Hey everyone, I'm back with a new chapter! I'm days late happy December everyone! Hope everyone had a wonderful thanksgiving holiday. Anyways I wasn't planning on a new chapter but due to how the last one ended I just felt like a new one was in order. This chapter will most likely just cover episode 6 of Volume 2, so right before the dance episode. We'll see as it depends on how long I want this chapter to be. There will be a separate chapter for Baron and Flare coming up, just they can bond abit more outside of the main story.
Others I'm planning on doing separate chapters for are: Tarro x Sybyrh, Daikon x Weiss, Blake x Spoiler, Jaune x Pyrrha/Spoiler, and Baron x Flare.
Anyways that's all for the rambling, onto the story!
P.S.- I don't own Dbz/DBS/DB Xenoverse, Black Clover, or Rwby and their characters. I only own the oc's that appear in this story along with having permission from a friend to use his characters (tarro and Daikon). Those belong to their respective creators!
Insert: Naruto Opening 8- Re:member
Visuals: Main Cast of this story (you should know who they are lol) along with The dark Elven rulers, Ozpin and the other teachers. Replace the sequence in the video with Mercury having to hold his head in pain as the scenery cracks and shatters before bring pulled to the surface by Khanna. Ending sequence ends with Ruby walking and Joining Odyn as they saunter towards their friends.
Chapter Twelve: Extracurricular — Elven Royalty
The revelation settled over the group the way most significant revelations settle — not with immediate drama, but with the specific quality of information that reorganizes what you were already looking at.
They had all seen the interaction. They had heard what Hyatan called Odyn. They had watched the Elven students kneel with the automatic, unself-conscious quality of people who have been doing this since they were old enough to understand what it meant.
Two and two had been placed side by side.
Now they were four.
"So," Weiss said, into the silence, "are you going to explain what that was?"
Daikon, who had positioned himself between Weiss and the answer she was waiting for, spoke first. "Give them a minute," he said. "This isn't the kind of thing you explain in the middle of a street without taking a breath first."
Weiss appeared to prepare a response to this. Then she appeared to recognize that he was right, which was, for Weiss, its own separate process.
Odyn exhaled.
"The woman you just saw," he said, "is Queen Hyatan Albanar. Sovereign of the Dark Elven people. The man who helped Ruby earlier today was her husband, King Berethon."
He said it simply, in the tone of someone stating a fact they have been carrying for a while and have decided is time to set down.
"And they're your parents," Blake said.
"Yes."
"Which makes you—"
"Yes," Roy said.
The silence had a different quality now.
"So you're princes," Yang said.
"We are," Odyn confirmed.
"Like — actual princes. Not in a metaphorical—"
"No. Literally."
Yang looked at Roy. Roy looked at Yang. Yang appeared to be processing this through several layers simultaneously — the social layer, the personal layer, and a layer that was doing something more private and more complicated that she did not choose to make visible.
"Don't," Odyn said, before anyone could complete the thought about whether they should start using titles. "Please. What we're asking you — what we're requesting — is that you treat us exactly as you have been. If that changes now, if everyone becomes formal and careful, others will notice. And then we have a different problem."
"He's right," Roy said. "The only thing that's changed is that you now have a complete picture. Everything else is the same as it was yesterday."
"Everything?" Yang said, to Roy specifically.
"Everything," Roy said, and he said it with the particular directness that he used when he was being very specific.
Something in Yang's expression settled.
Daikon was already looking away, which was the version of discretion he practiced when he had noticed something and chosen not to comment. This was relatively rare and therefore notable.
"Mercury needs to go," Khanna said, which redirected the conversation efficiently. She was already looking at him, and he was already understanding.
"Yeah," Mercury said. "If I'm gone too long—"
"I know." She walked with him to the edge of the group. "Don't forget what we discussed."
"I won't." He looked at her for a moment. "Thanks, Khanna."
"Go," she said. And then, more quietly: "Be careful."
He went.
Yang watched Khanna watching Mercury leave. Something in the observation landed in her filing system as something to return to. She filed it and turned back to the others.
Odyn was looking at her. She raised her eyebrows. He tilted his head slightly toward where Khanna now stood.
Later, he indicated, with the efficiency of someone who has communicated this way with his cousin for years and has extended the shorthand to people he trusts.
Yang nodded once.
Ruby was standing at the edge of the group looking in the direction Mercury had gone with the expression she had when she was thinking about someone who was not present and was not entirely sure what to think. Then she looked at Odyn, and the expression changed into the one that was specifically for him — warmer, less filtered, the one she wore when she stopped managing herself for a moment.
Odyn noticed.
He catalogued it without reaching any conclusions, and then looked at his brother.
Roy gave him a look that said: I see you noticing and not reaching conclusions.
Odyn looked away.
Later that evening — a quiet corridor near the training halls
Mercury had found the corridor by accident, which was how he found most things — moving through a space he didn't entirely know yet, operating on the instincts of someone who had learned very early to keep track of exits.
He sat on a bench near the window and looked at the courtyard below.
He had been having second thoughts about Cinder's operation for longer than he had acknowledged to himself. This was not a comfortable admission. Comfort and discomfort, as abstract categories, had not historically been the metrics Mercury Black used to evaluate decisions. He used: is this the smarter play? Is this going to get me killed? Is this the best available option?
None of those metrics had been producing reliable answers recently.
And then there was Khanna.
He didn't know her. He knew he didn't know her. And yet the specific quality of the way she said Merc — the ease of it, the assumption of familiarity that had nothing performed in it — had produced in him the same inexplicable sensation that had hit him when he saw Berethon and Hyatan in the street. The thing where you reach for a memory and find the reach itself, without the thing at the end of it.
Something had been taken from him.
He didn't know what. He didn't know when. He only knew the shape of the absence.
Khanna, walking back through the academy afterward —
Hailfire fell into step beside her without being asked.
"Well?" she said.
"He's thinking," Khanna said.
"That's enough for now?"
"That's enough for now." Khanna looked at the corridor ahead of them. "He needs to come to it himself. I can't hand it to him and have it mean anything."
Hailfire was quiet for a moment. Then: "Do you think he'll remember?"
"Eventually."
"And until then?"
"Until then, I wait." She said it with the particular flatness of someone who has made peace with something difficult and is not interested in being told whether the peace was worth it. "I'm good at waiting."
Hailfire looked at her friend. She had known Khanna for most of their lives. She had seen Khanna face things that would have broken most people, and she had watched Khanna not break, and she understood that the not-breaking was not the absence of something but the presence of something — a specific, deliberate, costly kind of endurance.
"Khanna," she said, carefully.
"Don't," Khanna said.
"I was going to say that I think you're very brave."
Khanna was quiet for a moment.
"I'm not brave," she said. "I just know what I feel. And I'd rather carry it quietly than not feel it at all."
They walked. The academy was settling into its evening sounds around them.
"Also," Khanna said, "he asked me to tell him something."
"What?"
"I told him to stay with Cinder for now. Don't act on his doubts yet. When her plan starts to move — that's when he makes his choice." She paused. "I don't love telling him to go back to her."
"I know," Hailfire said.
"But I think that's how this has to work."
"I know," Hailfire said again. "I think you're right."
"I hate being right about this particular thing."
"I know," Hailfire said, for the third time, and the third time was different — quieter, more present, the kind of knowing that means I see it and I'm here.
Khanna said nothing.
They walked the rest of the way in the specific comfortable silence of people who have been friends long enough to know when nothing needs to be said.
The following morning — the training hall
The sparring match had the quality of something that had been arranged for reasons that were not entirely about the match.
Mercury had asked to fight Odyn, and Odyn had immediately understood why — the request was a piece of theater, a performance of being exactly the kind of person Emerald and Cinder expected him to be. Choosing to challenge a Dark Elven prince was exactly the kind of aggressive, slightly reckless display that Mercury's persona required to be convincing.
The match never happened, because Pyrrha said something that surprised everyone, including Pyrrha.
She said: "I'll fight him."
And then she appeared to hear herself saying it and went slightly still.
It was not the kind of statement that was out of character for Pyrrha in the sense of being too aggressive — Pyrrha was a trained combatant and this was a training hall and offering to spar was entirely within the normal range of Pyrrha's behavior. What was out of character was the specific quality of how she had said it. The timing. The particular certainty of it, which had arrived before she quite consciously formed the decision.
She looked at her own hands briefly. A habit she had developed recently.
Professor Goodwitch approved the substitution with the mild efficiency of someone who is used to students wanting to test themselves against the most capable person in the room.
Mercury agreed, because the substitution served his purposes either way.
And Pyrrha stepped onto the floor with the controlled, focused quality that defined her in combat — the deliberate stillness that means someone has arrived at a place they know very well.
The fight was good. Mercury was faster than he appeared and more technically precise than his casual manner suggested — he fought with the economy of someone who has learned to do more with less and has found, over time, that this produces efficiency that larger movements can't match. He disarmed Pyrrha once, which was not nothing, and landed two solid exchanges before she redirected his momentum through her semblance and used his own force against him.
When he forfeited, the forfeiture had the quality of something calculated — not a defeat, but a deliberate conclusion. He said what he said about being leagues apart with the smooth delivery of someone performing a character.
Pyrrha watched him walk away with the expression of someone who has just met someone else's performance and does not know quite what to make of it.
The Elves, distributed through the class around her, said nothing. They knew what was happening and why. They would tell her, but not here, and not in front of Emerald, who was watching from the upper tier with her arms crossed and an expression that was cataloguing everything it saw with the smooth efficiency of someone trained to do exactly that.
Afterward — a quiet alcove off the main corridor
Khanna had waited until the rest of the students had dispersed before touching Pyrrha's arm.
"Come with me for a few minutes," she said.
Pyrrha looked at her. "Is this about—"
"Yes," Khanna said.
Pyrrha followed.
The alcove was unremarkable — a window seat in a corridor that nobody used heavily, the kind of space that accumulates quiet. Khanna sat across from Pyrrha and looked at her with the direct, assessing quality she brought to things that mattered.
"It's been happening more often," she said. "The moments when you feel like someone else is speaking through you."
"Yes," Pyrrha said. "How do you know about that?"
"I'm an Elf. We perceive things differently. The energy signature around you isn't entirely yours." She paused. "There's another presence. It's been there for some time, but it became conscious recently. That's why the moments are more frequent."
Pyrrha looked at her hands. "What is it?"
"Not a what," Khanna said. "A who. The soul of a Dark Elf, residing inside you. How she came to be there, I can't say for certain — it would require magic of significant scope, the kind that requires a royal. My best guess is that my uncle — Odyn and Roy's father — had something to do with it, but that's a conversation for another time." She watched Pyrrha's face. "She's not a threat to you. She's been acting to protect you."
"The moments in combat," Pyrrha said slowly. "When things happen before I decide them."
"Yes."
"The dreams," Pyrrha continued.
"Also yes," Khanna said. "Not your dreams. Hers. She's been conscious long enough to have her own memories bleeding into yours."
Pyrrha sat with this for a moment. "What do I do?"
"Talk to her," Khanna said. "When you're ready. She's been trying to reach you for a while. Now that you know she's there, she doesn't have to try as hard."
"And you're sure she's — not dangerous?"
"I'm sure. Whatever she was when she was alive, she chose to be inside you specifically. That's not the choice of something hostile." Khanna leaned forward slightly. "It's the choice of something that has a reason."
Pyrrha nodded. She appeared to be sorting through several things simultaneously — the intellectual acceptance of what she was being told, the emotional response to the implications, and the specific, complicated feeling of understanding something about yourself that recontextualizes the past several months.
"Does Odyn know?" she asked.
"He suspects," Khanna said. "We all do. We haven't said anything because it wasn't the right moment." She paused. "This is the right moment."
"Thank you, Khanna."
"Don't thank me," Khanna said, in the same tone she always used when she deflected gratitude — not unkindly, but with the efficiency of someone who finds thanks somewhat less useful than action. "Just — when you talk to her, listen. She's been waiting a long time."
That night — Pyrrha's room, late
She had been sitting at her desk for two hours without doing anything substantive when the voice arrived.
It had a quality — not external, not the voice of someone in the room, but not entirely internal either, the way a thought is internal. Something in between. Something that knew it was being heard.
He doesn't have a clue, does he?
Pyrrha looked around the room. Nora was asleep. Ren had his headphones on. Jaune had already gone to make his attempt with Weiss and had not returned.
"Who are you?" Pyrrha asked, quietly, into the room.
I've been with you this entire time. A pause, and the pause had the quality of someone who has been waiting and is now very carefully not rushing. I'm the other soul Khanna told you about. I've been watching you for a while now.
"Did you make me say that in the training hall?" Pyrrha asked. "About fighting Mercury?"
I thought it would be useful to know what he was capable of. Also — yes. I borrowed your mouth for a moment. I apologize for that.
"Do you need my permission?"
I've been trying to operate within it. When your life was in danger, I didn't always have time to ask. Another pause. I won't do it again without warning you first. Now that you know I'm here.
Pyrrha looked at her hands — the gesture that had become habit, the reaching-for-something in the physical world that was actually a reaching-for-understanding. "Who were you? Before."
The voice was quiet for a moment. Not reluctant. Careful.
That is a longer story, it said. And some of it you already know, even if you don't know you know it. Those are my memories you've been dreaming. A beat. My name was Sarai. And there is someone in this building who would very much want to know that I'm here — though I'd like you to wait before telling him. There are things I'd like to know first.
Pyrrha went very still.
Sarai, she thought.
Yes, the voice said.
Odyn's sister.
Yes.
The room was very quiet. Nora breathed peacefully. Ren's music was faint through his headphones.
"What do you want to know?" Pyrrha asked, eventually.
Everything, Sarai said, and the warmth in it was unexpected — not the warmth of something abstract, but the warmth of someone who has been in the dark for a very long time and has finally found a light on. Tell me about them. About all of them. I've been watching, but watching isn't the same as understanding.
Pyrrha thought about where to start.
Then she started at the beginning, and talked until the candle on her desk had burned most of the way down, and the voice listened with the patient, complete attention of someone for whom every word was a gift.
Meanwhile — visiting students' dormitory
Cinder's needle moved through black fabric with the precision of someone for whom the act of creating something is also the act of thinking.
"Pyrrha Nikos," Emerald said, looking at her scroll.
"The invincible girl," Cinder said.
"I wouldn't call her invincible," Mercury said. He was on the floor, ostensibly reading, actually calculating the cost of everything he was doing. "She's smart about using her power. She makes micro-adjustments — small enough that her opponents don't see what she's doing until they've already been maneuvered." He paused. "If you know what to look for, the semblance is obvious. If you don't, you lose and you don't know why."
"Interesting," Cinder said. "Add her to the list."
"Done," Emerald said.
Mercury said nothing. He looked at the page he was not reading.
"You said the Elves have developed some attachment to her?" Cinder asked.
"The black-haired one," Mercury said. "Khanna. They've been spending time together."
Cinder turned the fabric in her hands. "That's worth noting."
The room was quiet for a moment. Emerald watched Cinder, which she generally did — there was always something to learn from watching Cinder, and something useful in knowing what Cinder was thinking before Cinder said it.
"Cinder," Emerald said carefully. "The Elves are going to be a problem."
"They already are," Cinder agreed, in the tone of someone acknowledging something they have been thinking about for longer than this conversation has been happening.
"What did you tell them?" Mercury said. "Earlier. You said you'd explain why they hate you."
Cinder was quiet for a moment. The needle moved.
"A long time ago," she said, "I did something that I was told to do by someone who had significant power over me at the time. I was young. The decision felt like the only available one."
"What was it?" Emerald asked.
"I was sent to eliminate a family," Cinder said. The words came out without emotion, which was not the same as without weight. "A Dark Elven family. They were considered — by the person who sent me — to be a threat. A specific bloodline. The kind of thing that my employer did not want to exist unchecked." She turned the fabric again. "I completed the mission."
The room was very quiet.
"I was told there were no survivors," she said. "It appears I was misinformed."
Emerald looked at Mercury.
Mercury was looking at his page.
"How many?" Emerald asked.
Cinder's needle moved. "I don't count."
"The Elven students here," Mercury said. "Khanna. Odyn. They were there."
"Two of the targets, yes," Cinder said. "Children at the time. I was told to leave no one. Clearly, someone left." She paused. "It explains the particular quality of their interest in me."
Mercury set down his book. He looked at the wall.
He thought about Khanna touching his face and saying you'll remember eventually. He thought about the specific warmth of it — not calculated, not performed, the warmth of someone reaching for something real.
He thought about the massacre she had survived.
He thought about whose fault that was.
He looked at Cinder.
He looked at his page.
He said nothing.
Not yet.
Team RWBY's dormitory — the next day
The tablecloth squares arrived on the table in front of Ruby with the specific energy of someone who has been planning for twelve hours and has reached the implementation phase.
"I need you to pick one," Weiss said.
Ruby looked at the two squares. They appeared, to her eyes, to be the same shade of white. She looked at them from three different angles. They remained the same shade of white.
"The one on the right," a voice said, from her left.
She turned. Odyn had appeared beside her at some point in the past thirty seconds, which he occasionally did — arriving into a conversation without the preamble of having been elsewhere.
"Aren't they the same?" she whispered.
"She doesn't need to know that," he said. "And you know what happens if you give Weiss a non-answer when she's in event-planning mode."
"The right one," Ruby told Weiss.
"Wonderful," Weiss said, departing with the tablecloth and the absolute certainty of someone who has received the information they came for.
Ruby looked at Odyn. "You're very wise about Weiss."
"I've been watching," he said. "Also, she and Daikon have been planning this for three days and Daikon keeps complimenting her organization just specifically enough to make her unable to be annoyed with him about it, and if you create a power vacuum in the planning process right now she will fill it and the result will be a second meeting about doilies."
Ruby stared at him. "How do you know about the doilies meeting?"
"Roy told me. Hailfire told Roy." He paused. "There was a second meeting about the doilies."
"Was the conclusion—?"
"No doilies."
"Right."
He looked at her. She looked at him. The specific quality of the moment — comfortable, warm, completely ordinary in one sense and completely not in another — was the kind that neither of them was in the habit of naming.
"I'm on my way to visit my parents," he said. "They're in Vale until the end of the week. My mother—" He paused. "She asked specifically that you be invited."
Ruby's face did the thing it did. "She asked for me?"
"Yes."
"By name?"
"Yes, Ruby. Your name. She knows it."
"The letters," Ruby said.
"Yes," he said.
Something moved across her face — not quite embarrassment, not quite pleasure, but the specific combination of both that exists in the particular space between you've been telling people about me and you've been thinking about me enough to write it down. She managed it into a small, genuine smile.
"I'd like to come," she said.
"I thought you might," he said.
The courtyard — evening
Zero received them at the academy entrance and led them to the courtyard with the professional efficiency of someone for whom this is simply how things work. He knelt when they arrived, which Odyn acknowledged with the ease of someone for whom the kneeling had been background context since childhood and Hyatan dismissed with a quiet gesture that suggested she had always found it slightly excessive in informal settings.
Berethon was in conversation with a corner of the courtyard that he appeared to find philosophically interesting, which was, Odyn knew, how his father looked when he was thinking about something and had not yet decided whether to say it.
He straightened when he saw them.
"Odyn," he said. "And the famous Ruby Rose, returned."
"I'm not sure I'll ever be famous," Ruby said.
"That is generally how fame works," Berethon said. "You don't decide it. It decides you." He looked at his son. "You wanted to speak privately."
"When you have a moment," Odyn said.
"I have all the moments I need. Come." He looked at Hyatan. "We'll be back."
Hyatan put her hand briefly on his arm. "Take your time."
Berethon looked at her for a moment — the long look of someone who has been married long enough to hear what isn't being said and is choosing to honor it.
"Yes," he said, and they went.
Which left Ruby with Hyatan.
And Ruby, who was very comfortable with Berethon and had now been left alone with the queen, made the rapid adjustment from comfortable to extremely polite that tended to happen when the person in front of you was the head of an entire people and had very warm eyes that somehow made you want to say something true.
"Please," Hyatan said, "sit with me."
They sat on the bench at the courtyard's center. Around them, the academy evening had its sounds — the distant voices, the training bells, the ordinary ongoing quality of a school that does not stop being a school simply because extraordinary things are happening in certain of its courtyards.
"My son writes about you," Hyatan said.
"I know," Ruby said. "He mentioned it."
"Does he know what he writes about you?"
Ruby blinked. "What do you mean?"
Hyatan smiled — the smile of a parent who has read their child's correspondence and has arrived at certain conclusions that the child has not yet arrived at themselves.
"He describes you as my son always describes things he cares about," she said. "With great care and without realizing he's doing it. The care is in the specific detail — the things he notices that he wouldn't notice unless he was paying a very particular kind of attention."
Ruby was quiet for a moment. The courtyard had its sounds.
"He called me little rose," she said, and said it without quite deciding to.
Hyatan's expression did something specific. "Did he."
"He said he started it because — he said I reminded him of his sister." Ruby paused. "Sarai."
The name arrived in Hyatan's face the way names of the dead arrive when spoken by someone who did not know them — with recognition, with the specific quality of grief that is always present and usually managed, and with something else: something that was not quite surprise.
"He told you about her," Hyatan said.
"A little. He doesn't talk about her much. But—" Ruby looked at her hands. "I think she matters to him in a way that's part of why he — why he does the things he does. Why he won't let people be hurt if he can help it."
Hyatan looked at her for a long moment.
"Ruby," she said. "May I ask you something personal?"
"Of course."
"How do you feel about Odyn?"
Ruby opened her mouth to answer and found that three separate answers arrived simultaneously — the reflexive one, the managed one, and the one underneath both of those, which was the one that had been there for some months and had not been given a name and was now, in the specific quality of Hyatan's attention, being required to be honest.
"He's—" She stopped. "I think he's—"
"How do you really feel about him?" Hyatan said, and the gentleness of it was the gentleness that knows how to ask the question in a way that makes the answer possible.
Ruby looked at the courtyard. Then at her hands. Then, finally, at Hyatan, because Hyatan's expression had the quality of something that was safe to be honest in front of.
"My heart does something when he's nearby," she said. "It's been — it started gradually and now it's always there. When he says something kind, I feel like the day has been worth it regardless of what else happened. When he's not around, I notice the absence." She stopped. Started again. "I look for him when I walk into a room. I save things to tell him. I don't want our conversations to end." She looked at her hands again. "I've been telling myself it was just — that it was friendship. That it was gratitude. That I was making too much of it."
"But?" Hyatan said.
"But I don't think it's just friendship," Ruby said. "I think it's—" She stopped. "I think I love him. I think I've been in love with him for a while and I didn't want to say it because I didn't know what to do with it."
The words landed.
She sat with them.
Hyatan did not say I knew it or I thought as much. She looked at Ruby with the expression of someone who has received something true and is honoring its weight by being quiet for a moment.
"There's nothing wrong with what you're feeling," she said. "Love — genuine love, the kind that arrives without your permission and asks you to be honest about it — that is not a burden. It is a gift. What you do with it is your own to decide."
"What if he doesn't—" Ruby started.
"Ruby," Hyatan said. "He writes about you in every letter. The detail he uses to describe you is the same detail he uses to describe things he does not want to forget."
Ruby stared at her.
"I am not telling you what Odyn feels," Hyatan said. "That is for him to tell you, in his own time. I am only telling you what a mother reads when her son writes about something important to him." She smiled. "What you do with that information is also your own to decide."
Ruby sat in the courtyard with the sounds of the academy around her and with the specific feeling of someone who has said something true and has been received honestly, which is a feeling that is simultaneously terrifying and like something being released.
She looked at the bench. She looked at the sky. She looked at Hyatan.
"Thank you," she said.
"Thank you," Hyatan said, "for caring for him. He doesn't always let people care for him. He considers it his job to care for others." A pause. "It is good that there is someone who returns it."
Father and son —
The corner of the courtyard that Berethon had found philosophically interesting was, in fact, a section of old stonework that he had been looking at with the expression of someone deciding whether to say what he was thinking.
"Do you trust them?" he asked, when they had been walking for a few minutes in the direction of no particular place. "The humans."
"Some of them," Odyn said. "The ones I've met here."
"How deeply?"
Odyn was quiet for a moment. "Enough," he said. "Enough that when it counts, I don't hesitate."
Berethon looked at him. "That is either wisdom or a gamble."
"I think it's both," Odyn said. "But the alternative — maintaining distance indefinitely, never trusting anyone outside our people — that produces a different kind of damage."
"You sound like your mother."
"She's usually right."
Berethon made a sound that was not quite agreement and not quite otherwise. "The Silver-eyed girl," he said, which was how he had come to think of Ruby from Odyn's letters before he met her, and which had not changed now that he had. "She stood between us and those soldiers without hesitation."
"She always does," Odyn said. "That's — that's just who she is."
"Mm." Berethon looked at the stonework. "She told your mother that people are confused about the Elves because what they were taught doesn't match what they've seen."
"She's observant."
"She is." A pause. "She also said that you've been taking the things Cardin Winchester says without responding. She was — visibly upset on your behalf. More upset than you appeared to be, based on her account."
Odyn said nothing.
"It is not weakness," Berethon said, "to acknowledge that someone's words are landing."
"I know."
"You don't always behave as though you know."
A long silence.
"It's easier to carry it," Odyn said, finally. "If I respond, it becomes a confrontation, and then it's a situation, and then there are consequences for my team and for our people. If I carry it—"
"You carry it alone," Berethon said.
"Yes."
"Your mother and I did not send you here to carry things alone," Berethon said. He was looking at the stones, not at his son, which was how he approached the things he most wanted to be heard. "We sent you here to learn to build something. You cannot build while carrying everything by yourself." He finally looked at Odyn. "The humans you've trusted — let them help you carry it."
Odyn held his father's gaze for a moment.
"Ruby already does," he said.
Berethon looked at him. Something moved in his expression — not surprise exactly, but the specific quality of a parent recognizing that a child has arrived somewhere important and is only now beginning to understand where they've been.
"Yes," Berethon said. "I noticed."
They were quiet for a while, standing in the corner of the old stonework with the evening light doing its evening things.
"Father," Odyn said.
"Yes."
"Thank you for coming."
Berethon turned and put his hand on his son's shoulder with the directness of someone who does not make this particular gesture lightly.
"We're your parents," he said. "Where else would we be?"
The walk back
They were quiet most of the way from the courtyard to the dormitories.
Not uncomfortably quiet. The specific quiet of two people who have each said something true to someone else and are now carrying the weight of it in a way that is, for the moment, more than sufficient without adding words.
They were outside the dormitory building when Ruby stopped.
"Odyn."
He turned.
She was looking at a point slightly past him, in the manner of someone who has organized what they want to say and is preparing to say it and has discovered, at the last moment, that preparation and delivery are different things.
"You don't have a partner for the dance," she said.
"No," he said.
"I don't either."
"I know."
A pause.
"I'd like to ask you something," she said, and said it directly, because there was no other way to say it that was honest, and she had spent an hour with Hyatan being honest and was not going to stop now.
He waited.
She looked at him. Her face was doing several things simultaneously and she had stopped managing any of them.
"Would you come to the Beacon Dance with me?" she said.
The specific quality of the silence that followed lasted approximately two seconds and contained a considerable amount.
He stepped forward slightly — not a great distance, but enough to close some of the space between them, which was also a thing, and did the thing of crouching slightly to meet her at her height, which was something he did when he wanted to make sure she could see his expression.
"Yes," he said. "I'd be honored."
She blinked.
"Really?"
"Yes, Ruby."
"Just — just like that?"
"I've been thinking," he said, carefully, "that if anyone else had asked me, I would have very politely said no. And the reason I would have said no is because you asking felt — probable, eventually. And I was waiting for eventually."
Ruby stared at him.
"That's not — you've been—"
"I'm not saying that correctly," he said.
"No, you are," she said. "You are saying it correctly. I just — you were waiting?"
He looked slightly to the side, which was the version of embarrassed that he had, which was a minimal version by most standards. "I may have been aware that the question was approaching."
"Your mother's letters," Ruby said, and the laugh that came with it was surprised and genuine and completely unprepared.
"My mother's letters," he confirmed.
"She told me—" Ruby stopped laughing but kept smiling. "She told me to take my time thinking about things."
"She tells everyone that," he said. "It is her primary philosophical position."
"Is she right?"
He looked at her. "Usually."
Ruby looked at him for a moment — the full, unguarded look that she kept mostly between them in moments when she wasn't thinking about managing it.
"I'll pick you up at seven," she said.
"You're picking me up now?"
"You asked me first, last time," she said. "It's only fair."
He smiled — the full one, the one that was harder to produce than the mild one and meant considerably more.
"Seven," he agreed.
She went up on her toes and kissed his cheek — the same gesture as before, the one that was simple in its execution and not simple in anything else — and then turned and went inside, and the door closed.
Odyn stood in the evening with his hand at his cheek, performing the same calculation he had been performing since the first time she had done this, which was: what is this, exactly?
He did not reach a conclusion tonight either. But the conclusion felt, for the first time, like it was becoming available.
He went back to his dormitory.
Roy took one look at him and said: "She asked you."
"Yes."
"And you said yes."
"Obviously."
Roy sat back. He appeared to be doing the expression that meant he was not going to say I told you because he didn't need to.
"Good," he said.
"Shut up," Odyn said, without heat.
"I didn't say anything."
"You thought loudly."
Roy smiled at the ceiling. "Seven years of me telling you to be honest," he said. "And all it took was Ruby Rose."
The evening of the dance
The ballroom had been transformed with the specific ambition of two people — Yang and Weiss — who had fundamentally different aesthetic philosophies and had arrived, through several heated discussions, at a result that was better than either of their original visions. There were no doilies. There were no fog machines. There were chandeliers with warm light, and streamers in the academy's colors, and tables with white cloths — the one on the right, as it turned out — and the kind of music that requires you to actually move toward someone rather than simply existing near them.
Baron and Flare arrived first among the OHRF group, which surprised no one who had been paying attention. Flare had a purple dress that caught the light in the way of something with genuine craftsmanship behind it, and her hair was up in a way that had clearly taken time, and Baron stood beside her with the specific quality of someone who is trying not to stare and has completely failed.
"You look—" he said.
"Thank you," she said, before he finished.
"I didn't—"
"I know what you were going to say."
He smiled. She blushed. Her tail moved in the involuntary manner of a tail that has not yet learned to be subtle about its owner's emotional state.
He offered his arm. She took it.
They went in.
Roy arrived with Yang, which was its own specific event. Yang in a simple white dress with the confidence of someone who does not need ornamentation to occupy a room, and Roy beside her in the composed way he moved everywhere, with the additional variable of having received some of his magic via Yang and having absolutely no idea how to tell her that the transfer had been considerably easier than he had anticipated because of something he had not yet fully articulated.
"You look very nice," he told her.
"Thank you," she said. "You clean up well."
"Thank you."
They looked at each other.
"Are we doing the thing," Yang said, "where we're both extremely formal about this?"
"I was attempting not to," Roy said. "How is it going?"
"Poorly," she said, and laughed, and that was the end of the formality.
Ruby had the specific problem of heeled shoes, which she had not previously owned and which expressed their opinions about her gait in real time.
She was in the corridor when Odyn appeared at her door, and the stumble that followed was partly the shoes and partly the specific kind of coordination failure that happens when you see someone and your brain allocates too many of its resources to processing the visual input.
He caught her.
"Careful," he said, which he had said before, in this context, and she was beginning to understand that careful from Odyn meant I am paying enough attention to you to catch you before you fall, which was the kind of thing that should have been simple and was not.
"The shoes," she said.
"I know," he said. He looked at her, which took slightly longer than the situation required. "You look lovely."
She looked at him, which also took slightly longer than the situation required. He had done something with his hair — shorter, neater, the blue of it catching the corridor light differently than she was used to — and he had shaved, which revealed a quality of his face that the beard-in-progress had been obscuring, and the absence of the eyepatch was something she was still getting used to, the scar visible now and in this light doing something that was honest and quiet about what he had survived.
"You look very handsome," she said.
"Thank you," he said.
They were standing very close because of the catching, and neither of them had addressed this yet.
"Should we—" she started.
"Yes," he agreed.
He offered his arm. She took it. They walked toward the ballroom with the specific quality of two people who have said a number of true things to each other recently and are in the comfortable, slightly charged aftermath of that, which is a specific kind of closeness that doesn't have an ordinary name.
Inside, the dance had its particular quality of organized joy — people who are generally composed about themselves discovering that music and good company make composition optional.
Yang was already on the floor with Roy, which meant the formality question had been resolved definitively. Khanna was there with Mercury, who moved through the crowd with the specific attention of someone both enjoying himself and keeping track of the room, which was the particular skill of someone who has learned to do both simultaneously. Flare and Baron occupied a corner with the energy of two people who have recently arrived at the same understanding and are not entirely sure what to do next but are doing it together.
Blake arrived with Sun on her arm, wearing a dark purple dress and the specific expression of someone who has been convinced to do something they were resisting and has arrived to find that the something is acceptable after all.
Yang saw her from across the room.
She smiled.
Ruby and Odyn found a space on the floor that was neither too crowded nor too quiet, and Odyn put his hand on the small of her back — the formal position, the correct distance for the dance — and Ruby put hers on his shoulder and understood, suddenly, why Weiss had said the distance was important for maintaining composure.
"I don't know the steps," she said.
"Just follow me," he said. "And don't look at your feet."
"I always look at my feet."
"Look at me instead."
She looked at him.
"Better," he said. "Now."
He walked her through it — the basic waltz, the one that requires patience more than skill, the counting made unnecessary by the rhythm once you've stopped fighting it. She stepped on his foot once and apologized. He told her not to apologize and kept moving. She stepped on his foot a second time and managed not to apologize but made a face that communicated the same information.
He smiled.
The song moved around them.
"Your mother," Ruby said, quietly enough that it was just between them, "told me to think carefully about things."
"That's her standard advice," he said.
"Have you been thinking carefully about things?" she asked.
He looked at her — the full, clear, direct look he used when he was being very specific.
"Yes," he said. "For some time."
"And?"
"I think," he said, "that I'm still thinking. But the direction the thinking is going has become reasonably clear."
She processed this. They moved through a turn.
"That's the most cautious way anyone has ever said something like that," she said.
"I know," he said.
"You could just—"
"I know," he said, again, and something in the second time was different — warmer, quieter, less like management and more like someone standing at the edge of something and deciding, with great deliberateness, whether to step.
"Odyn," she said.
"Ruby," he said.
They were very close, because the dance had gradually done what dances do.
"I like you," she said, because she had been honest all day and she was not going to stop now. "Not just as a friend. I know you probably know that. But I wanted to say it properly."
He was quiet for a moment.
"I know," he said. "And—" He stopped. "I like you too. Properly. Not just as a friend."
The music continued around them, cheerful and unhurried.
"So what do we do with that?" she asked.
"We figure it out," he said. "Together. Without rushing it." He looked at her. "Is that alright?"
"Yes," she said. "That's more than alright."
She put her head against his chest, because it was there and the height differential made it natural, and she could feel him take a breath that was not quite surprise and not quite the end of a very long held tension.
His hand on her back adjusted slightly — closer.
Not much. Just enough.
The dance continued.
At the doorway, Mercury arrived with Emerald, both in their best, and Khanna crossed to him with the ease of someone who has been waiting for a specific moment and has correctly identified it.
"You're just in time," Ruby called, from across the room.
"Wouldn't miss it," Mercury said.
Khanna stood beside him, and he stood beside her, and neither of them made any particular declaration about what that meant. They didn't need to. Some things declare themselves simply by being present.
The ballroom moved around them — warm and bright, full of people who had each come from somewhere difficult and were, for the length of an evening, here together.
End of Chapter Thirteen
To be continued in Chapter Fourteen: Dance, Dance Infiltration — Cinder's Dark Machinations
Later, someone would ask Ruby Rose when she knew.
She would think about it for a moment.
And she would say: I think I always knew. I just had to get honest enough to say it.
And someone might ask Odyn the same question.
And he would say: Considerably earlier than I admitted it. But there is a right moment for admitting things. You learn to recognize it.
The right moment, in this case, was a courtyard in Vale and a corridor outside a dormitory and a waltz that neither of them had planned.
These things rarely announce themselves in advance.
They simply arrive, and you recognize them, and if you are lucky and honest and a little bit brave, you say: yes.
Ending song: Demon Slayer mugen train Arc ending theme
Whew! That was a long one! This chapter covered 2 episodes, I was going to have it cover 3, but then the chapter would be a little bit too long so I decided to end it at 2 episodes covered. Next chapter will cover episode 7 and episode 8 of Volume 2 of the Rwby story. As you can tell... there will be some pretty major events happening surrounding the fall of Beacon. And I apologize for the random appearance of Giblet with Hailfire, their relationship will be explored in abit more depth following volume 3's finale.
And Ruby is finally realizing her feelings for Odyn! I won't have her act on her budding feeling of romance towards Odyn just yet it'll still be a little bit. So what do you think of the story so far? PM me or leave a comment/Review on it. What do you think will happen as the story progresses? Please let me know, I'm curious to see what you guys think will take place.
Concerning what CRDL will do, don't worry I have something in mind for them.
What's happening with Pyrrha will be delved into more as the story progresses. Anyways that's all for now! Until the next one!