Hi again everybody! So as you can tell by the title, this is a transitional chapter. You should be able to guess who's featured in this chapter by the title lol š. This will help establish some foundation in a certain ship within this story. I won't spoil it, so without further ado.. here's chapter 10 of this story!
I don't own DBS, Rwby, or Black Clover and their characters. The only things I own are the OC's. Aforementioned series are own by Akira Toriyama/Toei Animation, Yuki Tabata/ Studio Pierot, and Rooster Teeth/Monty Oum respectively.
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Opening: Rising Hope: Irregular at Magic Highschool
Visuals: characters of this story, same with the world too
Chapter Ten: Not as Planned - Cashing in a Debt
The forest east of Vale had a quality in the early morning that it did not have at any other time of day - a specific quality of light, the kind that exists in the gap between darkness resolving and morning fully committing, when the air is cold enough to be honest and the birds have not yet decided on a direction.
In this light, metal rang against metal.
The sparring sessions had become, over the months at Beacon, a fixed point in the week - not scheduled, exactly, but present in the same way that breathing is present, as something the body simply moves toward when given the opportunity.
Odyn and Roy had been at it for the better part of an hour.
The thing about sparring with someone you grew up with was that it produced a different quality of fight than sparring with a stranger. A stranger showed you what they had learned to show. Roy showed Odyn what he actually was - the habits he didn't know he had, the reflexes that arrived before the decision to make them, the specific tells that years of training had made automatic. And Roy saw all of this in return, which made winning against each other a more complicated achievement than winning against anyone else.
This morning's five exchanges had all gone to Odyn.
Roy stood with his hands raised, his practice blade on the ground, and surveyed the pattern of outcomes with the particular expression he wore when performing honest assessment.
"Five consecutive," he said.
"You had me on the third," Odyn said. "And nearly had me on the fifth. The ankle feint was new."
"It was," Roy agreed. "Didn't work."
"It will, against someone who hasn't trained with you since you were twelve." Odyn stuck his practice blade in the earth and rolled his shoulder. "You're developing a tell in your left foot when you're preparing to commit. You set the weight before you've finished the feint."
Roy looked at his own foot. "I wasn't aware of that."
"That's generally how tells work."
They shook hands with the grip they'd been using since they were children - thumb-over, the pressure distributed, the specific duration that meant good session rather than truce. Then they stood in the morning light and let the cool air do its work.
"Plans for today?" Roy asked.
Odyn considered. "I made Ruby a promise. I owe her for the library incident."
"She still feels bad about it?"
"Yes. Which is the wrong direction for that feeling to be going - neither of us did anything worth feeling bad about - but here we are." He retrieved his practice blade. "Spending time with her seems the most direct way to address it."
Roy was quiet for a moment. When he spoke, his tone had the careful quality he used when approaching something that mattered. "You know," he said, "you don't have to frame everything as a practical resolution."
Odyn looked at him.
"I'm just saying," Roy said, "that you could also just want to spend time with her. That's a permissible reason."
Odyn held his gaze for a moment. Then he looked at the forest.
"Roy."
"Yes?"
"What are your plans for today?"
"...I'm not certain."
"Good." Odyn started walking. "If you get bored enough, you know where we'll be."
"I do," Roy said. "I'll decline for now."
"Why?"
"Because," Roy said, "two people spending time together and three people spending time together are not the same thing. And whatever this is-" He gestured at the general concept. "-it should be the first thing."
Odyn stopped walking.
He didn't turn around.
"I don't know what it is yet," he said, and he said it in the particular tone of someone speaking more honestly than they had intended to and deciding not to take it back.
"I know," Roy said. "But not knowing what something is doesn't mean it's nothing."
A pause. The forest around them was doing its ordinary morning things, wholly indifferent to the conversation happening in it.
"Take your time with it," Roy said. "Just - be honest with yourself. That's all."
Odyn resumed walking. "You've gotten very wise recently."
"I've always been wise. You just started listening."
"Don't push it," Odyn said, and the corner of his mouth moved.
Roy watched him go, and then turned and looked at the morning forest, and thought about the day ahead with the patient openness of someone who has learned not to plan too specifically.
An hour later -
Roy stood at the mirror in the team's dormitory and did the one thing he was reasonably consistent about that had nothing to do with training, which was taking his appearance seriously in the particular way of someone who does not care about aesthetics generally but does care about precision.
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A/N this is Roy's alternate outfit.
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A/N: and this is his normal outfit.. plus the Dragon insignia on the chest plate mentioned in an earlier chapter lol
The blue shirt. The amber shoulder pads. The teal bandana tied just below the hairline, in the Arkynorean fashion that marked someone who had come of age in their tradition. The white cape fastened across the shoulders with the specific weight of something worn rather than displayed. He tightened the bracers, checked the sheath, adjusted the cape's fall, and regarded the result with the brief, professional assessment of someone confirming that the output matches the intention.
Then he stood in the empty dormitory and considered the day.
Hailfire was spending it with Baron and Flare. Khanna would be with her brothers, who had come to Vale for the festival and were notoriously impossible to deny when they wanted to see her. Note and Beat went everywhere together and would have made their own arrangements. Odyn was with Ruby. Blake was still tracing threads back to Torchwick and the White Fang, following the information she carried. Weiss and Daikon were probably preparing for the tournament with the specific antagonistic energy they brought to any shared project, which somehow always produced excellent results.
Jaune's team had their own arrangements.
Roy, by process of elimination, had an open day.
He was not accustomed to open days. He was accustomed to structure - training schedules, mission briefs, the particular organization of a life that has been lived in proximity to purpose. An open day had the quality of a room without furniture: technically fine, practically disorienting.
He stepped out and decided to walk, because walking at least imposed direction, and direction was adjacent to purpose.
Vale - the commercial quarter -
The dust shop on the corner of Portsmith was exactly the kind of establishment that Roy had learned to identify quickly in any city - the specific combination of organized shelves, controlled lighting, and the faint smell of Dust in various states that meant someone had been running this place long enough to know what they were doing.
The clerk was elderly, friendly, and entirely unbothered by the fact that Roy was not human and not Faunus. This was, Roy had learned, either the mark of someone with no particular feelings about the matter or someone with extensive enough experience that the matter had ceased to register.
He suspected it was the second.
"Fire dust," Roy said. "My supply is low."
"Sword?" the clerk asked, looking at the sheath on Roy's side.
"Yes."
"Quality grade or standard?"
"Quality." He paused. "If you have it."
The clerk went to the back with the efficiency of someone who knows their inventory by feel rather than by label, and returned with three vials that caught the light in the specific, deep red way of fire dust that has been refined past the standard threshold.
Roy paid. The clerk thanked him in the manner of someone who means the thanks.
Outside, Roy loaded one vial and sheathed the sword and stood for a moment looking at the festival preparations still in their early stages - the scaffolding for the viewing stands, the half-erected banners, the particular organized chaos of a city getting ready for something it has been getting ready for all year.
"Hey, handsome~."
He turned.
Yang Xiao Long was coming up the street from the direction of the docks with the specific, unhurried energy of someone who has an amount of time and has decided to fill it with exactly this.
"Yang," he said.
"All by yourself today?" she asked, falling into step beside him before he had quite decided where he was going, which was a quality she had - arriving into the space beside you before you'd finished negotiating it.
"I am," he said. "Unusual circumstance."
"Funny. Me too." She looked at him sidelong. "And you owe me."
"I'm aware."
"So here's what I'm thinking." She took his arm - not urgently, not dramatically, just with the casual confidence of someone who has decided this is where her hand goes - and turned them in a direction. "You're going to let me show you parts of Vale you've probably never been to, because you spend all your time either training or looking after your brother."
Roy looked at where her hand was. He looked at the direction they were walking. He looked at Yang.
"I do not only look after my brother," he said.
"You're currently spending your free day restocking his dust," she said.
He paused. "I also needed dust."
"Did you?"
He considered the fire dust vials in his coat. "...I was somewhat low."
"Mm-hmm." She increased their pace slightly. "Come on."
The bar was not the kind of establishment Roy would have chosen, which was, he suspected, precisely why Yang had chosen it. She moved through it with the ease of someone who knows a place well enough to know which parts of it are worth knowing, and the owner greeted her with the specific warmth reserved for regulars who are also good company.
The second floor was quieter. Good light. A window that looked out at the street below with the particular perspective of someone who has deliberately put distance between themselves and the main action.
"They have good food," Yang said, sitting across from him. "I know the owner. He doesn't overcharge."
"High standards," Roy said.
"For bars, that's saying something."
They ordered. The waiter left. Roy looked at the table and then at Yang, who was looking at him with the comfortable directness she brought to most things.
"Can I ask you something?" she said.
"Within reason."
She smiled. "Why is your hair red when your brother's is blue?"
He hadn't expected that question. Most people, when they finally got comfortable enough to ask personal questions, started with something heavier. This was, he realized, characteristic of her - the thing that seemed like casual curiosity but was actually a very specific kind of approach.
"My mother," he said. "She's a Woodland Elf - a different strain of Elven blood than the standard Arkynorean line. Most of her family were red-haired. My mother was the exception - she had lavender hair, which was unusual even for Woodland Elves." He considered how to explain the rest. "Woodland Elves have a gift for foresight. That gift sometimes - expresses itself in the physical attributes. Changes the color of things. My mother's blood runs particularly strong, so the red hair reasserted itself in me."
Yang was listening with the specific quality of attention she had when something interested her genuinely rather than as a conversational obligation. "Foresight," she said. "Like - seeing the future?"
"Not with precision. It's more like-" He looked for an analogy. "-knowing the shape of something before you can see it clearly. The awareness of what's approaching before it arrives."
"Does Odyn have it?"
"Not in the way my mother did. He has something else - the magic runs differently in him. More concentrated." He paused. "I don't have the foresight either. I have other things."
"Like what?"
He looked at her. This was, he thought, a very Yang way to conduct a conversation - forward, specific, getting where she was going without circling it unnecessarily.
"The ability to hit things very hard," he said.
She laughed. It was the real laugh - the one that arrived without preparation.
"Seriously?"
"I'm simplifying," he said. "The point is that each of us manifests differently. The blood doesn't replicate, it - varies."
"Huh." She leaned back in her chair. "Could a human learn to use magic? If someone Elven taught them?"
He raised an eyebrow. "That's an interesting question."
"I'm an interesting person."
"You are," he agreed, and said it plainly enough that she looked at him briefly before she smiled.
"So?"
"In theory," he said. "The capacity exists in all living things - the energy, the basic substrate. Whether it can be shaped into the forms Elven magic takes is another matter. It would take considerable time and the right kind of instructor."
"Would you do it?"
"Train you?"
"If I asked nicely."
He looked at her. She was watching him with the direct, bright quality that he had never quite found a way to be prepared for - the specific kind of attention that wanted a real answer and would know if it received something else.
"I'd consider it," he said.
She smiled. It was the comprehensive kind.
They were still talking when Cardin Winchester arrived.
Roy registered him before he spoke - the specific configuration of a person who has found something to be arrogant at and is approaching it - and felt the particular kind of tiredness that comes from recognizing a recurring problem.
"What are you doing here, freak?"
The word landed with the specific casualness of something deployed so often it had lost any particular intention behind it, which did not make it better. Roy set down his drink.
"Cardin," he said, with the patient flatness of someone who has decided to be brief. "Walk away."
"I don't think I will." Cardin turned his attention to Yang with the specific confidence of someone who believes his physical presence is his primary advantage. "You shouldn't be wasting time with this-"
"I think the lady's been very clear about her preferences," Roy said.
Cardin ignored him and reached for Yang's arm.
Roy's sword was out of its sheath and in Cardin's eyeline before the movement completed. Not close enough to touch. Close enough to be unambiguous.
"I believe," Roy said, "she said she wasn't interested. I'm asking you to respect that and leave."
The quality of the moment was specific: Cardin had encountered, before this, Khanna's physical force and Odyn's controlled anger. He had not, to Roy's knowledge, encountered what Roy had - which was the particular quality of someone who is very calm, who has made a decision, and who is communicating it without performing it.
The distinction was apparently sufficient.
"This is boring anyway," Cardin said, and left with the energy of someone conducting a strategic withdrawal that they intended to think of as a choice.
Roy sheathed his sword.
Yang was looking at him.
"Sorry," he said. "I would have preferred not to-"
"Don't apologize," she said.
Her voice had a quality he hadn't heard in it before - quieter than usual, the brightness of it still present but doing something different. He looked at her.
"Thank you," she said. "He was-" She stopped. Restarted. "I can handle him. But it's different when someone else handles it for you. Because they want to." She looked at her drink. "I'm not really used to that."
He held her gaze. She was, he thought - watching the specific way her expression was doing something it usually didn't do, which was reveal something without performing it - considerably more complicated than the confident, bright surface she carried most of the time. Which was not a criticism. It was simply true.
"You're welcome," he said.
She looked up at him.
"Shall we finish dinner?" he said.
She smiled. The brightness came back, and it was the same as before and also slightly different, in the way that things are slightly different after they have shown you something real.
"Yeah," she said. "Let's."
Vale - late afternoon -
They walked.
This was the simplest description of what happened after dinner, and also the most accurate. Yang showed him the parts of Vale she knew - the street that came out above the market with the specific view of the coastline, the bookshop that had been there since before her father was born, the fountain that the locals considered good luck and which she considered aesthetically superior to the one near Beacon.
He observed. He asked questions that were specific rather than polite, the kind of questions that meant he was actually curious. She answered with the ease of someone showing something they love to someone who they believe will receive it correctly.
"You've lived here your whole life?" he asked.
"Near here. Patch. It's a small island." She looked at the fountain. "My dad still lives there. He's-" She paused. "He's good. He's very good. He's the kind of person who's just - good. At everything that matters."
Roy said nothing. He understood that my father is a good person could be said with many different qualities of feeling, and he heard the specific quality in Yang's, which was the quality of someone who loves someone very much and does not quite know what to do with how much they love them.
"My father," he said, "is very loud and very deliberate and has never once been uncertain about anything in the thirty years I've been aware of him."
"Thirty years?" Yang looked at him. "You're sixteen."
"Elves," he said.
She laughed. "Right. I keep forgetting." She shook her head. "Is that what it's like? Growing up knowing you'll just - be around for a very long time?"
"It's-" He considered. "It changes what you think of as urgent. Most humans treat most things as urgent. We tend to treat fewer things as urgent, but the things we consider urgent, we consider very seriously."
"Like what?"
"Like protecting the people we care about," he said. "Like being honest." A pause. "Like not wasting time on things that are small."
She was looking at him.
He looked at the fountain.
"Is this small?" she asked.
He was quiet for a moment.
"No," he said. "It is not."
She looked forward again. There was something in the set of her shoulders that was slightly different from before, a quality of having received something and being in the process of deciding where to put it.
"Good," she said.
When they reached the place they had met that morning, Yang stopped and turned to him with the specific quality of someone concluding something on their own terms.
"Debt's not fully paid," she said.
"I was under the impression we'd covered it."
"You owe me another one of these."
He looked at her.
"Another day like this one," she said. "That's the remaining debt. One more."
He held her gaze. "And if I had already been planning on offering one?"
"Then it's fortunate I'm making it mandatory," she said.
He found himself doing the thing he rarely did with Yang, which was smiling before he had time to not smile.
"Noted," he said.
She looked at him for a moment longer. Then she stepped forward, and the hug was brief and complete - the specific kind that is not performative, that does not have an angle, that means the thing it says. He put his arms around her and the hug was comfortable in the way that things are comfortable when they have found the right shape.
She stepped back.
She kissed his cheek with the lightness of something that is both completely simple and not simple at all, the kind of thing that is small in its physical execution and considerable in everything else.
"Thank you for today," she said. "Genuinely."
She turned and walked toward the direction of Beacon.
He stood.
He touched the side of his face, not consciously - the hand just moved there, as hands do when something has just happened and the body has registered it before the mind has.
Stud muffin, she had called him, which was a phrase in the human vocabulary that he intended to look up at the earliest available opportunity and suspected would not make his current situation any clearer.
The sound of two other people arriving registered before they spoke.
"Roy." Ruby's voice.
He turned. Ruby and Odyn were coming up the street from the festival grounds direction, and Ruby had the expression of someone returning from something that had gone well but is not ready to describe it yet, and Odyn had the expression he carried when something had confirmed a thought he had been turning over.
"You just missed Yang," Roy said.
"I saw her going the other way," Ruby said. "Did something happen? You look-"
"I'm fine," Roy said.
"You look confused," Odyn said.
"I said I'm fine."
"He's fine but confused," Odyn said, which was the version of agreement that meant he was unconvinced.
"What happened?" Ruby asked, with the specific concern she brought to people she cared about, which was the kind of concern that was also curiosity and also genuine.
Roy looked at his brother. Odyn looked back at him with the particular patience of someone who has said take your time and be honest with yourself and is now watching the results of that advice begin to arrive.
"I don't know," Roy said. "That's the issue. I genuinely don't know."
Ruby looked between them. "Is this about Yang?"
"Yang kissed him on the cheek," Odyn said.
"Odyn."
"He was going to tell you anyway."
"I was going to choose the timing-"
"Ruby," Odyn said, "what do you think?"
Ruby was looking at Roy with the expression she had when she was taking something seriously. Then she looked at Odyn. Then she looked back at Roy.
"I think," she said carefully, "that Yang doesn't do things she doesn't mean."
Roy considered this.
"She says she's always teasing," he said.
"She is," Ruby said. "Teasing is how she's comfortable. But she doesn't go past a certain point with someone unless-" She stopped, and something moved across her face that had a quality that Odyn noticed and filed. "Unless she means it," she finished.
Roy was quiet.
"So," he said, "what do I do with that?"
Ruby and Odyn looked at each other.
The look between them lasted approximately two seconds and contained a considerable amount of information, none of which was articulated.
"I think," Odyn said, "that's the question you need to answer for yourself."
"And I think," Ruby said, "that you already know the answer."
Roy looked at her. Then at his brother. Then at the street where Yang had walked away from.
"This is a lot more complicated than sparring," he said.
"Yes," Odyn agreed.
"People are significantly more unpredictable than opponents."
"Also yes."
"How do you manage it?"
Odyn looked at the street ahead. "You take it seriously," he said. "And you're honest. And you take your time." He paused. "That's about all the advice I have."
"That's the same advice you gave me this morning."
"It applies broadly," Odyn said.
Roy exhaled. Then, in the manner of someone concluding a difficult equation: "Fine. I'll think about it."
"That's all we're asking," Ruby said.
She sounded, Odyn noticed, like someone who had also recently been thinking about something and had not yet reached a conclusion but had arrived, at least, at the decision to keep thinking.
He did not say this.
He simply walked, and she walked beside him, and Roy walked beside them, and the festival lights of Vale were beginning to come on in the approaching dusk, and the city moved around them with its ordinary evening energy, and the three of them were quiet in the specific way of people who have something they are each privately turning over and who have found, in each other's company, a space where the turning over is permitted.
End of Chapter Nine
To be continued in Chapter Ten: A Minor Hiccup - Visitors from Abroad
The most useful kinds of honesty are the ones we perform for ourselves - the small admissions we make in private before we are ready to make them anywhere else. They are rarely dramatic. They tend to arrive in ordinary moments: in the specific warmth of a hand on an arm, in the resolution of five consecutive sparring matches, in the particular quality of a walk through a city that someone loves and is showing you because they trust you with the showing.
Roy Albanar stood on a street in Vale and touched his cheek and did not yet know what it meant.
But he had stopped pretending that it meant nothing. That was the first step, and first steps are, generally, the only ones required to be on the path.
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Ending song: Shonen Onmyouji ending 1
Visuals: Characters of this story
To be continued in chapter 11: A Minor Hiccup; Visitors from Abroad
Hey guys, (Rosesaiyan2/ Novablade67/ Novaflame6_Badal) I hope you enjoyed this filler chapter! As you guessed, Yang has been crushing on Roy since chapter 1 and now it's finally gaining some traction. I figured this would add some foundation to the Roy x Yang pairing, so it couldn't hurt. As I've stated previously, I plan on dedicating one chapter at points in the story to each pairing to give them more substance. That way, we avoid the issue of "Why are these two characters suddenly in love when they have no reason to be?" I'll make each pairing make sense as best as I possibly can.
Next chapter, we'll be jumping back into the Rwby cannon, don't worry the story will diverge from the cannon story at some point. I'm thinking after the mistral academy arc possibly is when it will diverge down a different path slightly.
Anyways I'll leave you guys with one last poll before we go:
Who will go on a "true" date first?
Roy and Yang
Odyn and Ruby
Baron and Flare
Daikon and Weiss
Jaune and Pyrrha
Sybryh and Tarro
Blake x Spoiler
Let me know who you think it will be and I'll announce the winner in a few chapters! Anywho that's all for now! See ya in the next update!