SAPR

by Scipio Smith

Balance (New)

Balance

Ruby’s hands clutched at the hospital blanket in front of her. “Six people… died?”

Yeah, that was about how I thought you’d take it, Sunset thought. And she couldn’t even say anything about it, because it was her fault.

“Yes,” Pyrrha acknowledged, from where she still sat on the edge of Ruby’s bed, “but many more did not.”

Ruby looked at her. “And that makes it okay?”

“That’s not what she said,” Jaune pointed out. “Of course that’s not what Pyrrha means; what Pyrrha means is that… we can’t let that tragedy drive out all the good.”

“Indeed,” Pyrrha murmured. “Yes, six people died, but the city was saved; the kingdom was saved, and only six people perished, despite the circumstances and the ferocity of a battle fought in the midst of Vale. That is… not a thing to be ashamed of.”

“But we’re huntresses!” Ruby insisted. “We’re supposed to protect everyone!”

“You’re not that naïve, Ruby, and we all know you’re not,” Sunset said, this answer coming far easier than it should. “We did the best we could, and so did Team Iron, Bluebell, Wisteria, Tsunami; the Atlesian troops; everyone who fought to lock down the Breach did the best that they could. Yes, we didn’t save everyone, but I think we did a pretty damn good job, all things considered.”

“There are things that happened down in Mountain Glenn for which we might reproach ourselves,” Pyrrha murmured. “My failure to best Cinder being one, Sunset’s departure from the rest of the team being another.” Her vivid green eyes glanced pointedly at Sunset as she said that. “Things for which to reproach ourselves, yes, but I do not believe that our performance once the battle was joined at the Breach is one of them.”

Ruby frowned. “So… that’s it? We just have to accept it?”

“Do you think there is something that we could have done differently?” Sunset asked. “Something that we could have done better? I’m genuinely asking you, by the way; this isn’t a trick or a rhetorical question to get you to realise that I’m right; if you genuinely believe that there is something we missed down there, then let’s hear it. I promise that I’ll take it on board for next time.” She glanced at Jaune and Pyrrha. “That goes for either of you as well.”

Ruby was silent, her brow furrowed, her expression a little vacant as though she was lost in concentration. Instead, it was Jaune who spoke first, saying, “Instead of having Pyrrha use the train to block the tunnel, could you have collapsed it behind us with your magic?”

“I doubt it,” Sunset replied. “That tunnel survived for years with no maintenance; it was clearly pretty sturdily built. And we’re talking about a lot of rock and concrete – deep enough to fill up the tunnel, thick enough that the grimm couldn’t just burrow their way through it – I don’t have that kind of power.”

“That’s what I thought,” Jaune muttered, “but I figured it was worth asking.”

“Could we have joined forces with the White Fang to fight the grimm?” Pyrrha suggested. “Perhaps together-”

“They were trying to kill us until after the train had stopped,” Sunset pointed out. “They didn’t exactly seem receptive to overtures of cooperation.” She glanced away. Her tail flicked back and forth from side to side. “But we could have tried. It’s something to bear in mind if we ever find ourselves in a situation like that again: just because someone is our enemy doesn’t mean we can’t cooperate in service of a larger goal.”

“I…” Ruby began, and then trailed off immediately afterwards and said no more.

“Ruby?” Sunset asked.

Ruby shook her head. “You won’t want to hear it.”

Sunset’s eyes narrowed. “Why not?”

“Because…” Ruby hesitated once again, but then she swallowed and seemed to resolve to press ahead regardless, “because if even some of us had stayed down the tunnel to hold the grimm off-”

It was all Sunset could do not to roll her eyes. “Celestia in the sunlight, Ruby! You’re talking about a last stand!”

“Only one person had to carry the warning about the grimm back to General Ironwood,” Ruby responded, “and any delay in the grimm getting down the tunnel would have given the Atlesians more time to redeploy to meet the grimm instead of the White Fang.”

“And everyone who stayed behind would be dead,” Sunset declared flatly. “Ruby… I will… I’m not sure that I will ever be able to understand you. You… you used your magic to save Pyrrha and me, you saw that we were about to die, and you didn’t just shrug and accept that as the lot of a huntress, but now… and it’s not just now, either, it’s so often that you talk like…” She sighed and ran one hand through her fiery hair. “I have to be honest with you, Ruby, perhaps even brutally honest. The biggest reason your willingness to talk of throwing lives away so casually isn’t repellent is the fact that you don’t actually follow through with it when push comes to shove.”

“It’s not throwing lives away,” Ruby insisted. “It’s sacrifice.”

“What’s the difference?” Sunset demanded.

“One is pointless; the other is what we’re pledged to do!” Ruby declared. “The reason that grimm got loose into the city was time. It’s that simple. General Ironwood was expecting the White Fang, and so he’d set up a wide perimeter. Then he found the grimm were coming, so he tried to tighten his perimeter, but it was too late. He didn’t have time. Time we could have given him if we’d stood our ground and held off the horde. You know I’m right. You all know I’m right.”

Jaune and Pyrrha both looked intensely uncomfortable, neither of them able to look at Ruby nor at one another, but neither of them said anything to dispute her point. Jaune shuffled his feet awkwardly while Pyrrha clutched at her sash with her free hand.

“I don’t know that you’re right,” Sunset said, the words dropping from her mouth like lead weights, crashing to the ground. “I don’t even know that these two know that you’re right, only that they don’t have the… I don’t know what to call it, but they don’t want to take you on with this, especially when you just woke up. Well, if you’re going to wake up and start talking like that, then you can’t complain when you get talked back to: I don’t think that you’re right. I think that you might be right, in the sense that, with more time, General Ironwood could have established a tighter perimeter, but there’s no way that you can say for sure that it would have been so tight that that one single grimm wouldn’t have gotten through regardless. In the first place, Rainbow Dash wouldn’t have agreed to it-”

“How do you know?” Ruby asked.

“Because we’ve talked about it,” Sunset replied. “We’ve talked about… sacrifice, as you call it. Except it’s not what Rainbow herself would call sacrifice. She won’t tell me, and I won’t go behind her back to find out, but I think she lost someone. Someone who gave their life for pride or honour or because their dignity was too precious to be forsaken and too precarious to withstand the perceived shame of retreat. I think if you had proposed some last stand down in that tunnel, she would have told you no.”

Ruby’s lip twisted in distaste, bordering upon disgust. “So after all her talk, she’s willing to just abandon those she’s supposed to protect? She’s willing to back down from a fight?”

“Rainbow believes in living to fight another die, is that so wrong?” Sunset asked. “If you die fighting a hopeless battle, then who fights the next battle? And say… I don’t know, say that we agreed with you, to turn at bay and fight, say that Rainbow and Applejack got out, what then? Do you think that Yang would have waited there at the tunnel mouth when she got out? Don’t you think she would have gone in after you, and Ren and Nora with her, because her heart wouldn’t allow her to just stand by and let you die even if her head told her there was nothing she could do? What about protecting their lives?”

“Would you?” Ruby asked.

Sunset blinked. “Would I what?”

“Would you have turned at bay, if I’d suggested it at the time?” Ruby asked.

Sunset swallowed. “We can’t throw bodies at the grimm,” she said. “We won’t win by trading our lives for theirs; there are more of them than there are of us.”

“What about saving lives?”

“You don’t know that!” Sunset shouted.

She could accept that she had done the wrong thing, but what Ruby was talking about was… she could accept that throwing dust onto a fire as she had done, was wrong – she had put people in danger by her act – but what Ruby was talking about was the equivalent of the fireman refusing to retreat before an inferno because he with his one hose might slow down the blaze for a little bit before he was consumed by the flames. And that… that, she could not condone.

She bowed her head, if only for a moment. Her ears drooped. Her tail fell limp behind her. Once more, she ran her hand through her hair as she looked up.

“Ruby, I… there are times when you… I love you, but I don’t know how to explain to you that you should prize your own life dearly.”

Ruby’s voice, when it came, was soft and small. “And I don’t know how to explain to you that, as the protectors of the world, our lives aren’t worth as much as those whom we defend.”

Sunset exhaled lightly through her nostrils. “No, Ruby, you can’t explain that to me.” She hesitated. “All of that probably makes me sound very selfish to you,” she murmured. “I mourn Vale’s losses. I mourn Sky. When I go to sleep, I see their spirits all around me, clamouring to know why I let them down, why I let them die, why I failed them.” She closed her eyes. “‘I was a butcher, I was a carpenter, I was a waitress, I was a housewife, I was a clown. We are those who trusted huntsmen to keep their vows.’” She shuddered, her whole body trembling. “Those words echo in my mind over and over again, and yet…” She opened her eyes, to find Ruby staring at her still, those silver eyes gleaming so brightly. “There are times when I envy your courage, Ruby, and your steadfastness in sticking to your beliefs, but… but I cannot share them. I cannot think so little of our worth and the worth of our existences.”

“I…” Jaune began tentatively. “I’m not so sure that Professor Ozpin does either.”

Sunset and Ruby both looked at him – as did Pyrrha, come to that – but it was Ruby who asked, “What do you mean?”

“You and Sunset, who feel so differently about this,” Jaune pointed out. “It’s almost as though you’re at opposite ends of a scale, selflessness and… selfishness.”

I’m not completely selfish, Sunset thought. And for that matter, martyring yourself without thought for those left behind might, in itself, be said to be a form of extreme selfishness.

Although I suppose that if that is so, it would still put Ruby and I at opposite ends of a hypothetical scale.

And I suppose Jaune didn’t say which of us was which.

“But you’re partnered up,” Jaune went on.

“Pairings are random,” Ruby pointed out.

“Are they, though?” Jaune asked.

“Not always,” Pyrrha admitted. “I… I chose you for my partner,” she added, a flush of colour appearing at her cheeks. “But I’m not sure how Professor Ozpin could be influencing the selection process.”

“As simply as by placing students on the catapults so that certain students land closer to the partners he’d prefer for them,” Jaune suggested, “and he wouldn’t even need to be obvious about it, like a good magician isn’t obvious about which card they want you to take.”

“To what end?” Sunset asked.

“Balance,” Jaune replied. “You both pull each other towards… towards the middle. So maybe, instead of arguing, you should try and learn from one another. Let each other guide you.”

As happened surprisingly often, considering that he looked like he didn’t have a thought in his head half the time, Jaune had just said something rather wise. Sunset and Ruby, when these arguments flared up, had a habit of approaching them as all or nothing affairs. One of them was right, one of them was going to win the row – or else they would just drop it for a while and let it continue simmering beneath the surface of their interactions. Ruby… Sunset liked Ruby, but she didn’t inspire the same tact and courtesy in her that Pyrrha did, and unlike Pyrrha, Ruby wasn’t the sort to shy away from a serious disagreement out of concern for the other party’s feelings. As a result, although they didn’t row often, their disagreements had a tendency to flare up more often than Sunset’s did with Pyrrha.

But perhaps that was because they had been wrong in approaching them that way. Perhaps Jaune had a point. Actually, the more she thought about it, the more convinced Sunset was that Jaune had a very good point. Rainbow had told her that this team needed her, and Sunset had taken that for confirmation that she was at least somewhat in the right… even though she also knew that she was in the wrong in the specific wrong thing that she had done.

Ruby… Ruby had the heart of a true huntress… but the evidence suggested that true huntresses had a somewhat short life expectancy. Yang’s great hope for Ruby was that she would reach twenty years old and graduate before she died, at which point, presumably, all bets would be off. And yet, at the same time, as much as Ruby’s seeming desire to lay down her life for the greater good might cause angst and annoyance in those who would rather she lived on, yet it had to be conceded that there was something magnificent about her devotion to her ideals. She was a storybook hero made flesh: unfailingly righteous, implacable in the face of evil; her strength was as the strength of ten because her heart was pure, always looking for a battle to fight, a monster to slay. Someone who thought nothing of their own safety because their only heart’s desire was to save someone.

Someone who could love and laugh, but not be weakened by that love, not be moved by it, not put that love above the greater good of those who depended on them.

It was admirable, if not always warmly so; sometimes, it was best admired as a painting in an art gallery: academically, and with a degree of detachment. But still, there was much to admire and something to learn from.

Sunset was of a quite different sort, by far, but she fancied that perhaps Ruby could stand to learn something from her too about valuing yourself, about knowing your own worth, about knowing what you could do if you lived.

Sunset didn’t know that Professor Ozpin had arranged this on purpose, but she could conceive that fate had done so without the headmaster’s knowledge or consent. She had told Yang that she, Sunset, was not Raven, and perhaps if Raven hadn’t bailed on Summer Rose, then Summer would still be alive, either because she had an ally by her side in battle or because Raven had taught her to be less careless of her own safety.

Perhaps, if they had been willing to learn from one another, then much sadness in the family could have been avoided.

Or Ruby wouldn’t exist, but let’s not get bogged down in the details.

She had done wrong, and she could acknowledge that to herself – she wouldn’t dare acknowledge it to Ruby. She could do with someone to learn better from, someone to set a better example she could follow.

But she still believed that Ruby could use the same.

“I’m not sure about Professor Ozpin’s intent,” she murmured, “but you make a lot of sense regardless.”

She walked around Ruby’s bed. Pyrrha made way for her, getting off said bed so that when Sunset sat down in the chair by her bedside, Pyrrha was not standing between them.

Sunset reached out for Ruby’s hand with one of her own. “I know that I am not a perfect huntress,” she said. “I know that I don’t have the heart of a huntress. I don’t even know that I am a huntress in spirit. But Professor Ozpin said that I could become a hero, and I’m willing to learn how from you, Ruby; if you’re willing to learn from me how to be…” Sunset searched for a word with which to describe herself. “Someone who comes home. Ruby, when I spoke to Yang, I promised her that I would bring you home, as I mean to bring us all home, just as I promised that I would stay by your side, and not run like Raven did. You may call me selfish, but Jaune’s right: if you can teach me how to be a hero, and I can teach you how to be selfish, then I think we’ll both become better friends for those who care about us. So will you teach me, and let yourself be taught? Please?”

Ruby did not look particularly enthused by the idea, and when she looked away, Sunset felt her stomach begin to chill with fear that she would reject the notion out of hand, like the hand of hers that was tightening its grip upon the sheet as though she were about to say something uncomfortable.

“Okay,” she whispered.

“Huh?” Sunset gasped, so prepared had she been for rejection. “You mean-?”

“I never meant to worry you,” Ruby said. “I never meant to make Yang feel the way she did. I don’t… you guys don’t really get it, but that’s on me as much as you because I can’t explain it. And if you’re willing to change for my sake, then… how can I do less?” She looked at Sunset now, a sad smile upon her face, the rose touched by frost.

Sunset was victorious, and yet, she took no joy in it. This was not a victory won by argument or good sense, but by… it almost felt like emotional blackmail, for all that she, Sunset, was committing to as much as Ruby was.

Nevertheless, the look on Ruby’s face was almost enough to make her change her mind, save that she knew that Jaune was right.

They needed to find balance: Sunset to make sure that she never again repeated what she had done down in the tunnel, and Ruby so that she survived to see her graduation despite this struggle in which they were engaged.

They both needed it, as painful as it might be for Ruby.

“Thank you,” she whispered.

“I’ll try my best,” Ruby said softly. “For you.”

“And so will I,” Sunset vowed.

And never, ever let you know my worst.

Comments

[Mastermind4892]

“It’s not throwing lives away,” Ruby insisted. “It’s sacrifice.”

“What’s the difference?” Sunset demanded.

“One is pointless; the other is what we’re pledged to do!” Ruby declared. “The reason that grimm got loose into the city was time. It’s that simple. General Ironwood was expecting the White Fang, and so he’d set up a wide perimeter. Then he found the grimm were coming, so he tried to tighten his perimeter, but it was too late. He didn’t have time. Time we could have given him if we’d stood our ground and held off the horde. You know I’m right. You all know I’m right.”

No, Ruby. Your idea may be dead on about giving Ironwood's forces more time to secure the line, but the process itself would have indeed made such sacrifices pointless. You were not there during the Breach. You didn't see how it took the combined forces of Beacon, Shade, Haven and Atlas to defeat all the Grimm we saw that day. Heavy artillery, missiles barrages, air superiority with capital ships... that is the force it took to make a difference against the Grimm's numbers. And down in the tunnels, Ruby Rose was unconscious, Rosepetal was down to one team member, and everyone else was exhausted. If they made a last stand against such endless numbers, even in a bottleneck tunnel, they did not have the numbers or remaining strength to contain them long. I would be surprised if they would have held them for as long as a minute. The amount of extra time they would have bought the Atlesians would have been negligible, and therefore it would have indeed been a pointless sacrifice.

Allow me to put this in a way that Ruby would understand, in another brutally honest and borderline insensitive response to her own insensitive question: When her mother died, Salem smiled in satisfaction. Salem rejoiced that another Silver Eye warrior had died, a Silver Eye warrior that will never again impede her plans. With her gone, with SAPR gone, Salem will now have an easier time slaughtering more lives tomorrow... and every day after.

[Adser]

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The grand problem with Ruby mentality is that to be effective with it, to reduce war to numbers that can be solved, you need a cold head, and Ruby is the biggest hothead in the cast.

There are times where sacrificing someone is the best option, but those times are few and far between, most of the time it is a net loss, meaning that you have to consider the whole situation before making such decision. And Ruby is barely able to consider the current situation, much less a future one.

She never has a plan or strategy, she just goes and gives everything she has to all battles, so that means that her sacrifice ploys are 99% of the time the wrong thing to do.

[Kiue Jin]

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When your enemy wants nothing more then your death, survival is the greatest vengeance you can take on them.

[Lancerguy]

Another great chapter with a talk that is long overdue, that which addresses Ruby for having a completely inverted moral web of responsibility. Also, loved that both Sunset and Ruby seem to understand that balance and harmony are required to move forward, even if they accepted that conclusion a little too quickly for my tastes. Both of them are set in their ways at this point, but shaken by recent events so I see compromise as a possible result, but maybe not an immediate one.

[Raul]

Yang’s great hope for Ruby was that she would reach twenty years old and graduate before she died, at which point, presumably, all bets would be off.

Fuck that’s depressing!

I feel Rainbow does need to deliver that herself, “you can only sacrifice yourself once.” So by god live to die another day, but christ. It hurts.

[Luviere]

Rwby..Rwby is kinda dumb isn't she? I like her, like Sunset said, but god damn is she dumb.