Chapter II: Kindred Spirits

CHAPTER TWO: KINDRED SPIRITS

Part I — Hearth and Stranger

Marcus's home was larger than the exterior suggested.

Two stories of timber and river stone, built with the practical solidity of someone who had survived enough winters to stop taking shelter for granted. Warm light spilled from the windows as they approached — oil lamps and a fireplace, the orange glow softening everything it touched. Teilanne catalogued it the way she catalogued every unfamiliar space: entry points, structural integrity, sight lines. Then she catalogued the warmth, which was different from fire, and allowed herself to register it simply as comfort.

Inside, the house smelled of woodsmoke and something cooking — bread, perhaps, and something savory that her body responded to before her mind could finish identifying it. She had not eaten since Planet Vegeta. None of them had.

"Make yourselves comfortable," Marcus said, gesturing to a worn couch that had the look of furniture chosen for durability rather than appearance. "I'll get food started. You must be—"

"Starving," Rhubar supplied, with a frankness that made their host smile.

"Thought so." Marcus moved toward the kitchen without ceremony, the ease of someone who was used to feeding people who needed it.

Teilanne settled onto the couch carefully, adjusting her grip as she eased Brussel from her shoulder to her lap. He had cried himself into exhaustion somewhere between the dock and the front door, and now slept with the total commitment that only infants and the very tired could manage, his small face untroubled despite everything that day had put him through. Uruk and Sala had similarly worn themselves down to stillness, their warm weight distributed across the cushions beside her.

Three sleeping children. All alive. All unhurt.

She let out a breath she had been holding for hours.

"Thank you," she said, when Marcus reappeared in the doorway. "For this. The food, the shelter." She paused, unused to the next words. "The kindness."

He shrugged with the particular ease of someone to whom the gesture came naturally. "You've got children. You look like you've had a day that would break most people." A diplomatic pause. "Besides, you saved my people from Grimm without being asked. That earns something." He disappeared back into the kitchen, then added from a distance: "How long since they've eaten?"

Teilanne exchanged a glance with Rhubar.

"Since before the crash," she said — which was true, and communicated exactly as much as she wanted it to.

Rhubar settled beside her, his shoulder warm against hers. His hand found hers between them in the way it always did when words were insufficient, and she felt the familiar steadiness of him — the quality that had drawn her to him across years of campaigns and blood and the kind of proximity that either forges bonds or destroys them entirely. They had built something solid, she and Rhubar, in the forge of a life neither of them had chosen.

She was glad to have it now.

A knock at the door interrupted the quiet.

Her hand moved instinctively, her body reading the sound as intrusion before her mind caught up.

"That'll be them," Marcus said from the kitchen.

"Them?" Rhubar's tail shifted beneath his clothing — restrained there for discretion, but she could feel it in the slight tension along his side.

"Called in some folks who'll want to meet you." Marcus came to the doorway, drying his hands. "Huntsmen — professional fighters. Figured they could answer your questions better than I can about how things work around here. And they're going to want to know about anyone who can handle Grimm the way you two do."

Teilanne processed this. An introduction, then. People who mattered in the local hierarchy of survival. She straightened slightly, settling into the kind of contained stillness that was either diplomatic composure or readiness — and which she'd learned, over the years, looked like the former even when it was the latter.

The door opened, and three adults entered on a wave of cool evening air.

She assessed them in the span of a breath.

The first man moved with the loose, unhurried ease of someone who had long ago stopped being surprised by danger. Dark hair, red eyes, clothing worn with casual disregard. A weapon hung at his hip — she could see it shifting even at rest, some kind of transforming blade, the mechanism compact and well-maintained. He smelled very faintly of something sharp and fermented. Controlled, she decided. Deliberately presenting as relaxed, which was itself a kind of guard.

The second man was physically powerful, with the open, broad-shouldered look of someone who had never needed to disguise either his strength or his intentions. His eyes swept the room with tactical efficiency before settling into warmth — the kind of practiced awareness that soldiers developed and civilians rarely noticed. He had a small blonde girl attached to his leg, perhaps two years old, watching the newcomers with bright lilac eyes and the completely unfiltered curiosity of someone who had not yet learned to pretend otherwise.

The third arrival stopped her.

A woman, dark-haired, moving with a fluid precision that spoke of extensive training — not the brute-force economy of a soldier but the refined control of someone who had refined their body into an instrument. Silver eyes caught and held the lamplight. She carried an infant bundled in red cloth against her chest, one hand supporting the child's weight with the practiced ease of the recently postpartum.

The silver eyes met Teilanne's.

Capable, was Teilanne's assessment, arrived at without judgment. Perceptive. And kind — not naively, but deliberately. The choice of someone who has looked at the world clearly and decided to be kind anyway.

She found, unexpectedly, that she liked her before a word had been exchanged.

"Qrow, Tai, Summer," Marcus said by way of introduction. "The folks I mentioned. The ones who came out of the forest."

"With kids," said the dark-haired man — Qrow — a note of something that might have been impressed buried under his dry delivery. "That's either very brave or very stupid."

"Both, most likely," Rhubar said, with the mild tone of a man who had long since made peace with both descriptions.

"Usually is." Qrow's red eyes moved between them with undisguised curiosity — assessing, categorizing, the look of a professional who was never quite off duty. "Marcus said you fought Beowolves barehanded. That true?"

"We defended ourselves," Teilanne said carefully. "We are... capable fighters."

"Capable." He tasted the word and found it insufficient. "Marcus said you took a Beowolf's head off with one punch. That's a bit past capable."

The blonde man stepped forward before she could respond, one large hand extended. "Taiyang Xiao Long. Tai, to most people. Don't mind Qrow — he's suspicious of everyone until he isn't, and then he's insufferable about it." He glanced down at the girl hiding behind his leg. "This is Yang. My daughter."

"And this," said the woman with the silver eyes, her voice carrying a quiet warmth that seemed to fill the room without effort, "is Ruby. She's a few weeks old." She looked between Teilanne and Rhubar and the three sleeping children with an expression that managed to be both gentle and entirely direct. "And yours?"

"Brussel," Teilanne said, her hand settling over her son's back. "And Uruk and Sala." She paused, measuring words. "Their parents died. We are raising them."

Something moved behind Summer's silver eyes — not pity, which Teilanne would have resisted, but recognition. The specific understanding of someone acquainted with grief.

"I'm sorry," she said simply. Which was the right thing to say, and said in a way that did not require anything in return.

Tai's hand had moved without his seeming to notice, resting on Yang's head. His voice was quieter when he spoke again. "Yang's mother left, a few months back. Just — left. Some days I don't know which is harder. Loss, or—" He caught himself, shaking his head. "Sorry. Heavy way to start a conversation."

"We don't mind heavy," Rhubar said.

"Our people—" Teilanne began, and then found herself rearranging the truth into a shape these strangers could hold. "Our village was destroyed. We barely escaped."

Not a lie. A smaller frame around a truth too large to present whole. Their entire race had died if Bardock's vision held — a village was simply the word this world's language offered for loss of that kind.

"Grimm?" Qrow asked. His tone had changed — the casualness dropping fractionally, replaced by something more professional.

"Something like that," Rhubar said. "We'd rather not—"

"No. Fair enough." And that was all Qrow said about it, which surprised her. She had expected pressure, the persistence of someone who wanted all the pieces of a story. Instead he leaned against the wall, crossed his arms, and moved on. "So what are your plans? You can't wander Remnant indefinitely with three children and no local knowledge."

"We want to settle," Teilanne said. "Somewhere stable. We need to understand this world — how it works, what it requires. And we can work." She looked at him steadily. "We can fight."

"Have you considered Huntsman work?" Summer asked. There was genuine interest in it, not the professional assessment of a recruiter but the practical suggestion of someone who was solving a problem. "It's what we do. Fighting Grimm, protecting settlements and travelers. The skills you've clearly got—"

"We don't know what a Huntsman is," Rhubar said, simply and without apology.

The three Huntsmen looked at each other in a way that communicated something.

"You really are from far away," Tai said.

Part II — Revelation

The clearing Qrow led them to bore the honest marks of its purpose.

Scorched earth. Impact craters worn smooth by rain and subsequent use. Deep gouges where something had been thrown or dragged. Trees at the perimeter with bark stripped away in rough arcs. Someone had worked very hard here, repeatedly, and the ground remembered it.

A training ground. Teilanne recognized the signs with the same ease she would have recognized a barracks or an armory. This was where people came to get better at staying alive.

"Alright," Qrow said, settling Harbinger across his shoulders with the ease of long familiarity. "Show me what you've got. I'll give you the first—"

"No," Rhubar said.

The word came out quietly. Not rudely, but with the particular weight of a decision already made.

Qrow raised an eyebrow. "No?"

Teilanne had felt the question forming in Rhubar since they'd sat down in Marcus's house. She had felt it in herself. The same evaluation, arrived at independently: How long can we maintain half a truth? And what does it cost these people if we don't tell them the whole one?

They had needed shelter and food and information, and they had accepted them from these strangers who had offered them without condition. Continuing to deceive them felt like a debt being accumulated against a good will that had not been freely offered under false pretense.

"We're not going to fight Grimm," she said, facing Qrow fully. "Not for this."

"Then—"

"We're going to fight each other." Rhubar was already moving to the far end of the clearing, rolling his shoulders through the familiar pre-match sequence. "You want to understand what we are. What we can do. This is the only honest way to show you."

Qrow's eyes narrowed. Behind him, Marcus stood in the moonlight with the expression of a man rapidly revising his understanding of the evening. "You want to spar. Against each other."

"You deserve the truth," Teilanne said. She moved to her own position, twenty meters separating her from Rhubar, the familiar geometry of a proper match settling around her like muscle memory. "About what we are. And about what we've been hiding since we arrived."

She reached up and removed her scouter, setting it on a nearby rock. Then, with the deliberate care of someone handling a long-suppressed truth, she unwound the wrapping from around her midsection and let her tail emerge.

The brown-furred appendage uncurled into the night air, stretching with the relief of something too long confined. It moved with independent life — swaying, reading the space around it, responding to her emotional state in the way it always had and which she had spent an entire day pretending it didn't.

Rhubar did the same.

Qrow's jaw came unmoored from its usual discipline. Marcus made a sound that might have been a word in a language that hadn't formed properly.

"We're not a threat," Teilanne said, into the silence. "To you. To this settlement. To anyone on Remnant who doesn't mean us harm. But you need to know what we are before you decide whether to trust us." She met Rhubar's eyes across the clearing. "So. Watch."

The old pre-match ritual came back easily, like a language she had never actually forgotten.

"Rules?" she asked.

"Standard suppression," Rhubar said. He had dropped into his stance — low, balanced, his tail counterweighting behind him. "No ki projection. No transformations. No serious force."

"No destroying the surrounding area. These people live here."

"Agreed." A pause. Then, with a grin that had nothing soft in it: "First to yield?"

"First to yield. I'm not explaining to Brussel why his father can't stand up."

"Bold words from someone who got soft playing mother."

"Bold words from someone whose primary workout lately has been carrying children."

"What the hell," Qrow said under his breath, but neither of them was listening anymore.

She moved first.

Or rather, she and Rhubar moved at the same moment, which amounted to the same thing — two points of force crossing twenty meters in a fraction of a second and meeting in the center of the clearing with a shockwave that bent the grass flat in a perfect ring and sent a sound like a struck bell rolling out through the surrounding trees.

Teilanne registered the impact, registered Rhubar's counter, registered the angle of his next attack all in the same instant that she was already responding to them. This was the thing that could not be trained into a fighter — the capacity to read an opponent who moved as fast as you did, who had studied the same forms and invented their own variations in the same training grounds, who knew your habits the way your own body did.

She had sparred with Rhubar for years. She knew the architecture of how he fought — the aggression tightly coiled under deliberate patience, the preference for counter-striking over initiation, the slight tell in his left shoulder before a combination. He knew hers just as well.

Which meant this was the only kind of match that truly tested her.

His palm strike came for her midsection with the speed of genuine intent, suppressed or not. She deflected it off her forearm and drove her knee up in the same motion, and he caught her knee with both hands and threw her — a clean, powerful throw that would have sent a normal person through a wall.

She flipped mid-air, landed, and launched herself back before her feet finished touching the earth.

The fight that followed was not a performance. That was the essential thing about it — not a demonstration for the watching humans, but a real match between two people who were actually trying to beat each other within agreed parameters. The sounds it produced were honest: the percussion of blocked strikes, the whistle of displacement, the occasional grunt of effort when something landed well.

The ground remembered, as training grounds do. Each footprint they left was punched several centimeters into the earth. Impact craters bloomed around them in a slow constellation. The air tasted of ozone and exertion.

Teilanne felt herself fully present in a way she had not been since the day before they'd fled. The hypervigilance of the crash, the desperate caution of their first hours on this world, the constant management of children and fear and uncertainty — all of it receded, replaced by the clean immediate logic of a match that demanded everything.

This is what I am, she thought, slipping inside Rhubar's guard and catching his wrist. Whatever else I become on this world. Whatever I learn to be. This is what I started from.

She used a technique she'd learned from Faasha — feint high, commit low, sweep the standing leg at the moment of maximum imbalance. Rhubar's foot left the ground. He turned the fall into a roll, came up behind her, nearly secured a grapple she had to use a burst of raw speed to escape.

They broke apart across the clearing, breathing harder now. Genuinely earned effort.

"You're getting predictable," Rhubar said.

"You're getting slow," she replied.

They charged.

Seventeen exchanges in three seconds — she counted them afterward, as she always did, from pure professional habit. Each one contained enough force to ruin the day of anyone without exceptional physical durability. Each one was answered, redirected, neutralized by someone who had spent years learning to do exactly that.

And then she saw it: a slight overextension on a punch, a millimeter of telegraph in his right shoulder. She had been waiting for it. She slipped inside the line of his arm, swept his rear leg, and as he went down she turned the momentum into a joint lock that she set at the precise angle to be uncomfortable without doing damage.

He tested it. She held it.

"Yield," she said, and could not quite keep the satisfaction out of her voice.

He struggled for a moment with the expression of a man sincerely attempting to find an exit that wasn't there. Then he laughed — the short, real laugh that she had always loved because it so rarely appeared.

"Yield." He let himself relax. "I am getting slow."

She released him, and they stood.

And remembered the audience.

Qrow had not moved from his position at the clearing's edge. Harbinger hung loosely from his grip. His mouth was open in a way that she suspected was not typical of his face's default configuration. Beside him, Marcus had sat down on a fallen log, his complexion considerably paler than it had been earlier.

The clearing around them was thoroughly destroyed. Impact craters stippled the ground. Footprints pressed centimeters into the earth. A tree at the perimeter had lost a substantial section of bark where a deflected strike had redirected into it.

Teilanne looked at it calmly. "We were being careful," she said.

"That was careful," Qrow said, in a voice that had lost most of its characteristic dryness.

"Careful is relative," Rhubar said. He walked to retrieve his scouter, his tail swishing freely behind him now, no longer pretending. "At full power, unrestrained, this clearing would be a crater. Probably the forest for some distance beyond it."

"We don't have Aura," Teilanne added. "Whatever energy you call by that name — we don't have it. What you saw is our natural physiology. Our species is called Saiyan. We are stronger than humans, faster, significantly more durable. We heal injuries that would be permanent in most species. And we are born, every one of us, to fight."

The silence that followed was the specific quality of silence that precedes either violence or acceptance.

It was Marcus who broke it, his voice carefully steady: "Your tails. They're real."

"Completely," Rhubar confirmed. "Saiyan trait. We are born with them." He glanced at Marcus with the particular expression of someone who had anticipated the next impulse. "Please do not touch without asking."

"Wasn't planning to," Marcus said faintly.

Qrow's tactical mind, she could see, was working. The professional part of him that could not be fully suspended even by shock. "You say you're not a threat to Remnant. I watched you fight. I've seen Huntsmen with years of training and fully developed Aura who couldn't move like that." His red eyes were direct, unafraid, and asking a real question. "What stops you from deciding that this world would be easier to take than to settle in?"

The question deserved a real answer.

"Because we have seen what conquest looks like from the inside," Teilanne said quietly. "Our people — the Saiyan race — we were not free. We were soldiers for an empire. Sent from world to world, taking them for a tyrant who viewed us as weapons rather than people. We hated it." She paused, finding the words. "When we had a chance to take our children somewhere that wasn't that — somewhere without Frieza, without the Empire, without being owned — we took it. At the cost of everything we knew."

"We don't want territory," Rhubar said. "We want a place to raise our family. And if you'd wanted evidence of that — we've been on this world for one day and we've already offered to protect your settlement rather than taking it."

Qrow looked at them for a long moment in the moonlit quiet.

Then he began to laugh.

It was a genuine laugh, slightly too sharp at the edges, the laugh of a man who had seen enough of the world to find absurdity genuinely funny rather than threatening. "Aliens," he said, to the open air, as though confirming it to himself. "Actual aliens with tails and enough physical strength to level a forest, and they want to settle on Patch and fight Grimm for a living." Another laugh. "I have to tell Ozpin about this. He's going to think I've been drinking."

"Ozpin?" Teilanne asked.

"Headmaster of Beacon Academy." Qrow's laughter faded into something more considered, his eyes settling back on them with the specific quality of someone making a decision. "A man who's going to want to meet you. Both of you." He paused. "But first — ground rules. If you're going to live here. Raise children here. We need to establish what trust looks like. What it requires."

"What do you need from us?" Rhubar asked.

Qrow looked at the demolished clearing, then back at them. "Honestly? I need what you've already started doing — being honest about what you are. Not hiding it. Because a secret like yours, on this world, in this climate — it gets discovered eventually, and the way it's discovered matters." He extended a hand. "And I need you to help. These Grimm — the ones you've been casually destroying all day like it's nothing — there are things out there that kill experienced Huntsmen. If you're willing to stand between those things and the people who can't, then everything else is secondary."

Teilanne took his hand.

It was a small gesture. It carried everything it needed to.

As their hands met, she felt something — subtle, present, alive in a way that was not ki but shared its essential quality. An energy that lived in the contact, warm and resonant. It lasted only a moment before fading, but she filed it away carefully.

Aura, she thought. So that's what it feels like from the outside.

"Come on," Marcus said, rising unsteadily from his log. "Summer and Tai are going to be wondering about the noise, and those children of yours need to eat."

They walked back through the dark trees toward the settlement. Teilanne could see the warm light of Marcus's house in the distance — the kitchen window, the faint shapes moving inside.

Rhubar's hand found hers. She let it stay.

Part III — First Connections

She heard it before she reached the door.

Not crying — which was the sound she had tuned herself to respond to without conscious thought — but something different. The small, purposeful sounds of movement. Exploration.

Teilanne pushed inside and her eyes found Brussel immediately.

He had worked himself free of the nest of blankets Summer had constructed and was now navigating the floor with the determined focus of an expedition. Hands down, knees down, tail up for balance — swaying in that new, unselfconscious way, free of its wrappings for the first time all day. His dark eyes swept the unfamiliar room with solemn inventory.

Looking for them.

"He woke about five minutes ago," Summer said from the couch, her voice warm with the private amusement of someone who had been watching this with great interest. Ruby was still in her arms, undisturbed. "He seemed—not frightened, exactly. Just very intent. I thought it better not to pick him up; I didn't want to startle him with a stranger."

Brussel had not found his parents yet. He crawled past a chair leg with systematic patience, rounded a table, tail trailing behind him with its own independent curiosity.

And then he found Yang.

The little girl was sitting cross-legged on the floor some distance from the couch, a scatter of wooden blocks arranged around her with the deliberate chaos of serious play. She looked up as Brussel crawled into her space, and her hands went still.

They regarded each other.

Teilanne watched from the doorway, held by the quality of the moment — two children meeting with the complete lack of pretense that adults inevitably unlearn. No wariness, no agenda, no rehearsed greeting. Just two small people encountering each other for the first time, at ground level, each waiting to see what the other was.

Yang pointed. "Tail!"

Brussel's tail, which had been swaying gently, arrested its motion at the declaration. Then — slowly, with the involuntary curiosity of a thing that had not yet learned restraint — it began to sway again, more deliberately. As if displaying itself. As if curious, in its own way, about the girl who had noticed it.

"Daddy!" Yang twisted to find Taiyang, pointing with emphatic certainty. "The baby has a tail! Like a monkey!"

"I see that, firecracker." Tai crouched beside her, his voice steady in the patient way of a parent who had navigated this kind of moment before. "Remember what we talked about — some people are different, and that's okay."

"Can I touch it?"

Tai's hand started to move. Teilanne spoke before he could. "It's alright," she said. "Gently. Saiyan tails are sensitive."

Yang turned back to Brussel with the expression of someone who had been given a sacred responsibility and intended to honor it. Her small hand extended with comical, excruciating care — fingers approaching the swaying appendage with the slowness of someone defusing something very small and important.

Her fingertips made contact.

Brussel made a sound — not a laugh, not a cry, but something between the two, something that did not have a word for it yet. And his tail, with the irresistible instinct of its nature, wrapped itself around Yang's hand.

"It's holding me!" Yang's face opened with the specific joy of someone being held by something that had chosen to hold them. "Daddy, it's holding my hand!"

She was, Teilanne realized, genuinely delighted — not curious anymore, but delighted, the difference between looking at something interesting and being touched by something wonderful. She had never expected to see that expression prompted by something Saiyan.

Brussel, for his part, reached out and began to conduct his own thorough inventory of this new person — patting her knee, her arm, her hand — with the methodical thoroughness of someone who needed to understand things through contact. Yang submitted to this with patient good humor, occasionally offering small commentary: "That's my elbow. That's my hair. That's my block — you can have it."

"He's very alert for his age," Summer said, watching them. "How old?"

"Just over a year," Teilanne said. "Saiyan children develop faster than — than most. He'll be walking soon. Talking not long after."

Tai looked surprised. "Yang was barely crawling at a year."

"We mature quickly. It's — a trait of our nature." She paused, finding the partial explanation that was easier than the full one. "The faster a Saiyan develops, the faster they can begin learning to protect themselves. The world we came from didn't offer much grace for slow beginnings."

Summer's face was thoughtful rather than alarmed. "That must make it hard to let them simply be children. If everything in your instincts is pushing toward readiness."

The observation was so precisely accurate that Teilanne had no immediate answer for it.

"We're trying," Rhubar said quietly, from beside her. "To let them be children first. Whatever else they become after."

"That's—" Summer started, then caught whatever she had been about to say and replaced it with a softer version. "That's a good thing to try."

Across the room, something was happening that demanded attention.

Brussel had completed his assessment of Yang and arrived at a conclusion. His dark eyes had settled on her face with the particular focus that preceded a decision. Yang had been talking to him steadily since he'd arrived in her space — explaining her blocks, explaining her name, explaining that she was going to be a Huntress and fight all the bad things and protect everyone — and he had been listening with the gravity of someone receiving important briefing material.

Now he smiled.

Not the reflexive expression of a baby whose face was still learning what it was doing. A real smile — the choosing kind, directed at a specific person for a specific reason.

Teilanne felt the breath catch in her throat.

She had not seen him smile since before the flight. Since before the weight of everything had settled on the household like a change in gravity. He had been watchful and solemn and infinitely patient for a creature barely a year old, as if he understood, somehow, that this was not the time for levity.

Yang did not know any of this. She just saw a baby smile at her, and she smiled back with her whole self, the kind of total generous happiness that adults spend decades trying to recover. "He likes me!"

"He does," Teilanne said, and her voice came out softer than she'd intended.

Uruk chose this moment to announce that he had rested sufficiently and was prepared to register his various concerns. Sala followed, as was her pattern — Sala never cried first, but she never let Uruk cry alone for long. The peaceful interlude dissolved into the immediate, practical chaos of multiple infants requiring simultaneous attention, and Teilanne moved into it with the automatic efficiency of someone who had been doing this for months.

"Here," Summer said, already in motion, transferring Ruby to Tai with the ease of long practice. "Let me help. I've done this part." She arrived beside Teilanne without making it a gesture of rescue — just arriving, practically, where hands were needed. "Uruk — the boy? Does he want to be held while he eats?"

"Always," Teilanne said, and was surprised by how natural it felt to say it.

"And Sala?"

"Bottle warmed. Not hot — she'll refuse hot."

"Got it." Summer moved, and the task that had been becoming unmanageable became manageable, and Teilanne was left holding Brussel with one hand free and the slightly disorienting awareness that she had just accepted help without arguing about it.

She was not sure, from the inside, what that signified. But it felt like something.

Brussel had been watching his parents from the floor — tracking them as they moved through the room, triangulating their positions, processing the situation — and the moment Teilanne settled with him, his whole body changed. He crawled to her with a decisiveness that left no ambiguity, and she lifted him, and he put his face against her neck and held on with both arms and his tail.

She felt the small tremor in him. The delayed release of a fear that had been too well-controlled for too long.

"I'm here," she murmured, in the Saiyan that came before everything else, before all the languages she'd learned in all the campaigns. "I'm here, little warrior. You were so brave today. So good."

He pulled back to check her face. Checked Rhubar's face, across the room, with the same thoroughness he'd applied to Yang. Satisfied, he turned and opened his arms imperiously in his father's direction.

Rhubar took him with the careful hands of someone holding something irreplaceable. Brussel grabbed his father's face with both palms and patted it twice with judicial solemnity, as if confirming continuity.

"Papa," he said. Not quite a word yet. But not quite not one.

"Hey there," Rhubar said quietly, his voice dropping into the register it only used here, in this context, for these people. "Did you make a friend while we were gone?"

"He certainly did," Summer said. She was feeding Uruk now, one hand free to gesture. "He was very brave about everything. You should be proud."

"We are," Teilanne said.

It was a simple thing to say. But sitting here, in someone else's warm house, on a world she had not known existed twenty-four hours ago, her son alive and calm and newly smiling — she found that proud was not large enough, and she let it mean more than the word usually did.

Yang had migrated to Tai's arms during the commotion and was now peering at Brussel from over her father's shoulder. "Can he be my friend? Can he? I'll share everything. Even my good blocks."

Tai laughed. "That's his parents' decision, firecracker."

Yang turned the full force of her appeal on Teilanne, and Teilanne discovered that lilac eyes and complete sincerity constituted an argument she was not equipped to counter. "I'll take very good care of him," Yang said, with the gravity of a formal commitment.

"I believe you," Teilanne said.

And meant it.

Qrow, who had been standing near the door since they returned — watching the room with the quiet patience of someone who was used to understanding things by watching rather than asking — finally moved. "This is what it is, isn't it." It wasn't quite a question. "What you crossed whatever you crossed to find. Normal evenings. Kids in the same room."

"Yes," Rhubar said, without qualification.

Qrow was quiet for a moment. Then: "I've got calls to make. People to inform." He moved to the door, stopped. "Teilanne. Rhubar." He glanced back over his shoulder, and the thing in his expression was not quite comfortable for him, she could tell — warmth being a language he had learned later than most. "Welcome to Remnant. You're going to fit in fine here." A pause. "Probably cause a lot of problems, but — fine."

The door closed behind him.

The room settled.

Tai was asleep in the chair within twenty minutes, Yang curled against his chest, both of them breathing in the slow rhythm of people who had run out of day. Summer was still awake, quiet and present, feeding Ruby with the focused peace of the recently new to parenthood.

Uruk and Sala slept again, replenished. Brussel fought sleep with the determination of someone who suspected he would miss something, his eyes growing heavy and springing open and growing heavy again.

Marcus appeared from the kitchen with food, surveyed the room, and decided against announcing it. He set the tray on the table and caught Teilanne's eye and shrugged in the way of a man who was used to feeding people in whatever state they arrived.

She ate one-handed, Brussel finally asleep against her shoulder.

"He's going to wonder about today," Rhubar said quietly, beside her. Brussel's chest rose and fell. "When he's old enough to ask."

"We'll tell him," she said. "All of it. When he can hold it."

"Including the part where his first friend was a two-year-old human girl who wanted to touch his tail?"

"Especially that part."

He was quiet for a moment. "It's a strange life we're building."

"Yes." She looked at the room — the sleeping Huntsman and his daughter, the new mother with her infant, the old man cleaning up his kitchen with the uncomplicated grace of someone who had chosen hospitality as a practice rather than a performance. The two Saiyan infants asleep on a human couch. Her son's tail curled around her arm, loose and trusting in sleep.

"But it's ours," she said.

Rhubar leaned back, his shoulder warm against hers, his tail settling in the way it did when he was finally, genuinely at ease.

"Ours," he agreed.

Outside, the world called Remnant continued its rotation toward morning, carrying them with it into a future that was, for the first time in longer than she could remember, genuinely open.

— To be continued in Chapter Three: Growing Strong —