Chapter Text
Ruby woke one day with an odd feeling. She had been staying with her father and Yang for the last couple of months, the first spent recovering from whatever she had done to the wyvern, the second spent trying to figure out what the hell to do next. Things with her team hadn’t exactly helped, or rather, they were essentially the root of the problem.
Blake had pulled a vanishing act on them the moment ships started leaving Beacon. She probably fled to Menagerie but they had no real way of knowing that for sure and it seemed to risky to gamble on.
Weiss had essentially been kidnapped by her family, flown back to Atlas on a private airship that was probably faster than anything they could have found to chase her down in.
That left Yang… who was certainly worse for wear. Which seemed like an understatement but Ruby couldn’t bring herself to feel anything but pity for her sister, injured and abandoned by her friends in the moment she needed them most.
Any one of the problems could have been solved with the presence of the other two members. Weiss and Yang could have helped her track down Blake; Blake and Yang could have helped her get Weiss back from the Schnees; Weiss and Blake together could have come with them to patch and helped Yang bounce back faster, or at all.
But she had none of them. Her whole team was missing, either in another part of the world or just some dark part of their own head, or possibly both at once. So what was she supposed to do?
Bumming around the house for a couple weeks doing chores and making sure to not anger her sister had only resulted in Ruby feeling restless and trapped. She considered for a while that she should return to Beacon and try to help clear the Grimm there, maybe figure out what power she had used to freeze the wyvern, but she had been dissuaded from that by the fact that all former Beacon teams had been evacuated—leaving only faculty—just one week ago.
Then after a week of twiddling her thumbs and drawing blanks, the oddness had started. One day Ruby had awoken and known—absolutely for certain—that the next major event was going to go down at Haven academy, thousands of miles away in Anima. She couldn’t for the life of her figure out why she knew this, or how she could possibly think that she could get there in time to stop it.
She knew she had to stop it obviously, who else could? Not without a team though, she was powerful in her own right but she would need a group to back her, even just to help out while she was busy with the important stuff. So in lieu of her original team, she sent letters to team JNR who were still in the area, having declined to move to Vacuo to finish up their training.
A day later, with all her supplies in order and a makeshift team to keep her company, Ruby left a letter on her father’s desk while he was away clearing Beacon, and went to find a ship that would take them to Anima’s western coast.
When asked her reasoning, either by her new teammates or the many adults they had to deal with while securing passage, Ruby had explained that she needed to be moving, and that she was sure Shade would be getting enough new students, Why shouldn’t they give Haven a shot?
She usually said this with a laugh, hoping that the humor of their absurd journey would distract from it’s sheer impracticality. If she could have got them air travel she would have, walking almost one and a half thousand miles seemed utterly ludicrous once they had finally set foot on Animanian soil after a week at sea.
But walk they did, and took carts and caravans whenever one happened to be heading in the right direction. The trip was long and arduous, but her companions managed to keep it relatively enjoyable, or at least Nora was trying her butt off to keep spirits up through Jaune’s grief and Ruby’s vague distance. Ruby was trying not to let on, but the odd feeling had been growing for a while, ever since she first felt it in Patch.
The more she thought about Haven Academy, and what they needed to do there, the more she found she knew what it looked like. She could imagine the grand entrance in vivid detail, the headmaster’s office at the top of the stairs, the tunnel leading down to the chamber that was supposed to be hidden. She must have seen pictures of the place or something, but that didn’t seem to cover everything she found floating around in her head.
The scariest part was all the things she didn’t know. She knew there was something that she needed to protect, something that she had helped to protect at Beacon, but that was at much greater risk this time around. She knew she needed to find a very specific someone to do this protecting, although who that person was or where they were remained a mystery. What she did or didn’t know, what she could remember, it all seemed frustratingly inconsistent and vague. At various points on their hike she could tell exactly which way they should go but she was absolutely certain that she had never seen a map of the area before. She tried to couch her directions in the language of a guess to keep her friends from asking how she knew.
She didn’t know how she knew and that was the oddest of the oddities, the cream of the bizarre crop. That was, until one day, when she finally heard the voice.
It was as normal a morning as any other they had experienced on the hike. A chill in the air kept her from ever really getting comfortable overnight, the constant sounds of the forest making sure she didn’t really want to anyway. Groggy and stiff, she had risen from the waist to stretch and rub sleep from her eyes, when a voice had spoken to her out of literally nowhere.
“Hello Ruby.”
She shrieked a little, jumping off her sleeping mat and immediately tangling her legs in her sleeping bag. Hopefully the noise hadn’t roused her friends.
“What is going on?” She wondered to herself, only a whisper in the quiet morning air.
“Nothing strange I assure you.”
Ruby whipped her head around to find the source of the sound, but saw nothing other than shifting sleeping bags and a low pile of embers within their clearing.
“Nothing strange about a voice speaking from… inside my head?” She couldn’t be sure, but that seemed like the most likely option, unlikely though it was.
“See? You’re getting the hang of this quite quickly.” The voice had a light smile in it this time, though no mouth could be seen. It was starting to sound more familiar by the minute.
“Okaaay…” Ruby tried to make things fit into anything she already understood, “are you the reason I thought it was a good idea to take my friends on a hike through the middle of nowhere?”
“Actually, I’m the one who told you to do that, but the connection wasn’t strong enough yet for you to hear the words. It seems to have worked though.”
Ruby sighed then. Something about the cryptic and vague answers was starting to be very familiar.
“So tell me, what relation do you have to the academies? Or the headmasters? Or… Ozpin?”
Pieces of some puzzle she hadn’t really been aware of started to fit together in her head, creating an outline that she dreaded even before her suspicions were confirmed.
“In fact, I am Ozpin. Although, I see that you have already put that much together.”
Ruby groaned this time, slapping one hand over her eyes as if that would relieve the strain on her brain for a moment.
“Of course! Why should I be surprised by that! My dead headmaster speaking to me inside by brain!” she felt like she could burst out laughing or possibly cry. Why couldn’t anything ever be easy?
“Things aren’t easy when they are important Miss Rose, if this was easy then I assure you matters would not be nearly so serious as they are.”
His tone had Ruby pausing in her hysterics, enough that she didn’t even comment on how he could apparently hear her thoughts.
“What do you mean?”
“Miss Rose, the attack on Beacon was not a fluke, or committed by some crazed terrorist. It was a coordinated attack from an enemy older than mankind, and that enemy will not be stopping until she has destroyed everything that humanity has built. Her next act will be an attack on Haven academy sometime in the following months, and I need you to help me prevent that from happening. Ruby, do you think you can do that?”
The question was almost nice, as if she actaully had a choice in the matter. They both knew she didn’t.
“Yeah, I’ll do what I can. What exactly were you—”
“Goooooood morning Ruby! Who are you talking too?”
Nora smiled at her from across the campsite.
“Oh uh, nobody. Just trying to think of what we need to do once we get to Haven.”
Nora seemed to think that was an acceptable answer, shrugging and moving to Ren’s side so she could annoy him awake as she did most mornings. Ruby suspected that Ren stayed in bed a little longer than necessary to allow her to do this. She laughed just a little, watching the two bicker through their morning routine. Hopefully she could keep this growing sense of responsibility from getting too big to bear.
Things had not gotten any easier—not after meeting Uncle Qrow as they did—Tyrian would have been a tough nut to crack on his own. Ruby was just grateful when her uncle seemed to appear out of nowhere, helping just in time like he always had.
He hadn’t been enough though, to save himself in the end. Maybe it was her team’s lack of coordination or Uncle’s semblance, she didn’t really know. Ozpin had offered to take over control, to fight her battle for her, something she had resisted for maybe too long. He hadn’t taken over in time to help her uncle, all that had happened was that Ruby watched her own hands separate the maniac’s tail from his body in one awful moment. She had felt the pull and the crack and the slice, but it hadn’t been enough to distract her from the gash on Uncle Qrow’s side.
The conversation afterward had not been great either. Ruby had to pretend she didn’t know everything that Uncle Qrow was telling her, even if she only realized she had access to the information as she heard it. The part about the gods seemed correct, though something about the story of the maidens sounded wrong to her ears. She decided it was better not to push that, there was no doubt that Qrow thought the story was genuine.
Jaune’s reaction had her tense though. She had wondered if she should tell her friends or not, about the situation with Ozpin starting to take up residence in her brain. She had no doubt that it would have landed her in some serious hot water when Jaune blew up, getting mad that Pyrrha was roped into something bigger than any of them had expected.
Ruby was sympathetic with him at the same time that she understood why this information was held secret. Jaune’s reaction was proof enough, that some people had a hard time handling the truth. She could only hope that she was someone who could manage it.
Anyway, she had other reasons to be annoyed with her uncle.
“Look I know that you were trying to help by protecting us from grimm this whole time, but really, you know they could have used the practice.” The words had come from Ozpin via her mouth, but she had only a moment to regret how patronizing they sounded before they were already biting her in the ass.
“Excuse me?” Jaune asked, still riding the high of his anger with the whole concept of Maidens and gods, “as if you’re so great yourself?”
“W-well it’s just that I had tutoring from Uncle Qrow for a long time, and um well…” she tried to back pedal but really, who was she kidding? “To be honest, Ren and Nora can handle themselves pretty well, I’ve been training to fight grimm since I was nine years old. If we’re being realistic, Jaune, you need a lot more training. The kinds of small grimm that Uncle Qrow was keeping away wouldn’t be much of a challenge for the rest of us and I think you could do with more direct battle experience on lower stakes enemies rather than building sized geists and crazy murderers.”
She felt a little bad at the way he deflated, but she had spoken the truth. They all needed to train harder, and Jaune hardest of all.
“Ruby you know I—” Jaune choked on his words a little, but she did know.
“Practicing your aura control with those videos is good Jaune, and I know how much it means to you, but it’s no substitute for experience. With Uncle Qrow all beat up like this you’re going to be getting plenty of that experience anyways, so lets just leave it for tonight. We can figure out what we’re going to do in the morning.” She already felt like the weight of a mountain had settled on her shoulders, but the way that Jaune relaxed helped her settle a little bit herself.
She heard Oz’ voice again as she got ready for bed, fluffing the bag of clothes she used as a pillow.
“You handled all that rather well.”
“Hmph, no thanks to you.”
“Don’t mention it, there will be plenty of time to thank me after you have made it through the coming trials.”
Ruby wondered for a moment if he could mishear her from inside her own head, as her eyes wandered over to Qrow. Could her stubborn passenger be of any use for a real problem?
“That’s a perfectly good question Miss Rose, If you bring us over to him perhaps we can find out together.”
She shuddered a little at his everything, feeling the ghost of a chuckle in the back of her mind, but she got up as requested and found herself a spot next to her dying uncle.
“Dying isn’t quite the right word, but we should be careful not to jinx it.”
Oz was as unhelpful as ever, right up until she knelt down and started to undo his bandages. She felt something take over, someone else guiding her hands through the motions of unwrapping and inspecting the ruined flesh. They had only done a quick job to get out of that town, not good enough to really help it heal, only stopping it from getting worse.
“There is a sewing kit in your backpack Miss Rose, please retrieve it and get a needle and thread.”
She did as told, and then her hands set about the task of laboriously sewing together the ripped edges of her Uncle’s skin. It was an odd sensation, feeling the wet flesh moving over her fingers even as they felt like they belonged to someone else. It was the longest she had allowed Ozpin to control her body, longer than it took to dismember Tyrian anyway.
The longer Ruby had to sit inside Ozpin’s head, the more she found she could look in at bits of it. She couldn’t really hear his conscious thoughts like he seemed to do with her, but there was a lot more of that weird memory thing going on. She looked at Qrow and remembered him as a student in Beacon, his team, her mother. Things were fuzzy, and they meshed and collided with her own memories in ways that didn’t make sense. She remembered how she had idolized him in her youth at the same time as she remembered watching his long slow descent into alcoholism as a result of his team falling apart. Ozpin seemed to hold some details more privately than others, especially those relating to her mother.
It was weird to see her parents’ team from the perspective of a stranger, and not all of it made sense. She knew that Raven had left and Taiyang had been devastated, but even after Summer helped him pick up the pieces she still maintained contact with both Raven and Qrow, something to do with this mission Ozpin was dragging her and JNR on. She could remember how that tension had eaten away at Qrow and how he had turned to drinking even before Summer had gone missing, and how he’d only gotten worse after.
Then at the same time she felt the affection that Ozpin had held for the man. Even as the headmaster back in their day they had been quite close in age. Qrow had felt for a long time more like an equal than a subordinate. He had been confidante, secret agent, trusted advisor. They had gone drinking together on numerous occasions—none of which Ruby could recall in detail—and honestly, Ruby was getting the impression that Ozpin had been closer to Qrow then he had been to anyone else.
That alone was a bizarre idea, she hadn’t thought Qrow would be close with anyone given his semblance, and well… his whole deal really.
But she got the sense, as her hands finished the final stitch and one layed gently across the mended flesh in a gesture far too gentle, that Ozpin cared deeply for the man she called Uncle.
Which was weird. Like, super weird.
Qrow opened his eyes then, hardly a spark of comprehension to speak of in his garnet eyes. He looked at her, looked at the expression Ozpin had formed on her face; the mask of a man he once knew better than anyone else held firm, gentleness and worry in the silver eyes that seemed far too old for the girl that held them.
His hand reached up, limp with fatigue and weariness from the poison, caressing her cheek with the faintest touch.
“Oz?”
Ruby shivered then. Everything had gotten so weird and strange and different and here was her Uncle dying in front of her she just knew that she could not possibly lose this man again, not after everything they had been through.
“No Uncle Qrow, it’s me Ruby.” she placed her hand on his, felt the cold skin and held back another shudder. “I’ll make sure you’re safe, I promise.”
His brow creased, either in confusion or disbelief. Hopefully he wont remember any of this, that it’ll all be some bad dream for him to wake up from in the hospital. Assuming they found one in time.
His hand fell from her grip, eyes skeptical even as he leaned back against his tree. Ruby didn’t leave his side, hardly slept that night at all; she had to make sure that his heart was still beating.