• Published 31st Aug 2018
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SAPR - Scipio Smith



Sunset, Jaune, Pyrrha and Ruby are Team SAPR, and together they fight to defeat the malice of Salem, uncover the truth about Ruby's past and fill the emptiness within their souls.

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Never Without You (New)

Never Without You

Pyrrha had been here before.

Not ‘here’ upon the roof of the hospital on which she stood, her glove-enclosed arms resting upon the iron rail that ran atop the low wall which encompassed said roof, but here as in this situation.

When Sunset had been caught in that explosion, she had been here, waiting for her to wake up, waiting as she lay unconscious in bed, waiting powerlessly for some sign that she would wake.

Now it was Ruby she was waiting for, and she had liked it no better than she had enjoyed waiting for Sunset.

In fact, she found that having been through it already seemed to make it harder to bear a second time round.

That… perhaps that was why she was up here on the roof. Or perhaps she had simply felt too awkward to remain in the room with Yang.

With Sunset, she had been alone. With the threat of the White Fang still looming over them, Professor Ozpin had ordered Jaune and Ruby back to Beacon for their own safety, only allowing Pyrrha to remain when she had invoked Mistralian honour to win the right. Pyrrha wasn’t sure if being alone – save for flying visits by Blake and Rainbow Dash – had made it easier for her to stay in the room with Sunset, trying to read from the Mistraliad, mentally wincing at the absurd note that Sunset had written in case of her death – a duel with Yang over Blake, of all things! – waiting, hoping, keeping an eye on Sunset constantly for the moment when her eyes would open.

Perhaps it had been easier alone. But the White Fang were defeated now – that was their victory, or at least a victory in which they had played no small part; it might not feel like a great triumph to Blake, but nevertheless, it was something that they could point to as an accomplishment – and with that danger passed, that shadow lifted; as many people were free to stay at Ruby’s bedside as they wished. Yang, of course, Sunset and Jaune, and Blake as well.

It was Yang who… that was rather unfair of Pyrrha to think it. Yang was Ruby’s sister; she had every right to be there. Perhaps it was simply the way that the elder sister seemed to hold them all responsible.

Or perhaps it was just that Pyrrha felt responsible and blamed Yang for the feeling when the other girl was blameless.

Certainly, retreating out of the room and coming up onto the roof hadn’t made her feel any better.

The only difference was that she felt like a coward.

The wind kissed her face, albeit a little less gently than Jaune, and blew through her long red ponytail, brushing her hair this way and that, threatening to send it billowing out behind her in a long tail, although not quite achieving such a thing. It rustled at the teal drops that hung on golden chains from her circlet, sending them tapping at her cheeks as they bounced this way and that.

Pyrrha ignored the sensation, leaving her aura to prevent too much discomfort as she leaned upon the metal rail and looked out.

Vale was spread out all around her, the busy ambulance bay before the doors giving way to the mundanity of the parking lot which, in turn, yielded to the rest of the city rising all around, the great towers rising to touch the sky mingling with the modest brownstones and the red-brick terraces.

It was not so easy to see Vale as it was to see Mistral; it wasn’t just a matter of standing reasonably high up the slope and looking down the mountain, but nevertheless, Pyrrha fancied that she had a good view of the city. If she could not see it all, then she could nevertheless see enough.

It seemed so large, and in its size, it seemed, as many large things did, to be permanent, impervious to harm… impregnable. And yet, this vast city, the heart of an even larger kingdom, had been thrown for a moment into the most grave peril.

A peril from which it had, nonetheless, escaped. Pyrrha’s green-eyed gaze drifted upwards, following the rising skyscrapers up into the clouds. The sky was filled with them, so much so that it was on the verge of becoming overcast, and yet, between the clouds, she could yet catch glimpses of General Ironwood’s mighty warships, their lights blinking upon their dark hulls like stars in the night sky, as they moved above the clouds like leviathans of the air.

Some of the smaller airships descended beneath the clouds, the better perhaps to see what was happening in Vale itself, flitting about the skyline on patrol, their eyes ever watchful.

The battle was won, but it was said that General Ironwood was summoning reinforcements nonetheless; the Valish Council had invited him to take over security for the Vytal Festival, and it seemed he meant to make it very secure indeed.

Pyrrha wondered if anyone else was asking themselves what, with the threat of the White Fang having diminished into nothing and the grimm having already been slaughtered in great numbers, the festival needed to be secured from.

She knew of course. Cinder Fall yet lived. Salem would outlive them all, and the mistress of the grimm might yet gather more of her dark creatures to launch yet more assaults upon the lights of civilisation, while her dreadful acolyte plotted and schemed to achieve… whatever ends had made her side with such a monster.

They yet had need of General Ironwood’s protection.

Without the Atlesian forces, without those leviathans of the sky, without the androids and the airships, Vale… there might not be a Vale to host the Vytal Festival. When the grimm poured out of the breach, it had been, in the end, the overwhelming fire of Atlesian warships that had stopped them.

It had taken a vast army to save a vast city.

Pyrrha looked down, her gaze falling in parallel with the wall to reach the ground beneath. No one looked up at her.

She wondered, if anyone was to look up, how small she might look from down there.

As small, perhaps, as Ruby looked in that hospital bed, or smaller still.

A frown creased Pyrrha’s features, her brows furrowing beneath her circlet. Would Ruby wake? With good fortune, she would. Sunset had woken, after all, and Sunset had been in worse shape.

She thought so, anyway. Perhaps, at least. It was hard to tell. It was impossible to say for sure. Sunset had been injured in an explosion, which was terrible but at least understood; Ruby had been affected by her own magic.

Magic. Before this year began Pyrrha would not have believed in such a thing. But now, there was Ruby’s magic and Sunset’s magic and Salem and Relics and-

“There you are,” Sunset said.

Pyrrha half-turned, looking around to see Sunset standing in the doorway that led up onto the roof – or back down into the hospital. Sunset let the door swing shut behind her with a dull thud as she walked across the black roof, the slightly springy substance it was made of lending a bounce to her step that hardly seemed to suit the look on her face as she approached Pyrrha at the roof’s edge.

The breeze rustled through her long mane and through her tail alike as she came to stand by Pyrrha’s side, resting her own gloved hands lightly upon the metal rail. “Hey,” she said.

Pyrrha glanced at Sunset. “I know that I shouldn’t have left Ruby-”

Sunset raised a hand to cut her off. “It’s fine,” she said. “Ruby… it’s fine.”

“If she wakes up and I’m not-”

“She’ll understand,” Sunset assured her. She paused. “Would you mind if I tagged along to see Penny?”

Pyrrha smiled ever so slightly. “Is that what you and Rainbow talked about?”

Sunset nodded. “Pretty much. If she wants to see me, then… I don’t have much excuse for staying away, do I?”

Pyrrha’s smile widened just a tad. “We will go together then… in place of Ruby.”

Sunset shook her head. “For ourselves,” she said.

Pyrrha considered that for a moment. “For ourselves,” she agreed. “To comfort a friend is something which we may do, at least.”

Sunset frowned. “'At least'?”

Pyrrha took a moment to reply, turning her gaze away from Sunset and once more casting it out across Vale. “It’s huge, isn’t it?”

Sunset looked out too, her own eyes taking in all of the city that could be seen. “Yes,” she said, her voice growing a little hoarse. “I suppose it is.” Her equine ears drooped down a little, for no reason that Pyrrha could tell.

Pyrrha hesitated for a moment. “It is now believed by some archaeologists and scholars that during the time of the Mistralian War, the time of the Mistraliad, the city of Mistral was only around the size of the city’s railway station.”

“How big is that?” Sunset asked. “You never showed us the station.”

“It is not small,” Pyrrha allowed. “Unlike Vale, Mistral has only one station serving the whole city and every conceivable destination, but nevertheless, compared to the size of Mistral – or Vale now – it is rather small.”

Sunset considered that, or seemed to. She grinned. “I bet Old Mistral did more for human happiness than a train station ever did.”

“Perhaps,” Pyrrha acknowledged. It had given them the Mistraliad, after all.

“Although one shouldn’t underestimate trainspotters.”

Pyrrha covered her mouth with one hand as a snort escaped her. “Sunset!”

“I know that you’re making your way towards a solemn point,” Sunset said, “but that doesn’t mean that we have to be solemn every step of the way to get there.”

Pyrrha half-turned to better face her friend, the kind of friend she had never expected to find but who, perhaps, understood her better than anyone. “What makes you think my point will be solemn?”

“You’ve come up here to brood on the rooftop by yourself, staring out across the city, and you expect me to believe there is no melancholy in your soul?” Sunset asked.

“Would you have me get to the point?”

“Not if you wish it otherwise,” Sunset said softly. “I… I confess I often find the way that you meander to your points to be quite beautiful. Like a riverside stroll to get to the picnic.”

Pyrrha smiled slightly at the compliment, even if the thing she was being complimented on was perhaps not a thing to be proud of. “I was just thinking,” she said, “that the age when a city could fit in the space that would now only be large enough for a train station was the age when a great hero, a prince of warriors and men, could do such deeds upon the battlefield that the city of such modest size would stand or fall upon their efforts.”

Sunset’s voice was soft. “I thought you were the one who thought we won?”

“We did win,” Pyrrha said. “But without General Ironwood’s army-”

“Without us, General Ironwood’s army would never have known what was coming,” Sunset pointed out. “And without us, they wouldn’t have had time to get into position before the grimm escaped the square.” Her ears drooped down yet further into her fiery hair. “One grimm was able to kill five people,” she whispered. “Just think what the toll would have been if… if there had been no one to stop them from getting up out of the tunnel, if they’d been free to get into the streets before the Atlesians troops arrived.”

“We owe our friends a great debt of gratitude,” Pyrrha said. “Yang, Nora, Ren; Arslan, Team Wisteria, Team Bluebell, though we have not been so close.”

“Sky,” Sunset murmured.

“Indeed,” Pyrrha whispered. “May the winds be his wings and carry him to heaven where the gods will feed him nectar and ambrosia.”

“Mmm,” Sunset mumbled. “So your problem is that we didn’t do enough by ourselves?”

“I… I suppose you could say that,” Pyrrha agreed. “Without the Atlesians, the city would have fallen.”

Sunset was silent for a while. She turned her back upon the city before them and leaned back upon the wall and rail as she thrust her hands into her pockets. “Yes,” she relented. “Yes, I daresay it would have. But the Atlesians were here, and the city did not fall.”

“And I am glad of it; I rejoice in it,” Pyrrha declared. “But if… if armies are necessary, if only an army and all the panoply of war that an army carries with it like a snail carrying a house on its back, can save a city or a kingdom, then what purpose huntsmen?”

“Not every battle can be won by an army,” Sunset pointed out. “Not every situation can withstand that sort of firepower being thrown at it. Some situations require a little more finesse.” She paused. “The greatest hero of my home is a librarian,” she declared.

Pyrrha’s eyebrows rose. “A librarian?”

“Well, she’s also a princess,” Sunset said, which might have seemed to take some of the wind out of her point except that she hastened to add, “but she lives in a library and, to my understanding, acts as the librarian… when she isn’t saving the world.”

“Your world requires saving?” Pyrrha asked, wondering to herself why, that being the case, Sunset had felt the need to come here to Remnant.

“From time to time,” Sunset said softly. “It’s less a question of continuous, low-level jeopardy such as we live with here and more long stretches of absolute peace punctuated by the occasional peak of intense peril. You can decide for yourself which is preferable. In any case, the great hero of my home has sufficient leisure to live and work in a library, and to… well, to enjoy a life of leisure otherwise alongside her companions: a farmer, a baker, an aspiring sports star, a dressmaker, and a… a caretaker of animals.”

Those descriptions sounded vaguely familiar to Pyrrha, but she couldn’t exactly say why. Instead, her voice took on a fond tone as she said, “I think that you are the one who is meandering towards her point now, Sunset.”

Sunset chuckled. “Ah, but am I doing it beautifully?” she asked. “My point is that not every situation requires nor can bear an army. Some situations require a hero.”

“In your world, perhaps.”

“In this world, too,” Sunset insisted.

“Such as?”

“An army cannot defend a village,” Sunset said. “Armies require too great a concentration of resources, they have too much interdependency, and there are too many villages which may be in need.”

“And for such tasks we are suited?” Pyrrha asked. She frowned at herself. “That sounded sharper and more arrogant than I intended. I… I sounded… I did not mean to sound so proud, and yet… could I have sounded any other way? Perhaps I am simply too proud and disgruntled in my pride to find that I have been born too late for my ambitions.”

“You have been born too late,” Sunset said, “though in your manners and your gentleness, to my mind, rather than your ambitions.”

The Evenstar, that gleams late as the darkness closes in. Even my epithet proclaims it.

“And yet,” Sunset went on, “I did not mean to insult you, and I am sorry if you took it that way. I would never-”

“I know,” Pyrrha said quickly. She sighed. “I just… I have no cause to be vain, now of all times.”

“'Now of all times'?”

“You… you have all been good enough not to say so,” Pyrrha said quietly. “But Ruby is lying in that hospital bed because of me.”

“How do you figure that?”

Pyrrha let out a bitter laugh. “Is it not obvious? I was the one ensnared by that… that grimm, whatever its name may be, I was the one who caught in its clutches.”

“So was I,” Sunset reminded her.

“Because you tried to save me!” Pyrrha cried. “If I had been stronger and faster, then-”

“Like you should have been stronger and faster against Cinder?” Jaune demanded.

Pyrrha gasped, her scarlet sash flying around her as she turned to see Jaune standing in the doorway, his blue eyes, usually so kind and gentle, close to glowering at her.

He had reason to glower, she conceded, for all that she did not like the sight. Not only had she put Ruby in the hospital through her incompetence, but she had also… she had come very close to breaking her promise to him. So close that the extent to which she might be said to have not broken her promise might seem like mere semantics.

They hadn’t talked about it yet. The time had not been right, beneath Mountain Glenn or in the desperate fight to hold the Breach, for obvious reasons.

But it seemed that they were come to the time now.

“I, um, I should probably… does anyone want some coffee?” Sunset asked, with much faux-cheer in her voice. She straightened up, her hands falling out of her pockets. “Great! I’ll just-”

“You can stay, Sunset,” Jaune said softly.

“What if I don’t want to?” Sunset asked.

“I want you to hear this,” Jaune insisted. “You’re our team leader, so I want you to understand this as well.”

Sunset sucked in a sharp intake of breath. “Okay,” she muttered, but that didn’t stop her sidling away from Pyrrha.

Jaune’s eyes didn’t follow her, remaining fixed on Pyrrha. For her part, Pyrrha looked down and played with her fluttering sash awkwardly with both hands. She said nothing, waiting for him to speak.

“You made me a promise, Pyrrha,” he said.

Pyrrha looked up, and into his eyes. “I did not break it,” she whispered.

“No?” Jaune asked, taking a couple of steps towards her. “Fighting Cinder without me, what was that?”

Anger hardly seemed to suit him. He had a face made for smiles, and a voice for laughter and kind words; a thunderous visage seemed almost to deface his features. Nevertheless, Pyrrha did not look away, knowing that she had deserved thunder. Her excuse sounded feeble even to her own ears as she said, “I didn’t send you anywhere.”

“Don’t play with words, Pyrrha!” Jaune snapped. “I deserve better than that… don’t I?”

“Yes,” Pyrrha said quickly. “Yes, you do, of course you do. I…” She clasped her hands together in front of her. “I was afraid.”

“'Afraid'?” Jaune repeated, taking another step towards her. “Afraid for me? Pyrrha, I thought you were the one who believed in me-”

“I do!” Pyrrha declared. “Have I not proven that? I’ve let you fight your battles, try your strength-”

“Against lone grimm, against low-level White Fang,” Jaune said, “but when it comes to a serious fight against Cinder, you tell me to stand back and wait!”

“Do you expect me to let you fight Cinder alone?”

“Of course not, but we could have fought her together!” Jaune yelled. He glanced at Sunset for a moment. “I know that I’m not as strong as you are, Pyrrha; Sunset, I know that I don’t have your magic. I know that the biggest contribution I can make to this team is with my semblance, but that doesn’t mean that I… I’m still your partner, I’m still a member of this team, and I…” He paused for a moment. “It’s not that I don’t understand why you wanted to fight Cinder by yourself. Believe me, I absolutely get it.”

“I know,” Pyrrha whispered, because she believed him. She believed that, in this, he understood her better than Sunset did, and not just because Sunset was blinded by her affection for Cinder, but also because Jaune understood, as Sunset perhaps never had – for all that she was a faunus – the feeling of being powerless. It was novel to Pyrrha, less so to Jaune unfortunately, but Jaune understood how it could torment you, gnaw at you, mock you.

She loved him for the fact that he didn’t say it out loud, and didn’t need to throw her inadequacies in her face to make his point.

“But I… I’m starting to think that you don’t really get why I asked you to make me that promise in the first place, if you think that not literally sending me away is enough to keep it,” Jaune said. “I thought you did, you told me that you did, remember? After Salem’s visions-”

“I told you I was a girl of my word,” Pyrrha murmured, glancing guiltily away. “And upon the letter of my word, I stood.”

“But not the spirit of what I asked of you,” Jaune reminded her. “I told you, down in Mountain Glenn, that if anything happened to you… that I didn’t want to live knowing that I couldn’t help you. When Cinder had you on the ropes while I was just standing there, how do you think I felt? How stupid, how pathetic, how useless do you think I felt? How angry do you think I felt with you for putting me in that position? When I heard you scream, I thought that I might lose you-”

“And what of that?” Pyrrha demanded. “As a… as a girlfriend, I… you could find a dozen others who can offer you all that I can and more.”

Jaune’s eyes widened. “Is that what you really think?”

Pyrrha looked at him. “Is it not so? Ruby-”

“I don’t love Ruby,” Jaune declared. He covered the remaining distance between the two of them, and his expression softened as he reached out and gently rested his fingertips against her cheeks. “Even if… even if that were true, then… then none of them would be you.”

Pyrrha looked up into his face, the face from which so much of his anger had drained away, the eyes that were soft again and filled with compassion… and with a degree of exasperation yet. No doubt he thought her very dense for not understanding.

It was better to be thought dense than to be thought malicious, especially since she had not set out to be malicious or disingenuous.

She wanted nothing more than to put her arms around him, to lay her head upon his chest, to melt into his embrace. She thought that it might be easy to do so, so much of his annoyance having ebbed away already. But it would not be right; at least, not before they had resolved this matter that lay between them.

“I… I promised that I would not send you away, because I thought that it was the guilt that you feared,” Pyrrha murmured. “The guilt of… of not being strong enough, that I didn’t think you strong enough. I suppose that, by telling you to wait, I laid that burden of guilt upon you nonetheless, and I am sorry for that, but I… am I not also allowed my fears? If Cinder had cut you down while you fought at my side-”

“Then you could find a dozen guys who can offer you all that I can and more,” Jaune said.

Pyrrha frowned. “That’s not funny, Jaune.”

“No,” Jaune agreed. “And it wasn’t funny the first time, either.”

Pyrrha winced and glanced down. “I don’t know… I cannot promise to watch you die.”

“But you’ve asked that of me already,” Jaune said, and though his tone was gentle, his words pricked at Pyrrha’s heart like daggers.

“Since you’ve kept me here listening to this with mounting embarrassment,” Sunset said, “although, I accept that I should have teleported away some time ago, because why you asked me to stick around is just becoming increasingly baffling, but since I am here, perhaps I might offer an observation?” She paused, possibly waiting for objections that did not come. “I understand where you’re both coming from. You fear one another’s deaths, you fear what would become of you if the other one died, you’re afraid to compound the pain of loss with the guilt of ‘what if.’ What if you’d been stronger, what if you’d been faster, what if you’d done this instead of that, what if you’d done anything at all?” Her tail twitched from side to side. “Guess what? That’s not unique to you. Not by a long way. Maybe it’s more pronounced for you both when it comes to the other, because you love each other, but you think that I don’t feel it too? You think that I don’t fear to lose you – or Ruby, for that matter?

“But this is a dangerous life that we’ve chosen, and that’s the point. We… we chose this.” Sunset looked away for a moment, her ears drooping down. “I will do whatever it takes to make sure that you don’t die, I will do whatever I can, whatever I have to do, whatever is within my power to make sure that you survive, to the last drop of my strength. But in the end… in the end, the only thing that I could do to make absolutely certain of your survival would be to pack you away from Beacon and send you home to your mothers.” She mustered a slight twitching upwards of the corner of one lip, though it did not reach a level deserving to be called a smile. “Neither of you want that, I take it.”

“Indeed not,” Pyrrha murmured.

“Well then,” Sunset said. “If you aren’t both willing to quit, then you’re both going to have to accept that there is some level of risk involved for the other, as well as for yourselves, otherwise… you know, I’d say ‘otherwise, this isn’t going to work,’ but let’s be honest, you could break up, and it still wouldn’t work as long as you still cared about one another on some level. So what’s it going to be?”

Pyrrha was silent for a moment. Sunset could be headstrong and heedless, but she could also speak with great wisdom, so long as the thing she was talking about was not something which stirred her into passions too great to be ruled by reason. In this case… in this case, she was quite correct.

She had not sent Jaune away in Mountain Glenn, but she had pushed him away nonetheless, and now, she saw that she had been very fortunate not to push him all the way away. If she did it again, if she continued to treat him like this, then she would undermine any claim that she could make to believing in him, and she would… she would push him so far away that he would not return. She couldn’t tell him on the one hand that she wished to see him flourish as a huntsman and then on the other seek to shield him from all danger as though he were a helpless innocent in need of her protection. Yes, there would be battles too difficult for him, and when those moments came, then she would be there without hesitation… but she could not do so as his protector. That was not what he wanted, that was not a relationship of equals… and what kind of relationship could they have if she did not see him as an equal?

If he died… even the thought of it made Pyrrha shudder in Jaune’s grasp. If he died, her heart would crack in two, the prospect alone threatened to bring tears to her eyes. She thought of Lyra and Bon Bon and how badly they had taken the loss of Sky Lark; if anything happened to Jaune, then that would be her… but it seemed that if anything happened to her, that would be Jaune, also.

She didn’t understand why. She could hardly comprehend her good fortune, but nevertheless, it seemed that fortune had blessed her, and so, if she wanted to remain blessed, then she had best reform her conduct.

While he was still willing to be patient with her.

Once more, her eyes found his, and Pyrrha held her gaze there. “I know,” she said, in a voice that trembled slightly, “that I did not keep my first promise as you wished I would, and for that, I am sorry. I cannot promise that my behaviour will be perfect in the future, or that you will have no more cause to be upset with me ever, but… but I will make you a new promise, and I vow to you that I shall try to keep it: that so long as we stand on the same battlefield, then I shall never fight without you.”

Jaune stared down at her. His fingers shifted across her face, brushing at the gold chains that hung from her circlet as his palms descended upon her cheeks, resting gently upon them. “That,” he whispered, “that is what I… that’s probably what I should have asked for in the first place, isn’t it?”

Pyrrha said nothing, but smiled brightly up at him.

Jaune smiled too, a bright smile that illuminated his eyes. “Never without?” he asked.

“Never without you,” Pyrrha affirmed.

And then he kissed her, his hands still upon her face, cupping her cheeks as his face descended towards hers, their lips meeting.

Ordinarily, the sensation of the kiss was enough to whisk Pyrrha away, banishing her from the world and its concerns – or banishing her concerns away from her. But now, though the kiss was as wonderful as it ever was, there was a part of her, at least, that lingered amidst her fears and doubts, a part of her which thought, which feared, which knew that it was not enough. That she was not enough. That together, they would not have been enough.

Jaune needed to be treated as an equal, or she would lose him, and in truth, they were equals: equals in unpreparedness for what lay before them. She would need to be so much stronger, so much more than she was now if she was to truly be never without him.

Or she would lose him in a way far worse than a bitter break-up.

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