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It is not until everything is done – with the Grimm in Vale, the destruction of their city though reconstruction is well underway – that it really starts to bother Ruby that Oobleck hadn't asked her why she wanted to be a Huntress, as her sister pointed out. It had scared her, watching Oobleck question her team and give an unsatisfied hum at their answers. A part of her was defensive of her team and their reasons, but she'd felt relief that he hadn't asked her, felt like her reasons her enough.
They'd saved the town, like heroes, like what she wanted to be, but hot foreboding weighed heavy in her stomach. It didn't feel like enough.
Oobleck had showed her the Goliath herd, but he hadn't asked her. She had been relieved, but now she felt dread.
“Profe- Doctor. Doctor Oobleck?” Ruby starts at the end of his lecture, as the rest of her team gathers their stuff to leave and glance at her in surprise but otherwise unconcerned. He'd just about dashed out the door, before most of the rest of the class, his thermos and papers under his arm. He stops at her beckoning and blinks, startled, for a moment.
“Ah, Miss Ruby Rose! Yes? A question! Yes, I'm just headed to my office, why don't you join me? Come, follow me.” He darts off again, after gesturing her to follow. She tries to grab her stuff to rush after him, but Yang gathers her books before she can start and Weiss snorts and waves her off as she and Blake join in packing her stuff. Ruby only has time to mumble a “thank you,” before she hurries after their professor.
She's nervous, never having been in a teacher's office before. His office turns out to be small and cramped (or perhaps only cramped – it is crammed so full of books and papers and artifacts that she can't exactly tell how large the room is), and Oobleck has to squeeze himself between his desk and a bookshelf to get to his chair behind his desk.
As he sets his stuff down he beckons her to shut the door after herself and she does. She glances around, unsettled and awkward.
“Sit, sit!” Oobleck invites her, rolling his chair to a small table with a coffee machine while still sitting. The only other chair is an overstuffed arm chair and when she sits on it, it is so squashy that she sinks right into it. Oobleck looks at her apologetically, “Yes, sorry. My last chair was… broken in an unfortunate accident and this was the only one I could find on short notice – I'll get a new one eventually – or so I said last year. Coffee?”
“Um, no,” Ruby struggles to stay sitting as the chair attempts to swallow her right up, “It's alright. Er, no thanks.” Coffee is bitter, she doesn't like it and always has to add so much milk and sugar that she has to pour most of the coffee out so it doesn't overflow to make it bearable. Yang jokes that Ruby likes her milk with just a little coffee, but she'd really rather have just the milk if it came to it.
Oobleck only hums as he pours himself a mug and rolls himself back to his desk. “So what was it you wanted to discuss with me, Miss Rose?”
“Um,” she stops, not certain anymore of what she wanted to ask before she plunges ahead – no point in fear of her own professor, especially one that had made it explicitly clear he loved teaching. “Why didn't you ask me why I wanted to be a Huntress? Like you did with Yang and the rest of my team?”
He stares at her for a long moment, though she can't see his eyes in his clouded glasses, and slurps at his coffee.
“Why do you think I didn't ask you?” he finally asks.
She doesn't know, that is why she is asking. Only she's afraid that he already finds her reasons unsatisfactory, that he finds her unsatisfactory as a team leader, as a Huntress. That he didn't ask because he didn't see anything worthwhile in her, that she wasn't going to accomplish what she wanted.
Ruby shrugs, unwilling to admit that, and Oobleck makes a noise of acknowledgment before asking, “Why are you here?”
“Um, you told me to follow you to your office remember? And I wanted to ask you… well, I just asked you. Uh...” Ruby stammers, hesitant.
“You misunderstand. I meant, why are you here, at Beacon?”
Her eyes widen and Ruby bites her lip before answering, “To be a Huntress, a hero.” Ruby pauses before continuing, trying to convince him of something, though she doesn't know what, “It is all I've ever wanted to be. A hero, like my dad and uncle and… and my mom. I want to save people.”
“And being a Huntress… That will make you a hero?”
“I, well, Ozp-,” She'd told Ozpin all this when she first met him, that she wanted to be a hero. He'd accepted her into Beacon early, only he hadn't said that training to be a Huntress would make her a hero exactly – he'd said warrior. But that was the same thing, right? “I want to save people, from harm, from Grimm. And saving people is being a hero right? I'm at Beacon, to train to be a hero.”
He nods, only his mouth sets like she's given him an inadequate answer.
“Beacon is here to teach our students, to train Huntresses in their craft and to create warriors for combat. Not heroes.” Oobleck says after a while, just as she'd been about to plead for what she'd said wrong. Ruby frowns as she tries to understand.
“But we're training to save people, aren't we? Isn't that.. being a hero?”
“Is it? Is training to fight in combat and kill Grimm saving people?” Oobleck usually is so flighty and full of movement – it is terrifying to see him so serious and still and looking at her.
“I- Grimm are killing innocent people and they need to be stopped, obviously… don't they? And if my team and I kill Grimm, the Grimm can't kill civilians anymore.”
He looks at her silently, thinking, and she shifts and sinks deeper into the chair. She's stopped struggling with the chair, almost wishing it would just swallow her into its cushy depths. Ruby watches as he brings his mug up to his mouth and gulps down a swallow of bitter coffee, her nose wrinkling at even the thought of the taste.
“And how does more killing accomplish your desire to save, as you say, innocent people?”
Ruby's frown deepens – surely he isn't sympathizing with the Grimm? No, there was more to it than that. Oobleck scoots his chair back to fetch himself more coffee as she thinks. Grimm don't have an Aura, surely – but, no. That is getting dangerously close to deciding who is alive and who is not – like Penny. Her friend might have an Aura, but she knows there have to be people with arguments to deny Penny her personhood, the way people try with Blake and the Faunus. It is not a question of the Grimm's sentience, but…
“How, how would I stop the Grimm from killing people without killing them? I don't. It's,” It's a necessary evil, she was going to say only. Only she doesn't believe that – there is no necessary evil, she doesn't believe that. Ruby was only parroting something she'd heard before.
Finally her professor sighs and Ruby thinks he is finally just going to give her the answer.
“You're not wrong Miss Rose,” he says instead, but Ruby thinks she might might not be right either. Either way, Oobleck is reaching for his books and she knows she is being dismissed, that the rest of their discussion is up to her to find answers to. “Thank you, for coming to me with your questions, Ruby. My office door is always open if you ever have questions for me – whether about lecture or otherwise. Never stop asking questions.”
Ruby waits a beat, “Um, thank you, Pro- Doctor Oobleck. I'll keep that in mind and just – let myself out. Thanks.” She flounders for a bit, trying to extract herself from the chair before she manages. Ruby walks out of the room with more questions than answers – she is not even certain her original question was answered.
For the first time in her life, Ruby has doubts about heroism.