Who: Qrow & various people What: December catch-all When: Throughout December Where: Around town, in memories, Trench Silent Hill, etc [ooc: starters in the comments! if you'd like something specific, pls hit me up on plurk or discord to plot!]
The scene within lands in the hallways of a school. This time, the boy isn't alone. There's three others alongside him--a girl with the same dark hair and crimson eyes, a young blonde boy with blue eyes and a laugh that's infectious despite his terrible puns. Another girl with dark hair, but hers has reddish streaks to it, and her eyes are a haunting silver. The latter two are the most outgoing, the type to drag their more reticent friends into conversations and adventures. Right now, there appears to be some kind of arm wrestling match going on between the boys, the silver eyed girl cheering on both competitors as the crimson eyed girl teases her brother not to embarrass her.
{You don't remember when it happened. Which moment it was, if it was during your continuously escalating prank war with Tai or the time Summer made you a cape because you mentioned you liked hers or the training mission where you killed a pack of Grimm together. But at some point you realized -- these people were your family. More than the Branwens ever were. You want them to be in your life, forever. You want to be like them, for real, rather than just pretending. You want to be a Huntsman, not just some murderous bandit. Raven feels the same, doesn't she? She has to. You've seen the way she looks at Tai. She...has to.}
A teacher appears in that same hall, a blond woman with her hair in a bun and a sharp sternness behind her glasses. Scolds them all that they're late to class and they scurry off with various degrees of sheepishness, leaving you alone in the empty hall as the memory fades.
The memory brings you to a house. A cozy little log cabin with sunflowers growing in the front yard. The sun shines high in the sky with soft fluffy clouds in the air. Everything seems idyllic and peaceful .... and it's in sharp contrast to the two men standing before it. One with black hair and the beginnings of stubble shakes his head as he reaches the door, expression drawn with grief and resignation. It's enough to snuff out the sole glimmer of hope in the blond man's expression, and he stares down at the ground instead.
"Tai, I....I don't think we're going to find her."
"What are we going to do?"
"I don't know."
"When should we tell them?"
"...I can look for her again. One more time. And then--"
Inside, two little girls remain soundly asleep. It's early in the morning, still. And you're deciding how and when to turn their worlds upside down. Even knowing it can't be your fault, it feels like the largest misfortune you've brought yet. It's just not fair.
The memory brings you to an inn, this time. Rain batters the windows as a familiar man sits indoors, staring into the lantern-light lost in thought. A waitress interrupts him with a drink he didn't pay for, and he's confused for just a moment until she says it's from a woman upstairs with red eyes. He looks up, giving the second floor a baleful glance. It's obvious he knows who the woman is, and he is at the least not entirely enthusiastic about going to see her--by the look of him, he expects a fraught conversation at best.
The waitress flirts with him, and he stares after her at first, but once she's gone, he sighs, picking up the glass as he stands, reluctantly heading to the staircase.
A near mirror image of him awaits upstairs, greeting him with an expression perhaps too sharp to really be called a smile.
It starts at the entrance to a large building. A nervous-looking man stands on a sort of dais as Qrow walks in alongside several teenagers.
The man--Leo--starts to act more and more squirrelly as the conversation continues, apparently uncomfortable with both the number of teens present and the fact that they are armed. Qrow, the one adult in the group, looks increasingly impatient with the pleasantries and cuts them off with a crabby demand to know whether or not they would be receiving support from "the council", but Leo doesn't get the opportunity to answer before one of the teens notices a little black bird perched on a railing, and calls it to it as her mom.
Qrow fires a shot to see if he provokes a reaction; indeed, the bird touches down on the ground and becomes a woman -- one that looks practically a mirror image of him.
"If you're going to shoot me, shoot me. That was insulting."
"What are you doing here?"
"I could ask you the same thing. You've been scheming, little brother," she responds, that particular cadence to "little" that might be recognizable to one familiar with having a twin, "Planning to attack your own sister."
He doesn't deny the accusation, yet all the same, he looks shocked, turning to face the man on the dais as though betrayed.
"Leo, what have you done?!"
The woman answers for him; he remains silent, as though ashamed. Qrow makes one last ditch attempt to get her to reconsider, to work together--we can beat Salem, he entreats--but she won't have it.
"All that time spent spying for Ozpin, and you still have no idea what you're dealing with. There is no beating Salem."
It's Ruby that interrupts, then, with her own impassioned speech about the impossible things they've all accomplished because they weren't alone.
"Work with us. At least I know we'll have a better chance if we try together. ...Please."
All the woman has to offer in response is contempt. "You sound just like your mother."
And then she opens a portal behind her, a fireball launched at Ruby before four figures emerge from it. Three of Salem's minions and a fourth unknown. A fifth steps in from behind to close the door behind everyone, lock them in.
(This was all a trap. Leo is a traitor...and so is your sister.)
"Sorry, brother. Sometimes family disappoints you like that," drawls her voice, dripping ice and poison.
(There's the familiar burn of exertion in your muscles as your blades clang and clash in deadlock, refusing to lose ground but failing to gain any -- but the more painful burn is in your chest. You were a fool for hoping she might ever come around. Did you ever really know her at all?)
"We're not family anymore."
"Were we ever?"
Maybe not. Maybe it was stupid to have thought they could've built something better than what the bandits had to give them.
Maul recognizes Ruby and Qrow right off the bat in the memory given how much experience he's had with both of them in Trench. Not that he's bothered to speak to Qrow since the last time he was witness to one of the man's memories. (Really, it seems like the only time he interacts with some people around here that he really hates is specifically for memory-sharing.)
It's easy to put together that the woman must be a blood relative of Qrow's given their close resemblance to one another and Maul is already guessing sister as she talks. He watches the conversation go on and shakes his head, anger that's directed towards the woman as she goes on. He can't fathom it, having family betray him like that. (Well, Sidious did, but Sidious was a monstrous sociopath, and therefore was an exception to the rule.)
Maul's family means everything to him. If one of them had betrayed him like this, it would have shattered him to his very core. "If my brother had done this to me, I don't think I would have let him go on living," Maul says softly. Not that Savage will ever do such a thing to his older brother. The two of them have been through too much together to ever think of stabbing the other in the back.
When Paul touches the antler of a Winter Mourning, he winds up....in a place he won't recognize. He stands before a little log cabin with sunflowers in the planters outside the window. It's obviously a rural sort of area -- there are no other houses immediately around, or much of anything beyond the nearby woods.
The stillness is disrupted by the approach of a middle aged man in a tattered red cloak; almost as soon as he approaches the door does a little girl burst from the doorway -- a much younger Ruby, as it turns out. And another, slightly older girl, with bright blond hair stands some feet away. They greet him as Uncle Qrow.
He asks the older one about a man named 'Tai', apparently their father, and upon the answer, promptly changes the subject. It's a beautiful day for a picnic, after all.
Paul knows who Qrow is. He's heard of him in passing, glimpsed him during occasional visits to Oscar's home before it burned, and once, memorably, faced him down with the other students after leaping off a clocktower at the behest of a man Paul still thinks of, vaguely, as their informal House's leader.
He's never seen him like this, and he's never seen Ruby like that - his first thought, before anything else, is that she's one of the most adorable children he's ever seen. It's strange to reconcile her with the merry but fearsome Huntress she's grown into.
Yang. It feels like a name he's heard before. Tai, he hasn't, but it isn't as though he's asked Ruby for her family tree. It took him a while to work out Ozpin wasn't her father in the first place; further inquiry felt risky. All of these fleeting thoughts skate by in less than a second, revolving around the realization that hit him immediately after he noted Ruby's precocious cuteness: something is wrong here, beautiful day or not.
Paul looks between Qrow and Ruby, and decides to start with him. He raises his hand in a silent wave, and for once in one of these memories, he also realizes he hardly looks out of place with his own modified Hunter's garb.
Qrow blinks at first, when the outsider arrives, as though the presence of someone who doesn't belong is what makes him aware that he's within a memory. It takes him a moment to place the face; he's seen Paul around, of course, but they've never actually talked. All things considered, it could be a more awkward introduction. This is far from the most painful or invasive memory he's had displayed, after all. In fact, apart from the quiet grief on display here, it really is a peaceful, beautiful day.
Nonetheless, it does take him a moment to gather himself for the personal questions that are sure to follow, before he raises his own arm in greeting.
One hurdle out of the way, however many more left to clamber over. The sunshine does alleviate some of the worries that might otherwise cling to him - until he looks at the girls again, and recalls the many dangers that Oscar has told him haunt this world.
He's a Paleblood. He's more than capable of protecting these echoes of girls who are already grown by eliminating any danger at the source, and there is no danger, only its echo. His brow creases with worry anyway for a moment before he looks back up at Qrow.
"And you're Qrow. Usually Uncle Qrow, from the telling. I hope this isn't..." a hesitation, then couched words "...a bad time."
Qrow mostly just shrugs, with the look of someone who has long since resigned themselves to Nonsense.
"Is it ever a good time, with Trench?"
Qrow has never had a solely positive memory shared during one of these occurrences. Even the most pleasant one had been complicated both by the nature of his relationship to its subject at the time, and the history of its watcher. He's pretty sure whenever it comes to his memories, the toll to make them stop is an awkward conversation. He treats it much like a child who is aware they need to eat their vegetables to get dessert, except in this case dessert is just freeing himself of his privacy getting invaded.
"...But there's nothing out to kill you in this memory, if that's what you mean."
Paul's shoulders unhitch at that, and the transition from poised readiness to calm stillness is a subtle but noticeable one. He looks younger and less sharp as he nods.
"Primarily," he admits, taking in their surroundings a second time with a less piercing eye, "Sometimes it's not so bad here. Or here. Remnant, yes?"
He knows the answer. Oscar has mentioned the lack of stellar travel in their world, so it isn't as though they could be anywhere else. Despite the ominous name, this patch of it is rather lovely. It reminds him of some of the southern islands on Caladan.
"How do you want to handle this?" He asks, pivoting back to Qrow. It's an unweighted question. This is Qrow's memory, and so it's his choice on how they proceed, or so Paul holds as a personal principle.
It's a shift of posture he recognizes, of course. A taut wire gone loose, temporarily. Every Huntsman and Huntress in Remnant knows it.
"If you're friends with Oscar, you probably know about our situation, so I can't say I disagree. Doesn't make Trench's bull--...crap less annoying, though. But yeah. Welcome to the Kingdom of Vale. This town's called Patch."
Look, don't judge him, he hasn't had to watch his mouth in many years but these are the baby versions of his nieces ok. At the question, though, he shrugs. It's nice of the kid to try to respect his privacy despite the town being itself, though he's been here too long to believe that he can get away with not talking about it.
"I mean, we could just go have a nice picnic, but in my experience, the town's gonna want us to talk before this memory lets us go."
He flaps a hand.
"Might as well rip the bandaid fast rather than by inches. Go ahead and ask whatever questions you've got."
Paul doesn't laugh at Qrow's abbreviated curse. A smile does tug the corners of his mouth, and there's something a little too tempered to his breathing for a moment, but he doesn't laugh. He wouldn't know where to start explaining that, and it seems they have enough on their hands.
But at least Qrow is being practical about the thing. That's always easier to start with. That leaves their situation much more settled - nothing planning to kill them, a mutual understanding of the expectations of this often strange and invasive city.
"Shame about the picnic," he ventures, lightly, looking down at the two girls again, "Maybe we can do both. What do you say?"
He knows that for him, these glimpses at the past are more than ordeals. They're a path home, however temporary and flawed, and a reel of faces he might never see again in the Waking World. He wouldn't deny Qrow that, if he wants it, especially when it comes to this blonde girl like a loosely closed fist.
"Works for me," he answers, with a shrug. For Qrow, these images aren't really something he cares to linger in. He and the others had made the choice to leave Remnant behind, for good, and it's hard enough to let lost family go without having these regular reminders dig into his chest.
"Hey girls, looks like a friend's going to join us today too. Say hi to Paul."
"Yay! Hi Pauly!" chirps little Ruby. Yang's greeting is quieter, more sullen. "Hi."
And it's as though that's the memory's cue to zip forward in time, letting the script play out with Paul a silent observer. At the end of it, Qrow comes back into himself as Ruby sleeps on his lap and Yang's run off back into the house to sort herself out. He doesn't go after her, if only because he's always understood the need to lick your wounds in peace. And ever since she learned the truth about who Qrow really is to her, biological uncle rather than honorary alone, he's struggled to know what to say. He is, after all, poor substitute for the mother she lost, and a reminder of the one who left her.
Qrow sighs, feeling tired. He turns to Paul, offering him one of the picnic sandwiches.
The rapid flow of the memory is a curious experience. Paul's cognition slips into an automatic receptive blankness, imprinting the things that occur too fast for him to understand them in the moment on a register of information he will be able to return to later, but even then, things elude him in their rapidity.
He was mid-bending down to say hello back to Ruby and Yang when it happens. On the other side of it, he blinks at Qrow all of the once, finding himself sitting next to him without a clear sense of how he wound up there.
The sandwich is wordlessly accepted, but not yet eaten. Paul holds it in one hand and half-closes his eyes, flicking back through the images and sounds he caught on the way like pages of a book. He puts together an impression. He nods, eyes sliding back open, and refocuses on the ostensible now.
"Does it get better for them?" He asks, quietly, for the sake of the little girl sleeping on Qrow's lap.
It's not the question he expected, honestly. Qrow had imagined it would start with "what happened?", perhaps, or maybe an inquiry into how their family dynamic was set up. After all, he is addressed as "uncle", and yet he looks nothing like the glimpse of Taiyang that Paul might have caught when Qrow went to tell their father where he was going. The girls, themselves, look somewhat different. Simple questions, about the facts of the situation, would've been much easier to start things off.
Does it get better is such a complicated, loaded question. Neither yes nor no are fully accurate nor inaccurate. Summer is gone. Tai eventually recovered enough from the loss to be their father again. Qrow spent the last decade struggling to hold himself above water, alcohol seemingly the last piece of driftwood in an endless ocean of despair. The war is unwinnable. Ruby has silver eyes.
(Atlas has fallen. The girls might both be dead. Qrow tries desperately not to think about it.)
After a long moment, he looks up from his lap where Ruby sleeps, out into the distance.
"Depends what you mean by 'better', I guess." He lets a shoulder raise and fall in a vague, noncommittal shrug. "You've met Ruby. She's become a tough, confident young woman, an incredible huntress. Couldn't be prouder of her. It's the same with Yang. But..."
He busies himself for a moment with unwrapping his own sandwich; it's difficult to find the words, really.
"You know how it is, I'm sure."
Nobody who has that particular posture in response to a change in threat assessment hasn't known grief, doesn't bear those scars. It's a universal among those who've spent their lives fighting.
The practical details aren't unimportant. Paul knows that as well as he does know how it is, if the way his gaze drops softly on Ruby after Qrow's answer means anything. But the how and the what are sharp-edged knives to ask someone to drag over their tongue for a near-stranger, and Paul also knows that a family is so much more than anyone's blood.
His question wasn't much kinder, but it came from hope, and Paul can only want that to make a difference.
"It changes you." The wind blows a loose strand of Ruby's hair across her face, threatening to tickle her nose. Without pausing to think better of it, Paul leans over to lift it up with the utmost delicacy, tucking it back behind her ear without ever actually touching her skin. She's so small. He doesn't know if he's ever going to get over how small children are.
"People want to blame someone when they lose a person they care about. Especially young people," Paul says, apparently unaware of the irony of those weary words coming from his lips, "It's still difficult to listen to, sometimes. You want to...make them understand that you'd have changed things, if you could, but they don't want to listen. It's too much."
Qrow can't help be a little endeared by how Paul reaches out to smooth Ruby's hair so it doesn't wake her up. He's never known the kid too well, beyond being caught up in all that mess with Oscar that he and the house got dragged into thereafter, but as far as proper first impressions go, his gentility with this young version of Ruby is certainly winning a good deal of favor in Qrow's eyes.
He smiles a little bit before he pulls his gaze away again, and for that brief moment he looks like a younger man. One less burdened by all the loss and grief.
The quiet lingers for some time, after that, Paul's words hanging in the air unanswered. It's simpler than that, yet also more complicated.
"Ruby was too young to remember," he answers, at length. "Yang...I don't know if she blamed anyone. Might not have given herself space to, really. Tai didn't...take it well, when we lost Summer. I did what I could, but I still had to be away sometimes, because of the war...She felt like she had to step up for Ruby."
There's a long, tired sigh.
"Nobody really stepped up for her, though. It was bad enough she wound up in a nest of Grimm looking for her birth mom. I should've talked to her before it came to that, but I didn't know how to deal with it either, when Raven left. Summer was her mom more than Raven had ever been, so it was just...easier, to pretend there was never anyone else. Until she was gone, anyway."
Edited (SORRY I KEEP NITPICKING lkjskd) 2023-01-06 01:01 (UTC)
So the shape of the family structure begins to emerge. It explains some things that weren't truly questions Paul had, shading in details that he had grasped as sketches instead of fully coloured in parts of the background.
The world of Remnant seems as shattered as their moon and disconnected as their stars, sometimes. Everyone builds their families out of the pieces they find at hand. It's a way of life Paul understands better now.
"If Yang is anything like her sister," Paul says, sitting back and looking up at the sky, "I don't know if trying to stop her would have made a difference. No offense to people from your world, but you tend to be...determined."
It's a diplomatic way of saying 'stubborn', and an even more diplomatic way of saying 'impulsive'. He's coming to understand that better too, though. Life can't be lived at arm's length. Sometimes you have to step onto the board yourself.
"And you lost them too." Paul lets his eyes half-lid. "It's easy to forget that when you're thinking about the things you should have done. You only can see it from the place you are not, not the one you were in then."
Determined is such a polite word for it. Qrow can't help a snort.
"None taken. Us huntsmen and huntresses...we sure are a certain kind of people."
The kind that risk their necks over and over fighting monsters who thrive on fear and negativity, which can't help but exist in a life painted with blood and danger. It's a vicious circle, an impossible situation even without the unstoppable apocalypse in the mix.
"But maybe she would've waited until she at least had an Aura, you know?"
It's not Yang walking into the Grimm's nest that's alarming; as she is now, he wouldn't even blink twice at it. It's the fact that she did it when she was so small she had to drag Ruby along in a cart behind her, that she went by herself with no Aura or semblance, and if Qrow hadn't been following behind her (at a misfortune-safe distance), she would've been killed there and then.
Paul's compassion hits him strangely, knowing that. He's heard it before, from the man who has since become his lover--that it took strength and courage for him to dig himself out of where he was, regardless of how he ended up there and how long he spent mired in it--but it's still a difficult thing to hear, sometimes, especially from someone he doesn't even really know.
"I mean, I spent over a decade in that place, so I dunno how much credit I can really give myself on that, but at the time ... yeah, fair enough."
He had been so ruined, at that time. Team STRQ was the first place that had ever felt like family, for Qrow. The first (and last) time he remembers having been genuinely happy without reservation, without the stain of grief marring it. He'd found a purpose and a place in the world and he'd thought maybe he could build a life around that, like he could contribute something to the world that mattered.
And then Raven left them with an infant girl and a shattered team and they'd almost put together the shattered pieces in a mosaic that resembled what was lost when Summer was gone too, and then they had nothing left to hold together the pieces with. He and Tai and Yang all mourned on private islands of grief, unable to show their pain to each other nor look too closely at anyone else's, for fear they'd come undone when they couldn't afford to.
Qrow can't begin to remember how many times he'd drank and wept before an empty grave on that cliffside in the dead of night, because it was the only time he could risk it. How often he settled on the bird form because it was easier than to look Yang in the eye knowing that he hadn't been able to stop her mother from leaving and spent years hiding it from her.
Little Ruby stirs in her sleep, maybe affected by some dream, and curls in closer, and Qrow's reminded of what kept him going, but there's something terribly raw about being brought here and reminded of when that grief was fresh, rather than an old aching scar.
"...We never found her body," he admits, suddenly and unprompted. He chooses to blame this on the Mourning, rather than any specific feelings of vulnerability this time and place evokes. "It wasn't a clean thing, all at once. She just went on some mission and never came back."
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winter mournings
the coolest team to ever graduate beacon
A teacher appears in that same hall, a blond woman with her hair in a bun and a sharp sternness behind her glasses. Scolds them all that they're late to class and they scurry off with various degrees of sheepishness, leaving you alone in the empty hall as the memory fades.
red like roses
"Tai, I....I don't think we're going to find her."
"What are we going to do?"
"I don't know."
"When should we tell them?"
"...I can look for her again. One more time. And then--"
Inside, two little girls remain soundly asleep. It's early in the morning, still. And you're deciding how and when to turn their worlds upside down. Even knowing it can't be your fault, it feels like the largest misfortune you've brought yet. It's just not fair.
family reunion
The waitress flirts with him, and he stares after her at first, but once she's gone, he sighs, picking up the glass as he stands, reluctantly heading to the staircase.
A near mirror image of him awaits upstairs, greeting him with an expression perhaps too sharp to really be called a smile.
"Hello, Brother."
double trouble
The man--Leo--starts to act more and more squirrelly as the conversation continues, apparently uncomfortable with both the number of teens present and the fact that they are armed. Qrow, the one adult in the group, looks increasingly impatient with the pleasantries and cuts them off with a crabby demand to know whether or not they would be receiving support from "the council", but Leo doesn't get the opportunity to answer before one of the teens notices a little black bird perched on a railing, and calls it to it as her mom.
Qrow fires a shot to see if he provokes a reaction; indeed, the bird touches down on the ground and becomes a woman -- one that looks practically a mirror image of him.
"If you're going to shoot me, shoot me. That was insulting."
"What are you doing here?"
"I could ask you the same thing. You've been scheming, little brother," she responds, that particular cadence to "little" that might be recognizable to one familiar with having a twin, "Planning to attack your own sister."
He doesn't deny the accusation, yet all the same, he looks shocked, turning to face the man on the dais as though betrayed.
"Leo, what have you done?!"
The woman answers for him; he remains silent, as though ashamed. Qrow makes one last ditch attempt to get her to reconsider, to work together--we can beat Salem, he entreats--but she won't have it.
"All that time spent spying for Ozpin, and you still have no idea what you're dealing with. There is no beating Salem."
It's Ruby that interrupts, then, with her own impassioned speech about the impossible things they've all accomplished because they weren't alone.
"Work with us. At least I know we'll have a better chance if we try together. ...Please."
All the woman has to offer in response is contempt. "You sound just like your mother."
And then she opens a portal behind her, a fireball launched at Ruby before four figures emerge from it. Three of Salem's minions and a fourth unknown. A fifth steps in from behind to close the door behind everyone, lock them in.
(This was all a trap. Leo is a traitor...and so is your sister.)
"Sorry, brother. Sometimes family disappoints you like that," drawls her voice, dripping ice and poison.
(There's the familiar burn of exertion in your muscles as your blades clang and clash in deadlock, refusing to lose ground but failing to gain any -- but the more painful burn is in your chest. You were a fool for hoping she might ever come around. Did you ever really know her at all?)
"We're not family anymore."
"Were we ever?"
Maybe not. Maybe it was stupid to have thought they could've built something better than what the bandits had to give them.
"I thought so, but I guess I was wrong."
no subject
It's easy to put together that the woman must be a blood relative of Qrow's given their close resemblance to one another and Maul is already guessing sister as she talks. He watches the conversation go on and shakes his head, anger that's directed towards the woman as she goes on. He can't fathom it, having family betray him like that. (Well, Sidious did, but Sidious was a monstrous sociopath, and therefore was an exception to the rule.)
Maul's family means everything to him. If one of them had betrayed him like this, it would have shattered him to his very core. "If my brother had done this to me, I don't think I would have let him go on living," Maul says softly. Not that Savage will ever do such a thing to his older brother. The two of them have been through too much together to ever think of stabbing the other in the back.
closed to paul
The stillness is disrupted by the approach of a middle aged man in a tattered red cloak; almost as soon as he approaches the door does a little girl burst from the doorway -- a much younger Ruby, as it turns out. And another, slightly older girl, with bright blond hair stands some feet away. They greet him as Uncle Qrow.
He asks the older one about a man named 'Tai', apparently their father, and upon the answer, promptly changes the subject. It's a beautiful day for a picnic, after all.
no subject
He's never seen him like this, and he's never seen Ruby like that - his first thought, before anything else, is that she's one of the most adorable children he's ever seen. It's strange to reconcile her with the merry but fearsome Huntress she's grown into.
Yang. It feels like a name he's heard before. Tai, he hasn't, but it isn't as though he's asked Ruby for her family tree. It took him a while to work out Ozpin wasn't her father in the first place; further inquiry felt risky. All of these fleeting thoughts skate by in less than a second, revolving around the realization that hit him immediately after he noted Ruby's precocious cuteness: something is wrong here, beautiful day or not.
Paul looks between Qrow and Ruby, and decides to start with him. He raises his hand in a silent wave, and for once in one of these memories, he also realizes he hardly looks out of place with his own modified Hunter's garb.
no subject
Nonetheless, it does take him a moment to gather himself for the personal questions that are sure to follow, before he raises his own arm in greeting.
“Yo. Paul, right?”
no subject
One hurdle out of the way, however many more left to clamber over. The sunshine does alleviate some of the worries that might otherwise cling to him - until he looks at the girls again, and recalls the many dangers that Oscar has told him haunt this world.
He's a Paleblood. He's more than capable of protecting these echoes of girls who are already grown by eliminating any danger at the source, and there is no danger, only its echo. His brow creases with worry anyway for a moment before he looks back up at Qrow.
"And you're Qrow. Usually Uncle Qrow, from the telling. I hope this isn't..." a hesitation, then couched words "...a bad time."
no subject
"Is it ever a good time, with Trench?"
Qrow has never had a solely positive memory shared during one of these occurrences. Even the most pleasant one had been complicated both by the nature of his relationship to its subject at the time, and the history of its watcher. He's pretty sure whenever it comes to his memories, the toll to make them stop is an awkward conversation. He treats it much like a child who is aware they need to eat their vegetables to get dessert, except in this case dessert is just freeing himself of his privacy getting invaded.
"...But there's nothing out to kill you in this memory, if that's what you mean."
no subject
"Primarily," he admits, taking in their surroundings a second time with a less piercing eye, "Sometimes it's not so bad here. Or here. Remnant, yes?"
He knows the answer. Oscar has mentioned the lack of stellar travel in their world, so it isn't as though they could be anywhere else. Despite the ominous name, this patch of it is rather lovely. It reminds him of some of the southern islands on Caladan.
"How do you want to handle this?" He asks, pivoting back to Qrow. It's an unweighted question. This is Qrow's memory, and so it's his choice on how they proceed, or so Paul holds as a personal principle.
no subject
"If you're friends with Oscar, you probably know about our situation, so I can't say I disagree. Doesn't make Trench's bull--...crap less annoying, though. But yeah. Welcome to the Kingdom of Vale. This town's called Patch."
Look, don't judge him, he hasn't had to watch his mouth in many years but these are the baby versions of his nieces ok. At the question, though, he shrugs. It's nice of the kid to try to respect his privacy despite the town being itself, though he's been here too long to believe that he can get away with not talking about it.
"I mean, we could just go have a nice picnic, but in my experience, the town's gonna want us to talk before this memory lets us go."
He flaps a hand.
"Might as well rip the bandaid fast rather than by inches. Go ahead and ask whatever questions you've got."
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But at least Qrow is being practical about the thing. That's always easier to start with. That leaves their situation much more settled - nothing planning to kill them, a mutual understanding of the expectations of this often strange and invasive city.
"Shame about the picnic," he ventures, lightly, looking down at the two girls again, "Maybe we can do both. What do you say?"
He knows that for him, these glimpses at the past are more than ordeals. They're a path home, however temporary and flawed, and a reel of faces he might never see again in the Waking World. He wouldn't deny Qrow that, if he wants it, especially when it comes to this blonde girl like a loosely closed fist.
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"Hey girls, looks like a friend's going to join us today too. Say hi to Paul."
"Yay! Hi Pauly!" chirps little Ruby. Yang's greeting is quieter, more sullen. "Hi."
And it's as though that's the memory's cue to zip forward in time, letting the script play out with Paul a silent observer. At the end of it, Qrow comes back into himself as Ruby sleeps on his lap and Yang's run off back into the house to sort herself out. He doesn't go after her, if only because he's always understood the need to lick your wounds in peace. And ever since she learned the truth about who Qrow really is to her, biological uncle rather than honorary alone, he's struggled to know what to say. He is, after all, poor substitute for the mother she lost, and a reminder of the one who left her.
Qrow sighs, feeling tired. He turns to Paul, offering him one of the picnic sandwiches.
"So...questions. Where do you want to start?"
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He was mid-bending down to say hello back to Ruby and Yang when it happens. On the other side of it, he blinks at Qrow all of the once, finding himself sitting next to him without a clear sense of how he wound up there.
The sandwich is wordlessly accepted, but not yet eaten. Paul holds it in one hand and half-closes his eyes, flicking back through the images and sounds he caught on the way like pages of a book. He puts together an impression. He nods, eyes sliding back open, and refocuses on the ostensible now.
"Does it get better for them?" He asks, quietly, for the sake of the little girl sleeping on Qrow's lap.
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Does it get better is such a complicated, loaded question. Neither yes nor no are fully accurate nor inaccurate. Summer is gone. Tai eventually recovered enough from the loss to be their father again. Qrow spent the last decade struggling to hold himself above water, alcohol seemingly the last piece of driftwood in an endless ocean of despair. The war is unwinnable. Ruby has silver eyes.
(Atlas has fallen. The girls might both be dead. Qrow tries desperately not to think about it.)
After a long moment, he looks up from his lap where Ruby sleeps, out into the distance.
"Depends what you mean by 'better', I guess." He lets a shoulder raise and fall in a vague, noncommittal shrug. "You've met Ruby. She's become a tough, confident young woman, an incredible huntress. Couldn't be prouder of her. It's the same with Yang. But..."
He busies himself for a moment with unwrapping his own sandwich; it's difficult to find the words, really.
"You know how it is, I'm sure."
Nobody who has that particular posture in response to a change in threat assessment hasn't known grief, doesn't bear those scars. It's a universal among those who've spent their lives fighting.
"It's never the same again, not really."
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His question wasn't much kinder, but it came from hope, and Paul can only want that to make a difference.
"It changes you." The wind blows a loose strand of Ruby's hair across her face, threatening to tickle her nose. Without pausing to think better of it, Paul leans over to lift it up with the utmost delicacy, tucking it back behind her ear without ever actually touching her skin. She's so small. He doesn't know if he's ever going to get over how small children are.
"People want to blame someone when they lose a person they care about. Especially young people," Paul says, apparently unaware of the irony of those weary words coming from his lips, "It's still difficult to listen to, sometimes. You want to...make them understand that you'd have changed things, if you could, but they don't want to listen. It's too much."
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He smiles a little bit before he pulls his gaze away again, and for that brief moment he looks like a younger man. One less burdened by all the loss and grief.
The quiet lingers for some time, after that, Paul's words hanging in the air unanswered. It's simpler than that, yet also more complicated.
"Ruby was too young to remember," he answers, at length. "Yang...I don't know if she blamed anyone. Might not have given herself space to, really. Tai didn't...take it well, when we lost Summer. I did what I could, but I still had to be away sometimes, because of the war...She felt like she had to step up for Ruby."
There's a long, tired sigh.
"Nobody really stepped up for her, though. It was bad enough she wound up in a nest of Grimm looking for her birth mom. I should've talked to her before it came to that, but I didn't know how to deal with it either, when Raven left. Summer was her mom more than Raven had ever been, so it was just...easier, to pretend there was never anyone else. Until she was gone, anyway."
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The world of Remnant seems as shattered as their moon and disconnected as their stars, sometimes. Everyone builds their families out of the pieces they find at hand. It's a way of life Paul understands better now.
"If Yang is anything like her sister," Paul says, sitting back and looking up at the sky, "I don't know if trying to stop her would have made a difference. No offense to people from your world, but you tend to be...determined."
It's a diplomatic way of saying 'stubborn', and an even more diplomatic way of saying 'impulsive'. He's coming to understand that better too, though. Life can't be lived at arm's length. Sometimes you have to step onto the board yourself.
"And you lost them too." Paul lets his eyes half-lid. "It's easy to forget that when you're thinking about the things you should have done. You only can see it from the place you are not, not the one you were in then."
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"None taken. Us huntsmen and huntresses...we sure are a certain kind of people."
The kind that risk their necks over and over fighting monsters who thrive on fear and negativity, which can't help but exist in a life painted with blood and danger. It's a vicious circle, an impossible situation even without the unstoppable apocalypse in the mix.
"But maybe she would've waited until she at least had an Aura, you know?"
It's not Yang walking into the Grimm's nest that's alarming; as she is now, he wouldn't even blink twice at it. It's the fact that she did it when she was so small she had to drag Ruby along in a cart behind her, that she went by herself with no Aura or semblance, and if Qrow hadn't been following behind her (at a misfortune-safe distance), she would've been killed there and then.
Paul's compassion hits him strangely, knowing that. He's heard it before, from the man who has since become his lover--that it took strength and courage for him to dig himself out of where he was, regardless of how he ended up there and how long he spent mired in it--but it's still a difficult thing to hear, sometimes, especially from someone he doesn't even really know.
"I mean, I spent over a decade in that place, so I dunno how much credit I can really give myself on that, but at the time ... yeah, fair enough."
He had been so ruined, at that time. Team STRQ was the first place that had ever felt like family, for Qrow. The first (and last) time he remembers having been genuinely happy without reservation, without the stain of grief marring it. He'd found a purpose and a place in the world and he'd thought maybe he could build a life around that, like he could contribute something to the world that mattered.
And then Raven left them with an infant girl and a shattered team and they'd almost put together the shattered pieces in a mosaic that resembled what was lost when Summer was gone too, and then they had nothing left to hold together the pieces with. He and Tai and Yang all mourned on private islands of grief, unable to show their pain to each other nor look too closely at anyone else's, for fear they'd come undone when they couldn't afford to.
Qrow can't begin to remember how many times he'd drank and wept before an empty grave on that cliffside in the dead of night, because it was the only time he could risk it. How often he settled on the bird form because it was easier than to look Yang in the eye knowing that he hadn't been able to stop her mother from leaving and spent years hiding it from her.
Little Ruby stirs in her sleep, maybe affected by some dream, and curls in closer, and Qrow's reminded of what kept him going, but there's something terribly raw about being brought here and reminded of when that grief was fresh, rather than an old aching scar.
"...We never found her body," he admits, suddenly and unprompted. He chooses to blame this on the Mourning, rather than any specific feelings of vulnerability this time and place evokes. "It wasn't a clean thing, all at once. She just went on some mission and never came back."