while also being halfway driven to tears.
The expression on Ruby's face was strange, it looked as comforting as it normally did, but something didn't seem right.
Weiss' Ruby expertise was still a bit rusty after the full year apart, and also the whole "Atlesian civil war and grimm invasion" thing.
She chalked it up to her own mind playing tricks on her.
Weiss was a fool.
—-
They'd gotten split up again not long after that, Blake and Yang had wandered off god-knows where, probably to go make out behind some tree or worse while she and Ruby were in a blind panic over the entire situation.
Yang and Blake possibly bumping uglies during this wasn't exactly a nice thought.
Ruby had split off at the same moment as everyone else, she'd wound up alone until she found some little mouse creature that could talk, and given that this is Ruby we're talking about of course she seems to have adopted it as a companion of some sort.
She calls them Little, a fitting name.
The thing seems friendly at least, the same can't be said for the wildlife she'd encountered when she was alone.
She'd blanked for a moment in her mind again, just like before. Only this time, the consequences weren't just a light cry and a sprint.
They were still in the woods when she could remember last seeing them, how she'd wound up in this cave was beyond her. The cave wasn't anywhere near as dark as she'd expected it to be, typically caves are pretty much black as pitch when you get to the innards, however this one seemed to have some sort of ambient brightness to it, it was a challenge to describe really.
The cave walls being oddly bright certainly helped, but it didn't exactly fix the current problem.
Myrtenaster in her hand, with the dust phials all long-since emptied from her prior battle with Cinder, Weiss stood shakily as she prepared to take a hefty impact from perhaps the strangest foe she could ever meet.
It was a giant cat, overly wide but certainly not fat. This thing looked like it was on some sort of performance enhancing drug, with its musculature bulking out on its sides and all across its frame. A clear display of danger.
She was ready to parry a swipe from its retractable claws, or dodge a bite from its oversized sabre-tooth fangs. She was not prepared for it to hop forward into an incredibly fast barrel roll straight towards her at break-neck speeds.
She tanked the hit head on, being left with no choice given the narrow nature of the cave. Poor little Weiss was ping-ponged out of the cave by a giant cartwheeling cat, and the embarrassment of that would stay with her until the end of time.
She spun through the air, catching glimpses of the ground, then the sun, then the ground, then the sun, and then a large brown smudge as her front end collided with a tree resulting in a rather abrupt halt to her momentum. The pain began as the air was knocked from her lungs, she wheezed out an angered sputter as she tried to get back up and fight again.
She managed to get her body turned back to the beast, but the temporary oxygen deprivation left her stumbling onto her rear, leaned against the tree as she stared at the overgrown cat that had probably landed with far more grace than her. She expected it to attempt another cartwheel attack towards her, but it didn't even get the chance to do anything.
Something came flying out of the forest surrounding her, something that glinted in the sun as it darted out from behind her, past her head and right into the creature's shoulder. The cat let out a deep grunt, as it stumbled back briefly.
It never managed to recover.
Before Weiss could thank any deities for the assistance, or get up to capitalise on the big cat with an attack of her own, a figure rushed out from where that object had come careening past her, charging straight at the cat with reckless abandon.
A man dressed in thick armour covering him near head to toe, anything in between was covered by something that looked like a sort of thick fleece, something like an old gambeson. Very old and very rusted, the original white and gold colours on the metal still shone through just a little, just enough to give a hint as to what used to lay in the place of rot. There was red, too. Red, or more accurately a shade of burgundy, flowed around this individual's waistline in the form of various loose tattered strips and rags.
A broken straight-sword gleamed under the sun's rays as it was thrust straight into the left side of the beast's neck and then ripped down and into the shoulder joint of the cat, all within what seemed to be a single step. The cat attempted to bite at the man, but he was too quick. Before the jaws could catch around his right arm, he let go of his blade and jutted his right elbow into the creature's jaw, slamming it shut with far more force than one would expect. Before the cat nor Weiss could respond to it his left hand had curled up into a steel fist and struck with all the might of an exploding sun with frightening precision, connecting directly with the outer edge of its jaw and sending its neck rotating at a much faster pace than its skeletal structure could keep up.
A single punch from this man had broken this creature's neck with a level of speed, strength and precision that Weiss had never seen before.
She found it beautiful.
She found it haunting.
The man let out a deep, dry grunt as his chest notably heaved with effort, as if he had trouble breathing. Perhaps the armour, perhaps prior injury, or age? The beast had collapsed, still twitching and dead as the armoured man loomed over it with a glare of great disdain that seemed to melt away the very flesh of the creature.
The man hunched over slightly, wrenching out both his blade, and the object that he had presumably thrown at the beast earlier. It was some kind of white metallic shunt, or stake. A crude sharpened pauldron-sized hunk of ugly scratched metal.
The hunch made Weiss think back to somewhere she'd seen that posture before. The woods, the figure gleaming in the distance. That was a real vision, and yet it seemed even more familiar than it should have been.
The man turned to look at her, two heavily dulled prussian blue spheres glared back at her own pearly white eyes.
Their breathing hitched as they hunched over slightly, lowering their head to point at the ground, away from her gaze.
"...won't be fooled again." He muttered in a scratchy baritone growl.
Before Weiss could even think of a response, or if she even should have responded at all, the man had already turned and began limping away.
That limp.
It looked incredibly serious, the kind of injury that'd take lesser hunters out of action permanently and yet he was still able to move quicker than lightning and strike with just as much speed and fury. If he did choose to do so.
He could do it, he could move like that seemingly without any issue, with speed beyond Weiss' ability to actually track the movement with her eyes. So why the limp?
She sat there, frozen in place as the limp she simply could not get out of her head jammed her brain into a deadlock.
She sat there for minutes, trying to figure out what caused that limp, and why it looked familiar to her.
It wasn't until Ruby meandered through some random brush in front of Weiss with a literal rat on her shoulder that Weiss managed to break out of her mental deadlock, shock overpowering her prior thought process.
"Ruby… Is that a rat?"
—-
They'd reached some sort of settlement now, a weird one. One that was hard to describe for any of team RWBY, although Weiss was shocked and confused less about the inanimate giant tea cup walking and talking, and more so about how her own team had somehow not had the realisation that weird shit was going on from the moment Ruby appeared with a sentient talking rat on her shoulder.
Then again, given that its the three gumbo's, it didn't exactly surprise her as much as it should have.
Weiss, trying to ignore the fact that her so called best buddies were denser than industrial concrete, looked to the shops that surrounded them, all riding along a single large root of an even larger tree that towered over everything around them, it was the only real landmark around and therefore, the only real thing they could aim to get to.
There was some sort of sentient plate selling smaller inanimate plates, which Weiss found a little distasteful, A cafe run by tea cup people that was serving tea in normal human sized inanimate tea cups, which also felt a bit weird, and various other stores that all seemed more bizarre than the last.
The blacksmiths was what truly caught her attention though.
A humanoid woman, seemingly a large one, hammering away at an anvil on a small dagger, various weapons lining the back of the store contained within glass cases. There were all sorts of weapons, maces, daggers, swords, hammers, rapiers, even a war pick, and…
She froze in her tracks, a dead stop.
A shield in gold and white, with a large crest on it.
Two. Golden. Arches.
This was Arc's shield, no doubt about it.
How the hell did it get into this blacksmith's hands?
Weiss gained some steam, and marched forward to accost the blacksmith for information, until she immediately faltered upon realising how large the blacksmith truly was. The blacksmith had moved the dagger off of the anvil and into cold water causing a cascade of steam, which brought the blade closer to Weiss and further away from her.
It wasn't a dagger, it was a god-damned longsword about the length of Jaune's. It looked so small in the blacksmith's large, clunky hands that made a light unpleasant grinding noise as they worked.
This creature was huge, it towered over Weiss while sitting down from metres away. I mean, there's no way Weiss could beat this thing on her own, given that only she had her weapon.
"Fascinated by that shield, are you?" The blacksmith asked, an almost smug air reverberating through its blank, unmoving face.
Weiss panicked for a moment, before steeling herself.
"That shield belongs to my friend, he is missing. Where did you get it." Weiss demanded quietly, in a tone that she had never used before in her life.
She'd felt anger before, certainly. She'd been angry about her childhood, about her family, her circumstances, the state of Atlas and it's people, the state of Mistral and how fucked it had become in such a short time as team RNJR had trekked through its vast empty bandit-laden forests and fields.
But this was different.
Weiss only stood here, now, because of The Jaune Arc. There hadn't been a single circumstance in her entire life that had been quite as cut-and-dry as this when it came to appreciating people. Where Weiss' brain was programmed to always find cracks in peoples resolve, to deduce what they got out of every single interaction with people as if conversations were pure transactions of favours, threats and promises. When she thought of Ruby dragging her through those early "bonding moments" as she put it, Weiss' brain still worked on autopilot to find what she got out of it. Ruby wanted a friend she could trust that wasn't related to her, plain and simple. That's what she got out of it, helping Weiss trust people and get more normal social experiences at a time she lacked even basic social skills, that was just a bonus for Ruby.
When Yang went along with her sisters hare-brained schemes she was often doing it more so to get under someones skin and fuck with them, it was her favourite pastime. Yang was a bully who somehow got exceptions through either charm or appearance, likely a concoction of both. It always stumped her, how Yang got this sort of immunity to the disdain of bullies that Weiss and Yang's own friend group had, including Yang herself who always said she hated that type of person. Oddly hypocritical of her.
Pretty much any interaction that Blake made that got her some alone time were the only ones she'd truly show interest in, otherwise she'd listlessly provide a series of "hmms" and "yeahs" until the end of the conversation. Honestly, Blake used people more than many Atlesian nobility did, which really scared Weiss.
She was guilty of it too, plenty so. She'd used people plenty of time before Beacon, during it and even after Beacon with this whole international war thing she'd inevitably embroiled herself in.
There was only one person who'd ever managed to avoid her eye for deducing what people got from conversations.
Jaune fucking Arc, an anomaly of a man.
Somehow that man was completely genuine in every single conversation he had with pretty much anyone willing to talk to him without relentlessly bullying him. He'd take insults gladly if it meant he could help someone else be happier, regardless of how it affected him, he'd taken some absolutely rancid dressing downs from the very best in the game without a second thought. He'd take hits meant for others in combat without wanting any repayment or debt, he'd do the same in conversations too, taking the attention of a negative conversation away from the people arguing and onto himself as a target.
When Weiss and Jaune talked, Weiss could never figure out why he was so dead-set on talking to her, even after he gave up on the relationship he seemed to desperately want during Beacon. It was alien to her, someone being either so dunderheaded or so convincing that she couldn't see through her defences. It scared her, more than anything she'd ever seen before. So, she reacted how her noble upbringing taught her to.
Put down the commoner, establish your superiority, and walk away with your head held high.
That didn't work on Jaune, the lovable idiot. He just kept coming back for more punishment like an abused puppy, over and over again. He only stopped when the only person who believed in him at Beacon had died. Or rather, he'd stopped talking to pretty much everyone for a while from how Ruby put it, allegedly he'd opened up more when Yang and Weiss had arrived, Weiss believed that he was only opening up because there were more people to talk to, it's pretty easy to get sick of people when you're stuck with them all day, every day, for a year straight.
Jaune didn't talk about what happened at Beacon's fall, he didn't talk about her, period.
He just locked up for a while, and then he'd leave.
She still remembered the moment that Cinder had tried to rub Pyrrha's death in his face during the battle at Haven, how she described in gruesome detail how Pyrrha had died, and what she'd done to her before the end. Of how Jaune had been left behind on purpose because Pyrrha knew she'd weigh him down. It was relentless and horrible. Were it anyone else, they would have broken down in an instant.
Not Jaune Arc. His response was somehow worse.
Jaune's expression did not move, not once.
Not one twitch of his face, barely even a few blinks.
His eyes didn't even seem to see Cinder, as if he was looking right through her at something a thousand miles away.
Weiss knew something was wrong with him, but she couldn't figure it out at all. If it was trauma, surely his team would have helped him, so why did they seem just as shocked as everyone else when they saw the encounter, and Jaune didn't respond?
Beyond that, what else could it be?
This had been the subject of Weiss' thoughts for a long time now, ever since the fight had started.
That battle of Haven was prevalent in her mind when thinking of Jaune for another reason though, when Jaune was completely broken, barely putting any effort into anything beyond completing the mission, only gaining a semblance of life when his blade was drawn and his shield was in front of him. The spark that once sparkled through his cerulean blues with a unique brightness had become dull and dead until the moment cold steel was in his hands. Then, a small spark would return, just as long as combat lasted. And then, just as quickly as it came, it died again once his blade was sheathed.
When that version of Jaune Arc had pulled the few broken bits and pieces that remained of himself together for just one single moment to awaken his semblance, one of the most convenient and useful semblances she'd ever seen, and bring the heiress back from the very brink of certain death, it finally made something in Weiss' mind click.
Jaune Arc couldn't lie like that, in fact she was starting to think he couldn't lie at all.
Any time she'd seen him lie, it'd been so obvious he was lying even a toddler could outplay him in a game of lies.
Jaune Arc was genuine in every thing he did, and that meant that the person whom had been the object of his affections for the entirety of their time at Beacon, the person who'd put him down at every single opportunity possible even when he hadn't done anything beyond appear nearby, was somehow still worth saving without a second thought.
Hell, she was pretty sure he was moving to take that lethal hit meant for her without his shield before his desperation had awoken his long dormant semblance.
Weiss Schnee would have been the side villain in the story of anyone that wasn't Jaune Arc, and yet he saw her as an ally so dear he broke the boundaries that held him back his entire life on a whim to save her.
To Weiss Schnee, Jaune Arc was a genuine fucking hero, and if he was gone, if he'd died in this world before they could even get to him…
There'd be no point in continuing on.
What's the point of being the heroes of a world she absolutely despised if the one who embodies raw, pure heroism beyond anyone and anything else she had ever encountered was already gone?
Weiss marched forward, towards the large glass casket at the back of the room, towards the shield of her friend.
Ten strides later, and she raised her hand to open the casket.
"I'm afraid that one's reserved for another soul." The Blacksmith stated with a tired sounding sigh.
Weiss lowered her hand, and turned to face the steel amalgam, fury in her eyes.
"That's been here for a very long time, child. The hands that shield was moulded to fit have long since abandoned them. After all, what use is a shield with anything behind it to protect? The poor child, I don't hold out much hope that he'll ever carry this again."
Weiss couldn't accurately interpret what it meant, not with how much extra information had already been thrown on her since the fall. But she could make out three defining pieces of information most valuable:
Jaune is here, he's abandoned his shield, and he's been here far longer than them.
But within those three staggering important answers to the question of Jaune's whereabouts, it multiplied the amount of questions beyond the pale.
If Jaune was here as the information provided so clearly indicated, then something truly horrible must have happened for him to abandon what may be the last part of his familial legacy left. What the hell could possibly make Jaune abandon the weapon that was quintessential to who he was, to what he stood for? That heroic visage that Weiss totally hadn't been vaguely fantasising about two minutes ago was all held together by that hunk of gilded steel, gleaming below the dawn as he saved the people around him, or rather, saved her. It was key to the whole image, a clear representation of what he wanted to be back at Beacon, and what he'd become over the time since the fall of Beacon.
For that shield, that bastion of faith, to be gone for a long time, as the blacksmith said…
Weiss struggled to believe it, to cope in the slightest with this absolute bombshell of a discovery.
Weiss turned to the blacksmith with a jilted look in her eyes, failing to properly focus on the towering metal homunculus lady as her vision blurred over.
The blacksmith merely tutted in response as she, for the first time, turned her gaze away from her steaming anvil, and towards the girl in prussian blue.
"If it means that much to you, I'll let you hold onto it."
Before Weiss could respond, the creature appeared directly in front of her within an instant, at a speed well beyond the reaction time she had to even see a sign of it happening beyond the light suddenly dimming considerably in front of her.
A pair of thick metal greaves landed on her shoulders, the fingers were manipulated like a string puppet within a puppeteer's grasp, with strange, janky movements that seemed uncoordinated and difficult to direct.
These weren't greaves, they were the hands of The Blacksmith, just as metallic and heavy as her appearance implied. The smell was the most notable part for Weiss, it'd be difficult for anyone to ignore the stench of sulphur and salt suddenly appearing right in front of them.
The Blacksmith moved in a manner that suggested she… or rather it, was trying to draw in breath, either to act or to speak.
It did neither.
It then exhaled, or whatever this thing's version of exhaling was, and dropped its hands from her shoulders, letting them limply slide down her torso and back to their resting place at its waist.
It turned, and walked slowly back towards the small wooden stool she had originally rose from. Good mahogany, or something similar to it if Weiss was correct. Weiss was usually correct when it came to bougie things.
"Take it and run, child. Don't fall behind."
—-
He had been hallucinating again.
He had to be, there was no other route of logic that could spit out such a horrid outcome.
When his eyes cast a listless glare and in return caught a glimpse of locks white as snow, his entire mind froze over all at one, rooting his old bones in place.
Weiss Schnee. In The Ever After.
It was an illogical farce, an impossibility.
Weiss never fell. He knew it, he didn't see it, so it never happened.
It could not have happened.
And yet, when the white haired woman that once haunted his mind like a plague suddenly came careening out of a cave and slammed her back into a thickset tree, consequently whipping her neck into the pillar of wood and knocking her loopy, he simply could not prevent himself from intervening.
With shunt in hand, and what remained of his blade, he'd do whatever it takes to maintain the dream.
He couldn't even remember what had knocked her from the cave and into daylight, but in a way, he was thankful for the brute's attack.
The facsimile of Weiss Schnee remained roughly unharmed, body still intact and rapidly recovering from her brush with a concussion. He was equally thankful for the sun that cast a beautiful gleam upon her head.
To most, it would simply be a woman that had survived an excursion.
To him, it was as if staring straight into an aurora borealis, or a constellation in the night sky.
Beautiful beyond comprehension, yet completely unreachable.
And ultimately, in The Ever After, a farce like everything else that resembled a familiar face.
Before he knew it, he'd already turned away from her and back towards… a random direction in the forest, meandering into the woods again.
He'd flown too close to the sun, too close to a memory of what he was, once upon a time.
It'd finally been so long that his mind was beginning to rot away, much as his body already had long ago.
A relief, in a way.
It meant there was an end to this, somewhere down the road.
Old Iron wandered, for there was nothing to return to, no shelter or warm bed, no hot meals or fresh foods, no clean clothes or methods of hygiene.
Old Iron had lost everything, but moving on was simply not an option.
He'd find a way out of the wretched place he'd been accursed to walk for so long.
It may take him until the end of time, but he'd get there.
He'd find the woman in burgundy again, if he could see her just once more, it would all be worth it.
—-
Weiss Schnee was thoroughly shitting herself at this point.
Donning the shield she had just discovered and bartered off with, she immediately was met with chaos.
A small cluster of some sort of large twitching gremlin-like abomination was wreaking havoc upon the populous, a teapot lady had been smashed into pieces as if a bull had ran into a fine china shop and the stall she once stood behind was equally annihilated.
It wasn't too much trouble to simply run from these creatures when they realised how outnumbered they were, dozens of these twitching creatures and four of them, only two of which were armed.
They stood no chance, they had to run.
They only had one path to take, up towards the peak of the tree, perhaps they could find another route out there, or perhaps they'd be completely doomed, who knows at this point.
During the scuffles to escape, Weiss had caught a glimpse of Ruby failing to even make an attempt to use her weapon, holding it as close to folded as possible out in front of her in the most casual manner possible. This was not the way Ruby Rose operated her baby, and Weiss knew it.
That was the part that worried her, however she was far more disturbed by Ruby's final action before they made their mad dash away from these creatures.
Ruby had bumped into a small plate person, no taller than a couple feet with a high pitched voice, crying and wailing for someone to help "mama pot" while he desperately tried to hold two shards of crockery together, as if they'd magically become one piece again.
A child, evidently.
This sight was disturbing for Weiss, especially knowing that she was completely useless to help in this situation, being so outnumbered and so deep in unknown territory.
Ruby however, seemed to become a whole other person for just a moment.
Weiss Schnee watched in awe, as Ruby Rose, her closest friend, her partner of two years, picked up this little crockery child with an expression akin to plywood, turned at a rapid pace and with every ounce of might she had, and threw them towards the horde, which rapidly converged upon the plate child with all the ferocity of feral dogs.
For all of the shit she had seen in Atlas, Grimm/Human hybrids, warfare grander than anything since The Great War, betrayal of the highest order from a General they once trusted as an ally. For all of that shit, she had never seen something that had horrified her more than anything else in her life.
Weiss had to force herself to keep running, to ignore the horrid sound of a plate smashing behind her as the crying which had shortly developed into full-blown wailing, suddenly ceased.
Ruby Rose had taken her first life, with seemingly no care of consequence or repercussion.
And she'd be damned if she didn't speak her mind about it.
—-
Ruby had fervently denied it, she denied it incredibly convincingly, going so far as to let out tears at the accusation. But Weiss knew what she saw. Unfortunately Yang and Blake lacked that same perspective given the goo-goo eyes they'd had hyperfocused on each other since well before they landed here.
Instead, they'd turned on Weiss, all three of them, and all at once.
She was making things up, causing problems that didn't exist, I was going back to old behaviour from the start of Beacon.
She was furious, she was enraged, she was…
She couldn't take the pressure.
Weiss turned away from her teammates, her friends, her sisters in all but name, and walked away, following the only direction available besides walking back into the twitching maws, or lack thereof, of the creatures they had just sacrificed a child running from.
A tunnel, or rather passageway seeing as they were in the stalk of a big plant or tree or something along those lines, no time nor reason to stop and check, Weiss wasn't exactly on an ecological survey.
She marched, with her head pointed down and her eyes partly closed as she wished desperately that she was anywhere but here.
A mistake, to be sure.
Slowly, the dimly lit wooden passageway around her turned to something different entirely, and poor Weiss didn't even clock it until she realised her footsteps sounded different.
Weiss Schnee brought her head up to face forward, and opened her eyes.
The passageway had opened up at some point along the way, be it through natural or unnatural means, into a field of faintly yellow reeds, seemingly stretching well beyond the horizon in all directions.
And sat right in the middle of this endless field of reeds, sat a familiar looking man, sat on a large rock heavily slouched over, breathing slowly, heavily. Beside him, sat what was likely once a longsword, now likely at a third of blade was gone, having presumably broken off at a sharp angle creating a one-sided point, the blade had gone so long without care that the blade's edge had become as close to serrated as it could given natural wear and tear, faint wisps of gold fabrics and markings on the handle and pommel still faintly remained like faint remembrances of a bygone time. The blade itself, likely once a gleaming silver slab of finely-produced steel, was now a heavily dulled and rusted blade.
Next to it, a hunk of sharpened metal, with a hole on the back for a hand to go into, and presumably there was some way to hold it if you put your hand inside. The rusted blade and shunt from before.
This was the man that saved her.
And he looked like he wanted to die.
She took a number of quickened, panicked steps towards him, planning to initiate conversation. Hoping, begging, that she'd find some sanity in this person, more sanity than her teammates had just displayed anyway.
She froze on mid-stride, as his head craned towards her rapidly, the slouched calm that once was there had left immediately as he slumped to the floor, grabbed his blade and shunt, and turned to face her, weapons hanging loosely by his side.
There was silence for what felt like years, as they stared at one another.
Then, he uttered a few words at barely a whisper.
"You followed."
To Be Continued…