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"How are you feeling today, Cloud?" Dr. Caulbaugh asked me. We were alone in a padded office. She had a plant in the corner that looked malnourished.
"I'm alright. Can't really complain." I responded. I stared at the tall plant.
"Oh I'm sure you could. How are you really doing? It's important."
"Fine. I suppose. Been getting into some missions lately. There are these two girls who have been taking care of me recently. Looking after me. They want to help but they're not sure how."
"Two other huntresses?"
I nodded. "Yeah."
"Two other friends?"
"We might be a bit more than friends. The three of us."
"I see. Aren't you a lucky man."
"Am I though?" I laughed a little. She looked away, a touch embarrassed.
"Yes I suppose it's maybe something to help balance out what all happened to you. Something good to come at me with rather than have everything bad." She worried the corner of her lip with her pen. "And everything is working out between the three of you."
"I think so. Except…" I gestured at the side of my head in a circular fashion to indicate my insanity.
"You're not crazy, Mr. Strife."
"Well then I'm right next to crazy, one rung above it on the ladder of sanity."
"You're too cognizant for it to be traditional psychosis. When a patient exhibits that they have no idea that they are showing symptoms of it. You're self aware of what is happening to you."
"Maybe…"
"But this relationship is working out well?" She asked.
"We had some stuff to iron out at first and get the air clear. We still are occasionally. But for the most part yeah." So far my relationship with Weiss and Ruby had been, well, it had been easy. The pieces falling together once Weiss and I talked a little about freshman year.
"Have you been able to have sex? Many patients report problems performing while on the sorts of medications we have you on."
I blushed a little. "So far it's been just fine."
"That's good news. That sort of endorphin rush can only help with depression. It can sort of clear your brain chemistry for a new wave of neurotransmitters."
I'd been kind of able to feel that. Like I was wiping away an old slate with the release. "I thought I had PTSD?" I asked.
She waggled a hand. "They often go together. Sort of a buy one get one free deal."
"But with my brain."
"It's a complex organ."
"I see…"
I looked over at her plant and thought of something else to talk about. We'd only just begun this meeting and I was already running low on topics.
"I've been thinking about getting a plant. You know? Something to take care of. It was Ruby's idea. One of those two girls. Something small and easy to take care of. Weiss, the other, was all onboard with it. I think they both think it'll be good for me."
"Been eyeing at my plant have you? I can never seem to keep any of them alive. What kind of therapist am I if I can't even keep a plant going and my patients need me for their brain?"
I laughed a little; a low chuckle. "That's how I figure mine would go. I can't even take care of myself and then I'm supposed to add something more to that. No way. Nah."
"Those are their names? Weiss and Ruby?"
I nodded. "I worry about them. I'm scared about the things that come through when I'm not paying attention while Mother assaults my subconscious. I feel like she's a shark, just waiting underneath the surface of my thoughts. And she'll spring out at some point I'll have no control over."
"Salem is constantly at your door then, so to speak. You keep calling her mother. Is that on purpose?"
"No. That keeps slipping through. No matter how hard I try that one comes through. It makes me worried about what else is slipping through the cracks on me," I said. "It's an accident. But one that I keep making."
"She is your mother though, in a way."
"Yeah but I hate her and I don't mean to call her that."
"Do you think of her as your mother?"
"At times. But for the most part I think of her as this foreign, nearly all powerful thing that has her hooks in my mind. She's no more my mother than the incubator I was grown in was."
"So she is kind of your mother."
"Kinda," I returned. "She called me her son, her child, that is. I think she thinks of me that way and it influences me."
"Do you think she loves you?" Tanya Caulbaugh asked.
I inhaled a shuddering breath. "Maybe? I have no idea. I've never really thought about that. I mostly just think about how much I hate her. And my father too."
"Merlot? Was it?"
"It was. I think I'm going to kill him if I ever meet him. Is that fucked up of me?"
"The desire to kill one's parents is not unheard of."
"Yeah but in my situation. With how I was made. Is that messed up for me to think about?" I cornered her.
"Probably less than it might otherwise be. If you grew up in a loving home then it would be different. How you were born matters to this. The things that happened to you are awful and unforgivable."
"That's what I thought…"
"Though I'd prefer it if you harbored fewer murderous thoughts. I know killing people comes up on the job but you shouldn't seek it out."
"I think about killing more than just him. There's this woman, Cinder Fall who killed my partner, Pyrrha Nikos. I want her to die too."
"Are you often consumed by thoughts of revenge like this? Between your father and this other woman it seems to be on your mind a great deal. There's this revenge piece that we're only just tapping into."
"Maybe… My friends want me to give it up. But the fact is that I'm one of the only people on the planet that can stop Cinder Fall before she strikes again. I won't say I'm doing it for a purely altruistic purpose but I am doing it for that at least in part. She'll kill people if I don't stop her and I'm one of the few that can."
"Who else could fight her? Instead of you?" She asked.
"I'm really not sure. Almost no one by themselves apart from me. I'm a menace now. I had to surrender myself to Atlas custody. They couldn't bring me in unless I wanted to. She's in a similar boat. She's very powerful. Very dangerous."
"I'm glad you decided to come in. The path you were on with the Marijuana was self-destructive."
"I miss it."
"You do? The Marijuana?"
"Yeah, I doubt the girls would appreciate it if I took it up again but I do miss it. I might not get kissed as much if that was the case."
"You're not going to use on me, are you?"
I shook my head. "Nah. They took my paraphernalia. The girls did. Besides, my word of honor is good. You've got nothing to worry about."
"That's good. I'll warn you right now that THC doesn't play well with some of the other drugs you're on. It can make things so, so much worse," she said.
"Hard to imagine worse than this," I pointed out.
"How have your hallucinations been?" She wondered.
"About the same. Maybe better. It's hard to say."
"Any auditory command hallucinations?"
"Yes."
"Any visual hallucinations?" She scribbled into her notes.
"Yep," I returned.
"And tactile?"
"You bet."
"How have the nightmares been, Cloud. I know that they were worse on the Asenapine but how about on this Vraylar?"
"They've been at my normal level."
"Your normal level is pretty bad." She tapped the corner of her lips with the pen.
"Yeah. Yeah it is," I confessed. I brushed a hand back through my hair. I scratched at my scalp a little. I hated my own weakness. In many ways I was just as weak as I'd been when I first showed up at Beacon.
"We'll corner that eventually. You have my word that it does get better. I've worked with a lot of PTSD cases and I've seen a lot of ones that were worse than yours. We can get you through this."
"We'll see, Doc."
"I think that's all the time we have for today, too. I want you to think about whether it's true that only you can bring the Cinder Fall to justice or if that's a complex you've come up with to justify it to yourself."
"Very well. I will."
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It didn't take me much thought about Cinder Fall to see whether I was one of the only people that can bring her down. I was. Dr. Caulbaugh didn't know about the maidens. She didn't need to know about them and since it was something on a need to know basis I hadn't shared it.
"How did therapy go, Cloud?" Ruby asked me.
"It went good. Even though I didn't have time to practice my lines for it."
Weiss did that thing where she hit me disapprovingly but her fingers lingered at my chest. I loved that. I loved when she did that. It just made me want to say more things she'd disapprove with. "You're not supposed to 'practice your lines.' You're supposed to share just whatever with them."
"Would you be able to? Just go in raw like that?"
"Well…" Weiss trailed. "Your phrasing is a little… I could maybe…"
"See that's what I thought," I said. I took a bite out of an apple at that.
My stomach felt small but my doctors were insisting that I at least eat something like three meals a day so I was snacking a little rather than have a full meal. Hey, it was the thought that counted.
I reclined back on my bunk in Atlas Academy. My point proven.
Ruby plopped down on my legs in the bunk. She rubbed a hand up and down on my leg contentedly. "Are you coming with us to dinner?"
"I got my dinner right here." I twisted the apple at her.
"The doctors say-" Weiss started.
"-the doctors say a lot of things. I'm fuckin' tryin' here." I twisted the apple at her next and took another bite to prove my new point. "I figure I'll leave you to Yang and Blake. I'm tired of coming between your team. I'll give this evening over to them."
"Hey, you don't come between our team," Ruby said softly, still rubbing at my leg in a comforting fashion.
"It's not that I don't believe you Ruby. It's that I can't believe you," I returned. "'Sides I should spend some time trying to turn this needle into a feather."
"Is that what you're doing with that?" Weiss asked.
"Yeah. Why?" I asked.
"I just thought you liked to stare at it," Ruby muttered. She was adorable. I reached out and brushed some hair behind her ear and she leaned into my touch like a kitten. She fluttered her eyes closed and let out a little sigh. I leaned all the way up and gave her a quick kiss.
"Please just come to dinner. Let us worry about how Blake and Yang feel," Weiss said.
I looked away from her eyes. She was disarming me. Trying to pen me in. If I looked at her too hard I'd have to give in.
"Please," Ruby begged, her eyes still closed. "Please."
"You two could literally ask me to jump off a bridge like that and I'd have to."
"So you'll come?" Ruby wondered.
"Got no choice now, do I." I tapped Ruby twice on the leg to tell her to get up off of me and I pulled myself up and out of the bunk. "But if I fall behind and never transfigure the needle that's on you two."
"Pssh. Yeah. Okay." Weiss hit me with the sass.
My feet hit the ground and I gestured for them to lead the way. They did, holding hands while I walked behind them and cored out my apple.
It was a short walk to team RWBY'S room. Literally one door down, was all. It brought back some memories of my team JNPR, when there was a team JNPR, being right down the hall from team RWBY. It was a painful memory. It had its ups and downs to it but really it was just painful as well.
"Yang, Blake?" Ruby opened the door and popped her head in, swinging the door wide open. "We're headed to dinner. You wanna come with us?"
"Sure. Will-uh-Cloud be there?" Yang asked.
"Right here." I stepped into view and waved at Yang.
"How's it hanging, Cloud?" Yang politely followed up.
"Oh you know. The usual."
"For you that could be anything," Yang returned.
"It's a bit of everything to be honest," I said. Weiss bumped me with her elbow. "Mostly good at the moment though."
"Reminds me a bit of getting dinner with team JNPR, you know? We'll be right there," she said getting up and helping Blake up too. Blake looked less enthused but she was coming.
"Yeah, those were… good times…" I trailed and rubbed the back of my head.
"Cloud…" Weiss hissed.
"I'm literally doing my best." I whispered back.
I let them all march in front of me and I took up the distant rear. "Remember when Nora would demand that Ren make pancakes for her, she wouldn't eat the stuff they made for us on pancake mornings," Yang said. "Oh no. She had to have it Ren style."
I didn't much like to think about Ren and Nora. Maybe even less than I liked to think about Pyrrha and what could have been there. When she had kissed me she had meant it. My fault. All my fault.
Not that I was unhappy with my current situation. I walked behind my two girlfriends and their teammates and listened to them reminisce about times past with another team long dead.
"She always just liked him in that outfit, I thought," Weiss said as we made our way up to the dinning hall.
"I didn't think it was about the pancakes. Just Ren's attention," Ruby murmured. "She liked having his attention."
"And they never got the chance to… well you know. Figure the other person out fully," Blake said. "I'd like to say it was obvious what they felt, but it never came from their lips."
"We'll never know, now." I cut in. I realized my mistake when they all turned to look at me. "I mean Nora was asking me for advice on how to get with him. And he was asking me for the same thing. They just…" I killed them. "Ran out of time," I finished. I tried to shake it off and come up with something less depressing to say.
Yang read me though.
"What about Pyrrha? We all knew that she liked you," Yang said. "You're quite the lucky guy looking at things like that."
"I never knew. Not until it was too late," I told her.
"Is there a story to that too?" Blake asked a touch sardonic.
We lined up and got our dinners. I tried to shake my somber mood off but couldn't quite manage it.
"She kissed me before she went and fought Cinder. Then she died."
"Cloud… your life sucks," Yang said as we sat at the table. It felt like there were three missing spots where I sat off to one side of the other four.
I looked at her in shock. "Um…"
"I'm not trying to make you feel bad or anything but you have to admit that your life does suck," Yang said quickly.
"I'm not sure whether to be offended or…"
"Not offended. You have to agree that your life so far has been a series of unfortunate events," Yang pointed out. "You got born, stuck at Beacon where you sucked, Pyrrha died, then Nora and Ren died."
"And it keeps coming," I agreed at last. "Doesn't seem like there's much I can do to get away from it sometimes. I mean I've had the occasional bright spot, all of Beacon was good, I think, but for the most part…" I trailed and shook my head. "What about you girls. It couldn't have all been easy for you either. Yang, you lost your arm for crying out loud."
"Yeah but I didn't kill my friends."
"Yang!" Weiss hissed.
"No, no. Weiss she's right. I fucked up."
"It wasn't your fault," Ruby said tenderly. She reached over to me but I rejected her touch for a moment. I didn't want the things she felt for me at that second. The purity burned me.
"Disagree. But that's not the point. It still happened to me. Is this really the first time we've all spent time together since Beacon fell? At least of those of us that remain?" I asked. At least of those of us I didn't let die, more like.
"Happy reunion," Blake muttered over her dinner.
"I'll cheers to that." Yang held out her glass. I clanked it with mine.
"So much has happened," Weiss said. "Even since that time Ren told us we had all grown so much. And of course you weren't there for that, Blake. I'm sure he would have told you that you had grown too."
"We've all changed. Some of us even changed our names," Blake murmured.
"Hard to imagine things will stay the same as they are now. I mean, I can't imagine working for Ironwood forever," I said. "Things are just going to keep changing."
"Hey, maybe you'll get some good changes out of this one," Yang cheered optimistically.
"Hey, I doubt it." I chuckled. "All things serious though I got Ruby and Weiss. How much better can I expect things to get for me? This is probably the high point of my life."
"You think something bad is going to happen?" Ruby asked.
"I know it will. That's how my life goes, up for a bit then down. Probably run into my sisters or something else awful and then caput."
"Well, family is just like that," Weiss said. I nodded but everybody else at the table shook their heads.
"Your two families are like that," Blake returned. "You leave my family out of this. My family is fantastic."
"Samesies," Yang threw in. "Yeah it's complicated but it's not hostile, well maybe not."
"I suppose we wouldn't know," Weiss murmured. "My father, well, don't even get me started."
"Same but for my momma." I held my glass to my lips. "She's such a bitch. You ever feel like literally every problem on the planet is your mom's fucking fault?" I took a long drink.
Yang laughed at that. "You're in my club on that one."
And Weiss gave a small giggle behind her hand. Blake smiled at me but Ruby just gave me that old worried look.
She reached out and put her palm on my thigh. A small comfort in a big world.
"Well not everyone has the mommy issues that you do. Some of us have our very own mom issues," Yang said.
I nearly spat out my drink. "What? What is it?" Ruby asked.
"I forgot to tell you all. I ran into Raven fucking Branwen when I was on the lamb with Neo checking out Merlot's laboratory in Anima."
"Well did you get her?" Yang asked her tone low and sarcastic.
"She teleported away before I could kill her. Sorry? Or not sorry. Whichever is best."
"Eh that's fine," Yang waved a hand. "She's bound to be slippery. Not sure if anyone will be able to catch her and put her down. She's a coward. She'd probably just run from you the next time you meet. If you run into her again, that is."
"I was sure to cut her nice and good for you, Yang."
"Oh is that why you did it?"
"Not really. I was sort of just pissed off at what I'd found in the lab. Needed a good target and she was just kinda there, I guess."
"Now that I get," Yang pointed at me with her glass hand. "Trust me on that one."
"Fair cop," I returned. Ruby was rubbing my thigh in a little circle and looking up at my face.
It felt good. Talking felt good. I was glad they dragged me out into this. I sighed and reclined. If only life could stay like this forever…
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-WG