# FLAME AND ICE
Chapter III — Part II: The Fall of a Snowflake & The 'Ice Queen' Incident
*The Ground Between Strangers
---
The bullhead was not built for atmosphere. It was built for function — the particular, utilitarian function of moving large numbers of anxious young people from one elevated location to another without incident — and it performed this function with the complete indifference of machinery toward the significance of its passengers' inner lives.
The passengers, for their part, were doing what anxious young people have always done in the absence of anything else to do: they were talking.
---
Ruby Rose had claimed the window seat with the focused decisiveness of someone who understood that the best views were claimed, not received, and was now pressing her nose close enough to the glass to fog it slightly. The countryside of coastal Vale was unrolling below them in the particular way of terrain seen from altitude — the miniaturisation of things that were large, the sudden appreciation for geometry when you removed yourself from it.
"Yang!" She pointed, fogging the glass further. "I can see our house from here!"
Yang squinted past her. "No you can't."
"I think I can!"
"We live on Patch. We're not even over the strait yet."
"It could be our house."
"It's a forest, Ruby."
"A forest near our house."
Yang leaned back in her seat with the expression of someone who has had this particular calibre of argument before and has made peace with the fact that it is unanswerable. The elves — distributed across the adjacent seats in the loose configuration of people who have sat next to each other for weeks of travel and have developed unspoken seating preferences — watched Ruby with the collective expression of people encountering something new and finding it, against all expectation, pleasant.
Yang turned toward them. She had the quality of someone who was comfortable making conversation with people she didn't know, and who had found, over the years, that leading with a question worked better than waiting.
"Hope you don't mind me asking," she said, "but where are you guys actually from? I've travelled a bit, I've met a lot of people, and I've never—" She gestured, encompassing the pointed ears, the orange eyes, the general quality of *other* that the dark elves carried without apparent self-consciousness. "—seen anyone quite like you before."
The six of them exchanged a look. Not a suspicious look — more the look of people deciding on a version of the truth that was manageable without being dishonest.
Sarai spoke. "Try not to be too surprised."
"Why would I be surprised?" Ruby asked, turning from the window.
"We're from Solitas."
The sisters processed this simultaneously. Yang recovered first, because Yang generally recovered first from most things.
"Solitas?" she said. "As in — way up north, glacier weather, that Atlas?"
"That Atlas," Sarai confirmed.
"That's... a significant distance. Wouldn't it have made more sense to go to Atlas Academy?" Ruby asked, with the genuine, guileless curiosity of someone who was simply following the logic and hadn't yet noticed the way the question landed.
She noticed, a beat later. The dark elves hadn't changed their expressions in any obvious way, but something had shifted — a collective stiffening, subtle as a change in barometric pressure, that a perceptive person would catch and an oblivious one would walk past.
Yang caught it. Her hand moved quickly to cover Ruby's mouth before anything else could follow.
Ruby's muffled sound of protest went unacknowledged.
"Atlas wasn't an option we were interested in," Odyn said. His voice was level, measured — the tone of someone who has decided how much to say and is holding the rest behind it with deliberate care. "Beacon was."
"That's fair enough," Yang said, removing her hand from Ruby's face.
"Sorry," Ruby said immediately, the word carrying the particular quality of someone who understood the apology was necessary even if they weren't entirely sure why yet. She looked down at her lap. "I didn't mean to—"
"You didn't know," Khanna said, simply. "Neither of you did. Don't feel bad about it."
Ruby offered a small smile toward the older girl — something grateful in it, something slightly raw at the edges. Khanna returned it without comment, in the easy way of someone for whom extending grace costs nothing.
Roy reached over and set his hand briefly on top of Ruby's head — a gesture that, in the context of the dark elven traditions he'd grown up with, was unambiguously one of comfort, and which Ruby received with wide eyes and then a slowly spreading, slightly helpless expression.
"You're alright," he said. "Neither of you did anything wrong."
Ruby looked at him. Something in her face did a thing that Yang, seated beside her, catalogued with the particular interest of an older sister.
Then she looked out the window again, because that was more manageable.
---
"Can I ask something?" Ruby said, after a companionable pause during which the bullhead had banked east and Beacon's cliff had become momentarily visible in the distance — a dramatic profile against the Vale sky, towers rising from the rock face with the particular authority of things built to last.
"Sure," Khanna said.
"That woman you were with — the one you hugged before we boarded. Was that—"
"My mother," Khanna said, without particular ceremony. "She found work near Beacon. Close enough to be nearby if anything comes up." A pause. "She worries."
"Most mothers do," Yang offered.
"Aunt Lylah especially," Sarai said, which caused Khanna to give her a look of mild reproval that Sarai received with complete equanimity.
"*Aunt?*" Ruby looked between Sarai and Khanna with the expression of someone re-sorting a set of categories. "So you're—"
"Cousins," Khanna said. "Odyn, Roy, and Sarai are mine. We have a large family."
Ruby looked from Khanna to Sarai, then back. The family resemblance — the similar cast of features, the matching colouration, the shared quality of attention in their eyes — was visible once she was looking for it.
"I can see it," she said, with the satisfaction of a small mystery resolved.
Out the window, a large body of water had appeared below them — the coastal strait, blue-grey in the morning light, the shadow of the bullhead moving across it far below.
Ruby sat back. "So that's Beacon," she said, more to herself than anyone, looking at the cliff that was growing steadily more specific as they approached. "Four years."
"Home for the next four years," Yang agreed.
"If we survive the initiation," Roy added.
"We'll survive the initiation," Odyn said.
"I know we will. I said *if.*"
"You said it in the tone of someone worried about it."
"I said it in the tone of someone *acknowledging the possibility,*" Roy said, with dignity.
Near the back of the ship, Baron had turned in his seat and was looking at something. Or rather, someone — a blond boy hunched over a waste bin near the rear exit, face pale, entirely absorbed in the particular misery of motion sickness.
"Guess the flight isn't for everyone," Baron said.
No one had a useful response to this. The statement was simply true.
---
The ground came up.
The bullhead settled onto the landing approach with the gentle, final quality of something that has made its decision, and the students around them began the process of gathering themselves — standing, collecting bags, adjusting weapons, putting on the version of themselves they wanted to present at the door of a new chapter.
The dark elves did this quietly and efficiently, as people who have been moving between locations for most of their lives tend to do. Sarai checked that her sword was properly secured. Baron reassembled the component he'd been examining during the flight and slotted it back into the hilt of one of his twin blades with a small, satisfied click. Hailfire settled her shield's carrying strap and rolled her left shoulder once, finding the familiar weight of it.
Odyn stood, bag over his shoulder, and looked at the doors.
Beyond them, somewhere in the crowd of students already disembarking from other transports, there was a person he had been thinking about for nine years. He did not know exactly where she was. He did not know what she looked like now — he had a letter describing silver hair and blue eyes and a rapier, and a memory of a girl who kissed him on the cheek on a hill in winter and called him her prince, and somewhere between those two data points was a person he was about to walk into a crowd and potentially find.
He had, at various points over the past six weeks of travel, rehearsed things to say.
He had also, at various other points, discarded all of them as insufficient.
He would, in the end, find something to say or he would not, and whatever it turned out to be would be what it was. This was not a satisfying conclusion, but it was an honest one.
The doors opened.
He stepped out.
---
Beacon's grounds were extraordinary in the specific, uncurated way of places that have been shaped by centuries rather than design briefs. The architecture was old without being decrepit — stone arches and high towers worn smooth at the edges by decades of weather, linked by paved paths that wound through stands of mature trees in a way that suggested the trees had been there first and the paths had accommodated them. The air smelled of cut grass and something mineral underneath, the smell of stone in sunlight.
Around them, the crowd of arriving students moved in the particular way of people experiencing something for the first time and trying to decide how much of that experience to show.
Ruby Rose abandoned subtlety entirely.
She transformed in the way of people who encounter the thing they love most and simply cannot contain the response — her eyes going wide, her whole body angling toward each new sight as it presented itself, a slightly unfocused brightness taking over her expression that was, in its own way, entirely genuine.
"Oh my gosh," she breathed. "That kid's got a collapsible staff — and over there, that girl — is that a *fire sword?*"
She was already drifting toward the nearest source of weapon-related interest when Yang caught her by the hood, producing a strangled sound from Ruby that she bore with the philosophical acceptance of someone who has been caught by the hood before.
"Easy," Yang said. "They're just weapons."
Ruby turned to look at her sister with an expression that could only be called offended on behalf of all weapons everywhere.
"*Just* weapons?" The indignation was complete and genuine. "They're an extension of ourselves, Yang. They're part of us. They're — they're art that *fights back.*"
Yang released the hood. "You have your own weapon."
"I *know* I have my own weapon." Ruby reached back and, in a single practiced motion, unfolded *Crescent Rose* from its collapsed form into the long, sweeping geometry of the war scythe — curved blade catching the afternoon light, the mechanism clicking through its stages with the sound of something very well-made doing exactly what it was designed to do. Then she held it at an angle and looked at it with an expression that, in a different context, might be described as reverent. "I'm very happy with my own weapon. I just also really like seeing *other* weapons. It's like meeting people, only better, because weapons don't judge you."
She looked at the elves. "You understand. Right?"
The elves regarded her. In their experience, weapons were tools — important tools, tools with histories and significances and in some cases names — but they occupied the category of *things used for purposes* rather than *objects of affection.* This was a framework that Ruby Rose had apparently not received and showed no signs of adopting.
"...You are a very specific kind of person," Hailfire said, thoughtfully.
"Thank you," Ruby said.
"That wasn't—"
"I know. I still take it as a compliment."
Yang laughed. The elves, several of them, did the thing where a smile happens slightly against a person's better judgment.
"Go make some friends," Yang told her sister. "On your own. There are people everywhere."
"But why would I do that when—"
"*Go.*"
Ruby looked at Yang. Then at the elves. Then she leaned in, in the conspiratorial way of a girl who has absolutely never been subtle a day in her life.
"Would you guys mind keeping an eye on Yang for me?" she whispered.
"We heard you," Khanna said.
"I know. Will you do it?"
Khanna considered. "She seems capable of looking after herself."
"She is. I just feel better when there are people around her. She has a tendency to walk into situations headfirst."
A beat.
"So does every single person in our group," Roy said.
"Including you," Sarai added.
Ruby's expression did not waver. "I know. Moral support."
Khanna looked at Yang, who had been joined by a cluster of other students and was already deeply involved in a conversation she appeared to be winning on charisma alone. Then back at Ruby.
"Fine," she said. "We'll keep an eye on her."
"Great!" Ruby beamed. Then: "Actually, my friends are already—" And she was gone, swept up in the crowd that had materialized around Yang, leaving a faint trail of rose petals in the airstream of her passing because that was, apparently, simply a thing that happened when Ruby Rose moved quickly.
The elves watched her go.
"She has petals," Baron said.
"Yes," Sarai agreed.
"That's not a Semblance we've encountered before."
"No."
"Interesting."
"Very."
---
The moment arrived without announcement, as significant moments generally prefer to.
They were following the crowd along the paved path toward Beacon's main entrance when a sound cut through the ambient noise of hundreds of arriving students — not a crash, exactly, but the particular sequence of sounds that results when a significant amount of luggage encounters a sudden, unexpected force: the initial impact, the scatter of cases, the brief, suspended silence of things still in motion, and then the softer sounds of individual items finding their stopping points.
Odyn turned.
Ruby was on the ground.
Beside her, distributed across the path with the indiscriminate thoroughness of things that had been precisely stacked and were now not, were a collection of elegant luggage cases — the kind that spoke of careful packing and considerable expense. Between the cases and the path stood a girl.
She was seventeen. Silver-white hair in a high side ponytail with a pale blue ribbon. Blue eyes. Posture immaculate. Rapier at her hip.
Nine years.
The word *nine* moved through Odyn's mind in the specific way of a number that has been counted so many times it has lost the quality of counting and become something else — a duration, a weight, a texture. Nine years of letters. Nine years of doing the mathematics of her approximate location and her approximate safety and her approximate state. Nine years of a letter in the outer pocket of a bag he had never once considered putting somewhere less accessible.
He was not, he discovered, prepared.
He had thought he was. He had been wrong.
She was looking at Ruby. Her voice carried the particular quality of someone whose anger is covering something else — not cruelty underneath it, but something more like *you could have been hurt and I am furious about it* wearing the face of *how dare you.* He recognised the distinction because he had learned to read her in the years when she was still a child and hadn't known what her own expressions meant yet.
He had been standing still for several seconds. Roy appeared at his shoulder.
"That's her," Roy said, quietly. Not a question.
Odyn nodded.
"Your childhood friend. And your—"
"Yes."
Roy was quiet for a moment. "Do you want me to—"
"No. I'm — I just need a moment."
He took the moment. Then he moved.
---
The sequence of events that followed was brief and chaotic in the way of things involving Ruby Rose and combustible material in close proximity.
Odyn assessed the situation in the time it took him to close the distance: Ruby, with a significant quantity of mixed Dust particles having entered her respiratory system, was building toward a sneeze of spectacular consequence. Weiss, still holding an open case of Fire Dust and standing directly in the probable radius of said consequence, had not yet realised what was building.
"Get *down,*" he said, moving in front of Weiss, getting his arms up—
Ruby sneezed.
The explosion was, by any reasonable standard, impressive. A simultaneous detonation of Fire, Ice, and Lightning Dust from multiple open vials produced a result that was more light show than concussive damage, but it was sufficient to send Weiss's case spinning out of her hands and coat Odyn, who had positioned himself squarely between the blast and its intended target, in a full-spectrum deposit of elemental particulate.
He coughed. There was frost in his hair.
"Are you all right?!" Weiss's voice, sharp with concern, cut through the settling cloud before he had fully gathered himself.
He turned to look at her. She was staring at him with an expression that had bypassed her usual composure — wide eyes, one hand raised to her mouth, the cold calculation of the heiress temporarily absent in favour of something that looked a great deal like genuine worry.
He was fine. He was, in fact, barely scratched — he had taken worse from sparring sessions where Roy was in a competitive mood — but the concern on her face was doing something to him that he had not adequately prepared for, and he was aware of it, and he chose to answer before it became visible.
"Fine," he said, and grinned because it was the most accurate description of his internal state he could produce under the circumstances. "You?"
She stared at him.
The concern was still on her face. Underneath it, working its way through, was something he could see the moment it arrived: recognition. Not of who he was — not yet — but of something adjacent to it. A quality. A register. The specific way his eyes looked at her, perhaps, which was a way they had been looking at her since they were both small children and had not changed in the intervening years because some things are structural rather than habitual.
Her heart was doing something. He could see that too, in the way her hand was still raised and she was not lowering it.
Then she remembered that she was angry, and she turned back to Ruby.
---
Ruby's apology was sincere and immediate and did not particularly dent the speed of Weiss's lecture. Odyn stepped back and let it run — he knew the shape of it, knew that Weiss's anger in these moments was always part performance, knew that underneath the performance was a genuine care for the safety of people around her that she had never learned to express in ways that didn't involve the word *hazard.* Knowing this didn't make the lecture easier to watch, but it made it comprehensible.
He was thinking about the moment he would have to intercede, and how to do it without embarrassing anyone more than the situation already had, when Ruby — with the specific exhaustion of someone who has run out of apologetic options — said: "I'm sorry, *princess.*"
Weiss went very still.
It was a particular stillness. The kind that precedes either a significant escalation or a significant reversal, and he was the only one there who knew which it would be.
"That name," Weiss said quietly, and the anger in her voice had changed quality — narrowed, become something more personal, "is not yours to use. There is exactly one person who has ever called me that."
Roy, beside Odyn, had opened his mouth to say something protective and well-intentioned that would have been extremely unhelpful. Odyn put a hand on his arm.
"Roy."
Roy closed his mouth.
Odyn stepped forward.
"I don't remember you being this hard on people, princess," he said.
Everything stopped.
Weiss turned toward him. The stillness again — this one different. Deeper. With nine years of held breath behind it.
"Princess," she said. Not the word itself. What was in it. The way it sounded from this specific mouth, in this specific voice, which was lower than she remembered and older than she remembered and completely, unmistakably, *exactly* the voice she remembered. "Only one person..."
She looked at him. At his face. At his eyes — the burning orange she had described in a letter once as *the colour of something just beginning to catch.*
"Is it really you?" she said, and her voice had broken, just slightly, at the word *really* in the way of things that cannot hold themselves together against the weight of what they're saying. "...Odyn?"
He smiled. "Hey, Weiss." A pause — easy, warm, the pause of someone who has practised being calm because the alternative was running across a courtyard in front of a hundred students. "It's been a while."
"Nine years," she said, "you *jerk*—"
She laughed. It came out as something adjacent to a sob — the laugh of someone who has been holding a significant amount of something in for a significant amount of time and has just been given permission to put it down.
Before either of them could say anything further, a third voice entered the conversation with the quality of someone who has been holding a book and waiting for the right moment.
"Weiss Schnee," Blake Belladonna said, from somewhere to Odyn's left, holding the Dust vial that had skittered to her feet in the explosion. "Heiress to the Schnee Dust Company. One of the largest producers of energy propellant in the world."
"*Finally,*" Weiss said, the familiar armour of dignity snapping back into place with the speed of long practice. "Some recognition."
"The same company," Blake continued, "with a well-documented history of controversial labour practices and deeply questionable business arrangements."
Weiss's expression completed a journey from gratified to furious in under a second. She took the Dust vial back, gathered the last of her luggage with the help of her attendants, and walked away with the particular gait of someone who has decided that the current location is beneath them and the next one will be better.
Odyn watched her go.
He was smiling, despite himself.
"I'll talk to her later," he said, to no one in particular.
Roy appeared at his shoulder again. "She's exactly how I pictured her."
"Don't."
"I'm just saying—"
"Roy. Don't."
Behind them, Ruby had lowered herself to sit on the ground with the deflated quality of a balloon that has had a complicated morning. She looked up at the empty path where Weiss had been, then at the empty space where Blake had been, and then at the very blue sky above her.
"Welcome to Beacon," she said, to the sky.
A shadow fell over her.
Odyn sat down on the paving stones beside her. The sound of five other dark elves doing the same followed in sequence — Roy, then Hailfire, then Sarai, then Baron, then Khanna — until six dark elves were arranged on the paving stones of Beacon's main path, looking up at the same sky as Ruby Rose.
"The view's not bad from down here," Odyn said.
Ruby turned to look at them. Her expression moved through several stages before arriving at something that was approximately *I cannot believe you are all doing this, and also this is the nicest thing anyone has done for me today.*
Then she laughed — a real one, startled out of her, with a small undignified snort at the end of it. "You guys are so *weird.*"
"All the best people are," Khanna said, to the sky.
"Shall we get up?" Roy asked.
"Yeah," Ruby said. "Let's."
They stood. And a moment later, a blond boy with an uncertain expression and impeccably ordinary travelling clothes appeared at the edge of their group.
"Hi," he said. "I'm Jaune."
Ruby considered him. "...Aren't you the one who threw up on the bullhead?"
Jaune laughed with the weary, self-aware quality of someone who has accepted that this is how his story begins at Beacon. "Yeah, that's me."
"The name is *Jaune,*" Odyn told Ruby.
"I know, I just—"
"His name is Jaune."
"I was just asking—"
"Ruby."
She closed her mouth. "Fine. Hi, Jaune."
Jaune blinked. Then he smiled — uncertain, but genuine. "Hi."
---
Beacon's interior was extraordinary in a different way from its grounds — where the outside had the authority of old stone and open sky, the inside had the warmth of an institution that has been inhabited for generations and absorbed something of everyone who has passed through it. The ceilings were high without being cold. The corridors were wide enough to carry crowds without feeling institutional. The trees in the inner courtyard were older than almost anyone currently enrolled.
The eight of them — Ruby, Jaune, and the six dark elves — moved through it in the easy companionship of people who have established a rapport without quite establishing a friendship yet, which is its own particular state of grace.
Jaune was explaining, with more good humour than the subject probably deserved, the technical details of his motion sickness and the general principle of why it was more common than people acknowledged. Ruby was listening with genuine interest, because Ruby Rose was the kind of person who listened to things genuinely.
"What do you have for your weapon?" she asked him, after a while.
Jaune unsheathed the sword with the slightly self-conscious air of someone who was aware it was not going to impress, but who had decided on honesty over performance.
Ruby looked at it the way she looked at all weapons — with her full attention, the way she'd look at a person she'd just been introduced to and was interested in knowing.
"And this?" He raised the scabbard. The mechanism engaged, unfolded, settled into a shield, and then — after a few moments of collaboration between Jaune's intention and the shield's apparent preferences — contracted and settled back onto the belt.
"It weighs the same whether it's extended or not," Ruby observed.
"Yeah," Jaune agreed, dejectedly.
"I made mine," Ruby said, after a moment. "Most students at Signal do. Did you make yours?"
"No. It's a hand-me-down. My great-great-grandfather's."
Ruby considered this. Then: "I like it. There's something to a weapon that's been used. It has a history."
Jaune looked at her with the expression of someone receiving more generosity than they'd expected.
"The classics," she said, and smiled, and meant it.
---
The dark elves showed their weapons one by one, at Ruby's very focused request, and she received each one with the specific quality of attention that is the highest compliment a person who genuinely loves a thing can pay to a new example of it.
Khanna's hammer — *Cathraylboldr,* she called it, with a pronunciation that Ruby filed away for a later attempt — unfolded its hammerhead into a cannon configuration and then folded back with the sound of something extremely well-engineered. Ruby's appreciation was immediate and complete.
Baron's twin blades converted at the hilt into blaster pistols in a demonstration that was slightly more dramatic than strictly necessary, because Baron had a flair for demonstration that he would never have admitted to. Hailfire's mace extended its spike configuration and the shield's shotgun ports cycled open and shut with a satisfying series of mechanical sounds. Roy's blades ran lightning-aspected Dust along their edges in a brief, controlled arc that lit the corridor in pale blue and made Ruby breathe "oh" in a tone that carried an entire paragraph of emotion.
Sarai's blades ran Aura through them — the technique was advanced for her age, and the glow was still slightly uneven, but the principle was visible and Ruby watched it with the interest of someone who was already thinking about applications.
Then it came to Odyn.
He unsheathed *Cinderveil* — or, more precisely, the blade he had renamed since the version Weiss would have known. *ArdynFangh* was the name it carried now, given to it in the tradition of the Albanar clan at the conclusion of a blade's first significant use — and he let Ruby look at it without prompting.
She looked. "Fire Dust?"
"Fire and Ice," he said. "The crystal's inlaid along the fuller." He turned it slightly so the light moved across the veining. "When I engage it, one or the other. The third application is different."
"A trump card," Jaune said, which was, Odyn reflected, precisely the right word.
"Something like that."
Ruby looked at the blade for another moment. "Does it have a name? Obviously it does — but what does the name mean?"
He considered how much to translate. *ArdynFangh* meant, in the First Tongue, approximately *fire that endures* — but the word *ardyn* also carried a secondary meaning in the clan's older usage that meant something closer to *a warmth that stays after the source is gone.* It was not a translation he felt like making in a corridor full of strangers.
"It means something like *lasting fire,*" he said.
Ruby nodded slowly, with the expression of someone who understood that there was more to this than they were being told, and who had decided that they were comfortable with that.
"I like that," she said. "A lot."
---
They found the building Khanna had spotted — the auditorium, by the weight of foot traffic converging on it — and followed the current of students inside.
Yang was already there, visible across the hall in the manner of someone who occupies space confidently enough to be found at a distance. She waved. Ruby navigated toward her with the linear efficiency of a person who was not going to let a crowd stand between herself and her sister. The dark elves followed.
"Ruby! Over here — I saved spots!" Yang, upon a closer look, had already accumulated the kind of social circle that most people take weeks to assemble. The seats around her were occupied by students who had clearly been talking for several minutes and were comfortable with each other in the way of people who have already exchanged the useful information.
Weiss Schnee was sitting two seats to Yang's left, separated by an empty seat, with the body language of someone who had not chosen to sit there but had found herself there and was making the best of it.
Ruby did not immediately notice her. Ruby was exchanging farewells with Jaune, who was departing to find his own seat, and with the distracted generosity of someone who had too many conversations going at once told him she'd see him after the ceremony and meant it.
The elves settled into the seats around Yang's group. Odyn took a seat, glanced to his left, and found Weiss looking at him.
They looked at each other for a moment in the specific way of people who have a great deal to say and have correctly identified that this is not the moment to say it.
He gave her the small nod of *later.* She returned it — barely, a single degree of head movement — and looked forward.
Yang leaned toward the elves with the expression of someone who has noticed a great deal and is interested in having it explained.
"So," she said, "Odyn and the ice queen. Someone's going to tell me that story."
"Gladly," Khanna said.
---
The figure who walked onto the stage first was not Ozpin — but the other faculty member alongside Glynda Goodwitch was unfamiliar to most students, which was, of course, entirely the point.
Sybyrh Arkham stood at the stage's edge in the plain, professional attire of a combat instructor, her black hair with its gold highlights pinned back, her expression carrying the focused composure of someone who has performed many auditions and is comfortable with this one. She looked, to the audience, like a new hire. She looked, to six dark elves in the fourth row, like someone they trusted with their lives, which was precisely what she was.
The briefest of exchanges — a look, a slight acknowledgement, nothing more — passed between her and Odyn.
Then Ozpin spoke, and the room turned toward the stage.
His voice had the quality of wood and old metal — not commanding in the way of volume, but in the way of density. He spoke briefly, as promised, and what he said landed differently on different people in the room: some heard encouragement, some heard challenge, some heard a kind of invitation.
Odyn heard: *knowledge can only carry you so far. The rest is yours.*
He thought about Thanatos. He thought about the encampment and the letter in the outer pocket of his bag and the girl two seats over who had been carrying nine years of silence with the same determination she'd brought to everything he'd known of her.
He thought: *the first step, then.*
Glynda dismissed them. The crowd began its comfortable dissolution.
And then Jaune Arc materialised near Weiss, with the specific expression of a young man who had decided that this was an opportunity.
"Natural blonde," Jaune offered. "In case that's relevant information."
Weiss stared at him with the patience of someone encountering a situation they had not anticipated and are calculating a response to.
"Jaune," Odyn said, before the calculation completed. "I appreciate the confidence. I genuinely do. But maybe not this particular moment."
Jaune looked at him. Odyn's expression was mild and honest and contained no judgment — it was simply the expression of a person who had information that Jaune didn't and was sharing it as efficiently as possible.
"...Okay," Jaune said, and trusted it, and moved on. This was, Odyn reflected, one of the more useful qualities of Jaune Arc: he was capable of taking useful information at face value without requiring it to be explained.
Weiss looked at Odyn with the expression of someone receiving an unexpected kindness and not having a ready category for it.
He looked back at her.
"Want to talk?" he said.
She breathed out. The armour, just slightly, shifted.
"Yes," she said. "I think we have some things to catch up on."
"Nine years' worth."
"At minimum."
They found a space away from the crowd's edge — near enough to the others to be sociable, far enough to be private — and sat, and Odyn let Weiss choose where to begin, because he understood that this was hers to arrange before it could be shared.
She began, as she always had, with the thing that mattered most and was hardest to say. He listened the way he had always listened to her — completely, without interrupting, with the full weight of his attention on what she was actually saying rather than what he was about to say next.
When she was done, he said nothing for a moment. The silence was not absence but fullness — the silence of someone who has understood something and is sitting with it before they speak.
Then he put his arms around her, because that was what the moment called for, and she let him, which told him more than anything she had said.
---
The ballroom at night was a different place from what it was intended to be.
Intended: a formal reception space, high-ceilinged, polished, impressive in the way of Beacon's institutional architecture. Actual: a dormitory of sleeping bags, a hundred anxious first-years distributed across the floor in the semi-organized arrangement of people who have been told to sleep here and are making the best of it, and the warm, complicated atmosphere of strangers becoming, slowly, something adjacent to acquaintances.
Ruby Rose was writing in a journal, lying on her front in her pajamas, the small lamp of a scroll-screen casting enough light to work by. She had the focused expression of someone who takes correspondence seriously, which she did — she had promised the people at Signal she would write, and Weiss Schnee's feelings about broken promises were not something she wanted to be responsible for.
That was a new thought. She sat with it for a moment. *Weiss Schnee's feelings about broken promises.* She had spent approximately four hours knowing Weiss Schnee and had somehow arrived at a position in which she cared about Weiss Schnee's feelings. This was, she thought, probably something about how Odyn looked at Weiss, which made Weiss feel important in a way that infected how everyone around them thought about her.
Roy was a few sleeping bags over, in a dark blue tank top and pajama trousers, doing something to the mechanism of one of his blades that involved very careful attention and a small tool. Every so often, Ruby looked over. When he looked up, she looked back at her journal. He knew she was doing this. He had decided it was not a problem.
"I heard that, by the way," Yang said, appearing next to Ruby and depositing herself onto the adjacent sleeping bag with the organised chaos of someone who moves at one speed regardless of context.
"Heard what?" Ruby said.
"The part where you were thinking about Weiss Schnee's feelings."
"I wasn't—"
"You made the face."
"I don't have a *face*—"
"The thinking-about-something-that-surprised-you face."
Ruby closed her journal. "I have a lot of faces."
"You have four faces. This was face number three." Yang crossed her arms in the easy way of someone who is right and knows it. "So. How's day one going?"
"I exploded in front of the school," Ruby said.
"I know."
"And then I met a girl who yelled at me and she's apparently someone's childhood best friend."
"I know that too, Khanna told me."
"And I sat on the ground with six dark elves."
"I know *that* because I saw it happen."
Ruby looked at her. "Then why did you ask how day one was going?"
"Because I wanted to hear you say it out loud. Sounds better that way."
A beat.
"It does," Ruby admitted.
Yang leaned back, looking at the ceiling. "They're good people, Ruby. The elves. I know we just met them, but — you can tell."
Ruby thought about Roy's hand on the top of her head. About Khanna's easy grace. About Odyn sitting down on a paving stone because she was sitting on a paving stone, and five others following him. "Yeah," she said quietly. "I know."
Across the ballroom, a candle lit.
---
They found Blake the way you find quiet people who have positioned themselves near good light and hoped not to be noticed — which is to say, by following the light.
Yang led. Ruby followed with the resigned expression of someone who has learned that when Yang decides they are doing something, they are doing something, and the available choices are *participate* or *be carried.*
Blake looked up from her book.
"You're the one who exploded," she said to Ruby, which was accurate.
The conversation that followed had the quality of things that begin awkwardly and find their footing in unexpected places. Blake was not easy to talk to in the way that some people are not easy to talk to — not because she was unkind but because she was closed in the specific way of someone who has learned that openness is a thing that costs you. Ruby, who had not yet learned this, was therefore accidentally effective at the business of opening her, simply by being genuinely interested in the book.
"A man with two souls," Ruby said. "Each fighting for control."
"Yes."
"Which one wins?"
Blake was quiet for a moment. "The book doesn't say. It suggests it depends on which one is fed."
Ruby thought about this. "That's... actually really interesting."
"I thought so."
Yang was in the middle of remarking on Blake's bow — which she meant as a compliment and which Blake received with the polite wariness of someone whose bow was not something they discussed lightly — when the air in the nearby vicinity changed.
Ruby felt it before she heard it — the specific change in atmosphere that precedes an argument, which is a pressure drop of sorts, a slight pulling-tight of something that had been relaxed.
She looked up.
Weiss was approaching. Her expression had the quality of someone who has been woken from light sleep by noise and has arrived with the full authority of someone who has opinions about noise.
Odyn was two steps behind her, wearing the expression of someone who is walking fast enough to prevent something but has calculated that prevention is no longer possible.
"What," Weiss said, taking in the ballroom corner tableau with the comprehensive gaze of someone doing an inventory, "is going on over here? Some of us are trying to—"
"Weiss," Odyn said.
"I know what I'm—"
"Weiss. Khanna is two sleeping bags away."
Weiss turned. Yang turned at the same moment. The two of them made eye contact — Yang's lilac eyes and Weiss's blue ones — with the immediate, mutual recognition of two people who have already met and whose meeting did not go smoothly.
"*You,*" they said, simultaneously.
In the sleeping bags around them, things went very quiet.
Then two hands descended from behind — one on Weiss's shoulder, one on Yang's — and the temperature of the atmosphere changed again, differently.
"Ladies," Khanna said, from the space behind them, with the smile she wore when she was being pleasant as a warning, "would either of you like to explain to me why this particular corner of the ballroom is the loudest corner in the ballroom?"
Weiss was sweating in the specific way of someone who knows the person behind them and understands the implications of their current tone.
Yang was not yet sweating, because Yang did not yet know the person behind her and had therefore not calibrated to the implications. She was about to receive that education.
"I could explain," Yang said.
"I didn't say you could talk yet," Khanna said, pleasantly.
Yang reconsidered.
"The three of us," Khanna continued, in the same pleasant register, "are going to have a very brief conversation about the value of indoor voices. Come along."
She had, with the casual efficiency of someone who has herded uncooperative people before and is comfortable with it, taken both of them by the ear. Not painfully. Just firmly enough to convey that this was a direction of travel that was happening.
"Khanna—" Weiss started.
"When I said 'come along,'" Khanna said, "that was direction, not invitation. *Come along.*"
The three of them disappeared.
Ruby stared after them.
"Are they going to be okay?" she asked.
"Khanna won't hurt them," Sarai said, from somewhere to Ruby's left, in the tone of someone who is being technically accurate. "She'll just make them feel quite strongly that they should have made different choices this evening."
"Is Weiss in trouble?"
"Weiss knows Khanna," Odyn said. He had sat down. He was looking at the ceiling. "She'll be fine. Slightly chastened. But fine."
"And Yang?"
"Yang doesn't know Khanna yet." Baron, thoughtfully. "So the experience will be more... educational."
Blake, beside them, had set down her book. She was looking at the space where the three of them had gone. "Your group," she said, to the dark elves, "is very interesting."
"We've been told," Roy said.
A long, comfortable pause.
Ruby opened her journal. Roy returned to his blade mechanism. Sarai leaned her head against Hailfire's shoulder and closed her eyes. Baron looked at the ceiling. Odyn thought about tomorrow — about the initiation, about Thanatos, about a letter that was almost certainly going to need to be written once he had an address.
About Weiss, two sleeping bags from where he was sitting, who had listened to nine years of silence and then said *thank you for not forgetting me,* which he was not going to think about for too long because there was a great deal of the next four years still to navigate and he needed to be functional for it.
Somewhere in the ballroom, Khanna could be heard conducting her educational conversation in a tone of unshakeable cheerfulness.
Yang's voice carried once: "*I understand, I'm sorry.*" Then silence.
Ruby snorted. Then covered her mouth. Then gave up and laughed.
The night settled around them.
---
**— To Be Continued —**
*Next Time: Chapter 4 — Initiation; The First Step, Part One.*