The next morning, Jaune awoke, groaning, to the sound of whimpers and the feeling of hair scratching against his chest.
He opened his eyes, and found that the hair was red. It was Pyrrha, her face pressed into his chest, both of them wrapped up in the nested bedding, bare as the day they were born.
She was twitching and whimpering, her eyes firmly shut.
"Jaune," she murmured. "Please, Jaune. Please come back."
Once, Jaune would've been shocked to learn that the Invincible Girl herself had nightmares. Now, he understood that every Huntsman did. Including him.
So instead of shock, he knew what to do. He gently jostled Pyrrha, hands on her shoulders, his voice gentle and steady and reassuring.
"Pyrrha," he said. "Come on, wake up. I'm here. Can you hear me, Pyrrha?"
Pyrrha whimpered again, but slowly, her eyes opened. The look in them was terrified, completely lost…until she saw Jaune, and felt her skin against his. Then, they brightened and filled with tears all at once.
"Jaune!" she said, her expression still a little fragile as she reached for him, her hands cupping his face. "I…you're real. You're really real. I didn't dream it?"
Jaune felt his heart twist a little at how scared Pyrrha sounded—but he couldn't blame her at all. Three years alone would turn anybody a little strange. He was just glad to finally be there to help her.
"Yes, Pyrrha," he confirmed. "I'm real."
Her response to that was to grab for him, her lips pressed to his in a kiss so overwhelming that Jaune could only cling on for dear life. Pyrrha's hands gripped the sides of his head, and the reminder that he was, somehow, by the grace of the Brothers themselves, allowed to kiss Pyrrha Nikos again almost managed to distract Jaune from the fact that the two of them were still naked.
When Pyrrha finally pulled back, she was visibly brighter and more put-together than she'd been even yesterday. It seemed that just knowing she was no longer alone, finally having a chance to process it, had already healed some of the wounds on her soul.
"I still can't quite believe it," she murmured. "Three years of thinking I'd never see any of you again…and now here you are."
Jaune nodded. "I thought I'd never see you again too, Pyrrha," he agreed. "But I'm never leaving you again. I'm never letting anyone take you from me again."
Pyrrha smiled, then. It wasn't quite her old smile, the one she'd worn at Beacon; this one was brittler, darker. It struggled to reach all the way into her eyes, which had once shone brilliantly with joy. But it was far, far closer than any smile she'd worn before.
"I think I might hold you to that," she said softly. "And I feel the same way, Jaune. Nothing is ever going to keep us apart again."
She hugged him, then, wrapped her arms around his chest. Sprawled out atop him, their bodies pressed together in that warm nest, Jaune realized for the first time that he'd grown even taller than her. He recalled that the height difference between them had once been a bare two inches. Now, Pyrrha's head nestled perfectly into the crook of his neck.
They should have had time to learn that in Remnant. Time to grow ever closer, bit by bit, to go on dates, to navigate the thousand and one challenges that would inevitably come with a relationship between Huntsmen. Time to fall in love. A chance to have their first time be in a better place than a chilly, rocky cave. A whole life for them to live together.
But they hadn't. Another sin for Cinder Fall to pay for, Jaune supposed; wherever she'd end up one day, when he drove his sword through her heart, he hoped it would be a whole lot less pleasant than this.
Eventually, Pyrrha stirred again. And this time, there was a gleam in her eye that was filled with dangerous intent.
"I don't know about you," she said, smirking as she rose to her feet, "But I'm thinking that a bath sounds really nice right about now. I usually wash up in that pond right down at the base of the cliff."
She turned and began to head towards the mouth of the cave. She got half a dozen steps before Jaune coughed awkwardly.
"Uh, Pyrrha?" he said. "Should you, um…maybe put on some clothes first?"
Pyrrha paused, turning back to look at Jaune and glancing down to find that, sure enough, she'd not bothered to dress again after last night's… activities.
Jaune would've complained more, but, well…Pyrrha Nikos in all her glory might just have been the most magnificent sight in the universe, as far as he was concerned.
She shrugged, and the motion did interesting things to…certain parts of her. Jaune felt a lump in his throat, recalling that he did in fact know exactly what said parts of her felt like, now.
"Eh," she decided. "I'm just going down to the pond. And, y'know, we're the literal only two humans in this whole world anyway. Not like modesty is really an issue."
Jaune figured that, of all the outcomes of falling into that damned void and ending up in the Ever After, a nude Pyrrha Nikos was probably close to the very best possibility. Even so, his face was still a little red as she turned back to the entrance, only to stop and ask, "Are you coming?"
Jaune coughed. "Uh…am I?" he asked.
That damn smirk was back on Pyrrha's face now, the one that reminded him a little of how she got in battle, when she had the enemy completely cornered, utterly checkmated, when her victory was totally assured. "Of course you are," she declared. "You're gonna wash my back."
Jaune coughed again. "Uh…did you mean to say you'd let me wash your back?"
Pyrrha crossed her arms over her still—exposed chest. "No," she said sweetly. "I said that you are going to wash my back. And then my front. And then after that…let's just say that we might not stay clean for very long."
Jaune frowned. "Don't we, uh, need to scout the area? Collect supplies? Figure out a way out of here?" he asked.
Pyrrha's smirk vanished again. She still stood in the cave entrance, her head turned away from Jaune.
"I've been here three years, Jaune," she said, much more quietly, her voice far more serious. "I've scouted and mapped basically everything in a ten-mile radius. I know where everything edible is, and how quickly it grows back. And I…I don't think there is a way out of here. Or at least, I gave up looking a long time ago."
Jaune felt something cold settle into the pit of his stomach. "You're saying we're trapped here?" he asked, before recalling the fruit he'd touched, and the fact that RWBY would almost certainly end up here eventually, too. Assuming they were even still alive. "And if RWBY fell through, too…then it might be a really long time until we meet up with them again."
Pyrrha nodded, still staring off into the distance. "Time is…weird, here," she agreed. "Could be that they'll show up today. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe in a week. Or it could be months. Or…"
"Years," Jaune whispered, half to himself. Pyrrha's green eyes were distant and glassy.
Suddenly, she turned, and strode right back over to him. She knelt down to look him in the eye.
"Look, Jaune," she said softly, but with the kind of strength that had earned her the nickname all had known her by. "There's a lot of things I don't know about this place. I don't know how it works, I don't know who controls it, I don't know why I ended up here instead of dying. I don't know if we'll ever be able to leave. But there's one thing I do know."
Jaune felt her hand clutch his. "What?" he asked.
Pyrrha's green eyes blazed. "I am going down to that pond," she said defiantly. "I am going to take a bath. And you are going to wash my back. After that…we'll figure it out. One problem at a time. Does that sound good to you?"
Jaune felt her words sink into him. "Yeah," he decided, letting her pull him to his feet as she rose. "Yeah, it does."
Pyrrha beamed, then. "You're a good man, Jaune," she said. "Thank you."
Jaune had nothing to say to that; his only response was a kiss pressed to Pyrrha's lips, gentle and soft.
Pyrrha's smile was even wider, and her eyes glistened wetly, when he pulled back again. "Besides," she added as they headed for the cave entrance, "There's worse fates than being trapped in a weird fairytale dimension alone with my boyfriend."
Jaune blinked. "Boyfriend?" he repeated dumbly.
Pyrrha paused. She pressed in close to him, her body against his.
"Boyfriend," she confirmed, her voice a deep, throaty purr. "Believe me, that's the simplest thing I want to call you, Jaune. But forget labels. The more important part is the other word: Mine. You. Are. Mine. And if Cinder Fall ever tries to take you from me again, I'll put my spear through her fucking heart."
Jaune…had to concede that that was an entirely reasonable response. Especially when they got to the pond, and Pyrrha held him to his word on washing her back. And then some. And then some more.
Present Day
Dinner in the Arc-Nikos (or Nikos-Arc) household turned out to be a chaotic affair.
For one thing, Ruby still wasn't entirely sure what they were eating. It was delicious, but the meat was odd and from an animal she didn't recognize, and she only believed the vegetables were edible because she was watching half a dozen kids absolutely tear into them.
Seriously, Pyrrha and Jaune's efforts to teach table manners to their kids seemed to have been only partially successful. Granted, one of those kids was Weiss Jr, who every member of Team RWBY had already realized was the complete and polar opposite of her namesake and every way, especially in manners and general resemblance to a feral hog, attitude-wise. Weiss Senior's look of steadily mounting horror as Weiss Jr literally gnawed on a bone was rapidly becoming Yang and Blake's greatest source of entertainment in years.
Even with all of the chaos around her, though, Ruby found herself digging in. She hadn't properly eaten in what felt like days, and she certainly hadn't expected a home-cooked meal when she'd fallen into an endless interdimensional void.
(How Pyrrha Nikos, the girl who everyone had quickly realized was capable of quite literally burning water trying to boil it back at Beacon, had managed to become such a good cook was something Ruby would have questioned, if she and her friends weren't benefiting so much from it that talking seemed like a waste of energy.)
That didn't stop Yang from talking, though, especially as the younger kids excused themselves from the table and tore off to go play, with the promise that they wouldn't go far. By the time she couldn't stop herself anymore, only Ruby Jr was still at the table.
"Okay, sorry, but I gotta ask," Yang finally said as she pushed her scraped-clean wooden plate away. "Six kids, Pyrrha? Really?"
Across the table, Pyrrha raised an eyebrow. "I'm not sure I get what you're implying," she said.
Yang snorted. "I wasn't implying shit," she said bluntly. "I was asking how in the hell you got knocked up once in a place with literally zero medical care, and decided not to castrate Jaune!"
Sitting next to Pyrrha, Jaune choked on his food at that. Ruby Jr just laughed.
Pyrrha, for her part, was grinning again. "Oh, it wasn't that bad," she replied. "Don't get me wrong, the no-medical-care bit sucked, but I always did want a big family."
Recovering from his choking incident, Jaune let out a chuckle. "Also, you did marry an Arc," he pointed out.
Pyrrha smirked. "That too," she agreed. "Pretty sure I knew what I was getting myself into when I fell in love with you."
A ripple of laughter went around the room. Everyone there had heard Jaune's stories about growing up with so many sisters by now. Even Ruby Jr, judging by the way she joined in the laughter.
Eventually, Blake spoke up. "I'm just saying, though," she said. "You really couldn't have learned to pull out?"
Pyrrha's smirk widened. "Bold of you to assume I let him pull out," she shot back.
A loud retching noise pulled their attention away before Blake could respond to that. Ruby Jr groaned in irritation as everyone's eyes landed on her.
"Can we not talk about my parents fucking?" she asked. "It's bad enough that I've got five younger siblings, I don't need more confirmation about why their bedroom's got walls twice as thick as the rest of the house."
Pyrrha and Jaune's eyes went wide. "Wait, you know about that?" Jaune asked.
Ruby Jr rolled her eyes. "Of fucking course I know about that, Dad," she said scathingly.
Jaune coughed loudly, while Pyrrha just chuckled. Even her daughter's disgust seemingly couldn't dampen Pyrrha's smug relish of the fact that she'd bagged Jaune Arc. And frankly, seeing how the years had treated him, none of Team RWBY could blame her.
A thought struck Ruby, then, as laughter and joy and no small amount of confused but positive energy rippled around the small room.
"Man, Ren and Nora are gonna flip when you guys come back with us," she declared, unable to hold back a giggle.
Blake, Yang, and Weiss burst out laughing too, already picturing the stunned looks on the other half of team JNPR's faces. Even Ruby Jr. laughed, presumably because she was imagining the hellion twins they'd already met being introduced to their namesakes.
Jaune and Pyrrha, though, didn't laugh. The looks on their faces grew pensive, even dark. Pyrrha's eyes in particular seemed to shut down like cell doors.
Slowly, the girls noticed that the two of them weren't laughing. "Is…something wrong, guys?" Yang asked, her own smile fading.
Jaune and Pyrrha shared a glance—and the depth of their wordless conversation, the amount of talking they seemed able to do without saying a single word, sent shivers down Ruby's spine. It implied a level of interconnection and understanding that was nearly impossible for her to comprehend; the result of twenty years of love and trust, interweaving their souls until they could no longer exist apart. It was intimidating to behold, for all that it made Blake—ever the romantic—sigh a little.
At last, Pyrrha spoke. "Jaune," she said softly. "Mind taking our daughter for a walk? I'd…like to talk to them alone for a minute."
Team RWBY shared their own glances—worried ones. Pyrrha sounded subdued, serious. Deadly serious.
Jaune sighed aloud. Whatever argument he and Pyrrha had had with their eyes, he seemed to have lost—and he'd apparently lost that argument many, many times before. He leaned down to kiss his wife, murmured, "Love you, honey," and motioned for Ruby Jr. to follow him as he left the room. She did so, and the four of them were suddenly left alone with a figure out of myth and legend and their own idealized stories—Pyrrha Nikos, the Tarnished Spartan. Still alive, with all the steel in her soul fully intact.
Yang was, as usual, the first to speak. "Man," she mused. "It is so goddamn weird to see Vomit Boy being a loving and supportive husband. And also a DILF."
Blake's only response was an agreeing, appreciative whistle.
Pyrrha managed to crack a smile, though it didn't quite reach her eyes. "You're not wrong," she agreed with relish, green eyes glowing. "But don't go getting any ideas, girls. That prime hunk of meat is mine, and I've got six kids to prove it."
Blake's ears twitched. "And you wouldn't even consider sharing?" she teased. "Even with the poor little Princess over there? Look at her, she's practically dripping on the floor!"
She jerked her thumb at Weiss, who squeaked as Pyrrha's gaze landed on her. "Hey!" she yelped. "I-I have no designs on your husband, Pyrrha!"
Pyrrha raised an eyebrow. "Good," she said. "If you did, I'd kill you."
She didn't sound like she was joking. Weiss went very, very still, and the temperature in the room seemed to drop a few degrees.
"She might have some on you though," Blake added unhelpfully, breaking the silence. "Don't know if you've realized, but you've still got it too, Pyrrha. Seems Weiss has a thing for redheads."
Weiss squeaked again, blushing too hard to even manage a snappy retort. Pyrrha put a hand to her mouth, laughing for a second before that same seriousness returned.
"It really is good to see you guys again," she said, before turning to Ruby herself. "But the reason I wanted to talk to you guys alone is because…well, I don't know if we're going back to Remnant with you."
There were no shouts, no gasps, no cries. None of Team RWBY made a sound. None of them dared. They were simply too stunned.
It was Ruby who gathered her wits enough to speak first. "I don't understand," she said. I thought you would've been determined to come home."
Pyrrha sighed. "Yeah, well, things change," she said.
Team RWBY exchanged uneasy glances. None of them had ever heard Pyrrha talk like that before.
"The Pyrrha we knew would've never let herself be taken out of the fight," Weiss said instead, sounding shocked.
Still sitting primly in her chair, Pyrrha's eye twinkled in much the same way it once had during a spar as she replied, "Oh, I'm still that Pyrrha, believe me. I'm just...well, older."
"Then why?" Yang blurted out. "For fuck's sake, you've been here what, twenty years? How are you not chomping at the bit to finally get out of here?"
Pyrrha's expression hardened. There were parts of that look that were familiar to the girl they'd known at Beacon—the curve of her lip, the set of her jaw—and parts that were like looking at a different woman altogether. She had laugh lines and crow's feet, for all that the years had been remarkably kind to her, given that she'd been living in the woods in a makeshift cabin. More than anything, though, there was a haunted look to her eyes, the same depth of pain and loss that Ruby had seen on Uncle Qrow and, in some far-off corner of her mind, Summer Rose's faces.
She found herself wondering, then, just what Pyrrha had been through to make her eyes look like there was something missing from them.
"That's just the thing, Yang," Pyrrha said, her voice sharp and pointed. "It has been twenty-three years. Twenty-three years for me, twenty for Jaune. We've spent more of our lives in the Ever After than we did on Remnant. I don't even know if it's going home for us anymore."
All four of the girls stared at this woman with eyes of steel and Pyrrha Nikos's face, unsure what to even say. The tarnished bronze helmet of the Spartan out of the storybooks watched them all from its plinth near the door.
Ruby couldn't stay quiet for long. "What are you talking about?" she said. "Of course Remnant is your home!"
Pyrrha's eyes darkened. "Is it?" she asked. "I spent my whole life there as a display piece, a symbol for others to gawk at. I fought in tournaments, I put on shows, I spent nearly my whole life as the Invincible Girl. And then I was murdered at seventeen. I never really lived, I don't think, until after Cinder killed me. My home, my parents…all of that feels so far away now. All I really consider home is Jaune and the kids anymore. My children were born here. Jaune and I…we built all this. Just up and leaving it…it's hard to think about, you know?"
She gestured at the house around them, at the food on the table, at the children's toys they'd carved, the home they'd made. At the weapon next to the door, a long, knobby wooden shaft, hard as iron, aged and dense, topped not with steel, but with a cracked, jagged, razor-sharp piece of a horn. A weapon unlike anything that had ever existed on Remnant. A weapon for a woman of the Ever After.
Ruby regretted what she said next almost as soon as it left her mouth. But she was so out of sorts, still reeling from so much death and loss in Atlas, from Penny, that the sight of Pyrrha Nikos, somehow alive and surrounded by life and apparently too scared to fight for it, broke something in her.
"Well, while you've been marrying the love of your life and having a bunch of kids, we've been fighting a war!" she snapped. "People are dying back on Remnant, Pyrrha! People you knew. People who you were supposed to protect! But you weren't there, and we were! And we lost!"
Pyrrha's eyes snapped open, and Ruby finally realized what it was about her that still felt so off.
It was Pyrrha's eyes; there was a light in them that wasn't quite sane, had hairline fractures in it like a plate that had shattered and been glued back together; technically fixed, restored, but still more fragile than it had once been, ready to break again along old fault lines if pushed.
For the second time, the room's temperature seemed to drop. Something rattled in the floorboards; maybe it was the floorboards, the nails holding them together being shaken by Pyrrha's Semblance. The girls shifted uneasily; Blake actually grabbed for her weapon.
But the look in Pyrrha's eyes, the one that seemed ready to crack, never crossed the line. With visible effort, she held herself together. Instead of snapping or snarling, she rose to her feet, and paced across the room, picking the Spartan helmet—the one she'd never worn on Remnant, and found only in the Ever After—up off of its shelf, turning it in her hands.
"There's something I don't like to talk about," she said quietly. "When Jaune found me again, I was…in a bad way. Mentally, I mean. I'd been alone for three years, thought I was dead and abandoned in the afterlife, was being hunted by a soul-destroying monster that looked like a Grimm…"
She trailed off, turning back to look at them, the helmet still in her hands. "I lost my grip on reality," she admitted, her expression somber and her eyes still locked on Ruby. "I started…seeing stuff. People, places, things. I heard voices, your voices. I…well, I went a little crazy."
She paused, taking a deep, heavy breath. Her eyes fluttered closed, then reopened, still blazing.
"By touching that fruit, Jaune saved my life," she continued, her voice thick with twenty years of emotion. "I really, truly believe that he did. If he hadn't found me, I think…I think I would've died here. Slowly, quickly, one way or another. I would've slipped up and gotten killed by the Jabberwalker, or taken a bad fall, or just…given up and stopped eating. All that would've been left of me by the time you got here would have been bones. You probably would've never even known I didn't die at the Vytal Festival."
Ruby shuddered at that, her skin cold and clammy. Her outburst was no longer ringing in her ears; it had been replaced by the eerie, chilling tone of Pyrrha's words.
Pyrrha set the Spartan helmet down on the rough-hewn wooden table, the t-shaped visor slit staring out at them, and turned back to Ruby.
"You don't need to convince Jaune to go back to Remnant," she said quietly. "He's been ready to go back for years now. He's got business there—business with Cinder Fall. I do too, I guess, but he's the one who wants her dead the most. Funny, how he wants revenge for my death more than I do. Ruby—my Ruby—is an easy sell too. She's heard all about the fight there—the Grimm, Salem, all of it. And she wants in. We've trained her until she's as good as any Huntsman, and she knows it. She's got Jaune's spirit–the one that makes it impossible for her to sit on the sidelines. She won't need any convincing. But you do have to convince me."
She stepped right up to Ruby, and looked her in the eyes.
"You're right, Ruby," she said softly. "I wasn't there to help you when Atlas fell. And I'm sorry. It was out of my hands, but I'm sorry anyway. And I can tell how much suffering you've been through lately. How much pressure you're under. My being alive must feel like a dream come true—and I'm punching a hole in it by not riding off immediately with you to fix everything. But that's not how this is going to go. And that's why, right there."
Pyrrha pointed out the window of the house, at the front yard, where Jaune had managed to gather up all six of the children. They'd dogpiled him, successfully overwhelming their father's strength with the weight of their numbers, wrestling him to the ground as he laughed and tossed them into the air, easily catching little Weiss as she squealed and demanded he do it again.
As Ruby stared at the heart-melting scene, Pyrrha said, "I have kids. I have an eight-year-old daughter who needs me around. I have a husband that I will never be separated from ever again. I…I have so much more to lose now."
Ruby tore her gaze away from the window, and her thoughts away from how unfair it was that Pyrrha could think of her daughter, who so desperately needed a mother, when Summer Rose had apparently never gotten that choice, and looked back at Pyrrha.
"What do you want, then?" she muttered, trying and failing to not sound sullen and childish.
Pyrrha gave her a small, crooked smile. "I'm not saying no outright. But I want you four to take a deep breath, sit down, and think this through," she said. "I want you to get some food in your stomachs, get some rest, process and come to terms with what happened in Atlas, pull together all the information we have, and come up with an actual plan. I want you to stop reacting, and start acting. That's my condition. I'll help you guys. I'll share everything we've learned about this place. I'll show you where to start looking for a way out. But I won't join you—won't send my children to war—until I know I can trust you with their lives."
It was too much for Ruby. She leapt to her feet. "How can you say that?" she demanded, fists clenched. "We're your friends, Pyrrha!"
"We'd never put your kids in danger," Blake agreed. "Who do you think we are?"
Pyrrha nodded. "I don't doubt that," she agreed. "But I haven't seen you in twenty-three years. And you said it yourself: last time you fought the things my children would fight, you lost. I lost, too. That can't happen again."
Pyrrha came around the table, and stopped in front of Ruby. She knelt down, so that even as Ruby hung her head, Pyrrha's brilliant green eyes seared into her soul.
"I can't throw my life away again, Ruby," Pyrrha whispered, her hand on Ruby's shoulder. "Whatever this second chance is, whatever miracle I got, I need to live. My kids need me. Jaune needs me. I'm willing to help you try and figure out a way to get out of here. Maybe I'll even come back myself. But I need you to understand that I am not the girl you watched die. Not anymore."
Ruby was silent for a long time. Longer than she should've been, probably. But she just couldn't find the strength.
At last, she said, "I...I don't want to say you've changed, Pyrrha. But..."
Pyrrha smiled. It was sad, and graceful, and resilient, and everything Ruby had always known Pyrrha would have been one day, if not for Cinder Fall. The look on her eyes—the haunted, cracked, damaged one—was still there, as Ruby suspected it always was, and always would be. But it was controlled, contained, accepted. "I understand, Ruby," she said gently. "I...I guess I've grown up."
None of RWBY seemed keen to break the new silence that fell, this one far more gentle than the last.
None of them, that was, except for Yang. "...Look, don't take this the wrong way," she said dryly, "but it is so weird to hear you lecturing us like you're Goodwitch."
That finally got through to Ruby, and she started to crack up laughing, whether from the insanity of imagining Pyrrha in Glynda Goodwitch's position, or from the fact that it kind of was what she'd been doing.
Pyrrha seemed to find it funny, too, judging by how she snorted. "Ha! It doesn't feel any less weird for me, trust me," she agreed.
As the door opened back up and Jaune and the kids came back in, Ruby found herself feeling better. Not good, not freed from the doubts and the grief and all the rubble that Atlas had left in her soul, but better.
Maybe for now, that was enough.