7,711My mother's test results have come back as NOT bowel cancer. Huge relief. They don't know what it is yet and want further tests, but not being that is just massive. Big weight off shoulders. Now it's just the insolvency to deal with.
Cover Art: Curbizzle
Chapter 61
Ruby was incredibly paranoid for their first "session" together. Jaune didn't call it that, just saying they were chatting, but he knew that was what she saw it as. From the very beginning, her hackles were raised – not aggressively, Ruby wasn't like that – but she was suspicious enough to pick over every word and expect an attempt at buttering her up at every opportunity.
Which was why Jaune didn't try.
Doctor Oobleck had taught him that unless someone was coming to you specifically asking for help and thus were prepared to be cooperative from the start, a therapist's first job was to build a rapport and some trust with the patient. Show them that they could be trusted to keep secrets, get them to relax around you until they felt comfortable enough to talk candidly. And, most importantly of all, their job wasn't to push the person or demand answers.
So, they talked about Signal. Ruby started off tense and wary, picking her words carefully, but after twenty minutes she was telling stories about her friends and the lesson there.
"Do you still talk to them?" asked Jaune.
"A little bit. Not as much as I'd like." Ruby tensed, wondering if that was to be an opening, but he hadn't meant it as such and she carried on once he didn't jump on it. "It's not easy to stay friends when we're so far apart, and I know we can talk online and over calls but we don't have anything in common."
"You don't talk about Beacon?"
"It makes them jealous. No. Envious. They were happy for me and jealous makes it sound bad, but they were disappointed they have to wait and it always gets awkward when I talk about how cool Beacon is."
"Hmm. I guess so. I'd argue there's no reason to be jealous when they'll get here eventually anyway."
"That's what they say but I guess it's easier to say you'll not be jealous than to actually not be."
"Guess so. I was jealous of Pyrrha, Nora and Ren when I first got here."
"Because they were so much stronger than you?"
"You don't have to rub it in."
Ruby giggled. "Sure thing, vomit boy."
"Hey now. I thought we were beyond those names. I don't even always get airsick, it was more my nerves acting up about coming to Beacon and being caught for being a fraud. The motion sickness just made it worse. Anyway, you ever thought of inviting your friends over to hang out in Vale? I could meet them."
"Ugh. No." Ruby stuck her tongue out. "They'd probably fancy you."
"Really?"
"Don't look so excited, they're underage." Like her. "And it's just that you'd be an older guy who's in Beacon, so you'd be automatically cool." Ruby sighed. "And I'm kinda worried things will be different between us."
"Different?"
Ruby shied away. "You said you wouldn't do the therapy thing..."
"I said that about your insecurity issues. This is different to that. You might not even be wrong here. Do you think you've moved on from them?"
After a moment's hesitation, Ruby decided it couldn't hurt to talk about it. "I guess? When we talk, they get excited about stuff I'd have loved back in Signal, but all I can think is it seems so childish. And it's dumb, I know, because I'm the same age as them and I am technically a child, but it's like I've had to grow up a bit to fit in here. Does that make sense?"
"Totally. You've had to take on the mantle of team leader. Plus, you spend all your time around older people so you're bound to adapt to them. I think anyone moved ahead in any school would end up the same way."
"Yeah." Ruby relaxed a little when he didn't criticise or poke holes in her statement. "It's like that. I'm not saying I'm older or anything, but even the conversations I have with people now are a lot more serious. When we talk, they sometimes say I sound more mature and I laugh it off, but I feel like I'm more mature than them. Not in a boasting way," she quickly added. "But, like, a boring way. They get excited about a cool new weapon mod and all I can think is that if I used it, our team would have to re-learn coordination around it and that'd make more work for everyone else so it's probably not worth it." Ruby stared down at her hands. "And I was obsessed with weapon mods before!"
It was the same for him. Not with weapons, Crocea Mors being about as standard as one could get, but Jaune knew he'd matured as well. Much like Ruby, it sounded arrogant to come out and admit that, but he also didn't mean it to boast. It was just that he'd had to start thinking about things he never had before, like how best to deal with team dynamics, how to help other people with their feelings, how to date one girl and not hurt the other on his team that had feelings for him.
"Life has gotten a whole lot more complicated since we've had to stop being selfish and worry about other people," Jaune said.
"Right!?" Ruby groaned and threw her hands in the air. "Like, I wouldn't say I was selfish before, but I only ever had to worry about my grades and not getting in trouble, and I could focus on making Crescent Rose as awesome as possible. And now I worry about Weiss and her father, Blake running off to do stupid stuff and Yang... well, I don't worry about Yang much."
That was an opening.
But Jaune didn't take it. Not when she'd finally relaxed.
They kept talking about her friends for a bit, with Ruby expressing her belief that she and they were probably going to just drift apart by the end of the year. It sounded sad, and it was, but Ruby just didn't have the time to jump back and forth between Patch and here, and they didn't have the freedom to come to her. He told her they could always reconnect in two years, which she said she planned to do, and it wasn't like Ruby didn't have her friends here.
In the end, they spent a full hour chatting before Weiss got impatient and texted Ruby to ask where she was.
"Looks like it's time to go," she said.
"Looks like it. Let me know if you decide anything with your friends."
"Hm. I will." Ruby hesitated, then said, "This... This wasn't bad. It wasn't as bad as I thought it'd be."
"That's what I am for with women, Ruby. I'm a proud Arc who will always leave a woman with the profound feeling that time spent with me wasn't as awful as expected."
Ruby giggled. "You could have made a `that's not what your sister said` joke."
"Yeah, but I somehow get the feeling Yang is super open with everything she and I do."
"Yep. Which means I know you've barely done anything with her."
"I know. Is that bad, you think?"
"I dunno. Yang seems happy, which is weird because I thought dating was meant to be more kissing and hanging around and... you know... more if it works out." Ruby wasn't so young as to be embarrassed at the idea of sex, but talking about him with her sister was apparently a step too far. Or an image she didn't want in her head. "It did make me wonder if Yang is stringing you along, and I got kinda upset at her, but I don't think that's it."
"Neither do I. I'm not sure what it is."
"Me neither. You're okay with it, though?"
"I'm seventeen. I've got time to figure out what this is, and I don't think I'm going to fall to pieces if she decides she isn't that interested."
"Plus, you have Pyrrha."
"Yeah." He winced. "But don't talk about her like she's some fallback option, please. That feels wrong."
"Sorry."
"It's fine. I know you didn't mean it." Ruby's scroll buzzed again. "You better go before Weiss assumes I've kidnapped you. Same time tomorrow?"
"Sure."
/-/
Day two was less tense, though Ruby was still waiting for the shoe to drop and kept pausing between statements to make sure her next words wouldn't invite him to psychoanalyse her. Weiss had also been giving him evils through the day, so he figured Ruby had told her some of what was up.
It was good she had someone watching her back.
Less awesome to feel Weiss' eyes drilling a hole in the back of his head for her to push Myrtenaster into.
So, Jaune skirted the topic on day two and asked her about what lessons were at Signal, all from the point of view of understanding it because he'd skipped them all. There was an angle there to talk about the two years she missed and whether those led to any of her inferiority complex with Yang, but he didn't dare touch it yet.
Plus, Ruby was doing just fine without those two years.
"Honestly, you're a freak of nature," Ruby said, without warning.
"Whaaat? Where did that come from?"
"Where did you come from?" she replied, prodding his chest with a cute little pout. "Do you have any idea how stupid it is that you're still alive and kicking and – worse – not the bottom of class anymore?"
"Uh..."
"You had no education, no training, no aura, and yet you somehow beat people in our class after just a few months of training from Pyrrha. And I get that she's super strong, but that doesn't mean she can turn a civilian into a huntsman in less than half a year! I was born to a huntsman and huntress, had a teacher for a parent and another teacher for an uncle, and it still took me months and months and months to get aura control down. It took Yang that long, too. It takes everyone that long!"
"Uhhh..."
"And then you swan in, somehow don't pancake yourself when you're thrown into the Emerald Forest, get your aura unlocked and have somehow got it under control in the time it takes you to find a Deathstalker!"
"Well..."
"You have no idea how stupid that is, do you?" Ruby groaned and tugged at her hood. "We spent years learning to do that and you accomplish it in months. I mean, at least I still beat you in fights, but do you even know how crushing it must be for Cardin? He knows you're a fraud and he loses to you on the regular."
"Yeah..."
"Jaune!" Ruby yanked on his collar and pulled their faces close. Her forehead pressed into his and her silver eyes were very annoyed. "Cardin will have trained for ten years or more. He's been to an academy. He's had hundreds of fights and spars with people who have also been trained. He'll have gone through practice, exams, injuries, lessons, late-night study sessions. And then he gets beaten by someone who didn't know what aura even was!" Ruby shook him like a doll. "Tell me how that's fair!"
It...
... kind of wasn't...
He'd never really put much thought into his progress since he was still in the bottom fifth of class, but now that he thought about it... Holy shit, he was as good as or better than 20% of people in his year in Beacon, despite never having trained a single day in his life before coming here. Not only was that amazing on his part but it was just so very sad. Sad for people who had worked far harder than he, and somehow weren't able to be better.
"I... never thought about it..." Jaune gulped. Thinking about it now, he was almost a bigger cause for inferiority and insecurity complexes than Yang was. That was a sobering thought. It was a good job Ruby was better than him still, or she might really be feeling awful. "Sorry...?"
"Sorry, he says. He's sorry." Ruby let go of him and slumped down next to him. "You're lucky we're friends because I'd hate your guts if I knew about all this and didn't like you. You make a mockery of everyone's hard work."
"Ouch."
"I don't mean it nastily. Maybe." Ruby didn't sound sure. "It's not like you do it on purpose, but talking about Signal like this made me realise you basically make academies useless. What's the point of Signal if someone like you can just waltz in and do this? it's not even like you're strong or trained before Beacon, you came in as a nobody and were able to hold your own in the freaking Vytal Festival in the space of half a year." Ruby glowered at him. "You're unfair! Hacks! Blake's crappy harem protagonists make more sense than you do!"
"Should I say sorry?"
"No!" Ruby thumped her head back against the wall they were leaning against outside of Beacon. "No way. If you come out and say it to people, they'll connect the dots and realise what I have. Ignorance is bliss. Better people think you're just well-trained from elsewhere. At least then they won't feel the urge to curl up into a ball and die." Ruby scowled harder. "I went through so many exams, sleepless nights and early-morning training sessions with dad and Uncle Qrow. I got shot with beanbags so I could practice aura."
"But noooo," she said, dragging the word out theatrically. "Jaune Arc doesn't need to do that. No, no, no. Jaune's aura comes pre-packaged and pre-learnt – and if that wasn't stupid enough, it comes in such ridiculous quantities as well. Anything else you want to share with the class? Does your sword fire lasers? Super-secret Semblance?"
Jaune glanced away.
"SUPER-SECRET SEMBLANCE!?" she cries, mouth hanging open in shock and betrayal. "NO! No, I refuse to believe it!"
"It's... um... I'm learning to control it...?"
"UNFAIR!" Ruby jabbed her finger into his throat. "UNFAIR!"
"Hey, at least I'm having to learn to control it as opposed to just unlocking it and having full control from the start."
"Grrrr!" Ruby punched his arm, then decided she liked it and kept going, beating his arm with her tiny fists. "Shut up. I nearly broke my bones with mine, and I crashed into every bit of furniture in the house. Yang nearly burnt the house down, and she broke down crying when she thought her hair was going to burn off! If your Semblance came out fully under your control from the start, we'd stop being friends right here and now! You stupid, overpowered harem protagonist!"
"I don't have a harem!"
"You didn't even argue the other parts!" she howled, punching him even harder. "And you have Yang and Pyrrha."
"That doesn't count."
"Shut up! I'm angry!"
They spent another hour together – though half of it was him being forced to make it up to an irate Ruby for apparently being so quick a learner than he invalidated the years of struggle and education that she and everyone else at Beacon had been through. Jaune felt like he owed Cardin an apology as well.
Or a shoulder to cry on.
/-/
It was the third day when Jaune poked.
He'd spent much of the day being given dark looks by Team RWBY, who Ruby had shared her revelation with. No one quite liked realising just how much his progress implied theirs was slow, least of all Blake who had literally been through terrorism to get as good as she was being upstaged by an idiot with some forged transcripts.
He was matched against Weiss in Miss Goodwitch's class and barely escaped with his life. Weiss had seemed determined to prove to herself that she was better, and that all her training and hard work had accomplished more than his blind luck. As such, the match was so ruthless and one-sided that Miss Goodwitch had cautioned Weiss on holding back and let him off without much criticism beyond "not doing whatever you did to upset Miss Schnee again".
Which was to exist, basically. Existence was pain.
Since Ruby was the cause of that, he decided to be a little more pointed that evening when they met for their daily chat.
"You know, you also invalidate a lot of Signal and mock other people's time spent studying," he opened with.
Ruby choked on her cookies. "Whrbll!?"
"You skipped two years – and didn't you tell me Signal starts at 11 and ends at 17? That's 33% of the curriculum that you just up and said `yeah, doesn't apply to me` to. Worse yet, I bet the last two years are where all the harder and more serious lessons are."
Ruby poked her fingers together. "Eheh."
"Don't look cute and `eheh` me," he said, poking her in the cheek. "I bet everyone else had to struggle through those years. Well, most people. Weiss was home-tutored and Blake learnt via... alternative methods."
"Those methods were alternative, alright," Ruby joked.
"Agreed. But most people had to go through two whole years of study that you skipped, which wouldn't have been so bad if you were playing catch up for the first half of year one or something. And if you were weaker in class and not a team leader. But nooo, that logic doesn't apply to Ruby Rose."
Vengeance was sweet.
But it was also therapy. He wanted to subtly poke holes in her inferiority complex by teasing her about how incredible she actually was. When he tried that before, she got defensive because she saw what he was doing but disguising it as good natured ribbing let him hide it.
"Ruby Rose sweeps in and becomes team leader – and she barely even struggles!"
"Hey. I struggled with Weiss."
"We both know that was because of Weiss being Weiss, not because of you being a bad leader. I feel like the only person she'd have accepted over her is Pyrrha, and even then she might have argued she was better."
"Urk. I mean, Weiss isn't that bad..."
"She isn't that bad now she's calmed down," he agreed. "But a lot of that is because you calmed her down." He mocked a salute from Atlas. "The Kingdom of Vale thanks you for your service."
Ruby giggled and slapped his leg. "Hey! Weiss is nice."
"Did you see what she did to me in class today!?"
"Mostly nice. Sometimes less nice."
"Well, if I'm getting stick for breezing through what it took people years to learn than you should as well, because you did the same thing. You're way too good." Ruby tensed. Crap. "That or Signal is overrated."
"Probably that," she said, taking the way out he offered. He knew she didn't really think it, though. Signal was a necessary institution and had been around for ages, and Ruby had to have realised she'd achieved something big in skipping two years of it and not suffering for it. "Plus, I have a teacher for a dad so I got a lot of extra lessons at home that other people didn't. Maybe I was more prepared because of all that."
You're grasping at straws, Ruby. Anything to avoid admitting you might be better at something than your sister.
He'd poked, but he didn't drive the nail in. Not when Ruby was in full deflection mode.
"Yeah, maybe so. You might also just be a lot more talented and hard-working than the average student. You and Yang both."
He was curious if she'd get worked up about him saying she was better than other people. If it was just Yang she felt she was inferior to, or if it were inferiority in general. The latter would be a lot more worrying.
"Yeah, that might be it too. I was always near the top of my class, and a lot of my friends would goof off." Ruby had no problem with it. "I mean, I'd play games and read comics as well, and Yang didn't train every hour of every day, but it definitely felt like a lot of others only trained at school. You know?" Ruby blinked. "Uh. I guess you wouldn't know since you never went to one."
"I go here, and I train at night with Pyrrha."
"Oh, yeah. That works." Ruby jumped back into the swing of things. "It's like that. You're meant to learn the fundamentals at school and refine them on your own, but a lot of people kinda didn't do the last part. Or they'd not do it properly. There's a big difference between training to exhaustion and just training until you feel tired. Having dad around meant Yang always knew what exhaustion was, and then she and dad could pass it onto me as well."
"Others didn't have that?"
"Nah. A lot of them had one huntsman parent who would be busy, or they'd be from civilian families who didn't know better. For a civilian, watching someone train for an hour a day looks really impressive, so they don't realise that you can go longer and harder with aura. Me and Yang were always pushed to breaking."
Yang and I, Weiss would have pointed out, but Jaune wasn't one to care about the way something was said. "Yeah, I guess that makes sense. Pyrrha definitely doesn't pull any punches in our training."
"Mmm. She'll know it, too. You can't be an athlete without knowing how to work every last drop of effort out of a workout. But not everyone who goes to Signal or a pre-academy makes it into a proper school like Beacon," she pointed out. "A lot of them fail in initiation or don't get accepted and they take normal jobs, sometimes in security or the police, where their skills can be useful. Or in the army if you're in Atlas. Actually, I think Atlas recruits from all the pre-academies. They had posters up in Signal saying if anyone failed their course, they could find new direction and good pay and training in Atlas."
Given the alliance, that was probably more acceptable than not, though Jaune hadn't seen any such posters himself. Not like Atlas were recruiting all the way over in Ansel.
"You ever consider it?"
"Nope. I knew I'd make it into Beacon. Both me and Yang did. We were too much ahead of people in our classes not to." Ruby giggled, adding, "Not that it stopped me panicking in initiation that I'd somehow fail and get kicked out, but I think that's normal."
"It certainly was for me."
"That's because you didn't have any aura!"
"I didn't even know what aura was."
"That's so much worse!"
It was a deflection, pure and simple, but Jaune played along because he felt he'd gotten something out of this. Ruby was confident in herself and quite assertive on being good enough to get into Beacon – acceptable case of nerves aside. Her inferiority was centred wholly around Yang.
Once Ruby called their chat after an hour and left with a smile, he called Blake.
"Phase two of the plan is a go."
"Can I back out?"
"Sure. But you'll have to live with the knowledge that Ruby is silently suffering—"
"Stop! Fine! I'll do it. Ugh. You should keep an eye out for Yang, though. She isn't blind to there being `something` going on, and she knows it involves you and Ruby. Also, she's not stupid enough to think you're cheating on her and she cornered me today to ask me what's wrong with Ruby that you and I think we need to help her."
Crap. Why couldn't Yang be a dumb blonde for once and not figure this shit out? She was far too perceptive. "I'll deal with her."
"Bold of you to assume you'll succeed."
"Oh, I said I'd deal with her. Not that I'd be successful. With me luck."
"I hope she breaks your neck."
"Love you too, Blake."
The faunus hung up on him.
It'd be worth it to deal with her mood swings and Yang's worry if it meant helping Ruby. Jaune stood and dusted himself down, turning his back on the forest and taking a step forward.
Only to bump into a wiry man's bare chest.
"Hi!" said the insane man trapped in a dream. Or the version of him in the outside world.
Jaune's jaw dropped. "T—Tyrian!?"
"You know me. Or you know a me." Tyrian Callows cackled. "Let's talk about that."
"S—Sure." Jaune took a step back. "How about we talk in my dorm—ooph!"
The faunus' fist buried itself in his stomach, hitting him far harder than a single blow should have, especially with his aura up. Jaune buckled, every last drop of oxygen driven out his lungs as darkness crept in.
But I blocked that with aura, he thought, with a desperate worry. I've taken harder hits from Pyrrha. Why—?
Tyrian's hand drew back, thankfully not bloody, but with an odd shimmer of aura that looked like broken glass. The fist had gone through his aura, past his protections, and hit him fully.
Oh... that's why...
Jaune slumped forward, into the man's arms.
Next Chapter: 18th July
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