Hey guys, Rosesaiyan2 here again. Sorry for the long period of silence, I had a bit of a writer's block and was wracking my brain to figure out where this story was going to go. Thankfully, I think I have a better idea of where I envision this story going now...
Anyways, as I said last chapter the two main pairings for this story are locked in: Koga x Ruby & Max x Yang.
Maybe you guys can help me figure out what the other pairings of characters will be?
Below is a list of possible pairings: Vote for which one(s) you guys like!
Shoryu x Blake
Kazuma x Weiss
Mist x Sun
Hon'oh x Neptune
Toshiro x Gwynne
or
Toshiro x Velvet
Gwynne x Mercury
Gwynne x Sun?
Jaune x Pyrrha
Nora x Ren
Yukikaze x Cardin
Let me know which pairing you guys like best or which of the RWBY characters you'd pair with the oc's. Anyways, enough of that. Onto the story!
Disclaimer: I don't own anything other than the Oc's in this story!
Opening theme:
BURN by FLOW (Tales of Berseria- opening 1)
Visuals: Camera pans down from the sky and across the grounds of Beacon, through the crowd of students, before coming into ground level within the forrest. It shows Koga fighting off some Grimm while training in the forest. It then pans to Ruby, Who's seen interacting with her team, diffusing an argument between Blake and Weiss before the girls then laugh with each other. The camera then pans to the different members of the main cast briefly before showing all of them as they stand at Beacon docks, surrounded by enemies. The chorus starts as each one of them begins fighting off members of the White Fang with Koga and Ruby charging towards Roman Torchwick. The crook is seen fighting off the two of them just before the screen pans back to the maain cast walking towards Beacon Academy.
Chapter Five: Jaundice
The hardest courage is not the kind that charges forward.
It is the kind that stays very still and waits
for the moment it has actually earned.
I. The Eastern Lawn — Before Classes
The grass on the eastern side of the dormitory block held its dew until mid-morning, when the sun finally cleared the tower line and the temperature became something other than theoretical. At this hour — early, the campus still mostly asleep — the lawn had a quality of privacy that was rare at Beacon, where something was always happening somewhere.
Max and Kouga had been at it for forty minutes.
They moved through the sparring the way people move through something they have done so many times that the choreography has dissolved into instinct — no ceremony to it, no posturing, just the clean back-and-forth of two people who knew each other's habits well enough to constantly be finding the edges of them. Kouga threw a punch that had real weight behind it. Max deflected rather than blocked, letting the force redirect, and came back with a kick that his brother ducked under with a fraction of a second to spare.
"Block."
Kouga blocked. His forearms absorbed the impact and his stance held.
"Good. Now dodge."
The kick came low, the tail swipe came in immediately after — the classic combination, the one Max had drilled into him a hundred times because it was the one that people forgot about when they were managing the first threat — and Kouga went under both, leaning back and to the left in one continuous motion before jumping clear of the follow-through. The tail hit the grass with enough force to leave a small, neat indentation.
A beat. Then Kouga came back in.
"Good. Now attack."
They met in the middle — fists, knees, elbows, neither of them pulling anything particularly — and the contact point between them generated a brief gust of displaced air that bent the grass sideways. They held the press for a moment, weight against weight, and then Max exhaled and stepped back and smiled.
"That's enough for today."
Kouga straightened, breathing hard but not badly, and nodded. He picked up the towel from the ground beside him and wiped his face with the grateful energy of someone whose muscles are talking to them.
"Thanks for the session."
"You've gotten faster," Max said, and he meant it — not as encouragement, but as an assessment. "Your footwork on the tail dodge is cleaner than it was two weeks ago. If you keep that up, I'll have to start actually trying."
Kouga grinned. "Is that a challenge?"
"It's an observation." Max picked up his own towel. "Which could become a challenge if you stop improving. So don't."
They gathered their things in the easy silence of people who have been comfortable with each other long enough that silence is just another form of conversation, and headed back to the dormitory to clean up before the day began.
◆ ◆ ◆
II. The Corridor — En Route to the Auditorium
Honoo and Kazuma were waiting in the hallway outside Team MKKH's room, both already dressed, both with the particular quality of patience that distinguishes people who are good at waiting from people who are merely tolerating it. Honoo had the latter down to an art. Kazuma was working on it.
"About time," Honoo said.
"Training ran long," Kouga said, which was true and explained nothing and both of them knew it.
They fell into step down the corridor, and were joined at the intersection by Team MSTGY — Mist first, then Yukikaze, Toshirou, and Gwynne — who merged with the natural ease of a group that had been navigating the same spaces together long enough to have developed an instinct for each other's pace.
"Still keeping Koga sharp?" Mist asked her elder brother, without looking up from the notes she was reviewing.
"He's improved more than I expected," Max replied. "I'll need to watch myself soon."
Mist permitted a small, pleased smile. She was proud of her youngest brother in the uncomplicated way of someone who had watched him work very hard for a very long time and considered his progress to be both earned and inevitable.
Yukikaze fell into step beside Max. She had the composed, sidelong quality of someone who asks questions carefully.
"Kazuma hasn't been giving you any trouble?"
Max considered this genuinely. "No. If anything, having him and Koga on the same team keeps me honest. Between the two of them, I can't afford to coast."
Yukikaze's expression settled into quiet satisfaction, the way it did when she heard something she had expected to be true and was glad to have confirmed.
The double doors of the auditorium were ahead. Through them, the sounds of a class already in session.
◆ ◆ ◆
III. The Combat Auditorium — Professor Goodwitch's Class
The match between Cardin Winchester and Jaune Arc had the particular quality of something that is technically a contest and functionally is not. The stage was lit. The spectators were attentive. The weapons were out and the aura readings were live on the boards above. All the formal elements of a duel were present.
What was absent was any genuine uncertainty about the outcome.
Cardin moved with the loose, heavy confidence of someone who understood that size and reach were advantages and had never been seriously required to compensate for their absence. His mace — a weapon he had named The Executioner, with the complete sincerity of someone who had never been asked to examine that impulse — sat across his shoulder like punctuation at the end of a sentence he was certain he'd already finished writing. Jaune, across the stage, held Crocea Mors in both hands and leaned on it with the barely-contained exhaustion of a man who had been keeping himself vertical on stubbornness alone for the last several minutes.
He charged. He swung. Cardin sidestepped it with unhurried ease, and the follow-through of the mace sent Jaune's shield spinning off his arm and Jaune himself skidding back across the stage floor. He looked up from the ground at the orange-haired boy above him, who was smiling in the particular way of someone enjoying something they do not need to be enjoying this much.
"This is where you lose, Jauney boy."
Jaune gritted his teeth and rose to a knee. He was still rising when Cardin's knee caught him in the gut with the casual brutality of someone who had decided the match was already over and was just arranging the furniture.
The buzzer rang.
"Cardin. That's enough."
Glynda Goodwitch's voice cut through the auditorium with the clean, decisive authority of someone who has ended things like this before and found them tiresome for precisely the same reasons each time. She descended to the stage with her tablet, her expression carrying the compound weight of professional disappointment and something more personal underneath it.
"Students," she said, addressing the room while Jaune remained on the floor, looking at his scroll with its blinking red aura reading, "Mr. Arc's aura has dropped below the critical threshold. In tournament conditions, this would constitute a formal defeat and end the bout." She looked down at the scroll, then at the young man holding it. "Mr. Arc. This is the third week. Please make use of your scroll during combat. Aura gauging is not a suggestion — it is a tactical instrument. A Huntsman who ignores it is a Huntsman who does not come home."
"Yes, ma'am," Jaune said to the floor. "I'll do better."
"See that you do."
In the front rows, Ruby's hands were pressed together in her lap with the tension of someone trying not to say something. Beside her, Kouga watched the stage without expression, which was its own form of expression for people who knew him well enough to read the absence.
"You think he's all right?" Ruby asked quietly.
Kouga didn't answer immediately. On stage, Cardin had turned away with the studied indifference of someone who wanted his disinterest noted. Jaune was picking up his shield.
"He's still standing," Kouga said finally. "That counts for something."
Across the aisle, the faunus teams watched the stage with expressions that had settled into a common register: controlled, focused, and carrying the particular quality of people who have found something objectionable and are deciding what to do about it. Max's tail moved in a slow, deliberate arc, once. It was the movement he made when he was managing something.
He spoke to his team without looking at them.
"Not here. Not now. Save it."
No one argued, though the arguing impulse was visible on at least two faces. They understood the discipline behind the instruction, even if the instruction required more patience than the moment seemed to deserve.
Glynda addressed the class again with the crisp transition of a professional moving past something she couldn't fix right now.
"The Vytal Festival is several months away. Students from the other kingdoms will be arriving in Vale before long. Those who compete in the combat tournament will be representing this academy and this kingdom. Train accordingly."
The bell rang. Students began to file out. Pyrrha remained near the stage, watching Jaune's back as he sat alone with his thoughts on the floor, and her expression had the quality of someone who cares about a problem they do not yet know how to solve.
Kouga descended the aisle steps and offered his hand without announcement. Jaune looked up, startled, then took it. He came to his feet.
"Thanks," he said, with the weak smile of someone who was grateful and embarrassed about needing to be grateful.
"Don't mention it," Kouga said, and meant it in the fullest sense.
◆ ◆ ◆
IV. The Cafeteria — The Afternoon Gathering
Nora Valkyrie was telling a story. This was not an unusual occurrence; Nora Valkyrie was always either telling a story or preparing to tell one, with a very small transitional zone between the two states. The story involved the middle of the night, several large Grimm, and outcomes that scaled heroically upward each time Ren gently corrected a factual inaccuracy, which he did with the steady, resigned patience of someone who had accepted this as a permanent feature of his daily life.
"So there we were," Nora announced, standing at the end of the table with the energy of someone addressing a stadium rather than a lunch table, "in the dead of night —"
"It was afternoon," Ren said.
"— surrounded by Ursai —"
"Beowolves."
"Dozens of them!"
"Two."
The table had arranged itself in the organic way of people who had been eating lunch together long enough to have developed a seating geography: Yang with her chin in her hands, apparently finding every word of this fascinating; Weiss at the far end, filing her nails with the focused attention of someone who was making a point; Blake with her book open at the degree that indicated listening-while-appearing-not-to; Pyrrha and Ruby at the center, maintaining the polite attentiveness of people raised to be kind to storytellers regardless of veracity; and then the faunus contingent, spread across the adjacent table in a configuration that suggested togetherness rather than separation.
Gwynne had been the first to notice that something was wrong with Jaune. She had the particular sensitivity of someone who was quiet enough to observe the people around her more than she was observed herself, and what she observed in Jaune Arc was the specific, careful blankness of a person who was performing normalcy from the inside of something that was not normal at all.
"Mr. Jaune," she said, with the soft precision of someone who means to be heard without startling, "are you all right?"
Jaune snapped back into the present. His smile arrived exactly one second after it should have. "Huh? Oh — yeah. Of course. Why do you ask?"
"Because," Ruby said, studying him with the direct, guileless attention that was uniquely hers, "you seem a bit not okay."
"Guys. I'm fine." He held up a thumbs-up as evidence. His eyes did not participate in the gesture.
Max set down his fork and looked at Jaune the way he looked at things when he had made a decision about them.
"Jaune." His voice was even. "That is not even remotely true. Is it."
It was not technically a question. Jaune laughed the laugh of someone who had hoped to avoid this and was now running out of hope.
"What? I said I'm —"
"Jaune, please," Mist said. "We can see it."
Whatever Jaune was about to say next was interrupted by his attention moving — involuntarily, with the predictability of someone looking at a sore tooth with their tongue — across the cafeteria to the far side of the room, where a group of students in the deep burgundy uniform of Team CRDL were gathered around a small, brown-haired girl with rabbit ears.
Cardin had one of them between his fingers.
The girl's name was Velvet Scarlatina. She was a second-year student, mild-mannered, soft-spoken, and currently the involuntary subject of a demonstration that Cardin was conducting for the entertainment of his teammates. He tugged on the ear. She flinched. He tugged again and laughed and said something to Sky Lark that made Sky Lark laugh too.
The tails at the adjacent table began to move.
Not dramatically. Not in unison. But if you were watching — and Ruby was watching, because she watched Kouga the way people watch the sky when they have learned to read weather — there was a change in the quality of stillness that the faunus students had been maintaining. It was the kind of change that happens in a room when a window opens and the temperature shifts by two degrees. Technically imperceptible. Practically obvious.
Kouga's hands had gone flat on the table. The sound that moved through the back of his throat was low enough that most people would not have registered it consciously, but Ruby was sitting next to him and she was paying attention, and she registered it.
Pyrrha spoke, with the measured calm of someone deliberately choosing the right pressure.
"Jaune. They're right. Cardin has been at this since the first week."
"He just — he's not that bad, he just —"
"He put you in a rocket locker," Shoryu said. "Last Thursday."
"That wasn't — I mean —"
"Two weeks ago," Mist said, her arms crossed, her expression the kind of patient that precedes the end of patience, "in the corridor outside the lecture hall, he extended your shield in a doorway while you were walking through it."
"Okay, but that was —"
"And the week before that," Kazuma said, with the clipped economy of someone who had filed this information under things-that-would-eventually-be-relevant, "he knocked your books out of your arms in the east corridor and kept walking."
The flashbacks were not dramatic reconstructions. They were small, ordinary cruelties — the kind that don't make grand statements, that leave no marks, that are designed specifically to be deniable and therefore impossible to formally address. The kind that are most effective because they happen in the space between the things that officially count.
Jaune stared at the table. He had been hoping, in the way that people hope for things they know are unlikely, that his friends hadn't noticed. They had noticed everything.
"He's a bully," Ruby said. Her voice was quiet but had no softness in it. "That's just what he is."
"Maybe," Jaune said. "But he's my problem. I don't want you guys getting —" He stopped.
He stopped because Mist had risen to her feet.
Not quickly. Not dramatically. She stood the way a tide comes in — gradual, inevitable, and ultimately very difficult to argue with. Her expression had the quality it got when something had gone past the point where composure was an appropriate response.
"I apologize in advance," she said pleasantly, to the table in general, and walked toward Team CRDL.
Max was two steps behind her before she'd covered half the distance.
◆ ◆ ◆
V. The Cafeteria — The Confrontation
Cardin heard her coming, or perhaps felt the shift in atmosphere that preceded her arrival, and turned with the expression of someone who had expected the cafeteria to be a safe venue for his current activities and was now revising that expectation.
Mist stopped in front of him at a distance that required him to look down, which he did. She was shorter by a head and a half. She appeared to find this neither interesting nor relevant.
"The only freak in this cafeteria," she said, with the conversational precision of someone making a correction rather than an argument, "is the one pulling on someone's ears for entertainment."
Cardin's expression moved through several things in quick succession: surprise, calculation, a brief flicker of the instinct that had been telling him something useful about these particular faunus students since the first week, and then — because seventeen-year-old boys with social reputations to maintain are often their own worst adversaries — the decision to override the instinct.
"Got a problem?" he said, squaring his shoulders.
"Yes," Mist said. "This girl is an aspiring Huntress. So are you, theoretically. You are bound by the same rules of this institution, which include, specifically, prohibitions on the physical mistreatment of students on the basis of their heritage." She tilted her head slightly. "Or I can let Professor Goodwitch know you'd like to review them together. Your preference."
The instinct tried again. Cardin ignored it again.
He looked at her — at the fuchsia hair, the reptilian eyes that had begun their shift, the tail that had gone very still in the way that tails go still when the person attached to them is making a decision — and said, with the magnificent tactical blindness of someone who had mistaken the absence of an attack for an absence of capability:
"Animals shouldn't be at Beacon in the first place. I was reminding this one of that. And you —" his gaze moved across Mist's features with a small, ugly smirk — "you're one of them too, aren't you?"
Behind him, Max had been murmuring a low, continuous, and completely unheeded advisory: Don't. Don't say it. I am telling you. Don't.
"And if I am?" Mist asked. Her voice had not changed. Her eyes had.
The smirk arrived. "Guess I'll have to educate you freaks on where you —"
He did not finish the sentence.
Mist's fist found his stomach with the precise, economic force of someone who had decided exactly how much force was appropriate and applied exactly that amount — no more, because excess would have been unprofessional, and no less, because insufficient force would have failed to communicate. Cardin folded.
"Oh," Mist said mildly, looking at her hand. "My apologies. My arm seems to have made a decision independently."
She looked at him until he straightened enough to meet her gaze, and then she looked at him for a moment longer.
"On your knees," she said. "And apologize to her. Properly."
There was a moment in which Cardin considered his options. The moment was brief, because Max had come to stand beside his sister, and the quality of Max's stillness — not threatening, not performed, simply the absolute absence of the kind of reassurance that normally fills the space around a person who is not going to do anything — was its own form of communication. Behind Cardin, his teammates processed this information and arrived at the floor before he did.
"We're sorry."
"I cannot hear you," Mist said pleasantly.
"WE'RE SORRY FOR WHAT WE DID."
The cafeteria had gone the particular quality of quiet that large rooms go when everyone in them has simultaneously decided to be very interested in what is happening.
"Good," Mist said. She turned to Velvet, and her expression changed entirely — the dark quality gone, replaced with the genuine, uncomplicated warmth that existed on the other side of her anger and was, if anything, more disconcerting for the speed of the transition. "Are you all right?"
Velvet Scarlatina looked up at her with wide eyes and the expression of someone who has just been unexpectedly defended by a stranger and is not entirely sure how to process it. She was small, brown-haired, gentle-featured, with long rabbit ears that she had been in the habit of folding down in public since arriving at Beacon and had been trying to train herself out of.
"Y-yes," she managed. "Thank you. Both of you."
"Anytime those four give you trouble," Mist said, "you let me know. Yes?"
Velvet nodded, then turned to Max, and the slight color that rose in her face was the involuntary kind that appears without consultation.
"I'm — I'm Velvet Scarlatina. Thank you, um —"
"Max," he said. "Max Dragonblade. Don't mention it."
"I'll remember that," Velvet said, and was gone before the redness could finish arriving.
Max watched her go, then turned back to the table to find everyone at it watching him with the combined attention of people who have just seen something they intend to remember.
"What?" he said.
"Nothing," Yang said, with the smile she wore when she was committing something to the file labeled for later. "Absolutely nothing. Carry on."
Max sat down. Mist sat down. The cafeteria resumed its ambient noise. And then Ruby, turning to the space where Jaune had been sitting, found it empty.
"Where's Jaune?"
◆ ◆ ◆
VI. The History Lecture Hall — Professor Oobleck's Class
Professor Bartholomew Oobleck operated at a frequency that most of the academy's coffee supply was only partially responsible for. He lectured the way some people drive on highways — fast, precise, constantly changing lanes, apparently unaware of or untroubled by the effect this had on everyone else. He carried his coffee as if it were load-bearing. He had opinions about Faunus history that were simultaneously deeply researched and delivered as if he had just remembered them thirty seconds ago and was racing to communicate them before they escaped.
The class on the day following the cafeteria incident was on the Faunus Rights Revolution — what most textbooks called, with the particular delicacy of institutions that had been on the wrong side of it, the Faunus War.
"Prior to the Revolution —" Oobleck zoomed to the map, struck it twice with his pointer, zoomed back — "humankind was quite, quite adamant about centralizing faunus population in Menagerie. Now! While this may feel like ancient history to many of you —" he was at his coffee cup, back already, at the front of the room again — "these are recent events. The repercussions of the uprising can still be observed directly! Which brings me to my question."
He stopped. This was rarer and more alarming than the zooming.
"How many of you present have been subjected to discrimination on the basis of your faunus heritage?"
The silence had texture. Then, one by one, hands went up across the room — not all of them, but enough to make the count feel like a statement rather than a statistic. Velvet raised hers after a brief hesitation. Alongside her, Max and Mist raised theirs without hesitation, followed by the rest of their teams.
Oobleck observed this with an expression that was, for a moment, entirely still.
"Dreadful," he said. "Precisely the kind of ignorance that feeds cycles of violence. Which brings us to the White Fang, and then to our primary question for today: what was the strategic turning point of the third year of the War?"
A hand. Weiss Schnee, straight-backed, prepared.
"The Battle at Fort Castle."
"Precisely! And — the advantage the Faunus forces held over General Lagune?"
At the back of the room, a paper football struck Jaune Arc on the side of the head and he jolted upright from the desk he had been lowering himself toward. Oobleck, whose awareness of the room was one of those rare qualities that moved faster than his body, had already turned.
"Ah, Mr. Arc. Contributing at last. The advantage, if you please."
Jaune's eyes found Pyrrha's across the room. Pyrrha made a series of careful, small gestures that were clearly meant to communicate an answer and succeeded in communicating effort.
"Binoculars," Jaune said, with the confidence of someone who has committed to a wrong answer.
The class received this in the way that classes receive things that are wrong but delivered with conviction — a beat of silence, then sound.
Pyrrha put her face in her hand.
Oobleck sighed the sigh of a man who had been doing this for many years and had not yet decided whether it was tragic or interesting. He turned to Cardin Winchester, who had been watching Jaune's embarrassment with the broad, satisfied smile of a man entertained at no cost to himself.
"Mr. Winchester. Perhaps you can provide a correct answer."
Cardin folded his arms. "Sure. The Faunus are easier to train than soldiers. Like animals."
The word landed in the room in the particular way that specific words sometimes do — not loudly, but with a change in the quality of the air around them.
"That's not open-minded of you, is it, Winchester."
Cardin turned. Mist was watching him from two rows over with the unhurried, patient attention of someone who had all the time in the world and was using it to be disappointed in him. He went slightly pale.
Blake Belladonna rose without being called on. She did this with the calm authority of someone who had decided that the correct answer was more important than the correct protocol.
"Night vision," she said. "Faunus have near-perfect sight in darkness. General Lagune underestimated this and failed to account for it in his tactical planning. It cost him the engagement." She looked at Cardin with the level, cool expression of someone who has been this conversation before from a different angle. "If he had paid attention in his own history classes, he might have been remembered differently."
Cardin stood up. His expression had the color and quality of someone working through three emotions simultaneously and landing on the least productive one.
He did not finish the motion.
Shoryu's tail moved once — a single, deliberate arc — and the back of Cardin's head connected with his desk with a sound that was, objectively, somewhat excessive for a corrective gesture. The desk did not survive the impact entirely intact. Cardin did not survive the impact entirely conscious.
The class was very quiet.
Oobleck looked at Shoryu over the rim of his coffee cup.
"I appreciate the contribution to order, Mr. Tokyoheim. I'd suggest a lighter touch in future applications."
"Noted," Shoryu said. "I'll calibrate."
"Splendid. Mr. Arc, Mr. Winchester — whenever he rejoins us — additional readings, pages fifty-one through ninety-one, essay format, my desk by next class." Oobleck was already in motion. "Moving on!"
Jaune's shoulders went the way that Jaune's shoulders went when things were adding to a total he was keeping. He looked at the unconscious Cardin. He looked at his scroll. He looked at nothing in particular for a moment.
Then he looked at the door, and when the bell rang, he was the first one through it.
◆ ◆ ◆
VII. The Corridor Outside the Lecture Hall
Honoo had been watching Pyrrha the way she watched most things she cared about — not continuously, not obviously, but with the kind of periodic attention that means a person is on your mind even when you're looking at something else. She had seen the way Pyrrha watched Jaune during the lecture. She had seen the way Pyrrha's face went when Jaune left first.
She let the rest of Team MKKH go ahead.
"Go on," she told Kouga. "I'll catch up."
He gave her the look he gave when he was deciding whether to ask and deciding not to. "Don't take too long."
"I won't."
She waited until the corridor had cleared to where it was just her and Pyrrha, and then she crossed to the red-haired girl with the easy, unhurried directness of someone who does not believe in the long approach.
"He's your friend," Honoo said. It was not a question. "And you want to help him but you don't know if he'll let you."
Pyrrha looked at her for a moment. Then: "Is it that obvious?"
"Only to someone looking for it." Honoo folded her hands. "I want to help him too. If you have an idea, I'd like to hear it. Whatever you're thinking about doing — he should have more than one person doing it with him."
The two of them waited outside the lecture hall door for Jaune and Cardin, who were receiving their additional reading assignments from Professor Oobleck at a velocity somewhat below Oobleck's usual pace, given that one of them was still locating his bearings.
Jaune emerged first, blinking in the corridor light.
Cardin followed, and in the moment between emerging and noticing that he had company, let the practiced meanness of his expression slip into something that required support structures he had temporarily misplaced. He saw Honoo. The meanness returned, but it was a smaller version of it.
He attempted to walk past Jaune. Honoo's foot moved approximately three inches to the left. Cardin's momentum did the rest, and the corridor floor received him with the impartial welcome it extended to everyone.
"Oh," Honoo said, looking down at him with an expression of complete serenity. "I seem to have misjudged the space. I do apologize."
Cardin got up. His face had the color of someone composing a response and discovering that every available response was a bad idea. He looked at Honoo — at the horns, the tail that had gone very still and pointed, the gaze that had the primal, uncategorizable quality that these particular faunus students carried as naturally as other people carried eye color — and made the first good decision he had made all day.
He left.
Jaune watched him go. Pyrrha touched his arm.
"Come with me," she said. "I have an idea. I think it might help."
Jaune looked at Pyrrha. He looked at Honoo. He had the expression of someone who had been trying very hard to manage a problem alone and was beginning to run out of alone.
"Okay," he said.
◆ ◆ ◆
VIII. The Dormitory Rooftop — Late Evening
Max heard them before he reached the roof.
This was not unusual. What was unusual was that he had come up here specifically because the training room was occupied and the eastern lawn was wet from an evening shower, and had found instead the quiet voices of two people having a conversation that was clearly private and clearly important, and had made the decision — without quite deciding it — to stay rather than descend.
He sat with his back against the water tower and listened, because the alternative was leaving, and the alternative felt wrong.
Jaune's voice came in pieces, halting, with the specific quality of someone speaking a thing out loud for the first time — testing it against the air to see if saying it changes what it is.
"I wasn't really accepted. Not the normal way. I — I got hold of some transcripts. I faked them. I lied to get in."
The pause that followed had the weight of a thing that has been carried for a long time and has finally been set down.
"I never went to combat school. I never passed any qualifying tests. Everything that put me in this place — I manufactured it. And now I'm here, and Cardin knows it, and every time he puts me on the floor in class it's because he understands the distance between what I claimed to be and what I actually am better than anyone else in this school."
"Jaune —"
"I always wanted to be a hero. My father was one. His father before him. Every Arc going back further than I know. And I just — I was never good enough to get here honestly. So I cheated my way in and now I'm drowning in it, and you're all so —" his voice cracked slightly — "you're all so good. And I don't belong in the same room."
"That's not true."
"Pyrrha —"
"That's not true." Her voice was quiet and very firm, the voice of someone who has decided that they are going to say this until it is heard. "You came here without training, without a combat school foundation, without any of the things that most of us took for granted before we arrived. And you're still here. You show up every day and you take every hit and you get back up every single time. Do you know how many people can say that honestly?"
A silence.
"I want to help you train properly. I've wanted to offer for weeks. But I needed you to tell me this first, because —" she paused — "because help only works if the person receiving it knows why they need it. You know now. Will you let me?"
Another silence. Longer.
"Just — let me think about it. Please."
"Of course."
Footsteps. The roof door opened and closed. And then one pair of footsteps remained, and there was the sound of someone sitting down heavily against the parapet wall, and the quality of the silence changed.
Max stayed where he was for a moment. Then he stood and came around the water tower and looked at Jaune, who looked up at him with the hollow, resigned expression of someone who has run out of the energy needed to be surprised.
"How much did you hear?" Jaune asked.
"Enough," Max said, and sat down beside him.
They were quiet for a moment. The city spread itself below the cliff in its familiar nighttime pattern: lights, movement, the distant sound of Vale doing what cities do when the people in them are not paying attention.
"My father," Max said eventually, "used to say that a hero isn't defined by where they begin. He said that anyone who's ever been called one started from somewhere inadequate. The question is only what they chose to do with the gap."
Jaune said nothing.
"You chose to close it. You just did it in the wrong order." Max looked at him sidelong. "But the closing is still the point. And you're still doing it."
"I'm a fraud."
"You're someone who wanted something badly enough to make a bad decision to get it. That's different from fraud." A pause. "Fraud is when you don't intend to earn it. You've been trying to earn it every day since you got here. The paperwork is wrong. The effort is real."
Jaune stared at the city for a long time. Something in his shoulders, which had been carrying a specific tension for weeks, shifted almost imperceptibly.
"Why are you telling me this?"
Max was quiet for a moment. "Because I recognized it," he said finally. "Not the transcripts. But the feeling." He let that sit without explaining it further. "We're going to help you train. All of us. You don't have to ask, and you don't have to explain anything. You just have to show up."
Jaune looked at him for a long moment.
"Okay," he said.
It was a small word. It carried a considerable amount of weight.
◆ ◆ ◆
IX. Beacon Academy — The Following Weeks
They did not announce it. They did not make a production of it. They simply began.
The mornings belonged to Max and Kouga. Jaune arrived at the eastern lawn before dawn because Max had told him to be there before dawn, and the first session was brutal in the particular way of things that reveal precisely how large a gap exists between where a person is and where they need to be. Jaune had heart. He had, Kouga noted to Max afterward, more stubbornness per unit of mass than anyone he had trained with. He simply had no foundation.
They built one.
Not quickly. Not dramatically. The way foundations are built: layer by layer, with each layer needing to dry before the next one went down. Stance before movement. Movement before combination. Combination before instinct. Max was a precise teacher — patient in a way that was not soft, demanding in a way that was not cruel. Kouga was a more forgiving training partner than he probably should have been, which Max allowed because the forgiving partner was what Jaune needed at this stage.
Afternoons found Jaune with Honoo, sitting across from her at a table in the library with a tactical diagram between them and Honoo asking questions that were both simpler and harder than they appeared.
"What do you see?" she would ask, pointing at the diagram.
"An Ursa, and a clearing, and —"
"What do you see that's not in the diagram?"
This was the lesson: that every environment contains more information than its obvious features, and that the difference between a fighter and a strategist is not skill but habit of attention. Honoo had a gift for teaching this — perhaps because she herself had spent years cultivating exactly this kind of awareness, and could trace the specific paths of thought that led to the conclusions she was asking Jaune to find.
Mist's sessions were different again: quieter, more precise, concerned with the inner architecture of aura control in someone whose reserves were, as she had noted early on, genuinely substantial.
"The size of the reservoir isn't the point," she told him, in the way she said things that she'd said before to other people and still believed. "The point is what you do with the connection. Most people experience their aura the way they experience breathing — they know it's happening, but they don't think about it. You want to think about it. All the time. Until it becomes the same."
And in the evenings, Pyrrha. Combat. The work that was most visible in its results and most painful in its process. Jaune lost every session for the first two weeks. He lost most of them in the third. In the fourth week, he landed a technique that Pyrrha had been showing him for ten days, and it worked, and neither of them said anything about it because saying anything would have made it awkward and they both understood this without discussing it.
The change was not sudden. It never is, in people who are changing the right way. It was steady — a degree here, a degree there — the way a compass needle moves when a ship changes course, almost imperceptibly at first, and then one day you look up and the horizon is different.
Jaune's stance became his own. His footwork developed a rhythm. He started arriving at training ten minutes early. Small things. The kind that nobody announces because nobody needs to — they are simply observed by the people who have been looking, and registered, and filed under the quiet category of things that make the effort feel worth it.
One evening, after Cardin had managed something particularly ungracious in the hallway, Jaune pulled Max aside with the specific quality of focus that Honoo's afternoon sessions had been quietly installing in him.
"I've been thinking," Jaune said, "about how to deal with Cardin. Not —" he anticipated Max's expression — "not the way I've been dealing with it. Something different. But I need you to trust me, and I need things to look worse before they look better."
Max studied him for a moment. The strategic glint in his eye was new. Not the borrowed confidence of someone performing an attitude they'd absorbed from their training partners — something more native than that. Something that had grown from the inside out.
"You're thinking about the Forever Fall trip," Max said.
Jaune nodded.
"Walk me through it."
He did. Max listened without interrupting, which was his way of paying attention to something important. When Jaune finished, Max was quiet for a moment.
"You calculated the sap ratios from Mist's lesson," he said.
"Yes."
"And the wasp behavior from Port's Grimm lecture."
"Yes."
"And the environmental setup from Honoo's positioning drills."
Jaune held his gaze. "I've been paying attention."
Max looked at him for another long moment. Something in his expression completed a transaction.
"Then we'll trust you," he said. "When the time comes, we step back and we let it happen."
◆ ◆ ◆
X. The Forever Fall Forest — The Assignment
The forest in autumn was a particular kind of beautiful — the kind that is unsettling in the way of beautiful things that are also dangerous, where the light comes through the canopy in long, amber columns and the silence has the quality of something that is not absence but presence. The trees here ran red and gold as far as the light could reach. The sap in them was thick and sweet and collected in the joints of the root systems in amber pools that moved slowly.
Professor Peach had distributed collection jars and delivered a set of instructions that were, by forest-expedition standards, relatively simple: gather samples from the marked trees, stay in your teams, do not touch the Rapier Wasp colonies on the western edge. Standard precautions. Reasonable expectations.
Team CRDL had already found a different arrangement.
Cardin had, as he occasionally did, identified an opportunity to outsource unpleasant work to someone who would not effectively resist it. Jaune was collecting his team's sap with the measured, deliberate care of someone paying close attention to quantities that did not need to be paid that much attention to. His friends watched from a distance with the restrained patience of people who had been told explicitly to wait.
Ruby turned to Max. Her expression communicated a volume of concern that she was exercising visible effort to keep contained.
Max shook his head. His tail moved once, slow and decisive. Trust him.
Ruby looked at Kouga.
Kouga looked at the trees. His expression said the same thing Max's did, though the version he showed Ruby was slightly gentler. He caught her eye and gave one small, certain nod.
She exhaled. She waited.
When Cardin reached for the jars — moving with the automatic entitlement of someone who had been taking things from Jaune for weeks and had stopped anticipating resistance — Jaune let him take them. All of them. Every jar he had carefully filled with carefully measured quantities of forest sap at carefully calibrated viscosity ratios that Mist had, without knowing the specific application, taught him to distinguish by sight and texture.
"Thanks, Arc," Cardin said, in the tone of someone wrapping up a transaction.
"Of course," Jaune said. He stepped back. His posture had something in it that had not been there six weeks ago — not aggression, not defiance, but a kind of groundedness. A settled quality. The quality of someone who knows how the next two minutes will go and has already made peace with his role in them.
Cardin drew back his arm and threw the first jar.
It hit the colony marker post, not the intended target, because the trajectory he had calculated was based on a viscosity that was no longer accurate for these particular jars. The sap spread. The second jar went wide. The third connected with a tree root and shattered at ground level, and the thick amber pool that spread from it was precisely the consistency that Jaune had intended and precisely the temperature and scent profile most relevant to the behavioral patterns of the Rapier Wasps nesting twenty meters to the west.
The forest made a sound.
It was not a loud sound. It was the sound of approximately three hundred insects reaching a consensus.
"You know," Jaune said, watching Team CRDL arrive at the beginning of an unpleasant understanding, "Professor Port spent an entire lecture on Rapier Wasp behavior last month. Their attraction to sweet substances. Their particular sensitivity to certain viscosity profiles. Their territorial response radius." He looked at Cardin, who was looking at the advancing cloud with an expression that was performing a very rapid education. "I took excellent notes."
He stepped aside.
Team CRDL's subsequent departure from that area of the forest was neither dignified nor slow.
The watching group of friends came forward in the silence that followed. Max clapped Jaune on the shoulder once — a firm, clean impact, the gesture of a peer rather than a mentor. Kouga was grinning with the unguarded quality he had when something had genuinely delighted him. Honoo's expression had the particular warmth of someone watching a student arrive somewhere they have been pointing toward for a long time.
"You used everything," Pyrrha said softly, beside him.
"I paid attention," Jaune said. And then, after a moment, with the expression of someone who is genuinely surprised to be saying something and genuinely means it: "I think I'm starting to understand what that means."
The trees of Forever Fall moved in a wind that came through the canopy from the north, and the amber light shifted in the way that light shifts when the angle of the afternoon has committed to something. In the distance, the sound of Team CRDL negotiating with the forest continued its diminishing course.
Ruby stood next to Kouga and watched the light move through the trees, and for a moment neither of them said anything, which was enough.
"He did it," she said eventually.
"He did it," Kouga agreed.
"We helped."
"We stepped back. That's different."
She thought about this. "Is it?"
"Completely," he said. "Stepping back so someone can succeed is harder than stepping forward to succeed for them. Most people don't know that yet."
Ruby looked at him for a moment — the particular kind of look that people give when someone has said the true thing they didn't know they were waiting to hear — and then looked back at the trees.
"I'm glad you're here," she said. She said it simply, without ceremony, the way you say things that are simply and exactly true.
The forest held the light a little longer. The afternoon was generous with it.
End of Chapter Five
Coming Next —
Chapter Six: The Stray
Ending theme:
Ending theme: Akeboshi [Demon Slayer- Mugen Train Arc]
Visuals: it flashes the cast introduced so far; Teams MKKH, MTSGY, JNPR, and RWBY all going about their business. The song then transitions to Several Silhouetted beings with Grimm present around them. It switches to the cast fighting off Grimm before Koga is seen to be battling with what appears to be a demon and Ruby running towards and reaching for him.
Hey guys! hopefully you enjoyed the chapter. As I've said before the two main pairings of this story are locked in those being Ruby x Koga & Max x Yang. There are some other pairings up for grabs below are some options for the other pairings, vote on which ones you think I should go with:
Blake x Shoryu?
Kazuma x Weiss
Mist x Cardin?
Yukikaze x Sun?
Toshirou x Gwynne
Hon'oo x Yatsuhashi/Neptune?
or
Toushiro x Blake?
Weiss x Shoryu
Sun x Hon'oh?
Neptune x Skye/ Emeryll [Characters introduced later in story]?
Yukikaze x Cardin?
Mist x Mercury?
Let me know what you guys think. are there characters i'm missing that could use pairings? should I switch up the pairings at all?
Anyways that's all for now, see you guys in the next chapter!