FLAME AND ICE
Chapter VIII — Budding Feelings; The Secret Unveiled
Professor Port was explaining, with considerable enthusiasm and a level of personal detail that suggested he had been waiting for an audience, the precise sequence of events that had led to his defeat of an Ursa Major using nothing but a hand-carved spear and what he described as sheer tenacity. The class received this with the respectful stillness of students who have learned that Port's stories have a velocity of their own and are best navigated by not stepping into the current.
Weiss was not, strictly speaking, listening.
She was watching the clock — specifically the gap between the minute hand's current position and the position it would need to reach before this class ended and she could think about things she was not supposed to be thinking about in class. Her right hand moved in small, absent circles around the ring on her left — a habit she had developed approximately forty-eight hours after Odyn had placed it there, which was how long it had taken her to understand that she was going to spend a significant amount of time finding reasons to touch it.
The ring was hidden. A subtle working, not difficult to maintain, but requiring the small continuous attention of something you have decided not to let down. She was not ready to explain it — not here, not yet, not until they had managed the formal conversation with her father that they had been carefully not having for three weeks.
A folded piece of paper landed on her desk.
She looked at it. Looked at Jaune, two seats over, who was performing innocence with the conviction of someone who has never successfully performed innocence and hasn't noticed. From behind and slightly to the right, she could feel Odyn's amusement without looking — there was a particular quality to his silence when he was trying not to laugh, and she had memorised it across nine years of correspondence.
She unfolded the note with the precise movements of someone who has decided this is happening and is going to give it the attention it deserves.
Would you like to study together sometime? — Jaune
Weiss looked at the note. Then at Jaune. Then at the note. In the periphery of her vision, Cardin Winchester was making gestures toward Jaune that had the specific character of someone who has dared another person to do something and is now observing the results with proprietary interest.
The note required a response. She had not yet decided what that response would be — the appropriate response to Jaune Arc asking her to study with him was complicated by the fact that she was engaged, which Jaune did not know, and by the fact that Cardin was watching, and by the fact that whatever she said in the next thirty seconds was going to establish a dynamic that would be difficult to revise later.
Port's voice rose with the climactic flourish of his narrative, drawing the class's attention forward for a moment. In that moment, without quite deciding to, Weiss wrote a single line on the note and folded it back along its original crease and returned it to Jaune's desk.
A group study session would be more appropriate. — W.S.
She did not look at his expression when he read it.
Odyn, behind her, had stopped trying not to laugh.
Port had moved from the Ursa Major story into a broader lecture on combat philosophy and was approaching the inevitable moment where he asked for a volunteer, which was Port's favoured method of applying theory to practice and which produced, in every class, the same specific tension of people deciding whether to make themselves available.
From the corner of her eye, Weiss watched Cardin lean toward a classmate with the particular posture of someone who is about to make someone else's morning worse. She had been watching Cardin Winchester across the weeks they had shared these corridors, and her assessment was clear and not favourable: the kind of person who mistakes cruelty for confidence and has been allowed to do so for long enough that he has stopped noticing the difference.
She looked at Jaune. He was holding her note with an expression she couldn't quite read — not hurt, precisely, but recalibrated. The expression of someone who has received a clear signal and is integrating it.
There was something in Jaune Arc that Weiss had been slowly, reluctantly, revising her opinion about. It was not his combat ability, which remained genuinely inconsistent. It was something less quantifiable — the way he absorbed disappointment without crumbling, the way he tried again, the way his instinct when someone else was struggling was to move toward them rather than away. She had watched him in Port's class, and in the hallways, and in the Emerald Forest, and she had arrived at a conclusion she had not expected:
Jaune Arc was not what he presented himself as. And what he actually was might be worth considerably more.
"Now then!" Port declared, spreading his arms wide. "Who among you believes themselves ready to demonstrate what they've learned?"
Weiss stood.
It happened before she had fully decided it, which was unusual — Weiss Schnee generally decided things before she did them. But the room's momentum had produced a response from some part of her that had been watching Cardin's expression and had made a choice.
"I'll volunteer, Professor. And with your permission — I'd suggest using this as an opportunity for teamwork observation." She looked at Jaune. "Mr. Arc, perhaps you'd join me?"
The surprise on Jaune's face lasted approximately one second before he replaced it with something that was working toward gratitude. He stood.
Cardin's expression did several things in sequence.
"Splendid!" Port declared. "Demonstration and assessment! An excellent use of our time!"
They made their way to the front, and Weiss was aware of Odyn watching from his row with the specific quality of attention he brought to moments where she was making decisions he approved of without telling him she was going to. She did not look at him. She did not need to.
What came through the door instead was Glynda Goodwitch, and the expression she was wearing had a quality that Weiss had learned to recognise in the last few weeks — contained urgency, the kind that precedes information you have not asked for.
"Miss Schnee," Glynda said, and there was something in the way she said it that made the classroom go quiet before she had finished. "Your father is here. He is requesting to speak with you immediately."
The room, which had been quiet, became quieter.
Weiss felt the blood leave her face with the specific completeness of something that has been dreading a particular thing and is now receiving it.
She touched the ring on her left hand. The illusion was still in place.
She had approximately four seconds to decide several things at once, and she spent three of them thinking about what she had said to Odyn last night — we should tell them properly, in our own time, not like this — and one of them understanding that our own time had just been cancelled.
Odyn moved. Not fast — not in a way that announced itself — but with the quiet, decisive movement of someone who has made a decision and is implementing it. He was at her side before she had finished processing the decision, and she felt, rather than saw, his hand come up between them.
The illusion dropped.
The ring caught the light.
Both rings caught the light.
The silence that followed had a texture to it — the specific texture of a room full of people absorbing something and not having a word for it yet.
"If Jacques Schnee wishes to speak with my fiancée," Odyn said, into that silence, with the calm clarity of someone for whom this sentence has been prepared and is being delivered at exactly the right moment, "he may do so with me present."
The word fiancée went through the classroom like a stone through still water.
Jaune's jaw arrived at a position it had not previously occupied.
Cardin Winchester appeared, briefly, to have forgotten how to form words.
Ruby Rose was already vibrating.
"Your — fiancée," Glynda repeated, which was less a question than a person parsing new information in real time.
"Yes," Weiss said. She straightened — not because she needed the posture, but because it was available and it helped. "Though the timing of this announcement was not our preference."
Glynda pressed her lips together in the expression of someone who is very good at adapting to new information and is currently doing so at significant speed. Then she pushed her glasses up, composed herself, and said: "Class is dismissed, Professor Port. We appear to have a more pressing matter."
Port, to his eternal credit, twirled his moustache once, took in the scene, and said: "I believe this concludes today's lesson on unexpected developments in the field. Well handled by all parties."
The hallway absorbed them all in the way of spaces that are not designed for crowds and are receiving one regardless.
Ruby Rose had been a professional huntress-in-training for approximately seventy-two hours and had already demonstrated capacity for rapid decision-making under pressure. She applied this now by appearing directly in front of Weiss at a speed that bypassed the concept of distance entirely.
"You're engaged," she said, which was not technically a question but had question energy throughout.
"We are," Weiss confirmed.
"To each other."
"That is generally how engagement functions."
"Since when?"
"It's — complicated."
"Since WHEN, WEISS—"
"Ruby," Odyn said, pleasantly, "we will explain everything. After we speak with her father."
Ruby looked at him. Then at Weiss. Then at the rings, which were now very visible and very real and very much there. A sound came out of her that existed somewhere between a squeal and a word and had properties of neither and both.
Yang, who had been processing at her own pace, stepped forward with the expression of someone who has had a hypothesis confirmed and is handling the confirmation with absolute delight. "Ice Queen. Holding out on us. I had a feeling. I knew there was something — the way you looked at him when he came to the door — I knew it."
"You said that wasn't what you thought," Blake said, from Yang's left, with the mild accuracy of someone correcting the record.
"I said that to give her privacy. I'm a very considerate person." Yang's expression was the definition of someone who was not concerned about consistency. "I want all the details. Later. After the terrifying father meeting."
Blake had, in the way she did things, arrived close enough to examine the rings without anyone seeing her move. Her expression was the one she used when she was more moved than she was going to say out loud. "Elven craftsmanship," she observed. "The metalwork on yours, Weiss — that filigree pattern. It's very old."
"It was his grandmother's design," Weiss said, quietly.
"That's—" Blake stopped. Visibly composed herself. "That's very beautiful."
Nora materialised from somewhere in the crowd with the specific force of a natural event, and the hug she applied to both Weiss and Odyn simultaneously had the structural properties of a geological formation. Neither of them could speak for approximately four seconds.
"Nora," Ren said, with the practiced patience of someone who has said this specific word in this specific tone hundreds of times. "They need to breathe."
Nora released them. "Sorry! I'm just — a WEDDING! There's going to be a WEDDING!"
"Pyrrha," Sarai said, appearing with her characteristic warmth and a significant lack of surprise, "pay up."
Pyrrha, composed and smiling, reached for her wallet. "I really thought you'd wait at least until second year."
"Sarai wins every bet," Odyn told Yang conversationally, which Sarai received with the expression of someone for whom accuracy is its own reward.
Khanna, at the edge of the gathering with the studied calm of someone who has known about this for nine years and has been waiting for everyone else to catch up, caught Weiss's eye. The look she gave her was not I told you so but something warmer and more specific — the look of someone who has watched something difficult become what it was always going to be, and is glad.
"Shall we?" Khanna said, tilting her head toward Glynda, who was waiting at the corridor's end with the expression of someone managing several things at once.
"Ruby," Odyn said, as they began to move, "we will sit down with you and the others properly this evening and answer everything."
Ruby, who was attempting to ask four questions simultaneously, reduced herself to: "Everything?"
"Everything," Weiss confirmed.
Ruby processed this. Then: "Do I get to be in the wedding?"
"We haven't discussed the wedding."
"Can I be in the wedding?"
"Ruby."
"I'm asking a reasonable question—"
"Later," Odyn said, and he was smiling, and Weiss was trying not to, and they walked.
Behind them, the assembled crowd dissolved into conversations that had the specific energy of people who have just been given something to think about and are dedicating full resources to it.
"Dibs on maid of honour," Yang announced.
"That's not — I'm her partner, I have precedence—"
"I'm older—"
"That's not how precedence works—"
"SOMEONE HELP ME DOCUMENT ALL OF THIS," Nora announced to no one, already searching her pockets for a notebook.
Glynda, a full corridor ahead, sighed in the specific register of someone who has chosen this career and is making peace with it.
◈ — The Elevator, Ascending
They were joined before reaching the lift.
Lylah Albanar came from the connecting corridor with the liquid, unhurried movement of someone who has already assessed the situation and has decided exactly where she needs to be. She was in civilian dress rather than her security consultant's role, but the way she occupied a hallway — the specific weight of how she moved through space — made civilian dress a somewhat academic distinction.
"I wondered when this would happen," she said, falling into step behind them with the ease of someone joining a procession they have been expecting. Her red eyes moved to Weiss. "You held the illusion well, for three weeks. Longer than I expected."
"Odyn told you," Weiss said.
"Odyn tells me very little. I noticed." A pause. "I notice most things."
Sybyrh Arkham appeared from the opposite direction at the same moment, which was either coincidence or coordination, and Weiss knew them both well enough to know which. Her instructor's expression had been replaced by the expression she wore when she was not an instructor at all.
"Your father's mood," Sybyrh said, to both of them, "is what I would call controlled fury. He came with a solicitor. The solicitor is waiting in the outer office."
Odyn's expression did not change. "He came prepared."
"He came prepared," Sybyrh confirmed. "Which means he came with documentation intended to challenge the original agreement. That is useful to know."
They reached the lift. Lylah stepped in first, turned, and said: "The agreement your grandfather made with the Albanar family, Weiss, is legally binding under the Treaty of Succession Rights. Jacques cannot dissolve it unilaterally. He knows this. He came anyway." She looked at the lift's ceiling for a moment. "Which means he came for something else. Information, probably. Or leverage."
"He always does," Weiss said, which was not bitterness exactly but the specific flatness of someone who has stopped being surprised.
Odyn's hand found hers as the lift began to ascend. Not a gesture of performance — simply what his hand did when hers was available. She had stopped analysing it months into their correspondence. It was just true, the way certain things are true.
"Whatever he says in there," Odyn said quietly, "remember that you are not walking in as a Schnee Dust Company asset. You are walking in as yourself."
"I've spent a long time walking in as myself without quite knowing what that meant," Weiss said.
"You know now."
She did. That was the thing she had been learning to hold: the specific knowledge of herself that had arrived, piece by piece, through nine years of letters and three weeks of proximity, until it was real enough to stand in.
"Ready?" he asked.
"Yes," she said, and meant it.
◈ — Ozpin's Office
Jacques Schnee had the quality of a man who is used to rooms reorganising themselves around his presence, and he had arranged himself by the window with the visible calculation of someone who has selected their position as much for its symbolism as for its view.
He turned when they entered.
What he saw was not what he had prepared for.
He had prepared for Weiss — his daughter, whom he understood, whose levers he knew, whose fears he had spent sixteen years cataloguing. He had not prepared for what stood behind Weiss: the dark elf with the orange eyes and the unhurried certainty, the red-eyed woman in civilian clothes who moved like a weapon at rest, the second figure flanking them with the pleasant expression of someone who could be very unpleasant with precision.
His eyes found the rings.
Whatever he had been going to say first, he revised it.
"So," he said. The voice was the one Weiss had grown up hearing — the one designed to communicate that the speaker has assessed the situation and finds it manageable. "The rumours were accurate."
"They were," Weiss said. "Though I'd have preferred to tell you directly, rather than through rumour."
"Then perhaps you should have done that." He moved toward the centre of the room — stopped, recalculated when Lylah's position subtly shifted. "I receive a report that my daughter has been concealing an engagement — a betrothal arrangement made without my knowledge or my consent — and I am supposed to be grateful that she's now informing me in person?"
"The arrangement was made with my grandfather's knowledge and consent," Weiss said. "The Treaty of Succession Rights, Article Fourteen, grants the right of betrothal agreement to the eldest blood relative in cases where the head of household is — " she paused, choosing the word precisely — "deemed to be acting in a manner contrary to the interests of the family's diplomatic standing."
Jacques's moustache moved in the specific way it moved when he was controlling a reaction that wanted to be uncontrolled. "You've been studying the treaty."
"I've been studying it for two years," Weiss said. "Father."
He looked at Odyn. The look was the one that Jacques Schnee deployed against business opponents — the assessment, the search for weaknesses, the calculation of what leverage was available.
Odyn received it with the patience of someone who has been looked at this way before and has decided that the looking is not the problem.
"You're the Albanar boy," Jacques said.
"Odyn Albanar," Odyn confirmed. "And you are Weiss's father, which means you will be my family in due course, so I would like, if possible, to begin that arrangement on reasonable terms."
"Reasonable terms," Jacques repeated.
"I understand you have concerns. Some of them are legitimate, and I'm willing to address those." Odyn's voice had the tone of someone who has thought about this conversation for a long time and arrived at clarity about how to conduct it. "What I am not willing to do is allow those concerns to be used as a mechanism for pressuring Weiss into a decision that was already made, legally and personally, by people who had the standing to make it."
Jacques turned to Ozpin, who had been watching this from behind his desk with the expression of someone who has seen several of these conversations and has stopped being surprised by how they go. "You're allowing this? In your school?"
"I'm allowing several things in my school," Ozpin said, pleasantly. "The betrothal agreement between the Schnee and Albanar families was made in good faith, with the blessing of two families who understood its implications better than either of us. I see no reason to intercede."
"The Schnee Dust Company—"
"Is not a party to this conversation," Sybyrh said, in the mild, informational tone she used to deliver things that were not mild at all.
Jacques looked at her. He had the expression of someone who has identified that the room is not arranging itself the way he expected and is revising his strategy.
"Trade routes," Lylah said, into the pause. "If you're calculating — which I know you are — consider what alliance with the Albanar family actually means in practical terms. The Cerulean House controls three of the seven primary Dust transport corridors through the highland territories. Those corridors have been closed to SDC traffic for nine years. They would not be closed to family."
Jacques was quiet.
"The goodwill alone," Sybyrh added, "of being seen as the family that bridged the gap — during a period when relations between humans and dark elves are at their most fragile in two generations — is worth considerably more than whatever arrangement you had with the Marigold family."
Jacques looked at Weiss. Something moved through his expression — not warmth, not exactly, but the specific recalibration of a man who has been outplayed and is deciding how to manage the acknowledgment of this.
"You planned this," he said.
"No," Weiss said. "We were ready for it. There's a difference."
A long silence.
"I hope," Jacques said, finally, carefully, "that you know what you're doing."
"For the first time in my life," Weiss said, and she looked at Odyn when she said it, not at her father, "I absolutely do."
Jacques straightened his jacket. Looked once more at the room — at the people in it, at the ring on his daughter's hand, at the man standing beside her who looked at Weiss with the expression of someone who has decided on something important and has not reconsidered it since.
He left without further argument.
The lift doors closed behind him with the sound of something that has finished.
Lylah let the silence hold for a moment. Then she said: "He'll try something else. This was reconnaissance. He needed to see the shape of what he's dealing with."
"I know," Weiss said. "He always does."
"We'll be watching," Sybyrh said. "The Vanguard increased its presence around Beacon two weeks ago, when we first became aware of the leak that brought him here today. And there are people monitoring his contacts in Atlas with interests in seeing the current tensions worsen."
Odyn nodded. "We'll talk properly — about all of it — later. Not here."
"Agreed," Lylah said. Then her expression shifted, from the sharpness of the last forty minutes into something warmer and more private. She looked at Weiss. "You were excellent in there."
Weiss absorbed this. "I had preparation."
"You had courage," Lylah said. "Preparation is what you did with it."
Ozpin, from behind his desk, made a small sound that was possibly agreement and possibly appreciation. He had the expression of a man who has watched many significant things and has stopped remarking on them except when they deserve it.
"One more thing," Lylah said, as they made their way back to the lift — and her voice had shifted again, into a register that was personal rather than strategic. She looked at Weiss with the specific care of someone who is about to say something that will require receiving. "You asked me, some weeks ago, whether there were family connections you didn't know about."
Weiss looked at her.
"There are. Several of them." Lylah glanced at Odyn. "This isn't the moment for all of them — some of those revelations require more careful ground and better timing. But I want you to know that we're aware of them, and we're watching over the people involved. Including the ones who don't know they're being watched over."
Weiss thought about Yang, who had been in this building for weeks unaware that the woman overseeing Beacon's security had a specific reason for knowing her name before she arrived. She thought about Ruby — and then she thought about Roy, and his careful, deliberate care toward her partner, and something she had observed but not yet named.
"Roy knows," she said. It wasn't a question.
"Roy knows what he needs to know," Odyn said. "And he's — " a pause, in which something moved through his expression that was private — "navigating it. As carefully as he can."
"The Vytal Festival," Lylah said. "By then, the timing will be right. And Summer will be there."
The name landed in the conversation with the weight of something that has been withheld for a reason, and Weiss did not ask the question that immediately arrived in her mind, because she understood — from the look on Lylah's face, from the specific quality of the silence around the word Summer — that the question was not hers to ask yet.
She filed it. She would wait.
"One thing at a time," Odyn said.
"One thing at a time," Weiss agreed.
The lift took them down, and the city of Vale waited beyond Beacon's windows, and somewhere in the corridor above the common room, the smell of something questionable was arriving from the direction of the kitchen.
◈ — The Kitchen: Shortly After
What greeted them when they pushed open the kitchen door was a scene that had, by its own internal logic, made sense to the people who had created it.
Nora Valkyrie was presenting a tray of cookies that were the specific shade of green associated with things that glow. Not metaphorically. Actually, measurably glowing. She was doing this with the expression of someone who has achieved exactly what they set out to achieve and is awaiting recognition.
"They're Dust-infused," she explained, to the group assembled around her in various stages of concern. "For extra energy during combat. I used the flour from the baking supply and just — added some."
"Some what, exactly," Ruby asked, having the specific tone of someone who wants the cookies to be safe but is losing confidence.
"Blue Dust, mostly. A little Fire. Experimental quantities."
"Nora," Ren said, which was a complete sentence.
"Look how they match your eyes!"
"Nora."
Weiss and Odyn arrived at the kitchen door and stood for a moment, taking in the scene: Pyrrha calmly extinguishing something in a mixing bowl; Jaune doing his best to help, which produced results of mixed effectiveness; Blake at the counter with her arms folded and the expression of someone who has decided this is not her problem while also being unable to leave; Yang laughing hard enough that she needed the counter for structural support.
"They're back!" Ruby spotted them and arrived via rose petal express. "How did it go? Is your father—? Are you—? Did he—?"
"He left," Weiss said. "Without causing permanent damage."
"To anyone?" Yang asked.
"To anything."
Yang made a sound that was deeply satisfied. Then she looked at Odyn. "I reserve the right to have opinions about you, going forward. Big sister opinions."
"I've been told to expect those," Odyn said.
"Smart elf."
Glynda appeared in the kitchen doorway with the specific timing of a person who was hoping to find something that wasn't happening, and found instead the full inventory of what was happening. She took it in with the expressionless quality of someone who has decided the face they're controlling is worth controlling.
"Miss Valkyrie," she said. "The cookies."
Nora brightened. "Wedding test recipes!"
"Are not," Glynda said, with the precision of someone delivering a ruling, "on the approved list of anything. I will, however, note that the structural integrity of the tray is impressive." She used her telekinesis to levitate the glowing cookies into a containment vessel with the practised ease of someone who has done stranger things in this kitchen. "For future reference: Dust is a controlled substance. It does not belong in baked goods. No matter how festive the outcome."
"Yes, Professor," said most of the room.
"I'm putting it on record," Nora said, to Ren, "that she called them festive."
"She did not call them—"
"Festive was implied."
Weiss looked at Odyn. Odyn looked at Weiss. Something passed between them that had no name and required none — the specific exchange of two people who have just survived something significant and have arrived at the conclusion that this is their life now, and find themselves, against all reasonable expectation, entirely at peace with it.
"We promised everyone an explanation," Weiss said, to the room.
The room, which had been conducting three separate conversations about cookies, stopped.
"Tonight," Odyn confirmed. "The common room. We'll tell you the shape of things — how we met, why we didn't say anything sooner. Everything that's ours to tell." He looked at Ruby, who was practically vibrating. "Yes, including the flower girl question."
Ruby made a sound that was joy rendered in a single syllable.
"I do want to say one thing now," Weiss said. She looked at her teammates, and at the people who had arranged themselves into something that was beginning to have the structure of a family — JNPR at the back, Khanna leaning in the doorway, Sarai beside Roy, Blake with her quiet attention, Yang with her hand already moving toward Weiss's shoulder in the anticipatory gesture of someone who is going to hug her whether she wants it or not. "I know this is — I know I haven't been — " She stopped. Started again. "I'm not good at being surprised. I'm not good at things I didn't plan for. But this." She looked at Odyn. "This I planned for, even when I couldn't plan anything else. And I'm glad it's not a secret anymore."
Yang's hug arrived before Weiss finished the sentence.
"You're getting better at the feelings thing," Yang informed her, from somewhere near Weiss's ear.
"Don't push it," Weiss said, and accepted the hug anyway.
◈ — Roy and Ruby: The Forge, First; Then the World
He had said seven o'clock at the forge.
He was there at six-fifty, which was either early or simply the gap between what you say and when you arrive when the thing you're arriving at matters to you.
Ruby came at seven exactly — he heard the rose-petal signature of her Semblance before he heard her footsteps, and he knew the sound well enough now to know the difference between Ruby in a hurry and Ruby in a specific kind of anticipation, and this was the second kind.
She appeared in the forge doorway in her uniform with Crescent Rose across her back and the specific expression she wore when she was trying not to be too obviously excited about something and had already lost the attempt.
"Hi," she said.
"Hi," he said.
A brief silence of the kind that arrives when two people have had a conversation in their head and are now in the actual conversation and are recalibrating.
"So," Ruby said, coming forward into the forge's warmth. "The third configuration. I lose efficiency in the conversion between the sniper and scythe settings — I think it's in the locking mechanism, but I can't—"
She had the weapon out and on the bench before she finished the sentence, already pointing at the mechanism in question, and he leaned in to look because he was actually curious and because the way Ruby talked about Crescent Rose was the way people talked about things they genuinely loved, which was something he did not find tedious at all.
"Here," she said, tracing the joint with one finger. "When I cycle through this transition, I lose about fifteen percent. I've tried adjusting the tension on the spring here and it doesn't fix it."
He looked at the joint. Turned the configuration, felt the mechanism move. "It's not the spring," he said. "It's this pin — it's not seating cleanly through the full arc. See how it drags here?" He showed her the point, and she leaned in until her hair brushed his shoulder, looking at the mechanism with the focused attention of someone for whom this is entirely natural and wonderful.
"Oh," she said. "Oh, that's — you're right. I didn't see it because I was looking at the wrong part entirely."
"Different angle," he said. "Sometimes it takes someone else's eyes."
She looked up at him, and they were close, and neither of them moved for a moment.
"Thanks," she said. Quieter than she usually was.
"Of course," he said.
They worked for an hour — Ruby talking through what she knew and what she'd tried, Roy asking questions that showed he was following rather than waiting, the forge's ambient warmth and the clean sound of small tools making the work feel right in the way that physical tasks feel right when your attention is happy to be there.
When the mechanism was fixed and Ruby had cycled through the conversion four times to confirm it, she set the weapon down and looked at it with the expression of someone satisfied in a way that is specific and genuine.
"Much better," she said.
"Good." He began returning the tools to their places with the methodical care of someone who has been taught to take care of the things he uses.
"Roy," Ruby said.
He turned.
She was holding a small piece of notepaper, folded twice. The expression on her face was the one she wore when she had decided to do something and was doing it before the part of her that second-guesses things could catch up.
"I wrote you something," she said. "For — for the date. Because I'm better at writing than at saying things out loud sometimes." She held it out. "You don't have to read it now."
He took it. Looked at it in his hand. Looked at her.
"I would like to read it now," he said.
She turned slightly pink. Turned to look at the forge's cooling rack. "Okay."
He unfolded the paper.
The handwriting was Ruby's — round and quick and honest, the handwriting of someone who writes the way they think rather than trying to make it look like something else. She had written:
I know this is a weird thing to say on a first date that hasn't happened yet. But I wanted to say it before, because after might be harder. You're the first person who ever made me feel like my weird is the interesting kind instead of the kind you have to make allowances for. I don't know what this is but I know it feels different from everything else. Thank you for the seven o'clock.
He folded the paper carefully and put it in the inner pocket of his jacket, which was where he put things he intended to keep.
"Ruby," he said.
She turned, still slightly pink.
"Shall we go?" he said. "I made a reservation."
The café was in the part of Vale that was warm in the evening — the old district, where the buildings had been repaired enough times that they had a layered quality, the present and the history visible simultaneously. The outdoor tables had lanterns, and the strawberry-chocolate parfait was, as Ruby had theorised, objectively excellent.
They talked easily in the way of two people who have established, in the forge, that the other person is worth talking to and have arrived at dinner with this established. Ruby explained the history of Crescent Rose's design in enough detail that most people would have found a reason to change the subject, and Roy asked a question about the alloy at the blade's edge that sent her down a twenty-minute path of happily technical information that he found genuinely interesting and showed this, which made Ruby talk more, which was a cycle that both of them were perfectly happy in.
He produced the box at the moment when the evening had settled into a comfortable rhythm and the parfaits were half-finished and the lantern light was doing the thing lantern light does.
He set it on the table between them.
She looked at it. Then at him.
"What is this?" she asked.
"Open it and find out."
She opened it.
The pendant was silver — a rose, worked in the specific way of Albanar craftsmanship, which was to say with the attention to fine detail of a tradition that had been doing this for centuries. The petals had a particular quality in the lantern light, the silver catching it in the way of something made for exactly this kind of illumination.
Ruby looked at it for a long moment.
"It's a rose," she said.
"It is."
"A silver rose."
"Yes."
She looked at him. Something moved through her expression that she let move rather than managing, which was the most Ruby thing she did and also the thing he found most — he stopped the thought, filed it, returned to the present.
"Can I—" she started, and then: "Would you—"
"Yes," he said.
He came around to her side of the table and fastened the clasp at the back of her neck, close enough that he was aware of the warmth of the evening and of her and of the specific difficulty of keeping his focus on the clasp. He stepped back.
She reached up and touched the pendant with two fingers.
"Thank you," she said, and the way she said it was the way she said things when she meant them entirely.
"Of course," he said.
He sat back down. They finished the parfaits. The lanterns burned. Around them, the old district of Vale conducted its evening business, entirely unaware that anything significant had happened at this particular table, which was the nature of significant things.
◈ — The Observers: A Diplomatic Distance
They had given the couple a head start.
Yang had called this plausible deniability. Blake had called it basic courtesy. Weiss had not called it anything because she had been the one to quietly call ahead to the café and ensure the corner table was available, which she was not going to discuss.
They were very bad at being inconspicuous.
Yang was physically incapable of watching Ruby be handed a gift without making a sound that she then had to convert into a cough. Blake's attempts at reading a menu from three tables away were undermined by the fact that she had been holding the menu upside-down for six minutes. Weiss had her composure intact but was very close to the edge of it.
Odyn watched the whole scene from behind his coffee with the expression of someone who has been expecting this for approximately fourteen years and is entirely at peace with it.
"He's going to drop something," Yang said, watching Roy navigate around the table to help with the necklace. "He always drops things when he's nervous."
"He didn't drop anything," Odyn said.
"There was a moment."
"There wasn't a moment."
"There was almost a moment." Yang sighed with the depth of someone who takes this responsibility seriously. "She's not going to look up. Look at her — she's touching the pendant. She's not going to look up for at least thirty seconds."
"Then stop watching for thirty seconds," Blake suggested.
"That's not how this works."
"She knows we're here," Weiss said.
Yang looked at her. "What?"
"Ruby knows we're here. She's known since the forge — I saw her check over her shoulder twice on the airship, and both times she had that expression. The one where she knows something and is deciding whether to acknowledge it." Weiss looked at her parfait. "She's letting us be here."
A silence in which everyone processed this.
"She's very kind," Pyrrha said, softly, from the adjacent table where she had been conducting what she claimed was an independent study session with Jaune and which had become, quietly, part of the same operation.
"She really is," Weiss agreed.
Jaune, beside Pyrrha, had the expression of someone trying to understand several things at once and making progress. "So Odyn and Weiss are engaged, Roy and Ruby are on a date, and we're all hiding at different tables in Vale pretending not to be here."
"Accurate summary," Blake said.
"Okay." Jaune nodded. "Just wanted to confirm."
Nora arrived at this moment from a side street, slightly breathless, with what appeared to be a notebook and a camera. "I GOT THE SHOT," she announced, at a volume that the café's other patrons registered. "The necklace moment. Ren, tell them—"
"Please sit down," Ren said.
"The lighting was perfect, though. The lanterns—"
"Nora," said everyone in range.
She sat, still beaming.
Across the café, Ruby and Roy were laughing at something, their heads slightly closer than the table required, the pendant catching the lantern light in a small silver point.
Yang leaned back in her chair and looked at the sky above Vale — the stars and the fractured moon, the clouds that moved across them in the mild evening air.
"She looks happy," she said. Not for anyone specifically. Just because it needed to be said.
"She is," Odyn said.
"Good." Yang's voice had the specific warmth of someone who is putting something down that she has been carrying for a long time — the weight of a big sister who has been the primary person watching over someone since she was eight years old. "That's all I needed to know."
The evening continued.
Eventually, Ruby and Roy stood and left the café in the direction of the airship dock, Roy's arm offered and accepted with the shy, careful formality of something that is new and knows it, and the small crowd that had assembled at various tables in the café watched them go and did not follow, because some moments belong only to the people in them.
Nora captured one last photograph.
"For the wedding album," she explained.
Nobody corrected her.
◈ — Beacon: Late
The dormitory had its night configuration.
Yang's light was on, then off. Blake's lamp burned late, as it always did. Below the window, Beacon's grounds were quiet in the way of places that rest between one significant day and the next.
In her ceiling-suspended bunk, Ruby lay on her back with her hand resting on the rose pendant, looking at the canvas of her tent-blanket overhead in the darkness.
She was not asleep.
She was thinking about the things that had happened today — the engagement revealed, the father who had come and gone, the kitchen and the glowing cookies, the forge and the mechanism that had turned out to be the pin rather than the spring, the table in the old district with the lanterns and the parfait and the necklace and the note she had written and given him and which he had put in his inner pocket the way people put things they intend to keep.
She was thinking about the letter in her own pocket — the note she had not given him, the second one, the one she had written and then decided was too much, the one that said I think I'm falling in love with you, which is terrifying and also wonderful and I'm not sure what to do with it so I'm just going to feel it for now.
She was keeping that one.
She would feel it for now.
Downstairs, in the common room, Weiss and Odyn were finishing a conversation that had started before dinner and had moved through several rooms and several registers over the course of the evening — the full accounting of things, as promised, from the fountain in the Schnee estate gardens to the pinky promise to the nine years of letters to the three weeks of proximity that had resolved in the lift this afternoon with two rings visible and a father backing toward an exit.
The others had listened with the specific attention of people receiving something that matters, and asked the questions that mattered, and Ruby had sat cross-legged on the common room floor and looked at Weiss across the circle of people and thought about what it meant to have been loved carefully across a long distance by someone who was watching over you even when you couldn't see them.
She had also thought about Roy. These thoughts had significant overlap.
She touched the pendant in the dark.
Silver eyes in moonlight, Blake had said.
She pressed her lips together against a smile.
In the next bunk, Yang was not asleep either. She was looking at the ceiling with the expression she used when she was thinking about something she wasn't going to say out loud, which was the expression she had worn for a long time — since before their mother died, since before Raven left, since before being someone's older sister became the shape of everything she was.
Weiss had said tonight: I'm not good at things I didn't plan for. But this I planned for, even when I couldn't plan anything else.
Yang had thought about this. She was still thinking about it.
She reached up and touched the ends of her own hair — golden, and real, and hers — and she looked at the ceiling and she was quiet.
Below her, Blake turned a page.
Outside, through the high window, the shattered moon kept its arc across the Vale sky.
Tomorrow would come with its own weight, its own challenges, the next stage of whatever this year was going to be. The SDC's political manoeuvres. The tensions that Lylah had named carefully in the corridor, the powder keg and the spark it was waiting for. The things that were coming that none of them could fully see yet.
But tonight, in this dormitory, in these beds, the people who had become something to each other — by initiation and accident and proximity and choice — were present in the specific way of people who have found something real and are, for the moment, simply inside it.
That was enough.
That, for tonight, was everything.
— To Be Continued —
Next Time: Chapter 9 — Jaundice & The Stray