Opening:
opening theme: Alive by Reona [Arknights: Prelude to Dawn]
Visuals: Replace the Arknights characters with the cast of this story and replace the reunion with Grimm and Atlas soldiers. The opening depicts the divide between the elves and the humans, while Huntsman and Huntresses fight off the Grimm. The chorus shows Odyn and the other elves struggle against the humans, the same with the faunus and Saiyan characters. The song ends as it zooms to a shot of Odyn and Weiss look off into the distance before the dark elf turns to look at Weiss. Weiss, noticing his gaze just smiles as the title card for the story comes up after the screen goes black.
Chapter IX — Jaundice; The Stray
The combat score settled on the display with the finality of things that have been decided.
Jaune Arc's aura bar sat in the red — not dangerously, but visibly, the colour of someone who has been hit more times than they have absorbed correctly and has not yet found the solution to why. Cardin Winchester's bar occupied the comfortable upper half of its range, and Cardin's expression occupied the specific configuration of someone who intends to let this be known to everyone in the vicinity for the remainder of the week.
"Mr. Winchester advances," Glynda announced, in the tone of someone reading a document they have had opinions about. "Mr. Arc — your defensive instincts have improved. Your application of them, under pressure, has not kept pace with your theory." She pushed her glasses up with the movement she used when delivering information she would prefer not to be delivering. "Your current standing falls below the threshold for Vytal Festival participation. I would recommend you address this before the tournament begins."
In the elevated section where Team ORHZ sat with Sarai's team and Khanna's team, Odyn was watching Jaune with the specific attention of someone for whom watching people in difficulty has a productive rather than spectator quality. Roy's expression was thoughtful in the way it became when he was working on something rather than observing it.
Lylah, in the seat behind them, said quietly: "Good instincts."
"Almost no foundation," Sybyrh replied, equally quiet. "As if his training was something other than what his record suggests."
"Or conducted by people who don't appear in records," Odyn said, without looking away from the arena floor.
Lylah made a small sound that was not quite agreement and not quite disagreement, which from her meant both.
In the front row of the student section, Pyrrha sat with her hands laced together in her lap, watching Jaune pull himself to his feet with the expression she wore when she had been trying to give someone something and wasn't certain they had received it. It was not disappointment. It was the more complicated thing that looked like concern from the outside and was something more specific from the inside.
The class filed out.
Cardin shouldered past Jaune with the self-satisfied momentum of someone who has won a point in a longer game and is not being subtle about this. His team followed with the particular formation of people who are borrowing confidence from the person in the lead and have not yet noticed how contingent this arrangement is.
Odyn fell into step beside Jaune as the corridor opened out.
"How do you feel about some additional training sessions?" he asked. "Our whole group together. No evaluation. No stakes."
Jaune looked at him sideways. There was the automatic reflex of someone who has been braced for a different kind of comment — and then, underneath it, the thing that the automatic reflex was protecting: hope, specific and slightly raw.
"Yeah," Jaune said. "Okay."
Pyrrha, catching this from a few steps ahead, allowed herself a small smile that she aimed at the corridor floor rather than at Jaune, because she understood that some encouragements work better when they are not observed.
◈ — The Cafeteria: Later
The tables had been pushed together in the specific way that happened whenever the full collection of their affiliated teams occupied the same space at the same time, which was increasingly often and which the cafeteria staff had begun to anticipate.
The conversation was the kind that a large, varied group produces when everyone is reasonably comfortable — overlapping and branching, several threads running at once, the occasional moment where two people on opposite ends of the table discover they have been having the same thought.
Jaune was picking at his food with the focused lack of attention of someone whose mind is elsewhere. Zero, across the table, was watching him with the particular attentiveness he brought to things he found anomalous.
"That shield feint yesterday," Scarlett said, leaning forward. Her crimson hair caught the cafeteria light as she looked at Jaune directly. "The second one, when you gave Cardin the false opening. That was deliberate."
Jaune looked up. "I just reacted."
"You reacted in exactly the right direction," Eleryc said. "Your best moves come from instinct. Your worst come from thinking too hard about what you're supposed to do."
"There's something under the surface," Flare said, her fox tail moving in the slow, thoughtful way it moved when she was paying genuine attention. "Something that's been trained. You can see it in moments — and then it disappears, like he's correcting himself."
Aiko's wolf ears had shifted forward incrementally during this conversation. She caught Zero's eye across the table — he gave a nod that said yes, I see it too.
Jaune's hands had tightened on his fork. Not obviously, but enough. Pyrrha's hand came to rest on his arm with the gentle, non-intrusive presence of someone who is not applying pressure but is making herself available.
"Whatever's underneath that," Roy said, and his voice had the quality it used when he was speaking something he had actually decided rather than performing it, "it doesn't change who you are right now or who you're working toward becoming."
"Sometimes," Flare said, "going backward is the only way to move forward correctly. I had to do that once. With my own — " she paused, selected the word with care — "with my own particular abilities. Someone showed me that what felt like a retreat was actually finding the foundation I'd missed."
The table was quieter now. Not uncomfortably — the kind of quiet that arrives when something true has been said in a group of people who recognise truth.
Then Sarai stood up.
The motion was sufficiently purposeful that it pulled attention even from the other end of the table.
"Excuse me," she said, with the specific politeness that she used when she was about to be extremely impolite to someone else. "I'll be back in a moment."
Roy called after her: "Don't go too—"
"I make no promises," she said, already moving.
Cardin Winchester had been conducting what he considered a witty critique of Velvet Scarlatina's rabbit ears — a critique that his team received with the laughter of people who have decided the person in front of them is funny and have arranged their responses accordingly. The cafeteria around them had the slightly lowered energy of a space where something unpleasant is happening and most people have decided not to be involved.
Sarai stopped in front of the table.
The cafeteria did not go silent — but it went quieter, in the way that happens when something is about to have an audience that did not formally agree to watch.
"Four huntsmen-in-training," she said, which was less an observation than an opening position. Her voice had the quality of something that has no reason to raise itself because the room is already listening. "This is what you've found to do with your time."
Cardin turned with the expression he used when he was about to be dismissive. "This doesn't concern you—"
"It does," she said, easily. "Let me explain why. You see, there are two reasons people pick on others in groups. The first is that they genuinely don't know better, which is fixable. The second is that they need an audience to feel capable, which is a different kind of problem."
Cardin's expression went through several configurations.
"I've been watching your combat sessions," Sarai continued, in the tone of someone presenting evidence. "Your individual scores are adequate. Your team performance is dependent on intimidation, which is an interesting tactical choice when you consider that in actual field conditions, Grimm don't become less aggressive because someone is trying to look threatening at them." She tilted her head. "Shall I continue? Because I have opinions about your footwork as well."
At the table across the cafeteria, Zero leaned toward Aiko. "Five lien. One of them cries."
"Not taking that bet," she said.
Cardin's team had the quality of people who have realised they are in a situation they did not prepare for. Russel made a movement that was probably going to be an attempt to step forward and reconsidered it mid-motion when Sarai's attention moved to him briefly.
"Here is what's going to happen," Sarai said. "You are going to apologise to Velvet. A real apology, not the kind you deliver at volume with your fingers crossed. And then you are going to think, carefully, about whether picking on people is actually making you any stronger. Or whether it's making you weaker every time you do it, because the only reason you need to do it is if you're not certain you're strong enough without it."
She waited.
The cafeteria waited with her.
Cardin looked at his team. His team looked at their boots.
"We're sorry for — " Russel started.
"Hmm?" Sarai said.
" — for making fun of you," Cardin finished, with the tone of someone who has arrived at the minimum viable apology and is hoping it will be accepted.
Sarai looked at him for a long moment.
"HUH?" she said, which in terms of volume redefined the cafeteria's ambient register entirely. "That? You call that an apology? Put some backbone into it! And this time, mean it!"
The next thirty seconds contained what several witnesses would later describe as the most comprehensive, heartfelt, practically desperate apology delivered by four people in simultaneous chorus that Beacon Academy had ever recorded in its institutional history. Cardin's voice reached an octave that none of his teammates had previously been aware he possessed. Dove was trembling in a way that was, generously, not described as shaking.
"We are so very, very sorry, Velvet — your heritage is wonderful and we were complete idiots and it will never, ever happen again — "
"Now that's an apology," Sarai said, with the satisfaction of someone whose quality standards have been met. "You may stop."
CRDL stopped. Then, with the collective instinct of people who have assessed their situation and identified the appropriate next move, they left the cafeteria at a pace that was not quite running and was very close to it.
The cafeteria applauded.
Sarai walked back to the table with the unbothered air of someone who has completed a minor administrative task and found everything in order.
"Well," she said, sitting down and returning to her food. "That's sorted."
Roy had buried his face in his hands and his shoulders were making the specific movement of someone trying very hard not to laugh and failing.
"That's my sister," Odyn said, to no one in particular.
Velvet, still standing near the table she'd been at, looked at Sarai with the expression of someone who has just witnessed something they will be thinking about for several years. "I don't think they'll bother anyone again."
"They better not," Sarai said, and reached for her drink. "I was being nice."
"Remind me," Baron said to Flare, behind his hand, "to never get on her bad side."
"Being on her bad side," Flare replied, equally quietly, "requires first meeting her bad side. This was apparently her nice side."
◈ — The Long Game
Odyn knew about Jaune's plan before Jaune executed it, because Jaune had told him — quietly, in the corridor after lunch, with the specific expression of someone who has worked something out and needs one person to know it before they can commit to it.
"The transcripts," Jaune had said. "Here's what I need you to understand about them."
And he had explained, and Odyn had listened, and by the end of it he had a significantly different picture of Jaune Arc than the one the semester had been building.
"You're going to let him think he has leverage," Odyn said.
"He is predictable," Jaune said. "He'll find them. He'll decide he's found a weapon. And then he'll use it the way he uses everything — loudly, at the worst possible time, expecting me to fold."
"And instead."
"And instead I don't fold." Jaune's expression had a quality that Odyn had not seen on him before — not the performed confidence that appeared and disappeared under pressure, but something more structural. "My family has been producing warriors for generations. Not the kind who appear in public tournament records. The training I received — " he paused, selected the word — "doesn't document well. But it exists."
Odyn had looked at him for a moment. "How long have you been playing the struggling student?"
"Since I got here," Jaune said. "Not entirely. Some of it is real — Beacon's system is different from what I know and I've been adapting. But Cardin's been looking for a target from the first week. The easiest thing was to give him one that wasn't going to hurt anyone except me, and then see what he did with it."
"And now you're going to show him what he was actually holding."
"Something like that."
Odyn had agreed to say nothing until the moment was right. He was good at keeping promises, and he kept this one.
The rooftop conversation was designed to be overheard.
Odyn, in the shadow by the access door, recognised the quality of Jaune's performance — the slightly elevated volume, the dejection calibrated just large enough to carry to the figure he had correctly predicted would be listening from the lower section of the roof. Pyrrha's hurt was real, and he had watched it happen with the discomfort of someone who knows a deception is necessary and dislikes the collateral damage of it anyway. She would be told. She would understand. But the moment had to complete itself first.
Cardin had the expression of a man who has found something he considers treasure.
The next several days were the kind that test the peripheral vision of friendship — the group seeing Jaune subdued, seeing Cardin smug, seeing the dynamic arranged in a way that felt wrong but which none of them could quite get traction on. Odyn deflected their concern without lying to them, which was the most precise kind of navigation.
And then the Emerald Forest, and the cliff, and Cardin with his jar of sap and his borrowed leverage and his plan that was going exactly the way Cardin Winchester's plans always went, which was to say it was going exactly the way Jaune Arc intended it to go.
"No," Jaune said.
The word landed differently than Cardin had expected.
"The transcripts you think give you power over me," Jaune said, with the calm of someone who has been carrying this position for weeks and has finally arrived at the place where he gets to put it down, "are exactly what I wanted you to find."
The confusion on Cardin's face was not performed. Neither was what came after it — the Ursa Major arriving from the tree line with the indifferent timing of a Grimm, which had not been part of Jaune's plan and which Jaune received with the expression of someone who has rolled an unexpected variable into their existing calculation and found it workable.
He moved.
Not with the uncertain footwork of the combat sessions, not with the telegraphed strikes that Cardin had been reading and countering for weeks. He moved with the precise, economical efficiency of training that had been carefully concealed — the shield at the exact angle that distributes force rather than absorbs it, the blade finding the gap in the Ursa's armour with the precision of someone who has been shown where gaps in armour tend to be.
From the treeline, Odyn watched.
"You want to know the difference between you and me?" Jaune said, to Cardin, who was watching with the expression of someone whose model of the world is being revised in real time. The Ursa pressed forward and Jaune adjusted, feet certain, weight distributed. "I might have come in through the wrong door. Every day since, I've been working to deserve the room. You've been spending that same time making sure other people know you think you own it."
The Ursa reared. Jaune's shield met it and redirected. His blade followed through the opening.
The Grimm fell.
Cardin stood in the settling dust with the look of a person who has been holding something they thought was gold and has just discovered what it actually is.
Odyn stepped out of the treeline.
"Well played," he said.
"You knew," Cardin said, looking between them.
"Someone had to," Jaune said. He crossed to Cardin and extended his hand. Not as a performance — as an offer. "The point wasn't to trick you. It was to show you something. Whether you use it is up to you."
Cardin looked at the hand.
He looked at the dissipating Ursa. He looked at his own hands — the ones that had been holding someone else's fear for leverage, and had just discovered they were holding nothing.
He took Jaune's hand.
"I've been a real jerk," he said, which was the least performative thing he had said since arriving at Beacon.
"Nothing that can't be fixed," Jaune said. "If you want to fix it."
The sounds of running footsteps announced the group's arrival — drawn by the Ursa's noise, weapons drawn, arriving to find Jaune and Cardin with a handshake between them and Odyn beside them with the expression of someone who has watched a plan complete itself.
Ruby's eyes moved from the dissipating Grimm to Jaune to Cardin to Odyn. "Did we miss something?"
"A lesson in strategy," Odyn said. "And something about second chances."
Cardin looked at the assembled group — at Sarai, specifically, who was watching him with the attentiveness of someone who had also had a theory and is rechecking it.
"I owe all of you an apology," he said. "A real one. Not the cafeteria version." He looked at Sarai directly. "Especially you. You were right. Every word of it."
Sarai looked at him for a long moment with the expression she used for assessments.
Then: "Admitting that took more than anything you've done in that arena," she said. "That's actual strength."
Cardin breathed. Something in him settled into a different configuration.
Weiss, who had come to stand beside Odyn, interlinked her fingers with his. "You knew," she said, quietly, because it was not a question.
"He told me before," Odyn said. "He needed one person to know he hadn't given up."
She looked at Jaune — at the change in how he occupied space, the way his shoulders were set now, the way he was talking to Cardin with the ease of someone who has stopped managing themselves and started simply being themselves.
"Sometimes," she said, "the best thing you can give someone is enough space to execute their own plan."
"You're getting wise," he said.
"I've had good examples," she said, which was simpler than everything it contained.
On the rooftop that evening, in the moonlight, Pyrrha was running forms.
She had been told. She had listened. She had been quiet for a moment in the way of someone who is deciding whether the ends justify the means and has arrived at a conclusion that is more nuanced than either option.
"You could have told me," she said, when Jaune had finished.
"I know," he said. "I'm sorry. Making you think I didn't value your help was wrong, even if the plan needed it. You've given me more than you know. I should have found a way to protect that while still doing what I needed to do."
She turned from the forms and looked at him. The moonlight made her hair its particular shade of autumn red. Her expression was the one she kept for things she was deciding carefully.
"No more holding back?" she said.
He drew Crocea Mors. "Not with you."
"Good," she said, and her blade came up in the opening position of a genuine match. "Because I've been calibrating to about sixty percent this whole time and it's been somewhat frustrating."
Jaune laughed — real laughter, the kind that comes from somewhere central. "Should I be worried about what forty percent looks like?"
"Probably," she said, with the warmth that appeared in her voice when she was being honest. "But I have a feeling you can handle it."
Their blades met.
Below them, Beacon's grounds were quiet. The moon watched over the old stone and the young people on it, and said nothing, and did its job.
◈ — Vale: Festival Preparations
The city had been putting on its best clothes for three days.
Streamers in the colours of all four kingdoms had gone up along the main avenues in an order that suggested considerable discussion about which kingdom's colours occupied which position. Banners with the festival's circular emblem rotated slowly in the morning breeze from their positions on the lamp-posts. The market stalls that normally sold practical things had produced quantities of merchandise that suggested the festival economy had been thought through in some detail.
Team RWBY walked through it with the specific configuration of a group in which one member is experiencing significantly more joy than the others, which was not unusual, and in which that member was currently walking backwards so as to face the group while also being in the front, which was also not unusual.
"The Vytal Festival," Weiss said, and there was a quality in her voice that her teammates had not heard very often — the quality of unguarded enthusiasm that surfaced when she forgot to manage it. "A celebration of four kingdoms' cultures. The planning alone, the coordination required, the sheer — "
"She's going to make it sound like a logistics report," Yang said, to Blake.
"I'm going to make it sound wonderful," Weiss corrected, without turning around, because she had been navigating backwards for thirty seconds and had the angles under control. "There will be dances, and exhibitions, and the tournament — which," she added, with the smallest shift back toward her habitual register, "I do think we should approach with proper preparation. There's nothing wrong with studying the competition."
"She wants to spy on them," Blake said.
"You cannot prove that."
"You just described it."
"I described it as studying," Weiss said. "There's a difference."
Odyn, walking beside her with the easy pace of someone who has nowhere in particular to be and is content about this, watched his fiancée navigate backward through festival decorations with the fond exasperation of someone who is used to this and has no intention of stopping it.
"The docks," he offered. "Vacuo students are arriving by ship today."
"Yes," Weiss said. "And as representatives of Beacon, we have a certain duty to — "
"To observe the competition," Blake supplied.
"To welcome," Weiss said, in her most precise Weiss voice, "our peers from another kingdom."
Zero, on the other side of the group, considered the smell arriving from the dock direction. "Is there a less fragrant route to this duty?"
"No," Sarai and Weiss said simultaneously, which produced a brief moment of mutual regard between them.
Flare's fox ears tracked the festival sounds with the specific attention of someone who experiences sound as a richer source of information than most of their companions. Her tail swished with the easy pleasure of a day that was, so far, uncomplicated.
It was Khanna who noticed the police tape first, because Khanna noticed most things and had decided long ago that noticing was a professional obligation.
The Dust shop's window was broken in the way that windows are broken when someone has decided the glass is an obstacle rather than a deterrent. The door was off its hinge. Two detectives from Vale's city force stood at the perimeter with the expressions of people who are recording things they cannot immediately explain.
The group slowed.
"Third this week," one detective was saying to the other. "Same pattern — fast, clean, targeted. Not opportunistic."
"White Fang's got a shopping list," the second said.
"That, or someone has a very specific project."
The detectives became aware of the group of students and offered the professionally adjusted version of their conversation for an audience.
"Festival week," one of them said. "Keep aware."
Blake's shoulders had gone tight. Not dramatically — she was too practised at managing herself for that — but Flare was standing close enough to notice the change, and Aiko's wolf ears had shifted forward incrementally.
"The White Fang," Weiss began, and then she did something that she had been practising, which was to complete the thought from a different direction than the one she had been starting from for most of her life. "Their methods here are dangerous. But their methods come from somewhere. Nine years of being blamed for things they didn't do, removed from economic participation, treated as a threat because of what they were born as—" She paused. Glanced at Odyn, who said nothing because nothing needed to be said. "That isn't an excuse. But it's a context."
Blake was very still.
"That's," she said carefully, "a different way of thinking about it than I'd expect from a Schnee."
"I've been learning," Weiss said, which was the simplest version of nine years of letters and several very good conversations.
"The cycle is the problem," Lazuli said, more to herself than the group. "Each side's action gives the other side's worst actors better arguments. It feeds itself."
"Which is why things like the Vytal Festival matter," Ruby said, with the directness of someone for whom this is obvious rather than idealistic. "You can't hold onto abstractions about people when you're standing next to them."
Yang looked at her sister with the expression of someone who is occasionally blindsided by how right Ruby is.
"Fusion food stands," Yang said, with the determined cheerfulness of someone steering toward something lighter while the serious thing settles. "I heard there are Vacuan-Atlesian combinations this year. Anyone brave enough?"
The conversation shifted, but it did not quite go away. It continued under the lighter version of itself, available for retrieval.
Weiss allowed her hand to find Odyn's again as they walked.
The matter of the public announcement had been simmering since the day Jacques Schnee had arrived and departed, and the combination of two weeks of visible hand-holding, matching rings, and the cafeteria's developing opinion had brought it to an inevitable pressure point.
It was Sarai and Khanna who named it, because they always did.
"When," Khanna said, with the straightforward delivery of someone who considers this a reasonable administrative question, "are you two going to officially announce what approximately half of Beacon has already concluded is true?"
Weiss's cheeks did something.
"We were waiting for the right moment," Odyn said, which was accurate.
"You were waiting for his parents," Sarai said, which was more accurate.
"Mother has opinions about ceremonies," Odyn confirmed, with the tone of someone who has been on the receiving end of these opinions and has made his peace with them. "She has sent Weiss documentation."
"Thirty pages," Weiss said.
"Part one," Odyn clarified.
"The good news," he continued, as the group absorbed this, "is that my parents arrive within the week. And we've discussed timing an announcement at the Beacon Dance — which gives the appropriate occasion, gives both families time to be present, and gives us control over the context."
"In the meantime," Weiss said, drawing herself up with the composure of someone who has decided that the cat has exited the bag by some margin and there is nothing to be gained by attempting to return it, "yes. We are engaged. The rings are real. My father knows. The dance is the official occasion."
The sound that went up from the assembled group was the sound that it always was when this particular news was confirmed to people who already knew it but had been waiting for the formal acknowledgment.
Pyrrha, who had money on a different date, smiled with genuine warmth and accepted her loss gracefully.
Professor Port, Jaune mentioned, had bet on dramatic tournament revelation. This seemed, somehow, exactly right.
The commotion at the docks arrived in the form of something quick, golden-haired, and extremely pleased with itself.
The sailors pursuing it were expressing opinions at a volume that suggested significant frustration. The thing they were pursuing was parkour-ing through the dock district with the easy theatrics of someone who has been doing this for a while and has developed opinions about style.
He paused on a lamppost, hanging by his — tail. A blonde, prehensile tail that wrapped around the post with casual expertise. He peeled a banana with the other hand.
"A no-good stowaway," he announced, to the nearest sailor, "would've been caught. I'm a great stowaway."
"Is he," Zero asked, "narrating himself."
"He really is," Aiko confirmed.
The stowaway's eyes found the group — specifically, they found Blake and Aiko, to whom he delivered a wink with the precision of someone who has identified his target — and then he was off again, vaulting over a crate and into the festival crowd.
"After him!" Weiss called, already moving, though Odyn's hand in hers meant that her pace was necessarily collaborative.
The chase had the quality of trying to catch sunlight — he was always ahead by exactly the amount needed to make catching him feel possible while remaining impossible, and he clearly enjoyed this. They came around a corner in a group that had lost both speed and formation, and the near-collision with the figure who had stepped into their path sent approximately half of them into varying stages of undignified landing.
The figure who had stepped into their path was entirely unmoved by the chaos around her. She had the unhurried stillness of someone who had seen the group coming and had decided to be here when they arrived.
Yang — extracting herself from the nearest tangle — became aware, in the same moment as Roy, that the positions in which certain parties had landed were going to be immediately relevant to family dynamics.
Weiss was sprawled across Odyn's chest with an expression that had not yet had time to compose itself.
Ruby was across Roy's, in the configuration that had, on a different day in the forest, produced a significant amount of blushing.
Roy, who had a sense of timing, said quietly: "Ruby. Your sister."
Ruby looked at Yang. Yang's scroll was already out.
Ruby made a sound that had no specific phonetic value but communicated everything.
The scramble back to vertical occurred at the speed that mortification produces, which was fast.
"Those," Yang said, with the satisfaction of someone who has been given a gift, "are definitely going in the wedding slideshow. Both of them."
"Yang."
"Both of them," Yang confirmed. "Non-negotiable. These are historical documents."
The figure who had caused all of this had waited out the moment with the patience of someone who finds human chaos mildly entertaining and has time for it. She was silver-white-haired, with Atlas's precise tailoring worn in the manner of someone who has considered whether to wear it precisely and has decided that the slight imprecision is more interesting. Her ice-blue eyes had the quality of someone who is paying attention to more things than they are looking at.
"Aurora Vale," she said, delivering a curtsy that managed to be entirely correct and slightly performative. "Winter Schnee's apprentice. My apologies for the timing."
Blake's bow twitched. Odyn registered this before he registered anything else about the introduction.
"I wasn't aware my sister had taken an apprentice," Weiss said, in the careful voice she used when she was purchasing time to think.
"Quite recent," Aurora said. "I'm here to observe, primarily. The tournament preparations, the security arrangements, the — " her gaze moved across the group with a quality that was less casual than it appeared — "various developing situations."
"That's not cryptic at all," Yang said.
"I prefer intriguing," Aurora replied.
She produced a small crystal from her pocket. It caught the light in a way that suggested it was doing something the light did not agree to. The white frost-edged petals that stirred around her feet were not connected to any visible semblance effect that explained them.
Odyn's grip on Weiss's hand had changed — not tighter, but more deliberate. He knew what he was looking at and he needed her to know that he knew.
Weiss felt the shift. She did not look at him. She stored it.
Aurora's expression had the particular quality of someone who has delivered an opening and is interested in the response it produces. "Well," she said, with the pleasantness of something that is not quite pleasant, "I should let you all get on. I'm sure we'll have occasion to speak more." Her eyes settled on Weiss for just a moment longer than was neutral. "I look forward to it."
She left in the direction of the festival crowds and was absorbed by them without difficulty.
Blake exhaled. Aiko's ears had flattened slightly.
"She knows things she shouldn't," Odyn said, to Weiss, quietly and for her only.
"How many things?" Weiss asked, equally quiet.
"That's what I need to find out."
The girl on the ground was not the person any of them had expected to find after Aurora left.
She was orange-haired, green-eyed, and had been positioned on the ground in the precise way of someone who had not seen the group coming and had received their arrival thoroughly. She beamed at them from this position with the specific luminosity of someone for whom being knocked over is not a categorically negative experience.
"Sal-u-tations!" she said.
Ruby, leaning forward: "Are you — going to get up?"
"Oh! Yes! I should!" She rose. The motion was fluid in a way that was entirely correct and contained, within its correctness, a small anomaly that Odyn's perceptual training picked up before his conscious mind named it: the joints moved in a sequence that was optimal rather than habitual. The blinking, when she began speaking again, was regular in a pattern that was — not biological in its regularity.
"I'm Penny!" she announced. "It is wonderful to meet you!"
"Nice to meet you, Penny," Yang said. "I'm Yang. That's Blake, Ruby, Weiss, Roy, and Odyn."
"It is wonderful to make your acquaintances!" Penny's head tilted to exactly forty-five degrees, which was precisely the angle at which human heads tilted when curious. "You're all from Beacon! I'm here representing Atlas for the tournament!"
Odyn was watching with the specific attention of someone who has noticed something and is checking it against multiple frameworks.
"Atlas," Roy said, in the pleasant tone that was also his information-gathering tone. "Have you met Aurora Vale? She's from Atlas as well."
The flicker was brief — barely a frame, the kind of processing interrupt that a biological system did not produce in that pattern. Penny's expression reassembled with impressive speed.
"Oh yes! Aurora is — a friend!" A slight undertone in the delivery that was a mechanical quarter-beat behind the social one. "Though I must admit, my memories of our time together in Atlas are not fully — I mean, are a bit fuzzy!"
Ruby and Yang exchanged the glance that meant that was an unusual thing to say.
Blake's bow made its small movement.
Odyn did not react. He filed.
Penny departed with the warm conclusiveness of someone whose visit function had completed, her gait's measured precision consistent from first step to last.
"She's kind of weird," Ruby said.
"Ruby!" Weiss said.
"A good weird!" Ruby clarified. "I'm pro-weird, you know that. It's not an insult."
Odyn smiled at the exchange. Later — alone with Weiss, in the specific quality of conversation they had developed for things that required both of them — he would say what he had concluded. Not here, not now, not with everyone in earshot.
Some information needed careful ground.
◈ — RWBY Dormitory: Evening
The group had dispersed by the time they made their way back to Beacon, but the dispersal itself had been meaningful — each team moving off with the particular attentiveness of people who have been in the same environment as something that needs discussing and are now going to discuss it in their respective configurations.
Blake's movement toward the dormitory had the quality of someone making a decision while they moved, arriving at it step by step. Yang had stayed close without making anything of the proximity. Roy and Hailfire had fallen behind without announcing that this was deliberate.
Inside the dormitory, the group that gathered had the shape of a smaller thing than the full assembly — RWBY and ORHZ, which was the configuration for conversations that were both larger and more personal than the kind you had at pushed-together cafeteria tables.
Flare had said more private and she had been right to say it.
Blake stood near the window. The window had been checked — Ruby noticed it, and understood what she was looking at, and did not remark on it.
"Blake," Ruby said, from across the room, in the voice she used when she was simply being what she was without any additional layer of anything. "You know you can tell us anything. We're your friends. All of us."
Blake's hands were clasped in front of her. The bow at the top of her head had been making small movements since the dock — micro-adjustments that were the body's honest communication about what the face was being asked to manage.
She looked at the floor. Then up at the group — at Ruby, whose silver eyes carried the warm, complete attention of someone who was giving her all of it; at Yang, who was still and careful in a way that Yang was not usually still and careful; at Weiss, whose expression had the quality of someone who has decided to receive rather than respond; at Odyn, who was simply present in the way that he always was, without weight or performance.
"There's something I need to tell you," Blake said. Her voice had lost its practised quality. "About who I am. About — " a pause, the specific kind that arrives before something true — "what I am."
Hailfire moved, so slightly, to the position near the door she always took when she wanted to ensure that nothing interrupted something important.
Roy had come to stand beside Ruby in the way that he stood beside her when his instinct was to be available rather than central.
"Whatever it is," Weiss said, and her voice had the steadiness that it had when she had decided on something and was standing in it, "we're here to listen."
Blake looked at her. Something moved through her expression that was the beginning of something — the specific quality of surprise that comes when you expected a different kind of reception and have received a better one.
The room was quiet in the way of rooms that are making space.
Outside the window, Vale conducted its evening. The festival lights were coming on in the city below — coloured lanterns along the main avenues, the sounds of the opening celebrations arriving faintly through the old stone of Beacon's walls.
The moon rose over it all, and the bow at the top of Blake Belladonna's head moved once more, and she decided.
— To Be Continued —
Next Time: Chapter 10 — Black and White.