Chapter Text
Ruby watched as her sister boarded the bullhead for her first year of Beacon and longed to join her. This would be the first time she’d be separated from her older sister in her life and she was understandably anxious about it.
Last night she’d been unable to sleep and so had gone to a local Dust in Vale where they and their father had rented a hotel room to stay the night and see Yang off for Beacon.
She’d just looking at a weapon magazine for nearly an hour before buying a vial of burn dust as a gift for Yang and to appease the shop clerk who had spent most of that hour glaring at her and muttering about this not being a library.
The entire time she’d been fantasizing about some criminal gang busting in and robbing the place and her fighting them off and impressing the Beacon Headmaster enough to get the early acceptance she’d been working towards as soon as she realized that she and Yang would be separated by Beacon.
No such luck however. So now she had to deal with the pain of seeing her sister’s bullhead fly up towards Beacon and knowing that she wouldn’t get to see her in person and feel her amazing hugs until the winter break.
Yang kept her promise at least to call every night before bed. Her partner was a ‘quiet girl’ named Blake while her teammates were the ‘dorky awkward mess’ Jaune and a ‘stuck-up rich bitch’ named Weiss. Their leader was the Jaune guy and Yang didn’t much like him. She didn’t know why just that ‘He’s hiding something.’
And life continued on. More notably empty of Yang’s warm hugs and calming precense in Ruby’s life.
Without Yang there and dad being a workaholic Ruby threw herself into what most interested her. Training until she couldn’t stand then retiring to her workshop to work on Crescent Rose.
Yang would have stopped her before she reached exhaustion and kept her sessions with Rose short but without Yang there to stop her Ruby was free to spend as much time as she wanted on Rose.
She still would have prefer her sister being there but she’d take what she could get.
About half-way through the semester Yang’s call was different. Apparently her team had been through a major fight and after talking it all out they’d come out the other side far stronger. Jaune became Joan and the tone went from ‘guh he’s such an annoying little shit.’ To ‘Ruby I’m too gay for this. Please send help.’
She had sent her congratulations to the newest member of the ‘not cis-ters’ club. She remembered how much of a shit she had been before her egg broke.
After that her and Joan exchanged texts. As the elder Transgirl she offered whatever advice Joan needed and surprisingly enough she found herself feeling quite good about it. She actually liked Joan and that she was much more willing to share some of the more embarrassing stories of Yang certainly endeared Ruby towards her.
Yang was too prideful to share embarrassing stories with Ruby in their talks and she hated texting because of the small buttons.
She found herself spending more time talking with Joan than Yang.
So when she received a text from Joan expressing how she maybe had a crush on Yang and wanted her advice/approval Ruby just smiled and told her that Yang was the type to appreciate a girl being straight forward with their interest.
A week later she got an early call from Yang gushing about her new girlfriend and being wonderfuly gay about the entire thing.
She was happy for her sister and she’d found a new normal in her day-to-day. Texting Joan throughout her day sometimes about weapons, other times about Yang and sometimes just forwarding gender memes.
Then as Winter break was approaching Yang’s call was nervous as she asked if her entire team could stay with them for break.
Apparently Blake wasn’t on speaking terms with her parents, Weiss had been disowned for dating a Faunus woman, which turned out to be Blake. And Joan’s family was extremely bigoted against non-cishets.
Which meant that they were all planinng to stay at Beacon over break but Yang wanted to invite them all because as they had heard growing up. ‘Your Hunter Team is your family.’
So Ruby got to properly meet Team JLWB (Pronounced Glib) for Winter Vale.
During the holidays she spent a lot of time training in the yard with her sister’s team. The comments asking why she wasn’t at Beacon after she won a few bouts left her puffed up with pride.
She mostly took wins from Joan and Weiss. Joan admitting to her that she hadn’t even had her Aura unlocked until Yang did in for her at initiation and had started with only the most basic of knowledge on how to fight. She was a fast learner by Ruby’s reckoning and an amazing Tactician. The longer she managed to draw out a fight the better she performed.
Weiss on the other hand was training in Fencing which was a poor match-up against Crescent Rose who could just bat her light blade aside and strike at Weiss’s body. In proper team combat though Weiss primarily used the glyphs of her Semblance to support her team from mid-range while taking out targets of opportunity.
Even still Ruby’s spars with Yang proved to her that she was falling behind. Before Beacon Ruby won about as often as she lost. Now she took up one win due only to revealing a new feature she’d designed into Rose, namely firing the blade connected to a length of chain to wrap around Yang. She was caught be surprise and lost that bout but nothing Ruby did allowed her to take another fight. It was infuriating.
Ruby pouted about that and she barely got any hugs from Yang was Winter Break and then Team GLWB was leaving to return to Beacon.
After that Ruby regretting spending a lot of her Winter pouting about losing to Yang and began working her ass off to get better with the goal of taking some bouts off her come Summer break.
Her semblance was the first. She’d always felt there was more to her semblance than she could access. But it had taken her years just to learn to stop from activating it without meaning to and a few months after that to get it to activate when she wanted it to. She’d always felt like training her technique and improving Rose would always keep her growing but that growth was no longer enough.
Her first discovery was that when she activated her semblance she transformed and didn’t need to come out of her semblance in the same position she entered. That had been a restriction before since she couldn’t attack while her semblance was active she had always readied her attack before activating her semblance, getting into position and following through on the swing.
Now she could use her Semblance to reposition Rose into rapid strikes swing, reset back to a prepared stance then swing again.
It meant dropping a number of techniques and moves that she’d developed assuming she’d need to move into position properly after each swing. She’d keep them in practice for when she couldn’t use her semblance but she had to practice this new semblance use.
The trouble was that Uncle Qrow was away on a mission and dad was busy with work at Signal. Her peers were so far behind her she could beat most of them with her eyes closed and in-fact had taken to using them to practice her unarmed fighting. After a few loses she was starting to puzzle out how to fight without Rose. She was ill-suited to her dad’s ‘Glass-Fist’ Style and had found far more success with a style focused more on light and accurate blows. It wasn’t good for fighting grimm who had few weakpoints in the way that people had them but Grimm were also way less likely to disarm her.
That did allow the idea to cement in her mind that a sidearm she could fall back on might be useful and with a greater understanding of her Semblance perhaps something that would be designed from the ground up to work with her semblance.
So she tested basic designs and pushed her semblance further. She caught up on lost sleep in her classes, she was so far beyond her class that even sleeping in class she was top of her class.
More than a few of her peers thought she was cheating but the sparring ring put a stop to that sort of talk. She was just that good and if it weren’t for stupid adults saying she’s too young to goto Beacon she’d be there and not stuck on Patch all alone.
She furthered her semblance in the discovery that while she needed to pull herself together into one area to reform she could split herself off infinitely if need be being aware of the area around any of her rose petals. That led to her trying to partially reform which took a ton of effort and focus early on but after a good month of working on it was usable in combat if still more effort than she liked. Similarly she had discovered that she could be mostly Ruby-shaped but just enough Rose to scatter when she was attacked allowing an attack to just disperse her and she could then reform elsewhere but that was far from combat-ready as it required her complete focus to stay on the edge and not scatter into the Roses of her semblance.
Unfortunately none of these developments really gave her inspiration for her Sidearm project. She’d tried a Chainsaw and Shotgun combo which she dropped after nearly sawing her face off. She’d re-approached a design that had evolved into Ember Celica that was even more of a failure than the last time she’d tried it since her Semblance didn’t work in the way her Mercurial Thorn had been designed. She had been made back when she thought her Semblance was just a Speed semblance and she could just make running punches at her enemies. Her speed really didn’t transfer between Roses to Ruby so Mercury was basically a useless weapon which made Ruby sad to see a weapon made for Grimm killing just continue to collect dust unused and too niche to really work for anyone without a specific kind of semblance.
She spent less time talking with Yang, where once they called and talked every night by the time summer came around it had become one longer session on Saturday night. By the time Summer came around Ruby had learned to adjust to Yang being gone and she found the presence of her and Joan (As she was staying with them for the summer due to her other option being a sister who left the family to marry her wife in Argus.) to be too much to handle. She’d gotten used to being alone and suddenly going from that to having Yang back would have been enough of a shock but adding to that the fact that she would be here for 3 months before returning to Beacon leaving Ruby alone once more.
Ruby avoided the couple. She’d been devastated enough by the original separation and the winter break one had just rubbed salt in the wound. Now she was expected to just continue on like she hadn’t spent the last year alone and hurting.
Fuck that. She spent most of her time out of the house or locked up in her workshop avoiding Yang and Joan. She was made only more angry by the fact that Joan was now beating her in spars more often than not. Joan who hadn’t even been training a year was now able to grab a win more often than not when Ruby had been training her whole life.
It made her furious and she absolutely hated it because before Winter she had actually liked Joan and got along well with her but now she couldn’t stand her because she was the most prime example of why she hated her age. She was being denied the opportunity to get better, to grow as a Huntress and even get out there and help people because she was too young for the adults to feel comfortable letting her into Beacon and she hatehatehatehatehated it all. She hated her Sister for leaving her here alone, She hated her sister’s team for stealing her away from her. She hated her dad for not noticing that she was suffering. She hated herself for feeling this way.
When Yang returned to Beacon it was a relief. Her home was her’s again and she no longer needed to avoid the couple or think up excuses to blow them off when they tried to do something with her.
She was still angry but with the objects of her hate away from her she could at least focus on what was important. She trained more she was falling behind and she needed to be better, stronger, faster.
She needed to finish her Sidearm project or discard it entirely. As it was she was wasting time on it that could be spent elsewhere.
She went forward on a design. Whip Swords with integrated shotgun bracers built from a heavily modified Mercury Thorn.
She renamed them Lashing Thorn and began practicing with them. They made for an excellent weapon in tandem with Rose. Rose’s largest issue was her length. In tighter confines like a forest or hallway she was limited in her swing arc options. Her semblance opened up arcs that others wouldn’t have available but not enough to not result in her being at a disadvantage from certain terrains. As well it was ill-suited for people who she had to hold back on or else split in two if their aura failed at the wrong moment. Or those who specialized it getting inside her reach.
Too many situations where a Scythe was ill-suited so having a pair of Shotguns strapped to her wrist that could shoot out a bladed whip gave her new options that offered handled those times where Rose was ill-suited.
She focused on learning Lashing Thorn in sparring class. Her peers were so far below her that they offered little challenge but there was something to be said for quantity over quality.
Winter came again and she was almost relieved to learn that they would all be spending all but the last week of break in menagerie with Blake’s parents. She did not want to deal with the people she hated so much for the entire break. A Week was more than enough thank you very much.
Dad was working, Signal was on break but dad always found more work. Ruby didn’t ask because ultimately she was happy her was gone. Having people in her house, and it was her house since she was the one who spent the most time in it, who cooked and ate and cleaned and lived in it. Nowadays it wasn’t unheard of for dad to sleep in the cot under his desk.
—cw:mentions of Cutting start now—
The first time she cut was the night of Winter’s Vale. She’d thought about it before but never had enough whatever it was to go through with it. But this time she did after receiving a text from dad that he was working late again. Even last year their tradition of gifts and family togetherness had been upheld but this year she was home alone. She extended Lashing Thorn’s blade and cut a shallow cut along her wrist. Then another, then a third before she patched it all up. Thanks to Aura there were no scars, no real risk from such a swallow cut. Just a nice little rush of endorphins that help her feel not so fucked.
The week with Team JLWB Ruby locked herself in her room or Workshop refusing to interact with them. Part of her wanted to challenge them to a spar but she was so terrified to challenge them and lose even harder than she had before. To have proven to her that she was stagnating and falling behind.
The cutting became a regular thing. Every day after school she’d cut a few times along her wrist before patching it up while Aura healed it and going about her daily training.
If there’s one benefit to her mood it’s that it attracts Grimm like nothing else. Once upon a time she had to hunt for Grimm. Now she can just go outside the walls of Patch and have the Grimm come to her. She enjoys killing Grimm. Take enjoyment as she cuts them in half, shreds them with Lashing Thorn, dismembers and overall annihilates entire packs of Grimm; mostly Beowulves but the occasional Boarbatusk and the rare Ursa too. Her pickings are slim on Patch, she longs to go elsewhere and kill new Grimm she’s only read about in books.
But she can’t, because she needs to stay in Signal if she wants to goto Beacon. Also Dad, but he’s becoming ever more minor in her decision making processes.
In the end she pushes her training, and readies herself for summer. Team JLWB will be staying for the second half of the summer after spending time at Menagerie during the first half with Blake’s parents again.
She intends to get every spar she can from them even if she loses if only to not be too far behind her Beacon peers. To have that slight edge.
She decides to head to the Mainland, with her semblance she could just float to the mainland and from there she could try hunting some bigger and more dangerous Grimm. She’s happy when an ancient Nevermore bares down of her with a crow while she was killing a pack of Beowulves. She uses her Semblance to simply scatter where Nevermore feather might have otherwise impaled her. Then she knocked it up a notch. She reforms behind the Alpha, Rose in hand and with a single swipe from behind removing it’s head from it’s shoulders. Then scatters again to reform with Lashing Thorn’s blades around two more and she pulls and tighten removing two more heads. The next Nevermore swoop she scatters timing it so that the wind the nevermore kicked up throws her roses into the air, she reforms on it’s back driving Rose into it’s back as an anchor. The smile on her face wide as her heart pumps blood through her veins. With a flick Lashing Thorn arcs out and wraps itself around the Nevermore’s neck. With her other hand it’s twin she swipes and removes the left wing sending the Nevermore into a dive which she steers with her handy dandy neck noose into what remains of the beowulf pack.
At the last moment she scatters once more reforming behind the lone beowulf surviving and removing another head from shoulders. She’s covered in Grimm Ash, her own blood and a toothy smile that won’t leave her face. She hasn’t felt so good in years.
The next week she feels good, she doesn’t cut, she just thinks of her Nevermore kill and gets a high far better than cutting ever could. But after a week even that high dulls and she returns to it.
Nobody noticed her three day absence. She’s gone longer without seeing dad before so it shouldn’t surprise her or make her hurt but it still does.