Hey guys, I hope you guys enjoyed the last chapter! I'll be the first to admit that writing this particular version of my longest running story (chapter number wise at least) has alot different of a feel to it. I think maybe because it's requiring me to to put more thought into what to write.. i don't know lol. I'll do my best with story pacing this chapter. If you haven't caught it yet, there was a pretty big bombshell about Qrow revelaed last chapter. The reason he keeps his relationship with dark elves a secret will be revealed at some point during the course of this story.
After some extensive thinking, I realized that there are some things I am going to change for this story compared to the original Flame and Crimson story on here. So the overall story will stay the same, but some of the events and character interactions will be different. Most notably as you guys have guessed and seen... Weiss is the main love interest for Odyn this time around, so that.. changes some things within the story that played out when Ruby was the main love interest for him. I may change it just because Ruby and Yang are step siblings, but maybe you guys can help me out with this one:
Which of the Rwby female characters should Roy be paired with this time?
I. Ruby
II. Blake
III. Yang
IV. Pyrrha
V. Velvet
VI. Emerald
VII. Cinder(Reformed/ Hero route)
Which of the male Characters should Sarai be with?
1. Jaune
2. Ren
3. Cardin(Reformed/ Hero route)
4. Sun
5. Neptune
6. Yatsuhashi
7. Daikon
8. Beat
9. Giblet
10. Shallot
11. Baron
12. Oscar
13. Mercury (Hero Route)
Who should Khanna be with this time?
1. Yatsuhashi
2. Jaune
3. Sun
4. Oscar
5. Baron
6. Giblet
7. Shallot
8. Neptune
9. Beat
10. Stay with Mercury(hero route)
11. Cardin(Hero route)
12. Daikon
Pairing for Hailfire: Who should it be?
A: Sun
B: Neptune
C: Oscar
D: Roy
E: Yatsuhashi
F: Beat
G: Giblet
H: Shallot
I: Daikon
J: Cardin(Hero Route)
K: Mercury (Hero Route)
L: Ren
Let me guys know what you think in terms of these Character polls.
Disclaimer: I don't own Black Clover, The Tales of Series, Dragon Ball, or Rwby and their characters. I only own the oc's who appear in this story. The aforementioned series and characters belong to their respective creators and owners.
Opening theme:
Opening: Alive by ReoNa (Arknights: Prelude to Dawn- anime opening 1)
Visuals: Replace the Arknights Characters with the characters in this story, same for the world.
CHAPTER II — Tragedy and Separation; Death in the Family
Location: Schnee Manor, Noble District Continent: Solitas — Kingdom of Atlas
There is a particular kind of peace that settles over a manor in the days following a momentous event — a peace that is less the absence of noise and more the presence of held breath. As though the house itself is waiting to see what comes next.
In the days that followed the Albanar family's visit, Schnee Manor breathed that particular quiet.
Jacques Schnee was away at the company offices, as he most often was. Whitley had his tutors. Willow moved through her routines with the practiced grace of a woman whose routines had long since become armour. And Weiss — Weiss trained.
It was the one thing she could rely on to make the hours feel purposeful, to give the restlessness in her chest somewhere to go. She and Winter used a spare room on the manor's east wing as their practice space — high-ceilinged, with good light from the tall windows and enough floor space that a rapier could move freely without fear of catching on furniture. The walls held a small rack of practice blades and a few mounted shields that served as targets for footwork drills.
On this particular morning, however, the footwork was not going well.
Weiss stood in the centre of the practice floor with her rapier held in a guard position that Winter had corrected three times already, and the form still felt wrong — tilted slightly, weight not quite where it needed to be, her mind somewhere else entirely.
Winter watched her from across the room with the patient expression of a teacher who has understood the diagnosis.
She didn't say anything. She waited.
Weiss attempted the advance-and-lunge sequence they had been drilling. Her lead foot landed a half-step off, the blade dipped on the extension, and she pulled back before the follow-through was complete. She straightened up, exhaled, and lowered the rapier.
"Again," she said to herself. It came out quieter than she intended.
She reset. Tried again. The lunge was better — the foot placement cleaner — but her arm hesitated on the extension, and the hesitation killed the momentum.
"Weiss."
She turned. In the doorway of the practice room stood their grandfather.
Nicolas Schnee II had not announced himself. He rarely did — he moved through the manor with the unhurried ease of a man entirely at home in his own life, and he had a particular gift for appearing precisely when he was needed. He was dressed simply today, for him: a pale grey waistcoat over a white shirt, dark trousers, the silver cane he carried more for the satisfaction of carrying it than any physical necessity.
He was smiling at her with the small, knowing smile of someone who has watched a person be somewhere else in their mind and understood the reason without needing to ask.
Weiss felt her composure straighten automatically. Then it loosened again, because this was Grandfather, and there had never been any point in performing for him.
"Grandfather?" She lowered the rapier. "What are you doing here?"
"Checking in on my granddaughters." He made his way into the room, glancing at Winter with a warm nod, and came to stand near Weiss with that unhurried, steady quality of his. He studied her for a moment. "How are you, little one?"
"Fine," she said. Then, more honestly: "...Alright, I suppose."
He crouched down — joints protesting, which he ignored with dignity — until he was at her eye level. His hand settled on top of her head, warm and certain, the way his hands always were. And he looked at her with the particular expression she had never been able to fully describe: the one that said I see you, and I am not going anywhere.
"You miss him," he said. Not a question. "Odyn."
She looked at the floor. Her fingers tightened on the rapier's grip, then released.
"I know it's silly," she said. "It's only been a few days."
"It isn't silly at all." He tilted her chin up gently. "Missing someone who matters to you is one of the most honest things a person can do." He straightened. "As it happens, I came to speak with you about something. Something that concerns both yourself and that young elf." A pause. "But first — perhaps you can show me where the trouble is in your training. I may have some thoughts."
Her expression shifted — uncertainty giving way to something brighter, more focused. "You know swordsmanship, Grandfather?"
"I know a great many things." His eyes were amused. "Show me."
Winter had quietly closed the practice room door and checked the corridor before she returned to stand near the wall, arms folded, watching. It was a habit she'd developed with care: her father was rarely home before late afternoon, but Whitley — eleven years old, attentive, and deeply invested in being useful to Jacques — was a variable she never left unaccounted for. A sweep of the east wing confirmed that Klein was the only other soul on this floor, and Klein was, as he always had been, categorically trustworthy.
She gave her grandfather a small nod. We are clear.
Nicolas began by watching Weiss run the advance-and-lunge sequence twice — once without comment, once with his full attention fixed on the mechanics. He saw it immediately: the hesitation on the extension was not a failure of technique. The technique was sound. The hesitation came from somewhere higher up, from a mind that was not fully present in the room with the blade.
He said so, gently, and watched Weiss's face move through surprise and then recognition and then a rueful, self-aware tilt of the mouth.
He worked with her for perhaps twenty minutes — adjustments to weight distribution on the guard, a way of breathing through the lunge that committed the extension without forcing it, a small correction to the angle of the wrist. He had, as he said, a great many things to know. He'd fenced in his youth. He'd also made it his business, over sixty-odd years, to know how the people he loved moved through the world.
When the sequence finally landed — clean, complete, the blade reaching its point without hesitation or apology — Weiss stood at the end of it with her chest rising and falling and a look on her face that was half satisfaction and half surprise at herself.
"There," Nicolas said, and there was more warmth in the word than a swordsmanship instructor had any business putting into it. "That is what it looks like when your mind and your body are in the same room."
Winter, by the wall, was smiling.
Nicolas settled into the practice room's single chair — an old wooden thing someone had dragged in years ago and never removed — and folded his hands over the cane in his lap.
"Now then," he said. "Sit with me a moment."
Weiss sat cross-legged on the practice mat in front of him, rapier resting across her knees, looking up with the attentive expression she wore when she understood that what was coming next was worth listening to.
"Weiss," he began, "you and Odyn are quite close, aren't you."
"We've known each other since we were very small," she said. Then, after a beat: "He's my best friend."
"Yes." He was quiet for a moment, choosing his words with the care of a man who has learned that how you give someone news shapes how they receive it. "His family — Lord Berethon, the Duchess — they have offered something of considerable value to our company. New trade routes. Technology that has not yet reached Atlas." He watched her face. "They asked only one condition in return."
Weiss's brow furrowed. Her mind was already moving ahead — he could see it. If there's a condition, it involves Odyn. If it involves Odyn, it involves me.
"What condition?" she asked.
"That you and Odyn, when you are both of age, be wed to each other."
The sentence landed. Weiss went very still.
Then her face did something extraordinary — an entire sequence of expressions cycling through in the span of perhaps four seconds: confusion, then startlement, then a bloom of colour that started at the tips of her ears and moved with impressive speed to her cheeks, then something that was trying to be composure and was not entirely succeeding.
"H — wed?" The word came out slightly high-pitched. She cleared her throat. "That would mean...that Odyn would be my..."
"Your fiancé," Winter said from the wall, with the particular measured tone of someone who is being very careful not to laugh. "And eventually your husband. You would be together, as Father and Mother are — only with Odyn."
If anything, the colour in Weiss's face deepened. She looked at her lap. Her free hand found a strand of silver hair and twisted it around one finger — a gesture so unconscious she clearly had no idea she was doing it.
"I..." She stopped. Started again. "I've never thought about it like — I mean he's my friend, he's always been my friend, and I do — I mean of course I like him, but that's just because he's — we've known each other for so long and — does he know?"
"He was the one who agreed to it," Winter said.
Something changed in Weiss's face at that. The flustered quality stilled, and behind it was something quieter and considerably more genuine — a warmth that she was too young, still, to have learned to conceal.
"Oh," she said softly. Her thumb traced the guard of the rapier. Then she lifted her head, and when she looked at her grandfather there was something decided in her expression — not the performed certainty she sometimes reached for, but the real kind, that comes from a person who has discovered what they actually want.
"I don't mind," she said. "Becoming... Odyn's fiancée. I don't mind at all."
Nicolas laughed — long and genuinely delighted, with his head tilted back the way he always did when he meant it.
"Wonderful." He reached forward and ruffled her hair, which she bore with tolerant dignity. "I'll see that his family receives the good news." He stood, the cane finding the floor. "We shall have to celebrate this properly when next they visit." He paused at the door, looking back at his younger granddaughter with a smile that had something permanent about it — the kind that settles into a face and stays, even after the moment is gone. "I'm very proud of you, little one. Never forget that."
Weiss watched him leave. Then she looked down at the rapier in her lap, and at the faint warmth still sitting in her chest where the flustered feeling had been.
"Winter," she said.
"Mm."
"You're not going to say anything about my face just now."
"I have absolutely nothing to say about your face," Winter replied, in the tone of someone who has many things to say but has chosen silence as the more devastating option. "Shall we run the sequence again?"
Klein found her in the east corridor an hour later, walking toward the garden with the slightly dazed, slightly luminous expression of someone processing good news they haven't quite finished believing yet.
"Young Miss." He inclined a tray toward her — silver, as always, polished to a mirror shine. On it sat a single envelope, sealed with wax. "A letter arrived for you."
Weiss raised an eyebrow. She took the letter, read the handwriting on the front, and something in her went very quiet and very warm at the same time.
"Thank you, Klein."
She took it to the garden bench — the one near the dormant rose hedge, where the light was good and the wind didn't reach — and sat down with the envelope in both hands for a moment before she opened it.
Dear Princess,
How are you? Things here have been alright, I suppose — which is to say, not entirely bad and not entirely easy, which is the usual truth of things.
By the time this reaches you, you'll already know what was decided between our families. I won't pretend I'm not thinking about it — I am. I've been thinking about it a lot, actually. In case you're wondering what I think: I meant what I said. I don't mind it at all. I think — if I'm being honest — that I'm glad.
There's something else I need to tell you, and I want to say it plainly because I think you deserve that: I have a bad feeling about something. I can't point to it exactly, but it's there. Your father — I don't know what his plans are, but whatever they are, I don't think they're good. I don't know why he hates us. I don't know what we've done. But the feeling I have is that he's planning something, and I'd rather you know I'm thinking this than not know.
You don't need to tell your grandfather — I'm certain he's already aware of your father's attitude toward us. And I've heard, from a few different people, that his health hasn't been what it was these past years. I don't want to give him anything more to worry about. So please — don't worry about me worrying. I just want you to know.
We'll meet again soon. I promise.
Sincerely — your fiancé, Odyn Albanar
Weiss folded the letter along its creases and held it in her lap.
The garden was cold. The dormant roses were bare-branched and skeletal against the pale wall, and the fountain at the garden's centre had been drained for the winter months. It was very quiet, the way Atlas was often quiet — a silence that felt like pressure rather than peace.
She thought about Odyn's words. Your father is planning something.
She thought about the look on Jacques's face during the visit — the cold, flinty quality of it, the disdain he hadn't bothered to conceal. She thought about Lylah's sword, and the way the room had gone still.
I hope you're wrong, she thought, in the direction of wherever Odyn currently was. I hope we're both wrong.
She called for Klein, and asked for pen and paper, and sat in the cold garden and wrote her reply — careful, deliberate, filling the page with every thought she'd been carrying since she saw him last, and finding that even a full page wasn't quite enough to hold all of them.
She folded it, sealed it, and handed it to Klein with quiet, specific instructions about her father not seeing the transaction.
Klein received the letter with the expression of a man who would go to considerable lengths to ensure her wishes were honoured, and bowed, and left.
Weiss sat for a moment longer. The winter light was thin and pale on the garden stones. Somewhere above the manor's roofline, a bird called once and then was silent.
She thought about a hill of frosted grass, and a pinky promise, and the warmth of two arms around her shoulders.
I hope we meet again soon, she thought, and meant it the way she meant very few things — completely, without qualification, the way you mean the things you know are true before you can explain them.
Narration — Weiss, older:
I was blissfully unaware, in that quiet cold garden, of what the next few weeks would bring. I had his letter. I had my letter to him. I had the warmth of a decision made that felt more like recognition than resolution — like finding something I hadn't known I was already certain of.
What a foolish, fortunate child I was, in those last hours before everything changed.
If I had known then what my father was doing — what he had already set in motion — perhaps I could have stopped him. Perhaps not. I have spent nine years deciding which of those is true, and I still don't have an answer I'm satisfied with.
Before I knew it, another two weeks had passed.
She heard the news on a Thursday morning.
She was on her way to the practice room when she nearly walked into Winter at the corridor junction — and the look on her older sister's face stopped her as completely as a wall.
Winter was composed. She was always composed. But there was something beneath the composure today that Weiss had never seen there before — something cracked, very slightly, like a fault line running through stone.
"Weiss." Her voice was level. "Come with me."
The rest of it came in fragments — Klein's voice, hushed and careful; the word negotiations; the word attacked; the phrase grievous wounds; and underneath all of it, like a note played too low to name, the thing that none of the fragments said directly but that all of them pointed toward.
She ran.
She didn't know she was running until she was already halfway down the corridor toward the east wing staircase, her boots loud on the marble floor, the fragments re-assembling themselves in her chest into something she was not yet ready to call by its proper name.
Grandfather. Please. Please.
She burst through the doors of his bedchamber.
He was there. He was in his bed. The room was full — Winter, Willow, the manor physician, two attendants — and they all turned when she entered with that particular expression that people wear when they have been preparing themselves for a moment and the moment has arrived before they were quite ready.
Her eyes went to his face.
He was still. There was a cloth across his midsection, darkened. His hands were folded. His eyes were closed.
He looked, impossibly, like he was sleeping.
"No." The word came out of her in a voice that didn't sound like hers. Smaller. Younger. "No — no, no, no—"
She was at the bedside before she knew she had moved, her knees on the floor, her hands on the coverlet.
"Grandfather — please — please wake up—"
Winter's arms came around her from behind — not to pull her away, just to hold. Her older sister's face was pressed into the back of her hair, and Winter's shoulders were shaking, and Weiss understood then that this was not one of the moments that composure could be summoned for.
"Weiss." Her sister's voice was barely above a whisper. "It's too late. He's... he's gone."
The word gone did something that no other word had. It broke the last thing that had been holding the moment at arm's length, and Weiss pressed her face into the coverlet of her grandfather's bed and let it break her.
Jacques Schnee stood near the doorway.
He was speaking — she could hear his voice through the sound of her own grief, the way you hear things from underwater. Something about the Faunus. Something about a trap. Something about those forsaken doing nothing. His voice had a particular quality to it that she was too destroyed, in that moment, to identify.
She would identify it later. In the dark, in her room, alone.
It was satisfaction.
Narration — Weiss:
Part of me died in that room. A part that was young, and certain, and unafraid of the world in the way that grandfathers make their grandchildren unafraid, because as long as they are there, there is always someone older and wiser and stronger who sees you and loves you and will not let anything happen to you.
When Nicolas Schnee II died, that certainty went with him.
What followed was this: Dark Elves, who had already lived at the margins of Atlesian tolerance, found themselves at the centre of a story they had not written. The public turned toward them as a convenient answer to a question no one had examined closely. They were already disliked. It took very little to make them into something worse.
They disappeared from Solitas within weeks. There were no dark elves in the noble district after that. There were no dark elves in Atlas at all, as far as anyone could see. They went — or were driven — somewhere else. I did not know where. I do not think anyone who was supposed to protect them bothered to ask.
I cried until I had nothing left. Then I looked at the moon from my window for a very long time. Then I went back inside.
The letter was on her nightstand.
She almost didn't see it — she had come into her room with the specific intention of sitting with her knees pulled up to her chest and not thinking about anything, and she had been doing that for some time — but then she turned her head and there it was. A sealed envelope, her name in handwriting she would have recognised anywhere.
She picked it up. Her hands were still unsteady. She broke the seal.
Hey, Princess.
I heard what happened. I want you to know — there aren't words for how sorry I am. Not adequate ones. I know you loved him, and I know what it means to have someone taken from you before the world is ready to give them up.
I also have to tell you something that I don't want to say but that you deserve to know: things have become very difficult for us here. The things people are saying about us — you can imagine. We are not permitted the same freedoms we once had. My people have been run out of our homes. What I told you before, about having to move — this is what I meant. My tribe, our families — we are going to a safer place. I don't know yet where exactly. But we have to go.
Please don't feel like this is your fault. I know you — I know you're already thinking something like that, and I'm telling you now: you don't see us the way the world does, and we have always known it. Whatever happens, that doesn't change.
When we meet again — and we will — remember the promise we made. Don't forget it. And until then, know that we're watching over you from wherever we are.
Sincerely yours, Odyn Albanar
Weiss read it twice. The tears came silently this time — not the desperate, wrenching grief of the bedchamber, but something slower, something that moved through her and left a different kind of weight behind.
She pressed the letter flat against her chest. Felt the paper. Felt the warmth her own hands had put into it.
"Thank you," she said, to no one in the room with her. To someone somewhere she couldn't reach. "Thank you, Odyn."
She sat with it for a while longer. Then she stood up.
It was not a dramatic standing. There was no sudden resolve that lit her face like a lamp. It was slower than that, and quieter — the kind of resolve that doesn't announce itself because it doesn't need to. It simply settles into the bones like a new understanding of how much weight they can carry.
She placed his letter in the small locked box in her desk. Beside the first one he had ever sent her.
Then she picked up her rapier from its stand near the window and went to find the practice room.
The years that followed were not kind ones.
Jacques Schnee moved through the aftermath of his father-in-law's death with the efficiency of a man who has been waiting for a door to open. He assumed control of the company. He called it due diligence. He called it family obligation. He used words like stewardship and stability, and if the people in the room noticed that his eyes were brighter than the occasion seemed to call for, they were too well-trained to say so.
Willow retreated. That is the most honest way to put it — she retreated, room by room, year by year, until she was present only in the sense that she had not left. The warmth that had been in her face in the front hall the day the Albanar family visited — the warmth that had said I was not always like this — grew harder to find, and eventually Weiss stopped looking for it in the places she expected and started recognising it instead in the small things: the glass of warm milk left outside her door during her worst study nights, the way Willow's hand would find her hair for just a moment in passing.
Winter graduated from Atlas Academy and joined the military. Jacques objected. Winter did it anyway. She was, in all the ways that mattered, her grandfather's heir.
Whitley remained. Whitley learned. Whitley understood, early and thoroughly, how power worked in the Schnee household under its new management, and he made himself useful to it. Weiss did not blame him for this. She found, to her own surprise, that she mostly pitied him.
And Weiss — Weiss trained. She studied. She learned the company's workings whether Jacques knew she was learning them or not. She kept Odyn's letters in the locked box in her desk. She and Khanna exchanged letters — sometimes several in a month — and through those letters she maintained the one thread of connection to the world she had lost, to the people who had known her before her grandfather died and the house went quiet in a different way.
The engagement was never spoken of in the Schnee household. Jacques didn't know. Weiss ensured he didn't know, with the same quiet, meticulous care she brought to everything else she decided to protect.
If he had found out, she did not doubt he would have moved to void it. So she did not give him the chance.
Nine years passed.
The girl who had kissed a dark elf boy on the cheek and called him her prince became a young woman of seventeen with a rapier at her hip and the word "heiress" attached to her name in every social context she inhabited. She was precise, accomplished, occasionally cold to people who did not know her well, and quietly, persistently, stubbornly herself in every way that mattered.
She still kept his letters.
She still thought about him every day.
She was going to Beacon.
The morning she left, the sky over Atlas was the particular grey of winter refusing to become spring. Klein stood at the manor's front entrance with her luggage already loaded, because Klein always anticipated and never needed to be asked.
She paused at the top of the steps.
She looked back at the house. At the windows. At the garden wall she could just see at the east corner of the grounds. At the bench where she had sat in the cold and read a letter and felt something settle into its proper place inside her chest.
"Do take care of yourself out there, Milady."
Klein's voice was warm and precise — the voice of a man who has watched a child grow up and considers the outcome good work.
She turned to look at him. There was a great deal she could have said. She had, she realised, never told him properly — about what he'd meant, during those years. How much it had mattered, having one person in that house who was simply, consistently on her side.
She said, instead: "Of course I will, Klein."
He bowed. She walked down the steps toward the aircraft, her luggage already aboard, her rapier at her hip, her posture composed and deliberate.
At the bottom of the steps, she stopped.
She looked up. The Atlas sky was grey and pale and very high. Somewhere beyond it — somewhere on the face of Remnant that she couldn't point to on a map — there was a young man who had her promise and a locked box full of her letters and a name she had not stopped saying in her head for nine years.
Odyn. She pressed one hand to her chest, briefly, over the place where the warmth of all those old letters seemed to live. If you're out there — watch over me. And...
I think it's almost time.
She boarded the aircraft. It lifted. Below her, the manor shrank, and the city of Atlas spread out in its grey-white winter geometry, and then the clouds took everything.
She faced forward.
She was going to Beacon.
— To Be Continued —
Next Time: Chapter 3 — Reunion at Beacon; Nine Years Later.
Ending theme: Reincarnated as a Sword ending song 1
Visuals: Replace Fran with Weiss in her home. Weiss then looks skyward and runs across a field before stopping and seeing Odyn as a child. The children stare at each other before it transitions to them as adults(young adults/teenagers) running towards each other from different perspectives. The song ends as the two are seen to be walking towards each other with Odyn smiling and reaching out his hand towards Weiss. Weiss turns away and blushes for a second before accepting the hand. The two hold hands as they walk towards the distance in a freeze frame.
Hey guys I hope you enjoyed the chapter. A little shorter i know. Sorry in advance if I skipped over some details, but I wanted this to be more of a weiss themed setup chapter for the story as it goes towards where the story will start. Next chapter will start from Odyn's perspective before he and the others head towards Beacon Academy. Alot of the story will stay the same, but as I said: Since Weiss is the main love interest this time, certain events will play out differently.
Before we go, here's a poll concerning our favorite hyperactive cookie lover, Ruby:
Should Ruby fall in love with Roy?
1. Yes
2. No
If no, then who should Ruby's (crush) love interest be?
1. Baron
2. Giblet
3. Shallot
4. Daikon
5. Sun
6. Jaune
7. Beat
8. Oscar
9. Other (write in suggestion)
Which Male Character should Yang's love interest be?
1. Giblet
2. Shallot
3. Roy
4. Valvahdern
5. Jaune
6. Beat
7. Daikon
8. Cardin
9. Other (write in male suggestion)
Who should Blake be with?
1. Giblet
2. Baron
3. Shallot
4. Sun
5. Roy
6. Jaune
7. Daikon
8. Beat
9. Other male write in
That's really it for now! I'll see you guys in the next chapter!
Next time: Chapter 3: Reunion at Beacon- 9 years later