Hey everyone it's RoseSaiyan2 here again! Hope everyone enjoyed last chapter, that was a doozy to write! Anyways, I've been building up to a certain event with Blake and now I think it's about time I delivered.
This chapter will primarily focus on Blake and what's going on with her. The others will be in the chapter, they just won't be a main focus necessarily.
To Spector45, thx for the suggestion on the Cinder poll man. I think I'll actually do that. Until then, Cinder will kind of more or less get tossed around by the saiyans, especially every time she encounters them after the fall of Beacon. As always, here's a quick story related poll before we start the chapter:
Should I introduce another character to take Pyrrha's place later in the story?
I. No, stick to the cannon story.
II. Sure, go ahead.
III. Leave it as is, Jaune should learn the consequences of not being strong enough to protect what he holds dear.
Anyways, that's all I have for the Author's Note before the story. Without further ado, onto the story!
Disclaimer: RoseSaiyan2 does not own Dbz/Dbz Kai/ DBS or Rwby and their characters. Those are property of their respective creators. The author of this story only owns the oc's which appear in this story with expressed permission to use the oc's of Tarro and Daikon from ComparedDreadx .
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CHAPTER THIRTEEN:
A Shocking Truth, Part I
---
Part I — What Blake Dreamed
Location: Team RWBY's Dormitory | Several Nights Prior
---
The nightmare always started the same way.
She was walking with her brothers — the specific comfortable rhythm of the three of them side by side, which she had known for so long that it had stopped feeling like a choice and started feeling like a law of physics. Nova to her left, Turuk to her right. The ground underfoot was somewhere between the academy grounds and somewhere she didn't recognize, the way dream geography works, assembling itself from available materials without concern for consistency.
Everything was fine.
And then it wasn't.
Something pulled her down — not a hand, not a force she could name, more the sensation of the ground asserting itself against her without warning, and she was on her hands and knees looking up at the place where her brothers had been standing.
They kept walking.
They didn't look back.
She reached out. "Nova. Turuk."
They couldn't hear her. She knew they couldn't hear her the way you know things in dreams — not as a conclusion arrived at through reasoning, but as a fact already embedded in the texture of the world. She had become inaudible. Invisible. The ground held her and she pushed against it and they kept walking, their shapes getting smaller against whatever was ahead of them.
Two people appeared beside them. She couldn't see their faces — couldn't focus on them, the way dreams sometimes refuse to resolve the things that matter most. But they were walking with her brothers, walking toward them in the way of people who knew them, and her brothers didn't notice anything wrong because to them nothing was wrong.
"No—" She scrambled forward and her hands hit the ground again. "Nova! Turuk! Please, don't go — don't go—"
Her own voice woke her up.
She lurched forward in her bunk with the specific violence of a body that has been trying to break through something in sleep and has finally made contact with the waking world. The sound she made was not quite a scream — too broken for that, too desperate.
She was cold.
"Blake!"
Yang's voice. The mattress shifting. Hands on her shoulders shaking her with the specific panicked urgency of someone who has been listening for thirty seconds and has made a decision.
"Blake, wake up—"
Her eyes opened.
The room was dark and warm and exactly as it was supposed to be. Three faces looked at her — Ruby with her silver eyes wide and frightened, Weiss standing at the edge of her bunk with one hand on the frame, Yang right in front of her with both hands on Blake's shoulders and an expression that was working very hard to stay calm.
They collided, briefly, as Blake came forward — head to head, both of them wincing — and then Blake was upright and the room was real and the nightmare was receding.
"Are you okay?" Ruby asked, very quietly.
"I'm fine," Blake said.
The word came out flat and automatic and none of them believed it, which she could see clearly.
"Blake." Yang's voice was gentle in the specific way it was gentle when she meant it rather than when she was being careful about it. "You look like you've seen something awful."
"It was a dream," Blake said. "Just a dream. I'm fine."
Weiss was watching her with the evaluating attention she brought to things she suspected were more complicated than they were being presented as. "You don't look fine."
"I'm fine," Blake said again, which was still untrue.
She could feel them looking at each other over her head — the specific silent consultation of people who have shared a space long enough to have a language that doesn't need words. She heard them decide to let it go, which was the right decision, which she was grateful for.
She turned onto her side and faced the wall and told herself the nightmare meant nothing.
She was still telling herself this in the morning.
---
Part II — The Match
Location: Beacon Academy Combat Classroom | That Afternoon
---
Pyrrha Nikos was not someone who could be made to look easy.
She moved through the match against Cardin Winchester with the specific quality of a person who had stopped being tested by this level of challenge some years ago and was now simply going through the steps with enough grace that the students watching couldn't entirely identify why she always won — only that she did, with a reliability that had long since made the word *invincible* follow her around whether she invited it or not.
Cardin went down. Cleanly. Definitively.
Glynda closed the match with the approval of someone who has high standards and has witnessed one of them being met.
"Well done, Miss Nikos. You should have no problem qualifying for the tournament."
Pyrrha bowed slightly. "Thank you, Professor."
Blake registered none of this.
She was in the third row with her book open in her lap and her eyes somewhere considerably further away than the combat floor, which was where they had been for the better part of three days. The book had not turned a page in forty minutes. The match had ended and she had not noticed.
What she was doing, in the way of someone who can't stop doing a thing and also can't stop knowing they're doing it, was thinking about the nightmare.
Glynda's voice arrived through the distance.
"Now, I know that's a tough act to follow, but we have time for one more match. Any volunteers?" A pause. "Ms. Belladonna?"
Blake snapped the book shut and found Glynda looking at her with the evaluating patience of a teacher who has identified someone not paying attention and has decided to do something about it.
"You've been rather docile these past few classes. Why don't you—"
"I'll do it."
The voice came from the wrong direction.
Mercury Black raised his hand from three rows back with the ease of someone who has decided that volunteering is the most efficient way to accomplish something, and the something he wanted to accomplish was this specific match.
Glynda looked at him. "Mercury, is it? Very well — and your opponent?"
She was scanning the room when Mercury pointed.
"Her," he said. "Pyrrha Nikos."
"Me?" Pyrrha asked.
"I'm afraid Miss Nikos has just completed a match," Glynda said. "I'd recommend—"
"I'll take it."
Scarlett Reinhardt's hand was up.
The room performed its customary recalibration whenever Scarlett volunteered for anything, which was a specific collective experience that involved approximately sixty percent of the room deciding it needed to re-evaluate its spatial relationship to the arena floor. Glynda's expression moved through several stages before arriving at something between professional assessment and cautious relief that at least it isn't Scarlett against one of the newer students.
"Miss Reinhardt," she said. "You'll... exercise your judgment regarding force application?"
"Of course, Professor," Scarlett said, standing. "I'll hold back as much as I reasonably can."
The room interpreted this with the accuracy of people who had observed Scarlett Reinhardt's version of holding back before.
Mercury Black looked at the reactions of sixty-odd students who had suddenly decided that giving the arena a wider berth was an excellent idea, and arrived at the assessment that he may have miscalculated something.
What exactly did I just sign up for? he thought.
---
The match was brief, which was its own kind of information.
Scarlett moved with the specific quality of someone who had been trained to fight by people who did not think in terms of semblances or dust weapons — someone who had built everything from the ground up and had the structural confidence that comes from knowing your foundation is solid. She let Mercury come to her for the first exchange, blocked the opening strike with the nonchalance of someone absorbing something they had predicted, and dispatched the momentum of it into a flip that repositioned him without requiring her to move significantly.
He adjusted. He was fast, and his technique was specific and refined — the footwork of someone who had been doing this since before they could have chosen not to. He found a rhythm and pressed it.
She broke the rhythm with an elbow.
He recovered. Went again. A sequence of strikes, each one finding something — the first deflected, the second glancing, the third landing on her forearm.
She let it land. Watched his next decision. When his kick came, she caught it barehanded.
The look on Mercury Black's face in that moment — the specific recalibration of someone whose model of the situation has just been revised — was, from Ruby's perspective in the third row, one of the most purely interesting expressions she had ever seen on another person.
"Two can play at that," Scarlett said, and kicked him sideways into the edge of the arena.
He skidded. Recovered. Stood.
Looked at her.
Looked at the gap between where he was and where the fight would continue.
"I forfeit," he said.
Scarlett almost stumbled, because she had been moving and had to redirect the momentum of it into something else. "You're... not even going to try?"
"What's the point?" He said it without apparent bitterness — the flat assessment of someone making a practical observation. "We're not in the same weight class. No sense in getting badly hurt to prove I'm aware of that."
Glynda announced the result with the specific relief of a teacher who has just observed a high-stakes match end without anyone being sent to the medical wing.
Blake, in the third row, had not watched any of it.
The alarm sounded. Class ended. Glynda reminded the assembled students of the dance and the mission in the same breath, with the professional efficiency of someone who considers both equally non-negotiable.
Scarlett crossed to Mercury as the room shifted around them.
"Hey." Her voice had an edge to it. "You. Mercury."
He turned.
"I know you were holding back," she said. "That forfeit wasn't about self-preservation — you calculated something and decided losing was the better outcome for whatever you've got going on, and I have no idea what that is. But I want you to know—" She pointed at him with the directness of someone who has made a decision and is communicating it plainly. "—I get genuinely angry when people don't think I'm worth their time. We'll have a real match eventually. And don't think about getting out of it."
"Sure," Mercury said. "Wouldn't dream of it."
He watched her go.
"Merc," she'd called him, on the way out.
He stood very still.
It was such a small thing. Four letters. The shortened version of a name he'd been called once, years ago, by a voice he kept losing the moment he tried to find it. The voice that always came with red hair and a sunny afternoon and a promise he couldn't hear the end of.
He looked at Scarlett Reinhardt's retreating back and thought: *No. That's impossible. It's been years. She wouldn't remember.*
He kept thinking it until he mostly believed it.
Emerald appeared at his shoulder. "You look pale."
"I'm fine," he said.
---
Part III — What the Others Heard
Location: Beacon Academy Grounds | After Class
---
Sun caught up to Blake outside with the specific determination of someone who has been watching a person not be okay for several days and has decided to do something about it today.
He fell into step beside her and matched her pace, which was faster than his natural walking speed by about fifteen percent, which told him something.
"Hey. Blake. You doing okay?"
She didn't look at him. "I'm fine."
Scarlett, walking with Nova's team a half-step behind team RWBY, glanced at Nova.
"She's not fine," she said, quietly.
"I know," he said.
"She hasn't been fine for three days."
"I know that too."
He watched his sister's profile — the tight set of her jaw, the specific quality of forward focus that Blake used when she was avoiding looking at something beside her. She had not been able to look at him properly since the morning after the nightmare, and he had noticed, and had been giving her the space he thought she needed, and was beginning to reconsider whether space was the right call.
Sun was attempting to continue. "I was thinking — there's this dance this weekend, and I was thinking you and me, maybe we make it a little less boring, y'know? Sounds like a solid plan, right?"
Blake stopped walking.
"What?"
The word came out with more heat than the question warranted, and Sun registered this and made the appropriate adjustment to his expected outcome.
"The dance," he said, more carefully. "This weekend. Did you want to—"
"I don't have time for a dance," Blake said, and her voice had the quality it had when she was angry at something that was not the person she was talking to. "There are more important things happening than a *stupid dance,* and I thought you of all people understood that."
Silence.
Nova spoke.
"Blake."
She went still.
"That wasn't fair to Sun," he said. "He was trying to help."
She turned away from him.
"And there's something wrong," he continued, not with force — just with the steady persistence of someone stating a fact they're not going to stop stating. "There has been for days. Will you tell us what it is?"
"It's nothing," she said.
"Blake—"
"I said it's nothing!"
The courtyard absorbed the sound of it. Several students nearby turned. Blake looked at the faces around her — at Nova and Turuk, at the rest of her team, at the group of people who had been watching her worry for three days and were now watching her snap — and the thing on her face was not anger anymore. It was something older and more frightened than that.
"I should go," she said, and left.
Sun, who had been the one trying to help, sat with the specific deflation of the genuinely well-intentioned who have been caught in someone else's storm.
Turuk reached for her. "Sis, wait—"
She was already past him.
Nova looked at the place she'd been.
Ruby appeared at his shoulder. The quality of her presence when she was worried about something was specific — a kind of contained energy, held in rather than spent. She looked at his face.
"Nova."
"She doesn't want to be around us right now," he said. "Not me and Turuk, at least." He looked at Ruby, and the specific request in his expression was something she'd learned to read — the look he used when he needed her to do something he couldn't do himself. "Would you and your team talk to her?"
"Sure," Yang said, already decided. "We'll find her."
"Of course," Weiss said, with the composure of someone who nearly said something uncharacteristic and caught herself. She straightened her glove. "We'll handle it."
Daikon made a sound that was technically a laugh.
"Something funny?" Weiss asked.
"You were going to say something heartfelt and then remembered who was watching," he said.
"I was going to say nothing of the—"
"We're leaving," Yang said, taking Ruby's arm. "Come on."
Weiss followed, with the specific posture of someone who is walking away from a situation on purpose. As she passed Turuk, Yang turned back and kissed him on the cheek with the same casual certainty she brought to everything, and Turuk's brain performed the specific short-circuit it performed whenever Yang did something like this, which was the short-circuit of someone who has a great deal of feelings they haven't organized yet.
"More later," she told him, with the smirk she used when she knew exactly what she was doing.
She rejoined her team.
Turuk stood in the courtyard.
Daikon and Scarlett looked at him.
"Don't," Turuk said.
"I wasn't going to say anything," Scarlett said.
"Your face was—"
"I'm a very expressive person, Turuk. It means nothing."
Aiko had turned away and was looking at the middle distance with the focused attention of someone who is not laughing.
She was laughing.
---
Part IV — Persistent Friends
Location: Team RWBY's Dormitory | That Evening
---
Blake had her arms crossed and the expression of someone who has decided not to be moved and intends to make this legible to anyone who attempts otherwise.
Team RWBY had arranged itself around the room in the loose configuration of people who have had this conversation before in various forms and have learned to approach it at different angles simultaneously.
"We want you to come to the dance," Ruby said.
"That's ridiculous," Blake said.
"Blake." Yang sat on the edge of the bed across from her. "We're worried. You can't sleep. You're barely eating. Your grades are slipping, and something happened between you and your brothers that you haven't talked about."
"You wouldn't understand," Blake said, which was true and also, in the specific way that true things sometimes function as weapons, a way of keeping the door closed.
"Then help us understand," Ruby said.
"People are in danger. There are things happening that matter a great deal more than—"
"What matters *right now,*" Ruby said, with the particular quiet certainty that she used when she was being serious rather than enthusiastic, "is you. Not the investigation. You. And you won't be able to investigate anything if you can't keep your eyes open."
Blake was quiet.
"We know you're still working on it," Weiss said, in the tone she used when she was trying to be gentle and had to practice it. "And thanks to you and Sun, we know they're operating southeast of Vale. Daikon and I found the primary dust theft records concentrated on Vale specifically. We have leads. The investigation is not over."
"And the missing Atlesian military tech," Yang said.
"It all matters," Ruby said. "But you also matter. One night, Blake. That's all we're asking."
Blake looked at her hands.
The door sounded with the particular rhythm of someone who has knocked before and knows the odds.
Weiss answered it.
Jaune Arc stood in the corridor with a guitar that he had apparently decided, at some point in the recent past, was an appropriate tool for this situation.
"*Weiss!*" he sang.
Weiss shut the door.
"*Please don't do that,*" he said through it. "I promise I won't sing."
She opened it.
He sang.
She shut it.
A beat.
"...Okay," she said, to Ruby and Yang. "I have a date in mind."
"So does Blake," Ruby said, very quietly, which was not intended for the room.
"I do not," Blake said.
"You like Sun," Ruby said.
"I have no opinion about—"
"You like him," Yang said.
Blake looked at the window.
"This is not a productive conversation," she said.
"What would be productive," Ruby said, settling on the mattress with the patience of someone who has decided she's here for as long as it takes, "is telling us what the nightmare was about."
Blake went still.
The word *nightmare* had the specific effect it had in conversations with people who know you well enough to have been awake when you had it. Ruby said it simply, without drama — just the acknowledgment that she knew it existed and she was asking about it.
"It was just a dream," Blake said.
"You called out for Nova and Turuk," Yang said. "In your sleep. You said *don't leave* and *don't go.* We all heard it."
A long silence.
"I know," Blake said finally. "I know you did."
She looked at her hands again. The room waited.
"I'm afraid of losing them," she said. "My brothers. Losing them in a way I won't be able to do anything about." She paused. "The dream — it kept showing me them walking away and not being able to reach them, and I couldn't hear them or make them hear me, and there were these two people beside them that I couldn't see clearly and I just—" She stopped. "I don't know what it means. I just know that since I started having it, I can't look at them the same way."
The room was quiet for a moment.
"That sounds terrifying," Ruby said, simply.
"Yes," Blake said. "It is."
Weiss crossed the room and sat beside her on the bed, which was not a thing Weiss Schnee did without deciding to. "Nightmares feel real," she said, "because they use real things to frighten you. Your brothers are not going anywhere."
"You don't know that," Blake said.
"No," Weiss agreed. "But I know that you have people around you who will do everything possible to make sure they don't." She paused. "Including me. Ridiculous as that may be."
Blake looked at her.
Weiss maintained the gaze with the specific effort of someone who is not comfortable with vulnerability and is doing it anyway.
"One night," Blake said. "The dance. One night, and we go back to investigating Monday."
"Deal," Ruby said, immediately.
"And you'll talk to someone," Yang said. "About the dream. Someone who might actually know what to do about it."
Blake looked at her. "Like who?"
None of them had an immediate answer for that.
---
Part V — The Conversation Pyrrha Didn't Want to Have
Location: Beacon Academy Rooftop | That Evening
---
Jaune was improving.
This was not a sentence Pyrrha had expected to be thinking as frequently as she was thinking it, but it was true — the work they'd put in over the past months was visible in the way it becomes visible in people who are learning things that suit them. His footwork was cleaner. His choices in a sequence were less reactive and more intentional. He was not yet a natural fighter and possibly never would be, but he was becoming a *good* one, which was something entirely different and arguably more significant.
She swept his legs. He went down. She helped him up.
"Your swordplay has improved immensely," she said, and the smile on her face when she said it was genuine.
"Couldn't have done it without you," he said.
She held the smile and let him have the moment, which he'd earned.
"Ready to work on your aura?" she asked.
He became very focused on something near his boot. "Actually I was thinking — we could maybe skip the aura component tonight? Go for a jog? Work on footwork some more?"
"You always make progress eventually," she said, because it was true and because he needed to hear it, which were two reasons that happened to be compatible. "Your semblance will make itself known when it's ready."
"It's not that," he said. He was quiet for a moment. "It's... Weiss."
The smile stayed where it was, which required something from her.
"Oh," she said. "What about her?"
He laughed the way people laugh when something is painful and they've decided to put a specific shape on it. "I asked her to the dance. She turned me down. I know — big surprise, right?"
"Well," Pyrrha said, and then had to find where the sentence was going, "there are plenty of other fish in the sea. I'm sure you'll find someone worth asking." She added, without quite being able to help it: "Just be sure a certain someone from team NDTSA isn't around when you ask her again. That could end badly."
"Ha — yeah." He made the sound of someone who has actually been thinking about this. "Easy for you to say, though. You've probably got people falling over themselves to ask you out."
Pyrrha's smile found the specific place it went when something had been said that was simultaneously wrong and true in different directions.
"You'd be surprised," she said.
He laughed again — the half-hearted kind — and then said, while already turning away: "Oh please. If you don't get a date to the dance, I'll wear a dress."
He walked away.
The smile left.
She looked at the green lights of Beacon in the middle distance and felt the particular loneliness of someone who is very publicly known and very privately unknown, and who has learned to keep those two things in entirely separate compartments.
"Pyrrha."
Scarlett's voice, from the stairwell doorway.
She turned. Scarlett was standing there with the easy posture of someone who has been there long enough to have heard a portion of the conversation and is not going to pretend otherwise.
"You saw all of that," Pyrrha said.
"Most of it." Scarlett came over to stand beside her at the railing. "He didn't mean it the way it came out."
"I know."
"He genuinely has no idea."
"I know that too." Pyrrha exhaled. "Which is the part that makes it what it is."
Scarlett was quiet for a moment — the quiet of someone who knows the person beside them well enough not to fill the space when the space is doing something useful.
"Do you want to talk about it?" she asked eventually.
Pyrrha looked at the lights.
"I want to sit here for a few minutes and then yes," she said.
"Okay," Scarlett said, and sat on the railing beside her, and they were quiet together in the way of people who have been friends since childhood and have learned that sometimes the friendship is most itself when it isn't doing anything in particular.
After a while, Pyrrha started talking, and Scarlett listened, and the night was very clear and very quiet above Beacon, and the conversation that followed was the kind that belongs only to people who have known each other long enough to be completely honest.
---
Part VI — Cinder's Inventory
Location: Dormitory Room, Beacon Academy | That Night
---
The room Cinder Fall occupied had the specific quality of a space being used for a purpose other than the one it was designed for, though nothing about the appearance of it would have told you this directly. The beds were made. The materials were put away. Everything was orderly in the way that things are orderly when order is being maintained as a tool rather than a habit.
Cinder sat on the edge of one of the beds with a needle and black thread, working on something, and the quality of her focus was the kind that belongs to people who find complicated work soothing.
Emerald was on the floor with her scroll, legs crossed, reading from a list.
"Pyrrha Nikos," she said.
"The invincible girl," Cinder said.
"She's exceptional. Technically, probably the most complete fighter in the student body." Emerald paused. "But she hides how she wins. The polarity semblance — she makes contact and adjusts metal. Weapons, armor, anything. Subtle enough that most opponents don't understand what's happening until it's done."
"People are so rarely aware," Cinder said, "of the strings attached to their victories."
"You'd never know from watching," Mercury said, from the floor, where he was lying on his back with a comic held above his face. He said it in the distracted tone of someone contributing to a conversation from a distance. "She fights like the outcome is already settled. Which, given what we know now, it basically is. Every time."
"Add her to the list," Cinder said.
The needle moved through the fabric with a precision that matched everything else about her.
"Her friend is more concerning," Mercury said.
Cinder looked at him. "Oh?"
"Scarlett Reinhardt. Forfeited our match."
"You forfeited," Emerald said.
"I assessed the situation and made a tactical withdrawal," Mercury said, which was technically accurate. "The point is she's not — she doesn't fight like someone from Remnant. The techniques, the power output, the way she handles force. It's something different." He paused. "I've seen a lot of fighters. She's in a category I don't have a name for."
"Noted," Cinder said. She did not sound particularly concerned, which was either confidence or the specific performance of it. "Everything comes to the same place eventually."
"The others are stronger," Emerald said. "The Belladonna brothers especially. Their friend group has four or five people who operate at a level that doesn't have a clear ceiling from what I can see."
"Even interesting things have weaknesses," Cinder said. She bit the thread. "Patience."
"You said that already," Mercury said.
"It's worth repeating."
He went back to his comic.
Emerald looked at him over the edge of her scroll. He had been distracted for days — that quality of absent focus that he usually didn't have, the pauses in his attention that showed up in the wrong places. She had been watching it and had not decided yet what to do about it.
He had said he was fine, multiple times, in the tone of someone repeating a thing they wanted to believe.
She looked at her scroll. Added Scarlett Reinhardt's name to the notes column with a small asterisk beside it.
Something different, Mercury had said.
She believed him.
---
Part VII — The Empty Classroom
Location: An Unused Classroom, Beacon Academy | After Class
---
Blake had been on her way to the library.
She was not sure, afterward, what had made her stop — whether it was something in the two figures' posture as they walked the corridor ahead of her, or some quality of motion she recognized without knowing what she was recognizing, or simply the accumulated three days of a dream she couldn't place making her more attuned to things she couldn't explain.
She stopped.
The couple walking ahead of her — Professor R. and Professor S., the two combat instructors who had arrived at Beacon at the start of the year with Tarro Koizumi and a quality of careful observance about everything they encountered — were talking to each other in the low, private register of people who had been talking to each other long enough not to monitor the volume.
They turned and found her watching.
There was a moment — very brief — where something moved through Professor S.'s expression that Blake couldn't name.
It was Professor R. who spoke first. "Miss Belladonna. Are you alright? You look like you're carrying something heavy."
*That is an accurate description,* Blake thought.
"Would you be willing to talk?" Professor S. said. "Not as a formal conversation — just as people. If something is troubling you."
Blake considered them. She had learned, over the past year, to read the texture of people who could be trusted — learned it the hard way, through mistakes, through the specific education of getting things wrong and surviving the getting wrong and adjusting. These two had a quality she had noticed from the beginning and not fully examined: the quality of people who were invested in the students around them in a way that went beyond their professional role without breaching it.
"Somewhere private?" she said.
They found an empty classroom.
---
The afternoon light came through the windows at an angle that made the dust visible in the air, and the three of them arranged themselves with the informal symmetry of a conversation that was going to take longer than a hallway.
Blake told them.
She told them about the dream — not the version she had given her teammates, abbreviated and deflected, but the full version. The ground pulling her down. Her brothers walking away. The two figures she couldn't see clearly. The reaching, and the not reaching, and the specific horror of being unable to call out in a way that mattered.
She told them about the three days since. About not being able to look at Nova and Turuk the way she used to look at them. About the cold place the nightmare had installed between her and her brothers where there hadn't been one before.
Professor R. listened with the focused attention of someone who was hearing everything, including the things adjacent to the words. Professor S. listened with the expression of someone who was feeling something very specific about this conversation and was managing it with a great deal of discipline.
When she finished, Professor R. said: "Your brothers are precious to you."
"Yes," Blake said.
"And this fear — this specific fear of losing them — comes from a place of love rather than from any real evidence of danger."
"I know that," she said. "Knowing it doesn't make it smaller."
"No," he said. "It rarely does." He looked at her steadily. "May we ask their names?"
Blake looked at him. The question seemed simple. Seemed like the kind of thing you'd say to organize a conversation.
"Why?" she asked.
"Because knowing who we're talking about helps us help you," Professor S. said. "If we can understand who they are to you, we can understand better what it is you're afraid of losing."
Blake looked at her hands.
She thought about trust. About the texture of it, the cost of it, the specific decision of deciding someone was worth the information you were giving them.
She thought about these two people who had listened to her for thirty minutes without interrupting, without redirecting, without trying to solve the thing before they understood it.
"Nova," she said. "And Turuk."
Something moved through Professor S.'s face.
Something considerable.
She controlled it almost immediately — or rather, she began controlling it, which is a different thing from having controlled it — and Blake watched it happen and arrived at something she hadn't been expecting to arrive at.
Professor R. spoke carefully. "Those are... remarkable names."
"Are they?" Blake asked.
"They're very similar to names we haven't heard in a long time," he said. "Names belonging to two people very dear to us."
Professor S. had both hands folded in her lap. The knuckles were slightly white.
Blake looked at Professor S. Then at Professor R. Then at Professor S. again.
At the specific quality of how they were sitting — the containment of something too large for casual posture.
At the way they had looked at each other when she said the names.
At the twenty things she had noticed about them over the past year without assembling them into a conclusion until this moment.
"Are you—" she said, and stopped.
Started again.
"Are you who I think you are?" she said. "Are you Nova and Turuk's real parents?"
The classroom was very quiet.
Professor R. and Professor S. looked at each other. The look had the specific quality of people who have been waiting for a long time for something to arrive, and who are now experiencing the arrival, and who are trying to hold themselves together while they do it.
They turned back to her.
Professor S. was crying.
Not dramatically — just the quiet, controlled tears of someone who has been keeping something inside for nineteen years and has just been told the name of what she was keeping. She was crying and smiling at the same time, which was the specific combination that belongs to moments where the heart doesn't know which direction to go and simply goes both.
"Yes," she said. "They are our sons."
Blake's hands went cold.
"We have been looking for them," Professor R. said, "since they were very small. Since before they could know we were looking." He looked at Blake with the steadiness of a man who has spent a long time practicing patience. "And now we teach at the same school. We see them every day. And they have no idea who we are." He paused. "Which is, for now, how it has to remain."
Blake said nothing for a long moment.
"My name is Rhubar," he said. "And my wife is Sala."
"Sala," Blake repeated.
"Yes," said Professor S. — Sala — whose eyes were still bright.
Blake looked at both of them. At this man and woman who had been in the same building as her brothers for an entire year. Who had been watching them grow without being able to say anything. Who were looking at her now with the specific expression of people who have just discovered that the person sitting across from them has been caring for their children in their absence.
Sala rose and crossed the room and put her arms around Blake in the way that a person holds something they have been missing for a very long time and are deeply relieved to have found.
Blake went still.
"You are not losing them," Sala said into her hair. "They are not going anywhere. And neither are you." She held on. "We understand something about what it is to be separated from the people you love most. We will not let that happen again."
Blake's hands came up slowly and found Sala's shoulders, and she held on.
"We think of you as our daughter," Rhubar said, from across the room. "If you'll allow it. The three of you are a family. We would very much like to be part of that, in time."
"I don't know how to feel about this," Blake said, which was the most honest thing she had said in three days.
"That's alright," Sala said. "Take whatever time you need."
She held on a little longer.
"I need you to keep this between us," Rhubar said, when Sala had stepped back and the room had resettled into something approaching its ordinary dimensions. "At least for now. If we tell them too soon—"
"There'd be too much at once," Blake said. She was thinking about Nova, and Turuk, and the specific way the two of them processed things — carefully, from the inside out, needing to understand something fully before they could carry it. "I know. I understand."
She looked at them — this man and woman who were her brothers' parents, who were sitting in a classroom at their school, who had been within arm's reach for a year.
"They're going to need time," she said. "When you do tell them."
"We know," Sala said.
"And you'll need to be ready for that."
"We know that too," Rhubar said.
Blake nodded slowly.
The nightmare, she realized, would not be coming back in the same form. Its subject hadn't changed — the fear of losing Nova and Turuk was real, would always be real, in the way that love and fear are inseparable from each other. But the two figures she hadn't been able to see clearly in the dream, walking beside her brothers into the distance—
She thought she understood them now.
"Alright," she said.
She stood.
"I'll keep your secret," she said. "For now."
And then, because it needed to be said: "Thank you. For listening."
Sala smiled. "Thank you for trusting us with it."
Blake walked out of the classroom and into the corridor and stood in the afternoon quiet for a moment before starting toward the library, which was where she had originally been going, and which felt, now, like arriving somewhere after a very long journey.
Behind her, in the classroom, Rhubar and Sala sat with the specific quality of stillness that belongs to people who have just experienced something they have been waiting for and are not quite ready to move yet.
"She's extraordinary," Sala said.
"Yes," Rhubar said. "She is."
"She loves them."
"She does."
Sala looked at the door through which Blake had gone.
"Our daughter," she said, and the word in her mouth had the weight of something she had not expected to be able to say and was discovering she meant completely.
Rhubar put his hand over hers.
Outside, the afternoon continued. The school continued. Somewhere in it, two young men who did not know they had just been found were going about their ordinary day, and the woman who had loved them since they were small enough to hold had just held their sister instead, and for now that was enough.
For now.
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★ END OF CHAPTER THIRTEEN ★
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Next: Chapter Fourteen— "A Shocking Truth, Part II"
Hey guys RoseSaiyan2 here again, hope you guys enjoyed the chapter! So as you can see Rhubar and Sala have revealed to Blake that they are the parents of Nova and Turuk. I figured Blake would be not really sure how to take the news so I did my best to convey that feeling.. at least I hope I did.
Sorry if she was a little... ooc this chapter, part II should come out within the next few days so keep an eye out for it. After that, it is onto the dance episode! I actually may go in a slightly different direction regarding some things surrounding the dance, but overall that chapter (14) of this story will play out pretty similar to the cannon episode, just with a few changes obviously with saiyans around. We're getting towards the midway point of volume 2 of the Rwby story so I envision pairings will start coming to fruition sooner rather than later. Aiko's pairing will be later in the story due to who she will most likely end up with.
Tarro will have some more interaction with the saiyans, specifically Nova and Turuk coming up. He'll become a pretty important character later in the story. Daikon's interaction with Weiss' father will be interesting to say the least lol. That's all for now and I'll end it with a poll... as always lol.
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How should the eventual first meeting/Confrontation between Daikon and Weiss' Father go?
A. Daikon threatens Jacque Shnee when he attempts to take Weiss back to Atlas.
B. Jacque forcibly takes Weiss just out of the reach of Daikon with the saiyan vowing to himself to rescue her after she's taken.
C. Soldiers surround Daikon and threaten to kill him, forcing Weiss to go with her father.
D. Jacque tries to force the soldiers to kill Daikon since he thinks he's a faunus just to show how much he hates faunus thinking he's protecting his daughter from one.
E. Other scenario (comment one)
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Should Yatsuhashi leave with his team when they transfer to Shade Academy after the Fall of Beacon?
I. Yes.
II. No, go in a different direction.
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Should Jaune have a pairing after Pyrrha dies?
I. Yes (write in suggested pairing)
II. No, stick with cannon Jaune.
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[Know I've asked this before lol]
Should Pyrrha die at Cinder's hands?
I. Yes
II. No (comment your reasoning and scenario in which she lives)
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Anywho that's all for now! See ya in the next part! Plz vote on za polls!