Ozpin’s office was the quietest place in Beacon. High in the academy’s central tower, insulated by thick walls and the sheer altitude, it was a sanctuary of ticking clocks and calm consideration. Tonight, it was a pressure cooker.
Jaune lay on an oversized medical gurney, unconscious. His armored form was too large, too alien for the rich mahogany and worn leather of the room. He looked less like a person and more like a piece of munitions someone had left on the furniture. Team RWBY stood clustered near the window, a united but fraying front. Glynda Goodwitch stood by Ozpin’s desk, her arms crossed, her expression a thunderhead of disbelief and suspicion.
And in the center of the room, holding the complete, unnerving attention of Beacon’s headmaster, hovered the Ghost.
“…and that is the extent of my knowledge,” the Ghost concluded, its light pulsing steadily. It had just spent ten minutes delivering a report so fantastical it bordered on lunacy: resurrection, the Traveler, a cosmic war, the Light, and the transformation of Jaune Arc, deceased student, into Crusader-1, amnesiac Titan.
Ozpin, who had not moved a muscle, finally lifted his half-full mug of cocoa. He took a slow sip, his eyes never leaving the Ghost. The silence stretched, filled only by the rhythmic tick-tock of the great clock behind his desk.
“Fascinating,” he said at last. The single word was utterly devoid of the shock or disbelief RWBY had expected. He sounded like a historian who had just found a missing piece of a very, very old puzzle. “A power that is not of this world, that can return the dead to life, but without the soul they once possessed.” He looked at the inert form on the gurney. “Or perhaps, it returns them with a new one.”
“His soul isn’t gone,” Ruby blurted out, taking a step forward. “He’s just… lost. He’s still in there.”
Ozpin’s gaze softened as it fell on her. “Hope is a powerful thing, Miss Rose. Often more powerful than any Semblance. But we must deal with the reality we have, not the one we wish for.” He turned back to the Ghost. “You say you are cut off from your ‘Vanguard’.”
“My long-range communications are nonexistent,” the Ghost confirmed. “I have been operating on my own protocol: find a Guardian, protect humanity.”
“An admirable protocol,” Ozpin mused. He set his mug down with a quiet click. “But it has placed us all in a delicate position. You have brought a soldier from an unknown army into our world, into our school. He has fought our enemies, yes, but he is a complete unknown. A weapon without a wielder we can trust.”
“He is not a weapon! He’s my Guardian!” the Ghost retorted, its shells fluttering with agitation.
“He is a boy who died and has been turned into something else,” Glynda cut in, her voice sharp as glass. “Something you control. Forgive us if we don’t simply take your word for it.”
Yang bristled, taking a protective step closer to the gurney. “He saved all those people at Onn. That’s gotta count for something.”
“It counts for a great deal,” Ozpin agreed smoothly. “It has earned him our gratitude, and a chance. But it does not answer the fundamental questions.” He steepled his fingers, his expression growing serious. “There is one thing that must be done immediately, before any other consideration. His family must be told.”
The air went out of the room. RWBY stared at him. The thought was so obvious, so necessary, and yet so terrifying they had collectively pushed it from their minds.
“You can’t,” Weiss said, her voice barely a whisper. “What would you even say? ‘Congratulations, your son who you mourned for months is back, but he’s a mindless super-soldier from space’?”
“I will say,” Ozpin said, his tone gentle but firm, “that there has been a development. That their son has been found. I will tell them the truth, as best as we understand it. They have a right to know. They have a right to see him.”
He reached for his scroll, his movements deliberate. “They have suffered enough from secrets.”
He tapped the screen and put the call on speaker. The room held its breath as the connection tone chirped once, twice. Then, a woman’s voice, warm but tired. “Hello? Nicolas? Is everything alright?”
“Juniper, it’s Ozpin.”
There was a pause. The warmth in the voice cooled to concern. “Professor. It’s late. Has something happened?”
“Something has,” Ozpin said, his voice a careful blend of compassion and authority. “I am calling about Jaune.”
A sharp intake of breath on the other end of the line. Team RWBY could feel the sudden, sharp pain of a healing wound being torn open again. “Jaune?” his mother whispered, the name a fragile ghost.
“He’s alive,” Ozpin said.
A choked sob. The scroll clattered on the other end, followed by a muffled cry of “Nicolas! Come quick!” Footsteps, then a man’s deeper voice, panicked. “What is it? What’s wrong?”
“It’s Professor Ozpin,” Juniper Arc managed to say. “He… he said…”
“Mr. and Mrs. Arc,” Ozpin continued into the chaotic silence. “Your son is at Beacon. He is safe. But he is… changed. He was wounded, and his memory has not returned. He would not recognize you.”
It was a masterful understatement, a kindness that was also a lie of omission. Ruby felt sick. She watched the unmoving form of her friend, the boy whose family was on the other end of this call, their world being broken and rebuilt in the span of a single sentence. His seven sisters, his father, his mother. She pictured their home, the one Jaune had described as loud and full of love, and how this news would shatter its peace.
“We… we’re on our way,” Nicolas Arc said, his voice thick with emotions too vast to name. “We’ll take the first transport.”
“I will have one sent for you personally,” Ozpin replied. “He will be here when you arrive.”
He ended the call. The silence that rushed back in was heavier than before, freighted with the impending arrival of a family coming to meet the ghost of their son.
“Now,” Ozpin said, turning his attention back to the matter at hand. “We must decide—”
He was cut off by a sound.
It was not a loud sound, but it filled the room entirely. A low, resonant hum, layered with the chime of cascading data and the faint hiss of static. The air grew thick, electric. The Ghost shot upward, its blue eye widening in shock.
“That frequency…” it whispered. “It’s not possible.”
In the center of the office, between the desk and the gurney, the air began to shimmer. Light, the same brilliant blue as the Ghost’s eye, bent and warped. A column of swirling particles descended from the ceiling, coalescing with impossible speed.
Glynda’s hand flew to her crop. Team RWBY instinctively drew their weapons, forming a protective crescent around Jaune’s gurney.
Two figures resolved out of the light.
The first was a man of colossal stature, even larger than Jaune, his skin the pale grey of twilight. He was clad in magnificent cobalt and silver armor, marked with the same T-shaped sigil as Jaune’s Titan mark. His face was grim and lined with a terrible authority.
The second was a woman of average height, her dark hair pulled back severely. She wore flowing, elegant robes over practical armor, and her eyes—her eyes burned with an intelligence so fierce it felt like a physical force.
They stood in the center of Ozpin’s office as if they owned it.
“The Light flare from this sector was… unexpected,” the woman said, her voice calm and clear, her gaze sweeping over the room and dismissing everything in it as irrelevant. “But unmistakable.”
The massive Titan ignored everyone. His gaze, hard as granite, landed on the small, floating robot. “Ghost,” he commanded, his voice a deep baritone that vibrated in the floorboards. “Report. By what authority have you created a Guardian in an uncharted system?”
The Ghost, which had been frozen in disbelief, snapped to attention. It flew before the two newcomers, its light flickering with a deference that bordered on fear. “Commander Zavala. Ikora Rey. I… I was disconnected. I followed protocol. The Traveler’s Light was strong in him. He was a candidate.”
Zavala’s eyes finally moved from the Ghost to the gurney. He took in the white and gold armor, the makeshift repairs, the exhausted stillness of Crusader-1. His expression did not change. It was the look of a general assessing a piece of equipment.
Ruby stood frozen, Crescent Rose held loosely in her hands. These were the Vanguard. The leaders from the Ghost’s story. They were here. Hope surged through her—a desperate, brilliant hope. They could help him. They would know what to do.
But as she watched Zavala’s cold, impassive gaze sweep over Jaune, a new and terrible feeling began to curdle that hope into dread. He wasn’t looking at a lost boy. He wasn’t looking at a hero. He was looking at an asset.
Her mission to bring Jaune back, which had seemed so clear just moments ago, suddenly felt impossibly small. She was no longer just fighting an absence in her friend’s mind. She was now standing against the very people who had made him. And she had no idea if they were here to save him, or to reclaim him.