A/N: This fic is brought to you by the typewriter monkey living in my brain, along with the usual suspects on Discord, aided and abetted by Scoundrel, Logar3, and a whole bunch of other RWBY-loving wackos more than willing to bully me into turning a random idea into whatever the hell this is.

Please note that there may be inconsistencies with canon, since my RWBY knowledge can be a little spotty, and also that this fic is deliberately a bit non-linear, so if scenes seem to be missing, they'll probably show up eventually.

If you're interested in seeing more of this, please feel free to join the Discord server where I do most of my brainstorming and writing: /gA64bh39Te

With that said, please, enjoy!


In a place beyond time, four Huntresses tramped through the woods, led by a man literally out of a living fairy tale.

Ruby's eyes followed the broad, armored shoulders of the older, bearded Jaune warily as he led them through the dark forest of the Ever After.

This still felt so weird. It had been a neck-snappingly fast turnaround from the Fall of Atlas and what had happened to Penny, to falling into that abyss, to waking up here…and immediately finding out that one of Remnant's greatest bedtime stories was based on their friend.

Their twenty-years-older, objectively now hot friend. Seriously, Ruby could still hear Blake and Yang muttering behind her, throwing around words like "would" and "DILF."

Ruby would've talked to Weiss to distract herself from that, but she wasn't doing much better. Weiss was worryingly close to actually biting her lip as they followed Jaune deeper into the twisting woods.

Was Ruby the only one of them who had any self-control? Or was she just still so hung-up on…well, on Penny?

"Where are you taking us, anyway?" she asked out loud, trying to distract herself from the pain that lay in her thoughts.

Jaune glanced back at them, his horse tossing its head beside him. He offered Ruby the same awkward, warm grin she'd grown so used to seeing from him, back when he hadn't had a beard and twenty years' worth of accumulated wear on his face.

"Well, I figure that whatever you guys decide to do next, you'll need to rest and eat before making a plan," he said. "So, I'm bringing you home."

Weiss raised an eyebrow. "Home?" she said. "We're in the middle of nowhere."

Jaune nodded. His expression was a little distant. "Exactly," he agreed. "Safer that way. There's not much out here to draw any of the things in the Ever After that are best left alone. And I…have things that I need to keep safe."

Yang put her hands on her hips. "Like what?" she asked.

Jaune just smiled. "It's…probably easier to show you than to explain," he said. "Here, it's not far now."

As it turned out, that was an understatement. They'd barely walked a dozen more paces before something dropped down directly on top of Ruby.

She shouted in surprise; still twitchy and operating on a hair trigger, Crescent Rose was out and swinging before she even really knew what was going on. Somewhere behind her, she heard Jaune start to speak, but he was too slow.

The human—at least, she looked human—who'd jumped her was just as fast as she was, though. And she had the advantage of surprise. She swung her own weapon—something long-handled and wickedly sharp—and before Ruby could even blink, Crescent Rose was trapped, pinned to the ground between a spear point and a golden axe blade.

"Easy there, girl," her attacker said, her voice not that much older than Ruby herself. "Didn't mean to startle ya."

Ruby fell backwards with a yelp as the girl freed their weapons from each other, hoisting the long-handled halberd onto her shoulder with ease. Now that she'd landed from where she had apparently been waiting up in the trees, Ruby could tell just how powerfully built the girl was; she looked even stronger than Yang.

Ruby's gaze turned to look over the group; Blake, Weiss and Yang were all on the verge of attacking, weapons drawn and stances low. Their faces bore the hard-taught lessons of Atlas and Beacon and all the other battles they'd fought when it came to fighting first and asking questions later. Jaune hadn't even reached for his sword. Instead, he had an oddly fond look on his face.

"Hey, kiddo," he said affectionately, stepping up to the tall girl. "You the one on sentry duty today?"

The girl beamed. "You're lucky it was me and not one of the twins, Dad," she shot back. "They woulda attacked your friends here just for fun."

Ruby's eyes went wide. Glancing at her friends, she saw theirs had, too.

Had this girl just called Jaune "Dad?"

Jaune barely seemed to notice their confusion. Instead, he put his hand on the girl's shoulder, and chuckled, "I would've liked to see them try, kiddo. Is your Mom around?"

The girl nodded. "She's inside," she said, turning to gesture through the trees at the building that Ruby finally spotted, now that she wasn't under attack.

It was…well, when Jaune had said "home," Ruby had kinda been expecting a ramshackle hut, or maybe a cave strewn with random junk he'd collected in twenty years of living here. This…this was a house. A sturdy, well-made log cabin in the woods with smoke rising from its chimney, a little stable built into a lean-to on one side, and, frankly, way more rooms than one man living alone could've possibly needed. By the standards of Remnant it was a little on the rustic side, sure, but for a place where the only buildings they'd seen had been weird fairytale magic nonsense, finding an actual human house in the woods was like spotting a unicorn. Hell, they probably had unicorns here, so it might be rarer.

Jaune nodded at his… daughter? He took a few steps towards the cabin, letting out a whistle—only for Yang to grab his arm.

"I'm sorry, Jaune, but what the fuck?" she hissed. "You can't just—just have a girl drop out of the trees and call you "Dad" and not explain anything! What did you do?"

Jaune looked slightly embarrassed. "It's…a long story, Yang," he admitted. "And it gets…weirder."

Yang didn't look even a little bit satisfied by that, but before she could say anything, the redheaded girl snapped her head up at Jaune's words.

"Wait a second," she blurted. "Yang?" Your name is Yang?"

Yang blinked, as did Ruby and the others. "Uh, yeah?" Yang said, confused. "What, you know another Yang?"

The girl looked like she wasn't sure whether to laugh or start jumping for joy. She turned to Jaune again. "Dad, are these four the ones you and Mom told us about?" she asked gleefully, hand still on her halberd. She was practically vibrating in place now, her dark red curls—so dark at their ends they nearly faded to black—bouncing in her glee.

Jaune sighed. He gave the four members of Team RWBY an apologetic look. "Uh, yeah," he told his daughter. He turned back to RWBY, then, and rubbed the back of his head bashfully. "RWBY, meet my daughter. Her name is, uh…well, it's Ruby."

Instantly, Blake, Weiss, and Yang's heads whipped around to look at Ruby—the original Ruby, the one staring at the taller, older girl who bore her name with a completely stunned look in her eyes.

Ruby couldn't think. She could barely breathe. Crescent Rose slipped from her fingertips, clattering to the ground.

"Oh," she squeaked, as Ruby Jr. waved her hand shyly, turned from a boisterous warrior who'd near-effortlessly disarmed a trained Huntress into a bashful girl in an instant.

"Hi," she said shyly, flashing the awkward, warm grin that she could have only gotten from her father. "My parents told me a lot about you!"

Somehow, in her shock, Ruby could only find it in herself to ask a single one of the thousand questions raging in her chest. She turned to Jaune, and asked, "Wait…if you're her dad, who's her mom?"

A second later, Weiss's eyes shot open, and she added a second question: "Hang on…the fairytale…it was "The Rusted Knight and the Tarnished Spartan."

Jaune raised an eyebrow. "Was it, now?" he asked. He seemed to be enjoying their confusion. His daughter was nearly jumping in the air with excitement.

Blake's ears twitched. "Holy shit," she whispered. "You're one half of the most legendary romance story in all of Remnant? Everyone knows about you two, and…and…"

Yang's voice was very, very quiet as she completed her girlfriend's sentence. "And there's only one person I can think of who could be the Tarnished Spartan, if you're the Rusted Knight," she whispered. "But…she's…it can't be."

The answer to all their questions was audible in the gasp that Blake, Yang, and Weiss gave a second later, when the front door of the cabin opened, and a woman stepped out into the clearing.

Ruby couldn't believe her eyes, at first. She refused to believe them. It had to be a trick. She had to be hallucinating.

She knew this woman. She'd met her before. Not as she was now—with her long red hair in a simple, workmanlike braid instead of a glossy ponytail, with a cloth bandana around the crown of her head instead of a tiara made of gold and bronze, with a body still hardened for war yet with a soft rounding to her hips and chest from motherhood and the passage of time instead of a lean warrior's build. But she knew her all the same.

She'd called this woman a friend, once. Had admired her, looked up to her. Had wanted to be like her.

She'd watched this woman die. Killed by Cinder Fall in what felt like a different lifetime. Burned out like a torch, too bright, too quick, too soon.

Behind her, Ruby heard Yang gasp, and Blake whimper, and Weiss fight back a sob. She heard Jaune say, "Everyone, I'd like you to meet my wife."

And as the door of their home opened again, and a gaggle of red-and-yellow haired children began to pour out one by one, Pyrrha Nikos beamed at them with the eyes of a woman who knew the grief they were feeling all too well, and said, "Hello again, RWBY. Been a while, hasn't it?"


Twenty Years Earlier


The red-haired girl crept through the low scrub near the beach, low on her haunches, careful not to make a sound. Branches rustled against her skin, scraped against her tunic and the armor she wore, which was beginning to turn green from tarnish and lack of care. In her hand, she carried a crude but wickedly sharp spear, the tip seemingly carved from a jagged, striped horn.

It had been a while since she'd been out this far; there wasn't much in this part of the Ever After worth harvesting, hunting, or gathering. Maybe there were fish, but she lacked the skills and the tools to catch them, and there were far easier food sources here, anyway.

Still…something had drawn her out here. She didn't know what. Some hunch, some suspicion…maybe intuition. Whatever it was, it had been one of the things that had kept her alive for so long, and so she knew better than to ignore it.

She'd been familiar with intuition for a very long time indeed. She remembered another time, another life, when she'd taken that feeling and honed it, built upon instinct and cultivated skill until she was called a prodigy, until crowds had cheered her name in the arena.

And then it had all disappeared. That intuition, that fighter's instinct, had failed her; she'd learned that she wasn't as Invincible as she thought she was. The fires had claimed her, burning her away like ash on the wind.

And then…she'd woken up here.

The girl crept further down, out of the brush, feeling sand beneath her feet. She felt exposed; something deep in her brain hissed uncomfortably, trying to urge her back into the shadows. She ignored it.

There was a boy, lying on the sand, with blond hair and gleaming armor. There was a sword at his side, one that she recognized. A piece of fruit shaped like a clock spilled out of his hand as he groaned painfully.

The girl bit back a sob. She knew this boy. She'd loved him. She'd kissed him, once—but only once. She'd wanted so much more, but she'd never gotten the chance.

But this…this was just another apparition. She got them sometimes; more and more, lately, as she spent longer and longer alone. She'd already lost track of how long it was; she'd tried counting, before, but she'd given up as she approached the second full year of being alone in this place. Nowadays, she saw one every few days. A pale echo of a face she'd known, a voice calling out to her from the shadows. A laugh, a joke, a memory of the past, or a dream of what could've been. A girl like a thunderbolt with orange hair, a boy with dark hair and a calm, serene face, a white-haired prim princess or a silver-eyed girl with a gleaming scythe. She saw them all and more besides. She knew their names, every one.

But the cruelest specter of all was this one. The boy she'd loved. The boy she'd never see again.

"Jaune," she whispered, as she always did when she saw him. She knew he wasn't real. She knew her mind was tricking her—that somewhere in her years of isolation, she'd lost a piece of her sanity.

She didn't care. What was the point of staying sane? She was alone in a strange world with horrifying monsters and no way back. So what if she saw things that weren't really there? So what if she murmured tender words she'd never gotten a chance to speak whenever she saw this boy? Anything to feel a little less alone. Anything to pretend she hadn't failed.

Only this time, something was different. The apparitions she saw rarely reacted beyond a smile or a wave, and if they spoke, it was only things she recalled hearing them say, once.

But that wasn't what happened this time. Instead, the moment she spoke, even fifteen feet from him, the boy jolted, rolling onto his feet and drawing his sword.

Then, his eyes landed on her, and he froze. His sword slipped from his hand.

"Pyrrha?" he gasped, voice soft, as if he wasn't even sure he could speak the name aloud.


Jaune hadn't even been here five minutes, and he was already in way over his head.

First, there had been the damn clock fruit. Whatever picking it had done, he knew it couldn't be good. The sight of the sun and moon spinning in the sky like that didn't make any sense—had he time travelled somehow? Had something been sped up, or slowed down, or reversed?

None of it made sense. And then he'd heard an agonizingly familiar voice speak his name, and it had torn right into the wound in his heart he knew would never truly heal.

So he'd leapt to his feet, and turned around to find a ghost staring back at him.

The girl standing at the edge of the beach was, unquestionably, Pyrrha Nikos. That long red hair, those green eyes, the armor and the tall, graceful body of a warrior—he'd know her anywhere, even if he hadn't loved her.

There were things he didn't recognize, too; the armor was tarnished, her hair wild and tangled, her spear was completely different and far more crude than the weapons he'd once watched her train with, and there was a wild, haunted, not-quite-sane look in her eyes. But it was Pyrrha.

And that could only mean one thing, because Pyrrha was dead. Jaune's eyes narrowed. "Neo," he growled, drawing his sword. "I'm not falling for this again!"

The fake-Pyrrha's eyes widened, and she bared her teeth in a snarl. In an instant, that odd hornlike spear was leveled at him, the space between them narrowed down to a bare few feet.

Jaune braced for an attack—but it didn't come. Instead, he noticed that fake-Pyrrha was shaking. Even her spear arm was trembling—and he'd never known the real Pyrrha to do that, while she'd lived.

Still shaking, Pyrrha hissed, "Y-you're…you're not real. You're just a memory. You're just in my head."

Jaune's eyes widened. "Whatever game you're playing, Neo, it's not going to work," he snapped. "I know your tricks."

The false Pyrrha took another step forwards, spear still leveled at Jaune's chest. "You're not real," she repeated, voice trembling, as if she was trying to convince herself. "You're not real, you're not real. You're not. I'm just…I'm seeing things again."

Jaune was… really confused. Whatever Neo was trying to pull…he couldn't see the point of it. Neo typically used disguises to get in close to attack—but the fake-Pyrrha was already well within range to strike him. And yet she hadn't.

More than that…why did she look as if she'd gone half-feral in the woods? If Neo was going to try to imitate Pyrrha to throw him off his game—something he'd never put past her—she would've imitated the girl he'd known at Beacon far more closely. But this wasn't that Pyrrha. Her armor was tarnished, her weapon was wrong, and her appearance wasn't quite the seventeen-year-old girl he'd known. She was a little taller, a little thinner, her facial structure a little more mature; she was the same age as he was now, three years older than they'd been at Beacon. And none of those subtle differences were things that Neo would have gone to the trouble of creating…right?

Pyrrha took another step forwards. Now, the end of her spear was so close, Jaune might not be able to block if she suddenly attacked.

But still, she didn't. Instead, she continued to speak as if to herself. "He's not actually there, Pyrrha," she muttered under her breath, voice almost singsong in its cadence. "You're just losing it again. Come on, get a grip, just focus. You're a little crazy, sure, but you knew that already. Stop and think. Jaune's not actually there, you're just hallucinating. So the delusion's a little bit stronger than normal, that's fine. Totally fine. Just wave your spear through him and he'll poof away, and you can go right back to being weird crazy Pyrrha again."

She took one last step. Her spearhead thunked against Jaune's breastplate, sturdy and solid and entirely real.

For a moment, neither Jaune nor Pyrrha spoke. They just stared at each other, as Pyrrha's brain tried to comprehend the solid, unyielding mass at the end of her spear where she'd not been expecting one, and Jaune tried frantically to figure out a way to satisfy the part of him still utterly convinced that he was about to be attacked by Neo's umbrella.

Pyrrha's mouth opened, but no sound came out. Her lips worked, trying to form words, but none were forming. She was shaking so badly Jaune could feel his whole breastplate rattling. Her legs quivered beneath her, as if she was a house of cards about to crumble.

At last, Jaune spoke.

"Do…do you remember the only thing I knew about you when we met?" he asked, slowly, timidly. He didn't dare lower his sword, but he didn't raise it further, either. Instead, he asked her a question he was nearly sure Neo wouldn't know the answer to—something only the real Pyrrha could possibly have known.

For a moment, Pyrrha didn't speak. There was a dangerous, wild look in her eye, and for a moment Jaune wondered if Pyrrha—or whoever this was—was about to attack him.

And then, instead, tears welled up in her eyes. "You didn't even know who I was," she whispered. "Until you recognized me from the Pumpkin Pete's cereal box."

Jaune sheathed Crocea Mors in an instant, feeling like his knees would give out from under him. Pyrrha's legs did give out, sending her toppling onto the sand.

"You're real," she whispered, tears already flowing down her cheeks. "Oh, Brothers, you're real."

Jaune felt something break in his chest, where the now-familiar knot of grief usually resided. "Pyrrha," he gasped.

Pyrrha was alive? He couldn't believe it. He couldn't even begin to believe it. It was too big. Too monumental. Too impossible.

He should do something, he realized. Hug her, touch her, hold her. He needed the proof, the undeniable evidence that this wasn't all a delusion.

She was, as usual, miles ahead of him. Jaune started to reach for her, only for Pyrrha to leap from her kneeling position straight into his arms, sending him toppling backwards under an assault so ferocious she didn't even need to use a weapon to pin him to the sandy ground. Before he even knew what was happening, she was kissing him, her lips on his, filling his whole world.

That was what finally did it. Pyrrha was already crying, tears rolling freely down her face, and now Jaune, too, began to sob. It finally got through to him. Finally, it felt real.

Pyrrha Nikos was alive. She'd found him again, after all this time.

There was nothing Jaune could do but kiss her back.