[That's another thing he is still finding himself settling into, those little pings of happiness whenever he walks into the room. It is one thing to be aware, logically, that the person who you've become romantically involved with enjoys your presence in his life, but it's another to physically feel it every time, especially when you still have the baggage of feeling at a baseline like a burden on those you love.
It draws a little smile to his face as Break settles beside him and grips his arm, while still reassuring him he's alright.]
Yeah, sure.
[That's why he came out here in the first place, of course, but admitting that is too sappy.]
Ah, well. Quite suddenly, I had some sort of...it must have been a dream? Trench nonsense to that effect. But in that "dream", I was in Remnant, as though I'd always been. Had a proper Semblance of my own and everything.
[Obvious, then, why he'd hunt down Qrow for this immediately, even if he doesn't seem distressed at all. Just a little out of it, as he sorts through having had a whole other life dumped into his head. Idly, his hand plays with Qrow's sleeve, mostly because it is there.]
I'm uncertain of...how much of it might have been reflections of things that were "real".
...Huh. Fun new twist on the memory shares, I guess.
[He says this so flatly, the way one accustomed to Trench's climate might say "it is cold and rainy again today, I guess". At a certain point, one no longer even really sweats the regular mind invasions -- especially when it's someone you've grown to trust so implicitly.
He could buy time to ask about the man's semblance in the memory, and if it were anyone else, he probably would. But it's better to just rip off the bandaid and get the miserable part of the conversation over with, he thinks, and then maybe they can chatter over the fun part like his Semblance and if this version of him still hated guns.]
[Break hesitates, putting his thoughts in order. Truthfully, this is one that may well be shittier for Qrow to hear about than it was for him to live through, if everything matches up.]
I'd swung by Vale for the -- Vytal Festival? But it all went to hell, and...Beacon was destroyed.
[Beacon had never been home to him, even in this memory. Break is aware, though, that it's where Qrow grew up for real, and perhaps the last place of true safety and optimism he'd ever known. He lingers with Qrow for that reason, rather than puttering off to make tea just yet.]
[Qrow's eyes do widen, slightly, when Break tells him what he saw. In the last two years, for all the memories he's had pulled out for public display, nothing's ever touched on the events surrounding that clusterfuck.
It could be worse; the actual battle wasn't the hardest part for Qrow, really. It was more the aftermath--finding Ozpin's corpse in the rubble, hanging onto his cane, the sudden crush of responsibility without Oz at the helm and no way to know how long he would be gone--trying to figure out next steps and hold the fort down until Oz came back. The loss of Yang's arm, the breakup of team RWBY that reminded him so much of STRQ's collapse. Even so, there's a slight heaviness to his sigh. It's not a pleasant memory.]
Yeah, that's real. It's how the kids got involved in the war.
Edited (i know how math works) 2022-10-10 00:18 (UTC)
[It's a small reaction, but it's enough, and placing the incident in a context he had before this strange dream serves as further confirmation. Break nods to himself, still looking a little absent.]
I wasn't really involved with the kids directly. I was -- helping to evacuate the town? The grimm had closed in. [A pause.] Tea and snacks, I think.
[This does not go with tea at all but this story calls for the unhealthiest of radioactive orange cheese snack, he thinks. But he also doesn't want Break to have to conjure them one at a time now, after what he's just seen. It's not exactly the sort of thing that lends itself to a whimsical magic state of mind.
He doesn't really wait for an answer, rifling through the pantry as Break puts on a pot of tea. He finds some spicy nacho chips instead, and settles on those as he perches on the chair by the window, munching on his chips like a particularly disgruntled badger.]
It was a clever plan, on Salem's part. She knew her people would be outnumbered if they went after the tower directly. So they found a way to put on a spectacle, instead. Knowing the panic would draw enough Grimm to overrun the whole city.
[There's a level of embarrassment to it, too. Even knowing the broader scope of the picture now, it was his job to find out Salem's plans before they could be put into place. It was foolish to carry on with the Vytal Festival as though nothing had happened to Fall, as though there hadn't been a recent intruder to Beacon. And Ironwood's fleet had just handed her all the more means to spread fear and panic on a silver platter.
He looks up at Break as he arrives with the tea, before sighing again, staring into his own older reflection in the cup.]
...Ruby and Yang were only first-years, when it all went down. Yang lost her arm in the battle.
Edited (repetition is my mortal enemy) 2022-10-17 09:10 (UTC)
[Door, schmoor. The true indicator of Qrow being welcome in this household is that there is an indulgent stash of his atrocious junk food in the pantry amidst all the made-from-scratch rich people cooking that goes on in here.
But, Break is Break and he cares about the nuances of tea and snacks very much, so with the other digging into his spicy orange crunchies he selects a smoked tea with a deep, rich flavor that's almost savory. It suits his mood, too, and he sifts through his own snack stash to find the last of the molasses cookies to go with it, made from the one jar of the stuff they were able to scrounge up recently. After everything he just saw, his usual penchants for fruity teas and fluffy vanilla cookies just feel sort of...off.]
Early on, you told me that...it was a surprise that I'd lost an eye and simply done without it, as in Remnant prosthetics are the way of things. I imagine that's how it went for your Yang, too, right...?
[Still looking far away as he, too, settles in, Break's hand rises to his face in an unconscious gesture, as through protecting the one eye he does still have. Poor thing has been through a lot.]
It sounded careless to me when you said it, back then. Lose an arm and attach a new one, carry on. However, thinking of it with these alternate memories so fresh...no, no, it still makes me very angry. A kid who has been through combat school since she could toddle is still just a kid. To knowingly force young ones who had no business seeing fighting with true consequences yet into such an affair, for them to endure the trauma of such a wound when their bodies aren't even fully grown yet, that's...
[He was still very much himself in the "dream". Remnant gave him a great many different perspectives, but it seems he still came to many of the same conclusions. One of those is that throwing kids into a war they had nothing to do with is shit.]
Yeah. Top of the line from good ol' Ironwood, even.
[The tidal wave of sheer bitterness that crashes over the bond as he says that name is truly something, a large scratch in the otherwise somber but steady record of his state of mind in this conversation.
But he does not elaborate, and after Break expresses his anger, Qrow is just quiet for some time, before he sighs.]
It wasn't supposed to be like that. Oz kept the war a tightly guarded secret--only a few of us were ever in on it. Salem blindsided us--she knew how Oz operated, that the Vytal Festival would be too important to cancel without stirring up the same kind of anxiety and panic--and once the Grimm breached Amity...
[He scrubs at his face.]
They're Huntsmen, you know? To not stand and fight, protect their friends and the innocent people who'd gathered there...it'd have been unthinkable. We could've demanded 'em to evacuate or be expelled, and I'd eat my whole scythe if most of 'em didn't stick around and fight anyway.
...But you're not wrong. It should've never gone that far. We fucked up, and they had to deal with it.
[He does not dwell on the war very much, these days, because he needed to be able to bury it or it would drive him mad, but sometimes bits of it come back up to the surface. All the people that were lost over all those centuries, who died believing they were saving the world. The sacrifices and the suffering. All for a war that could never be won, but its loss would mean armaggeddon.]
[That feeling of disgust from Qrow has Break squinting hard, aligning that feeling to the context he has now, and the context he had from Qrow in the first place. They've never discussed Ironwood directly that he can recall, but they had not had the blood bond before, at any time when the war came up. Perhaps, he thinks, now he knows why.]
I was not acquainted with your girls in the dream. However, having spoken with Miss Ruby at length here in Trench, she definitely has "chosen one disease". Definitely, definitely. I thiiiiiiiiiiink...they'd have stayed. Yes.
[His frown deepens.]
...I was one of Ozpin's. Not from the -- not from the start. I wasn't a Huntsman. Rather, he scooped me up into his fold after...
[The continuing befuddlement over the bond solidifies into annoyance. Break possesses many different and distinct forms of annoyance, Qrow will have discovered by now; taking a look at the things that cheese him off is like walking into an ice cream shop and finding an amusing variety of different flavors of the same thing. This one in particular is the petty kind, most often surfacing when someone known for making life difficult for other Sleepers has posted something stupid on the omni network again.]
Bit of a dick, that Ironwood, isn't he? Atlas as a whole, what a stodgy mess.
[Chosen one disease is not something Qrow is innocent of contributing to, if he's honest--he told Ruby about her eyes, after Beacon. But it's complicated, too--she inherited more than her mother's eyes, after all. Saving people has been in her blood since she was small. And Salem's people would've always come after her, eventually. Patch would never have been a good place to hide long-term.
Those thoughts are disrupted as Break brings the conversation back to Ironwood.]
Oh, you have no idea. And back then I actually thought of him as a friend.
[Uttering the word "Friend" comes with it that violent storm surge of emotions again -- the bitter sting of betrayal, an absolutely crushing sense of grief, a rage that was genuinely murderous at one point before being dulled by the passage of time. How well Qrow copes with his feelings at any given time varies, but the intensity at which he experiences them is always pretty consistent. Perhaps Break might be getting a bit of a firsthand look at why Qrow had spent so many years drowning them in alcohol.]
[But then, Qrow's brain starts to catch up on processing the emotions that are coming through from Break's end, and his eyes suddenly widen with realization.]
Wait, don't tell me--
[...and then he just lets out a cackle, pure schadenfreude, as he puts the last of the pieces together.]
[Break delivers this as a light, gentle drawl, accompanied by a prim little sniff. Then he shoves an entire cookie into his mouth in one go. There may as well be a flashing neon sign above his head that reads, UNDERSTATEMENT.]
[That actually wins a real laugh from Qrow, whose mood was going on a pretty intense nosedive from this line of conversation. Damn. Even as a fake memory, that's hilarious. He appreciates there being this silver lining to Trench's bullshit this one time.]
Yeaaaah, that's pretty much Atlas' whole deal. You remember when I told you about the Great War, right? Atlas started that one. Big surprise, I'm sure.
[Break's alternate self might well have already known that -- but Qrow's still a salty bitch, so. He is going to grumble about it anyway.]
[He pauses, blinking a little at the absurdity of it. "His family", as though the ones he's thinking of specifically actually existed. Well, maybe in some realm they actually do. Remnant Regnards. After all, both his world and Ange's acknowledge that all of these universes are possible and probably tied together in some fashion. Break believes that's how Trench is able to pull people in from so many other worlds, too, though he doesn't bother to think about it much.]
...I only -- lived the one little bit, but...I knew my own story, you know? We were from there, and most all of us military. I imagine it's the closest thing the dream could sort out to my real family having produced knights for so many generations. I did not...thrive, in that setting, and...as a young man there was a certain incident wherein my involvement got a great many people killed. Less reprehensible than the truth of things, I suppose, but enough that I felt a need to leave Atlas entirely. And, of course, you know how Ozpin is about collecting listless strays.
[He gives no indication that he intends to elaborate on "the incident", but Qrow knows the real story, so there's no doubt he can detect the parallels anyway. A fighter brought up to do great and noble things from childhood, carrying on family tradition, only to bungle it all somehow and come out of the other side of things thoroughly fallen and with blood on his hands. But then, caught by someone who could give him a reason to keep going, and gave him a chance to accept it on his own terms.
It all checks out. And it's no surprise his story would manifest in such a way in this fake Remnant, really. He and Qrow have always been terribly alike in all the ways that matter most.]
[Break doesn't need to elaborate on details. Qrow can pretty much imagine the shape of it, based on everything they've talked about over the last year and change. The mention of Oz's tendency to collect listless strays brings him back to that conversation they'd had in this house, back when their friendship was new. They'd talked about so many things that night, from the mentors that believed in them to their personal apocalypses to family. It's nostalgic, and maybe it's because of that comfortable ease that he can share something a little more vulnerable.]
He always did know how to draw in the people who needed something to believe in the most. Back then, I used to think of him as someone who had all the answers, 'cause of that.
[If Break had met him a year prior to Trench, Qrow would've sounded a lot more bitter about that. Instead, he just sounds...solemn. Maybe a little sad. Ozpin was a safe harbor when he was a child, and though that pedestal needed to be broken to build a new foundation atop it, one never really forgets that feeling.]
I think the weirdest part of Deerington for me wasn't all the freaky dream logic, but realizing that he was so good with those people because he was one of them.
[That immortality had broken him so utterly that he kept himself going off the faith and hope of others, that if he could still inspire the lost and hurting to believe in something bigger than themselves, he could hold onto the will to keep fighting too. Qrow hadn't processed the weight of all those millennia until the dream made him experience his old mentor's memories -- until he realized that his own griefs had nearly shattered him, and he'd lived them for only a couple short decades.
To face the prospect of losing everyone you love, lifetime after lifetime for thousands of years with no relief on the horizon by your own choosing, all for the sake of others being able to live in peace just a little longer, a little longer, a little longer, forever .... no human being was meant to bear that gracefully. Understanding that was the first step to being able to forgive him.]
[This is one of those subjects where Break and Qrow are in tune enough to understand one another perfectly, but just different enough that they are distinctly their own people.]
I don't know that "something to believe in" is quite the way I would phrase it for myself. Rather, I'm the sort of person who needs a reason, if I'm to keep going. I can believe in all sorts of things, but if I can't find a purpose for my own existence, something I exist for, then...
[He shrugs. They've spoken before about how Qrow, at a loss after learning the truth behind the unwinnable war, devoted himself to the kids -- because even if he couldn't believe in what they were fighting for anymore, he could still protect the people he loved. Qrow knows, too, how it was Break's quest for White Alice that kept him going, and watched him use his devotion to his kids to find his feet in Trench. They both get it, even coming at the same thing from different angles. That's just how they are.]
Your Ozpin was very like my Rainsworths to me, in the dream. He had a job for me to do, saw to it that I was trained in how to do it, and set me loose to handle it as I saw fit. That I was able to come and go as it suited me, mm. That was why devoting myself to his cause with a whole heart was something I could do.
[He does get it--that was one of the earliest things they'd bonded over, after the kids they had to watch out for. They're both people who need to find somewhere they're needed and give themselves over to that. But the difference, perhaps, is that while the reasons Break has found to exist have changed throughout his life, he's always had one in some form or another.
For the first half of Qrow's life, though...he didn't.]
Yeah, I get it. If my family went back to the sea tomorrow, I'm not sure what I'd do with myself.
[Akechi had called him out on it, back in Deerington. If you were to be left alone, who would you live for? He didn't have an answer then. He still doesn't.]
...Back then, though, it was different. All I ever knew before Beacon was how to survive. When you've got nothing else, you think that's enough, you know?
[He shakes his head, letting out an almost wistful-sounding hum.]
Think teaching people like me how to live helped remind him that it all mattered. That there were still things in the world worth fighting for.
[Break lets out a hum that's a little more emotional than his usual agreements. He does know what he'd do with himself if everyone he's come to care for her returned to the sea tomorrow -- he'd stay exactly where he is, all alone, keeping things ready in case any of them ever returned like a lighthouse standing tall in the dark. Being a fool, he'd probably be falling all over again for a new gaggle of loved ones at the same time, constantly setting himself up for more of such feelings.
It's not a fate he wants even as he's accepted it as an inevitability if it's what this world decides to give him, and in fact the reminder of it causes a palpable surge of melancholy over the blood bond. He takes a long sip of his tea as he gets it under control, and the silence drags itself heavily across the moment.]
...I don't believe that my Remnant self had reached that point yet. [It's a soft admission.] I say as much because...it was my kids who taught this "real" me such, and -- late enough that I have not been able to fully embrace such until...arriving here. The difference between having a role in the story that one is content enough to play and...caring enough to try to write a different ending is...
[The burst of melancholy is met with a little electric charge of anxiety; it's undirected, in this case. Formless, shapeless. But there's still a weight to it, serrated teeth in its edges.]
Caring enough to try to earn the ending you want means opening yourself up to the possibility of failing.
[It means scraping your ass off the pavement of a bar and fighting alongside your kids in Atlas despite the impossible odds, seemingly finding a path to the next chapter and watching it all fall to ruin before you.
There is a good reason they chose to walk away from Remnant, as the dream crumbled.]
[That's a loaded statement, and Break is silent in the face of it for several moments. It's a desperation he's known intimately several times over. He cared enough to hurl himself straight into hell for the ending he wanted, once, and didn't get it. Then he signed on to his own ending without realizing he'd care about completely different things by the time he actually arrived there, and most of the few acceptable parts of it that were left were torn from his hands, too. About the only thing he can still say with any pride is that he did what only he was able to do back then, and while that certainly isn't anything small in the midst of the larger story, most days it's overshadowed by the bloody shrapnel he flung into his dearest people on his way out.
It takes a concentrated effort not to fall into his usual funk about that. Instead:]
That other me…I wonder if Trench conjured the notion of him up to entertain itself, or if that dream was a brief connection to a reality that truly exists. And, if it's the latter, I wonder what his ending will be.
[The notion of other versions of himself out there doesn't bother him much. He doesn't really want to meet any of them, mind, but the idea of their existence doesn't trouble him.]
I have an unpleasant hunch that he may not last much longer than I did.
[It's a strange idea, but not one without merit. After all, there were the January sheddings, and there'd been an implication along those lines when they'd started finding dying Wastes in the crumbling dream that were themselves Sleepers.
Qrow feels similarly about the whole situation. It's honestly somewhat comforting to him that there's some version out there to deal with the war so he himself can firmly leave Remnant in the past and focus on the new life he's been building here. Even so, he wouldn't really want to be confronted with alternate versions of him either.]
If that Remnant ran across the same lines as mine, it's probably not a good ending, no. Huntsmen don't tend to last that long out there in general, and then you bring Salem into the equation for those of us in Oz's inner circle...
[he shakes his head]
You know how it is. Fighting in apocalypse wars isn't exactly good for your health.
[He expects his own ending to be far from peaceful. Especially knowing the state of things as he left them, two years ago. Because unless they're mistaken about it all, a Qrow with nothing more to lose is one that is one that's liable to be exceptionally reckless.]
No. And, on top of the usual nonsense, my semblance was — well, breaking things, essentially. I was still using my old name, so perhaps that was a tribute of sorts to my present one. [Break finally smiles again, but it's self-deprecating, and a little mean.] With no lock able to keep me out of places I should not have been, I imagine that version's capacity for getting into trouble was near limitless.
[He may not be the most self-aware person around, but any menace worth his salt can spot a skill or item absolutely no one wants him to have from a mile away. And there's no way any version of himself wouldn't make reckless decisions with an ability like that. Remnant Break may well be one who manages to get himself murdered before anything else takes him out.]
I carried a terribly boring sword with no shotguns in it for that reason, I’m sorry to tell you. And, I never bothered to replace my eye permanently. The risks in being unable to control what was damaged if my semblance got away from me were simply too great.
[You know how sometimes, someone says something and you get a Thought stuck in your head that's frankly dumb but it will not leave without being entertained? Qrow perhaps might have lingered a bit more on that last part and how he can relate to it, if not for that. Break can probably tell, if not from the bond, then from the silly smirk that forms on his lover's face.]
I don't know, it sounds like it still counts if your soul was the gun.
[…yeah. That's dumb. But it's dumb in a way that has Break opening and closing his mouth a couple of times as he gathers up a baffled protest, dumbly.]
Wha. That's — my soul is not explosive and noisy! [ lol ] And it wasn't as though I was going about blowing holes in things. You couldn't follow my trail of destruction and think, "ah, yes, the perpetrator of this business definitely had a gun."
[He waves his hands around ineffectually as he says this. Boyfriend just called him a shotgun??? He cannot believe —]
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It draws a little smile to his face as Break settles beside him and grips his arm, while still reassuring him he's alright.]
Yeah, sure.
[That's why he came out here in the first place, of course, but admitting that is too sappy.]
What was it?
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[Obvious, then, why he'd hunt down Qrow for this immediately, even if he doesn't seem distressed at all. Just a little out of it, as he sorts through having had a whole other life dumped into his head. Idly, his hand plays with Qrow's sleeve, mostly because it is there.]
I'm uncertain of...how much of it might have been reflections of things that were "real".
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[He says this so flatly, the way one accustomed to Trench's climate might say "it is cold and rainy again today, I guess". At a certain point, one no longer even really sweats the regular mind invasions -- especially when it's someone you've grown to trust so implicitly.
He could buy time to ask about the man's semblance in the memory, and if it were anyone else, he probably would. But it's better to just rip off the bandaid and get the miserable part of the conversation over with, he thinks, and then maybe they can chatter over the fun part like his Semblance and if this version of him still hated guns.]
Which shitty thing did it dump on you this time?
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[Break hesitates, putting his thoughts in order. Truthfully, this is one that may well be shittier for Qrow to hear about than it was for him to live through, if everything matches up.]
I'd swung by Vale for the -- Vytal Festival? But it all went to hell, and...Beacon was destroyed.
[Beacon had never been home to him, even in this memory. Break is aware, though, that it's where Qrow grew up for real, and perhaps the last place of true safety and optimism he'd ever known. He lingers with Qrow for that reason, rather than puttering off to make tea just yet.]
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It could be worse; the actual battle wasn't the hardest part for Qrow, really. It was more the aftermath--finding Ozpin's corpse in the rubble, hanging onto his cane, the sudden crush of responsibility without Oz at the helm and no way to know how long he would be gone--trying to figure out next steps and hold the fort down until Oz came back. The loss of Yang's arm, the breakup of team RWBY that reminded him so much of STRQ's collapse. Even so, there's a slight heaviness to his sigh. It's not a pleasant memory.]
Yeah, that's real. It's how the kids got involved in the war.
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I wasn't really involved with the kids directly. I was -- helping to evacuate the town? The grimm had closed in. [A pause.] Tea and snacks, I think.
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[This does not go with tea at all but this story calls for the unhealthiest of radioactive orange cheese snack, he thinks. But he also doesn't want Break to have to conjure them one at a time now, after what he's just seen. It's not exactly the sort of thing that lends itself to a whimsical magic state of mind.
He doesn't really wait for an answer, rifling through the pantry as Break puts on a pot of tea. He finds some spicy nacho chips instead, and settles on those as he perches on the chair by the window, munching on his chips like a particularly disgruntled badger.]
It was a clever plan, on Salem's part. She knew her people would be outnumbered if they went after the tower directly. So they found a way to put on a spectacle, instead. Knowing the panic would draw enough Grimm to overrun the whole city.
[There's a level of embarrassment to it, too. Even knowing the broader scope of the picture now, it was his job to find out Salem's plans before they could be put into place. It was foolish to carry on with the Vytal Festival as though nothing had happened to Fall, as though there hadn't been a recent intruder to Beacon. And Ironwood's fleet had just handed her all the more means to spread fear and panic on a silver platter.
He looks up at Break as he arrives with the tea, before sighing again, staring into his own older reflection in the cup.]
...Ruby and Yang were only first-years, when it all went down. Yang lost her arm in the battle.
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[Door, schmoor. The true indicator of Qrow being welcome in this household is that there is an indulgent stash of his atrocious junk food in the pantry amidst all the made-from-scratch rich people cooking that goes on in here.
But, Break is Break and he cares about the nuances of tea and snacks very much, so with the other digging into his spicy orange crunchies he selects a smoked tea with a deep, rich flavor that's almost savory. It suits his mood, too, and he sifts through his own snack stash to find the last of the molasses cookies to go with it, made from the one jar of the stuff they were able to scrounge up recently. After everything he just saw, his usual penchants for fruity teas and fluffy vanilla cookies just feel sort of...off.]
Early on, you told me that...it was a surprise that I'd lost an eye and simply done without it, as in Remnant prosthetics are the way of things. I imagine that's how it went for your Yang, too, right...?
[Still looking far away as he, too, settles in, Break's hand rises to his face in an unconscious gesture, as through protecting the one eye he does still have. Poor thing has been through a lot.]
It sounded careless to me when you said it, back then. Lose an arm and attach a new one, carry on. However, thinking of it with these alternate memories so fresh...no, no, it still makes me very angry. A kid who has been through combat school since she could toddle is still just a kid. To knowingly force young ones who had no business seeing fighting with true consequences yet into such an affair, for them to endure the trauma of such a wound when their bodies aren't even fully grown yet, that's...
[He was still very much himself in the "dream". Remnant gave him a great many different perspectives, but it seems he still came to many of the same conclusions. One of those is that throwing kids into a war they had nothing to do with is shit.]
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[The tidal wave of sheer bitterness that crashes over the bond as he says that name is truly something, a large scratch in the otherwise somber but steady record of his state of mind in this conversation.
But he does not elaborate, and after Break expresses his anger, Qrow is just quiet for some time, before he sighs.]
It wasn't supposed to be like that. Oz kept the war a tightly guarded secret--only a few of us were ever in on it. Salem blindsided us--she knew how Oz operated, that the Vytal Festival would be too important to cancel without stirring up the same kind of anxiety and panic--and once the Grimm breached Amity...
[He scrubs at his face.]
They're Huntsmen, you know? To not stand and fight, protect their friends and the innocent people who'd gathered there...it'd have been unthinkable. We could've demanded 'em to evacuate or be expelled, and I'd eat my whole scythe if most of 'em didn't stick around and fight anyway.
...But you're not wrong. It should've never gone that far. We fucked up, and they had to deal with it.
[He does not dwell on the war very much, these days, because he needed to be able to bury it or it would drive him mad, but sometimes bits of it come back up to the surface. All the people that were lost over all those centuries, who died believing they were saving the world. The sacrifices and the suffering. All for a war that could never be won, but its loss would mean armaggeddon.]
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I was not acquainted with your girls in the dream. However, having spoken with Miss Ruby at length here in Trench, she definitely has "chosen one disease". Definitely, definitely. I thiiiiiiiiiiink...they'd have stayed. Yes.
[His frown deepens.]
...I was one of Ozpin's. Not from the -- not from the start. I wasn't a Huntsman. Rather, he scooped me up into his fold after...
[The continuing befuddlement over the bond solidifies into annoyance. Break possesses many different and distinct forms of annoyance, Qrow will have discovered by now; taking a look at the things that cheese him off is like walking into an ice cream shop and finding an amusing variety of different flavors of the same thing. This one in particular is the petty kind, most often surfacing when someone known for making life difficult for other Sleepers has posted something stupid on the omni network again.]
Bit of a dick, that Ironwood, isn't he? Atlas as a whole, what a stodgy mess.
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Those thoughts are disrupted as Break brings the conversation back to Ironwood.]
Oh, you have no idea. And back then I actually thought of him as a friend.
[Uttering the word "Friend" comes with it that violent storm surge of emotions again -- the bitter sting of betrayal, an absolutely crushing sense of grief, a rage that was genuinely murderous at one point before being dulled by the passage of time. How well Qrow copes with his feelings at any given time varies, but the intensity at which he experiences them is always pretty consistent. Perhaps Break might be getting a bit of a firsthand look at why Qrow had spent so many years drowning them in alcohol.]
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Wait, don't tell me--
[...and then he just lets out a cackle, pure schadenfreude, as he puts the last of the pieces together.]
Man, I wish I could've seen his face.
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[Break delivers this as a light, gentle drawl, accompanied by a prim little sniff. Then he shoves an entire cookie into his mouth in one go. There may as well be a flashing neon sign above his head that reads, UNDERSTATEMENT.]
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Yeaaaah, that's pretty much Atlas' whole deal. You remember when I told you about the Great War, right? Atlas started that one. Big surprise, I'm sure.
[Break's alternate self might well have already known that -- but Qrow's still a salty bitch, so. He is going to grumble about it anyway.]
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[He pauses, blinking a little at the absurdity of it. "His family", as though the ones he's thinking of specifically actually existed. Well, maybe in some realm they actually do. Remnant Regnards. After all, both his world and Ange's acknowledge that all of these universes are possible and probably tied together in some fashion. Break believes that's how Trench is able to pull people in from so many other worlds, too, though he doesn't bother to think about it much.]
...I only -- lived the one little bit, but...I knew my own story, you know? We were from there, and most all of us military. I imagine it's the closest thing the dream could sort out to my real family having produced knights for so many generations. I did not...thrive, in that setting, and...as a young man there was a certain incident wherein my involvement got a great many people killed. Less reprehensible than the truth of things, I suppose, but enough that I felt a need to leave Atlas entirely. And, of course, you know how Ozpin is about collecting listless strays.
[He gives no indication that he intends to elaborate on "the incident", but Qrow knows the real story, so there's no doubt he can detect the parallels anyway. A fighter brought up to do great and noble things from childhood, carrying on family tradition, only to bungle it all somehow and come out of the other side of things thoroughly fallen and with blood on his hands. But then, caught by someone who could give him a reason to keep going, and gave him a chance to accept it on his own terms.
It all checks out. And it's no surprise his story would manifest in such a way in this fake Remnant, really. He and Qrow have always been terribly alike in all the ways that matter most.]
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He always did know how to draw in the people who needed something to believe in the most. Back then, I used to think of him as someone who had all the answers, 'cause of that.
[If Break had met him a year prior to Trench, Qrow would've sounded a lot more bitter about that. Instead, he just sounds...solemn. Maybe a little sad. Ozpin was a safe harbor when he was a child, and though that pedestal needed to be broken to build a new foundation atop it, one never really forgets that feeling.]
I think the weirdest part of Deerington for me wasn't all the freaky dream logic, but realizing that he was so good with those people because he was one of them.
[That immortality had broken him so utterly that he kept himself going off the faith and hope of others, that if he could still inspire the lost and hurting to believe in something bigger than themselves, he could hold onto the will to keep fighting too. Qrow hadn't processed the weight of all those millennia until the dream made him experience his old mentor's memories -- until he realized that his own griefs had nearly shattered him, and he'd lived them for only a couple short decades.
To face the prospect of losing everyone you love, lifetime after lifetime for thousands of years with no relief on the horizon by your own choosing, all for the sake of others being able to live in peace just a little longer, a little longer, a little longer, forever .... no human being was meant to bear that gracefully. Understanding that was the first step to being able to forgive him.]
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I don't know that "something to believe in" is quite the way I would phrase it for myself. Rather, I'm the sort of person who needs a reason, if I'm to keep going. I can believe in all sorts of things, but if I can't find a purpose for my own existence, something I exist for, then...
[He shrugs. They've spoken before about how Qrow, at a loss after learning the truth behind the unwinnable war, devoted himself to the kids -- because even if he couldn't believe in what they were fighting for anymore, he could still protect the people he loved. Qrow knows, too, how it was Break's quest for White Alice that kept him going, and watched him use his devotion to his kids to find his feet in Trench. They both get it, even coming at the same thing from different angles. That's just how they are.]
Your Ozpin was very like my Rainsworths to me, in the dream. He had a job for me to do, saw to it that I was trained in how to do it, and set me loose to handle it as I saw fit. That I was able to come and go as it suited me, mm. That was why devoting myself to his cause with a whole heart was something I could do.
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For the first half of Qrow's life, though...he didn't.]
Yeah, I get it. If my family went back to the sea tomorrow, I'm not sure what I'd do with myself.
[Akechi had called him out on it, back in Deerington. If you were to be left alone, who would you live for? He didn't have an answer then. He still doesn't.]
...Back then, though, it was different. All I ever knew before Beacon was how to survive. When you've got nothing else, you think that's enough, you know?
[He shakes his head, letting out an almost wistful-sounding hum.]
Think teaching people like me how to live helped remind him that it all mattered. That there were still things in the world worth fighting for.
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It's not a fate he wants even as he's accepted it as an inevitability if it's what this world decides to give him, and in fact the reminder of it causes a palpable surge of melancholy over the blood bond. He takes a long sip of his tea as he gets it under control, and the silence drags itself heavily across the moment.]
...I don't believe that my Remnant self had reached that point yet. [It's a soft admission.] I say as much because...it was my kids who taught this "real" me such, and -- late enough that I have not been able to fully embrace such until...arriving here. The difference between having a role in the story that one is content enough to play and...caring enough to try to write a different ending is...
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[The burst of melancholy is met with a little electric charge of anxiety; it's undirected, in this case. Formless, shapeless. But there's still a weight to it, serrated teeth in its edges.]
Caring enough to try to earn the ending you want means opening yourself up to the possibility of failing.
[It means scraping your ass off the pavement of a bar and fighting alongside your kids in Atlas despite the impossible odds, seemingly finding a path to the next chapter and watching it all fall to ruin before you.
There is a good reason they chose to walk away from Remnant, as the dream crumbled.]
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It takes a concentrated effort not to fall into his usual funk about that. Instead:]
That other me…I wonder if Trench conjured the notion of him up to entertain itself, or if that dream was a brief connection to a reality that truly exists. And, if it's the latter, I wonder what his ending will be.
[The notion of other versions of himself out there doesn't bother him much. He doesn't really want to meet any of them, mind, but the idea of their existence doesn't trouble him.]
I have an unpleasant hunch that he may not last much longer than I did.
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Qrow feels similarly about the whole situation. It's honestly somewhat comforting to him that there's some version out there to deal with the war so he himself can firmly leave Remnant in the past and focus on the new life he's been building here. Even so, he wouldn't really want to be confronted with alternate versions of him either.]
If that Remnant ran across the same lines as mine, it's probably not a good ending, no. Huntsmen don't tend to last that long out there in general, and then you bring Salem into the equation for those of us in Oz's inner circle...
[he shakes his head]
You know how it is. Fighting in apocalypse wars isn't exactly good for your health.
[He expects his own ending to be far from peaceful. Especially knowing the state of things as he left them, two years ago. Because unless they're mistaken about it all, a Qrow with nothing more to lose is one that is one that's liable to be exceptionally reckless.]
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[He may not be the most self-aware person around, but any menace worth his salt can spot a skill or item absolutely no one wants him to have from a mile away. And there's no way any version of himself wouldn't make reckless decisions with an ability like that. Remnant Break may well be one who manages to get himself murdered before anything else takes him out.]
I carried a terribly boring sword with no shotguns in it for that reason, I’m sorry to tell you. And, I never bothered to replace my eye permanently. The risks in being unable to control what was damaged if my semblance got away from me were simply too great.
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I don't know, it sounds like it still counts if your soul was the gun.
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Wha. That's — my soul is not explosive and noisy! [ lol ] And it wasn't as though I was going about blowing holes in things. You couldn't follow my trail of destruction and think, "ah, yes, the perpetrator of this business definitely had a gun."
[He waves his hands around ineffectually as he says this. Boyfriend just called him a shotgun??? He cannot believe —]