Author's Note:

This is an AU fic. Many core parts of the world (such as Aura) will work slightly differently than they do in the series.

Enjoy, and if you like it (or hate it), reviews are appreciated!

~o~O~o~O~o~

In the cabin of an airship cruising toward Vale, two figures stood out in sharp relief, splotches of color against the institutional grays and browns of the seating area. The yellow one was sitting, arm stretched out, people-watching with a bored expression. The red one was kneeling, scroll plugged into the other's gauntlet, totally absorbed by its screen.

"Yaaaaaang," Ruby whined. "Hold still."

Yang let out a long-suffering groan. "We're on a moving airship, Ruby. This is as still as you're gonna get."

Ruby puffed out her cheeks, looking up from the glowing screen of her scroll to glare at her sister. Yang rolled her eyes but relented, making an effort to keep her arm steady.

Ruby brightened up immediately, grinning and turning her attention back to her screen, tapping away.

"What are you even doing, anyway?" Yang asked, peering over to stare at the tangle of wires connecting Ruby's scroll to Ember Celica. "I thought you said Ember Celica was ready to go yesterday?"

Ruby nodded emphatically. "Mhmm, Mhmm. They were. Don't worry, I wouldn't let you go anywhere if they weren't in tip-top shape. I just wanted to run some diagnostics at altitude, make sure they'll keep working if you need to punch something on top of a mountain some day."

Yang facepalmed with her unoccupied hand.

"Ruby, the cabin is pressurized."

"Aha!" Ruby said, sticking up a finger while continuing to type with her other hand. "True but misleading. The cabin is pressurized, but only to about 12 PSI. That's almost 8000 feet above sea level."

Yang groaned again, leaning her head back. "Fine. Sure. But still, we need to have a talk about priorities."

Ruby wrinkled her nose, eyes still glued to her screen. Her pupils reflected a rapidly scrolling wall of text, green on black. "Keeping you safe is priority number one, Yang. Well, maybe not literally, but it's at least in the top ten."

"Ruby."

"Right, right. I know what you're going to say. Even if that is my number one priority, is this the best way to work toward it? It seems like a low-urgency task. But even if it's low-urgency, it's high-saliency, because how often are we up in the air like this? And really, what else would I be doing with the time? Working on something I know to be valuable that I might not be able to do later is better than sitting around trying to dream up the exact optimal course of action, even if..."

"Ruby..." Yang said, her voice taking on a slight edge.

Ruby stopped typing. She looked up from her scroll to see Yang staring down at her, her lilac eyes tinged with just the tiniest hint of crimson.

Yang took a deep breath, closing her eyes. When she opened them, their color was perfectly normal.

"Can I move my arm yet?" she asked, in a patient tone.

Ruby averted her eyes, nodding. "Um, I guess so. All my readings are within safe ranges. I should really check both gauntlets, though, if I'm being thorough..."

Yang leaned over, cupping Ruby's chin and raising the young girl's face until their eyes met. Yang smiled, but she didn't look particularly happy.

"Ruby. If you..."

Yang stopped, mulling something, and started again.

"You're so, so clever Ruby. And it makes me so proud, most of the time. I just wish you wouldn't use that cleverness to lie to yourself."

Yang let go of her little sister's chin, looking around the large open cabin at the milling students. "You want something important to do? Go make some friends."

Yang started plucking the wires out of Ember Celica. Ruby yelped and swatted her hand away, doing it herself with significantly more care.

"People come from all over to go to Beacon," Yang continued, not missing a beat. "You aren't the only one who doesn't know anybody. It's going to be really easy to meet people these next few days, and god knows you need the help. Urgency, saliency, whatever you want to call it, it's obvious you should be talking to people right now."

Ruby chewed on her lower lip as she coiled the wires one by one, tucking them into the cargo pockets on her skirt. A dozen objections leaped to mind, but Yang was right. Like she said, it was obviously the right thing to do. Ruby pushed the objections down, feeling a tight ball of anxiety grow in her stomach as she began to realize that she was actually going to have to talk to people.

"C'moooooooon" Yang said, clapping Ruby on the back hard enough to elicit a soft "Oof". "How bad can it be? Look, there's a bunch of other wallflowers sitting around waiting for someone to talk to them. Why don't you pick one and go say hello?"

Ruby sighed. She reluctantly glanced around the room, keeping her gaze low to avoid any accidental eye contact.

~o~O~o~O~o~

The cabin of the airship was surprisingly spacious. There were metal seats bolted to the ground in clusters, but while a few students were still lounging, most had gotten up after takeoff and were mingling near the large windows.

Ruby's eyes caught on a beautiful metal case. It had a lustrous white hue, as if the entire case were made of polished silver, and the front was engraved with a magnificently intricate snowflake. It was lying flat on a chair beside its owner, who was casually resting a hand on it as she swiped through her scroll with the other.

Nobody enrolling at Beacon was going to let their weapon be packed into the cargo area, but apparently some were more discreet than others. Ruby found herself wondering what could be inside the case. It was long and narrow, but with mechashift weaponry being what it was, that didn't mean much.

Ruby looked up at its owner's face. The girl had delicate features set into remarkably pale skin, marred by an ugly gash over her left eye. Ruby almost cringed to see it, but more than anything she was curious. Scars that could survive the normalizing effects of aura were rare; the wound had to be part of the girl's self-image. Either she'd acquired it when she was very young, or it was important to her for some reason. Either way, there had to be an interesting story behind it.

Ruby breathed in and out again. Maybe going to talk to her wouldn't be so bad. She could ask to see her weapon, people were usually proud to show those off.

Suddenly, the girl's eyes flicked up from her scroll, locking on to Ruby's. Ruby froze for a moment, realizing that she'd been staring. After a long second, Ruby smiled and stood up, waving awkwardly. The girl stared back, her eyes narrowing by the tiniest fraction, then turned back to her scroll.

Ruby's whole body tensed, her stomach crumpling like a paper ball. She looked away as fast as she could, hand dropping to her side.

Nope, never approaching her in a million years.

Why was this so much harder for her than other people? She'd never managed to figure it out. Yang always told her to relax, but she was pretty sure that was because a relaxed Yang was outgoing and social. A relaxed Ruby would just sit in her seat contentedly reading on her scroll until they landed. If you needed to psych yourself up to interact with people, how in the world were you supposed to relax while doing it?

Ruby noticed, suddenly, that Yang had disappeared from where she'd been sitting. When had that happened? Argh. Yang had developed ditching her into an artform. Ruby spun around, trying to catch her sister before she got too far.

Instead, her head slammed into something hard as she whipped it around. Ruby's aura flared, preventing the damage but not the pain, and she fell backward with an audible "Ow!".

~o~O~o~O~o~

A gloved hand shot out and caught her shoulder before she could lose her balance. Ruby managed to steady herself, her visual cortex finally catching up with reality and parsing what was in front of her.

She found herself looking at a white metal breastplate. Maybe some sort of high-carbon steel? It was certainly hard enough. The metal was a little scratched, which was very strange. Normally aura protected one's clothes and armor.

"Sorry about that," said a friendly voice from above her.

Ruby realized she was spacing out again. The person in front of her was almost a solid foot taller than her, and she had to crane her neck to get a look at his face. He had blue eyes and a goofy mop of blonde hair that hadn't seen a comb in days. He was looking down at her with an apologetic smile, rubbing the back of his head with the hand that wasn't holding her arm.

Which reminded Ruby that his other hand was holding her arm. He looked a little gangly, but he had a firm grip, and it was surprisingly comforting to-

Ruby's brain finally finished chewing over the situation it was in, and decided that the optimal course of action was to speed her heart up about 80 BPM and redirect excess bloodflow to her cheeks.

Stupid brain.

"Are you alright?" he asked, giving her arm a reassuring squeeze. "That was a nasty bump."

What sort of question was that? She was clearly enrolling at Beacon, which meant her aura was activated. Forget crashing into him, she had pretty good odds of surviving the ship crashing.

Or maybe he was asking because she was standing there like a mute blushing idiot? Aaaaargh.

Ruby felt something familiar welling up in the back of her mind, a strange excitement that was also something more. The stress and stimulation and curiosity and excitement and need to just have a goddamn second to think overflowed, washing into her brain, down her spinal cord, through her whole central nervous system. The world around her slowed to a crawl.

Well, at least she had a second to collect herself.

Ruby eased out of the boy's grip, ever so slowly. She didn't want to give him ropeburn. Or would it be shirtburn? Clothburn?

Moving while under the effect of her semblance was always a strange experience. Her muscles couldn't move at these speeds - nobody's could - so her aura ended up moving her limbs by itself, normalizing their position to stay in line with her sped-up proprioception. Air felt like thick soup when she was going this fast, and sound slowed to a deep, continuous drone. Together with the strange weightlessness of her limbs, it felt like drifting through a dreamscape.

Ruby finished extricating herself from the boy's hand. She backed up a step, putting about three feet between them. Or was that too far?

Ruby knew she had social problems. Problems, plural. There were a thousand little things she did wrong, subtleties of timing or distance or tone that just weren't right. If it were one or two big problems, she felt like she could work on them, practice and practice and batter them into submission by sheer repetition. But there were too many to make a dent in, and she never could figure out some general principle that tied them all together.

Like how close to stand to people, for example. It was complicated. When Ruby was young, she'd stood right in front of people, the way she would with Yang or her dad. But it turned out you weren't supposed to do that, you were supposed to stand farther away from people you didn't know. It had been one of the first things Yang had had to take her aside and tell her: that she was coming on too strong by getting right in people's face when she met them.

But it wasn't just how well you knew someone, it was a thousand other things. Age mattered - kids could get as close as they wanted, as you got older you were supposed to stand further apart. It wasn't just how well you knew someone, it was the type of relationship. You stood closer to a cousin you'd never met than to a teacher you'd known for years. And there was a gender aspect, some sort of subtle signal she couldn't untangle that seemed to shift every year or two that dictated how close she was supposed to stand to boys in particular.

And as if that wasn't bad enough, people were playing all sorts of games, all the time. Shopkeepers would stand extra close and fake familiar body language to try and make a sale. Sometimes people would stand at the distance for the relationship they wanted, rather than the relationship they had, or sometimes people would stand further away if they were mad.

And then it seemed to vary again by personality. Yang could stand any distance she wanted from people. She made them comfortable somehow. Other people, like uncle Qrow, seemed to have a bubble around them that kept people out. (Or most people, at least; nothing was going to keep Ruby from tackling him.)

Ruby felt a hard thump in her chest, the first heartbeat since her semblance had kicked in. Argh, how long had she been thinking?

That was her other problem. She tended to space out, get lost in her own thoughts and lose track of the moment.

Ruby forcibly pulled herself out of her thoughts. She was feeling less stimulated, now that there was no immediate pressure, which meant her semblance was probably going to fade soon.

She looked over the boy she'd bumped into. He was wearing a strange sort of armor, chestpiece and pauldrons and gauntlets poking out of his gloves. Why would you wear armor that covered your ribcage but not your stomach? If anything it should be the opposite.

Under the armor were casual clothes, a hoodie and jeans that clashed with the faux-martial look. He had a sword sheathed at his waist, the sheathe clearly mechashift, but old, possibly even first-generation. She couldn't see the sword, but as far as she could tell its handle was solid metal, forged or cast rather than machined out of thin layers, the type of weapon that would hold up even without aura reinforcing it.

Ruby felt the world around her starting to speed up, gradually at first, but she knew she only had moments. She hesitated briefly, then took half a step forward, close enough that she could just brush his chest plate with her fingertips if she reached out. She put on a big smile as the world sped up fast and faster, until in a whirring rush she was dumped back into moving, chattering reality.

She was also dumped back into her normal body. She stumbled mentally as she realized her heart was still hammering and her cheeks were still flushed, her physiological state out of whack with the calmer place her mind had been, too far out of sync for her aura to fudge it.

The boy blinked at his empty hand, confused, then looked up at where she was now standing. She clasped his outstretched hand in both of hers, more out of instinct than anything, shaking it vigorously.

"Hi! IIII'm Ruby."

"Um...hi?"

"Oh! Sorry. That was my semblance. It's a little temperamental. Emotional semblances run in my family. No pun intended. Sorry for running into you!"

Her voice came out breathless and squeaky. She was talking too fast.

The boy smiled back at her, though.

"Ah, Right. I'm Jaune! Jaune Arc. Sorry for the bump there, I was just..."

"Nice to meet you Jaune! Can I see your sword?" she interrupted.

"Um..."

"I mean, if it's alright. It's forged, right? I've never seen a real forged sword before."

Ruby dropped his hand and stepped a little closer, bending down to peer at the sword.

"Oooooh, right. My sword. Uh, yeah, sure! Why not?"

Jaune looked around to make sure nobody was nearby, then carefully pulled out the blade. He looked at it himself for a moment, something inscrutable passing over his face, then flipped it around and offered the handle to Ruby.

Ruby snatched it up without a moment's hesitation.

"Woooooooooooooooowww~" she said, turning it over in her hand. It was heavy. So inefficient, but so cool...

"It's so shiny!" she said, angling it to catch the light. Ruby gently touched the tip, enjoying the pricking sensation on her finger.

"There's something else on here, too. Did you oil it?"

"Just this morning." Jaune said proudly, puffing out his chest.

Ruby was impressed. People with aura almost never bothered with maintenance. Their image of their weapon would keep it sharp and rust-free, which made it tempting to just skip all the extra work. But if you never maintained your weapon, well, then you wouldn't tend to think of it as being in particularly amazing shape. It would stay functional, but that extra little edge would be gone.

Ruby spent a few hours of quality time with Crescent Rose a week, and she liked to think it showed. It was nice to meet someone else who cared about that kind of thing, even if he did have some anachronistic tendencies.

"Why did you decide to forge your weapon, of all things?" Ruby asked.

"Er...I didn't exactly forge it myself. It belonged to my grandfather. He used it to fight in the war."

"Woooooow!" Ruby said again. "A real heirloom, passed down through generations. And a sword, too. That's drawing on some powerful imagery. I guess the boost to your self-image is worth the loss of flexibility? Unorthodox, but I could see it being a good tradeoff."

Ruby hefted the sword and started swinging it, feeling the balance. It was heavy. Jaune took a nervous step back.

"Erm, yeah. Something like that."

"I'm surprised your school let you get away with it. I went to Signal, and they're a real stickler for making everyone design their own weapons. Not that I mind, of course. Weapon design and maintenance was always my favorite subject."

Ruby stopped after a few swings, reasonably satisfied. She tossed it in the air, letting it flip a few times, and caught it deftly by the blade, holding it out to Jaune hilt-first. Etiquette and all that. Jaune took it back and sheathed it, looking considerably relieved. Ruby understood perfectly; she got nervous whenever Crescent Rose was out of her hands, too.

"Oh, I haven't shown you Crescent Rose. Do you want to see?"

Without waiting for an answer, Ruby reached behind her and pulled out her baby. Crescent rose expanded in her hand as Ruby brought him forward, fifty seven individual mechashift components unfolding in perfect synchrony. She wasn't just guessing, she could feel them unfolding in perfect synchrony, her sense of proprioception expanding through the scythe as her aura wrapped around him, the weapon so familiar to her soul that he might as well have been a part of her.

Ruby whipped crescent rose around in front of her and over her shoulder, showing off a little, careful not to let the sharp tip touch the plane's rather nice carpeting. She brought him to rest behind her, held against her back with both hands, blade near the ground and shaft in the air behind her.

"Whoah!" Jaune said, taking another step back.

Was this one of those social cues with space? Was she doing something wrong? He hadn't actually said he wanted to see Crescent Rose. Maybe she should have waited for him to respond?

Wait, this line of thinking was a trap. She was going to space out again.

"You made that?" Jaune asked, mouth open. "That's amazing!"

That made Ruby smile. He really did have an eye for weaponry. All mechashift transformations looked impressive to civilians, but being able to tell Crescent Rose apart from your everyday mechashift weapon just by seeing him unfold once, that took a little bit of taste.

"Yup. Two years of classes, nights, and weekends, right here."

"Only two years?"

Ruby froze. Oh shit. She'd just let him know that she'd been moved ahead two years, hadn't she? What was he going to think?

"Um...yeah." she said, looking down and rubbing her toe against the carpet. "I...kinda-sorta got moved ahead a little. It's not a big deal, though."

Ruby rushed to change the subject, eyes glued to the floor.

"But...but that's boring. You really didn't have to make a weapon in your curriculum? Where did you go to school?"

"Erm..."

Jaune rubbed his hand on the back of his head, eyes flicking to the right.

"I was...sort of homeschooled, actually. It's kind of an odd situation. But, wow, only two years to make that...I'm not sure if I could do that if I spent the rest of my life on it."

Ruby blushed more, digging her toe deeper into the ground. Was he being patronizing? It felt like the tone of the conversation had shifted a little.

At least he was still talking to her. Yang's group of friends treated her like a kid, but then again, they'd known her for a long time. A 10 year old feels a lot older than an 8 year old, but maybe 17 and 15 felt less far apart?

Was she doing that thing Yang always said she did, where she got worked up over nothing?

There was a moment of awkward silence.

Jaune cleared his throat. "Well, anyway, it's nice to meet you, Ruby. Sorry again for bumping into you. I guess I'll let you go, I don't want to hold you up too long if you have somewhere to be..."

"Oh, I don't have anywhere to be." she said, before realizing how lame it sounded. Stupid brain, why would you say that?

"The only person I know here is my sister, and she ditched me." she continued, digging herself deeper.

"Huh. Well, I don't really know anyone either, actually. Maybe we should go pick a few stragglers out of the herd and make some friends?"

Ruby finally looked up, hope blooming in her chest, wildly out of proportion to the mundanity of the situation. Jaune was wearing a goofy grin, not seeming put out by her age or awkwardness in the slightest.

Yes please! she almost said, barely catching herself. She coughed gently instead. "Um...that sounds fun." she said, just a hair quieter than normal.

"Great!" Jaune said, clapping his hands together. "Should be easy, with such a great conversation starter."

Ruby wondered what he was talking about for a moment, but now that she wasn't looking at the ground, she realized that most of the students and all of the crew members in the cabin were staring at her. Shortly thereafter, she realized that she was standing in the middle of a civilian craft with a seven-foot combat scythe deployed behind her.

Ruby's stomach dropped through the floor, crescent rose collapsing in her hands as her body dug deep for new reserves of blood to send to her face.