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Chapter 4: Care and Considerations

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When Ozpin arrived early the next morning, he found both Ruby and the (as Ruby had put it) 'not-as-dead-as-they-thought-he-was' Torchwick still fast asleep. He walked over to Ruby and gently shook her shoulder, making sure to stand where he could easily dodge any attack she might launch. As a hunter himself, he knew how defensive responses could become ingrained – especially when one had spent as much time on the front lines as Ruby had. She failed to respond however, and looking closer he could see exhaustion in her face even as she slept. Ozpin frowned at this – but knew there was little he could do about it besides give her a day off to rest and hope it would enough to keep her going.

The war was taking its toll on everyone.

Sighing, he shook her shoulder again, harder this time, and she finally showed some signs of wakefulness.

"mm m-Hmmm?bzz…z…wuzzzupgoawaayy…" Ruby batted feebly in his direction.

"Ruby, you can sleep more later if you like, but right now we need to discuss a few things and I have to leave soon for a strategy meeting."

She cracked an eye open, then bolted upright in the chair, just barely catching her precious scythe before it fell to the floor. "Professor Ozpin! You finally got here!"

At the last exclamation Ozpin glanced sideways. "Yes. Sorry about that, Ruby. I truly did get here as quickly as I could."

She waved a dismissive hand. "Ahh, don't worry about it! I know how things go, and I've certainly slept in worse places."

"Hm" Ozpin smiled slightly at her little quip, then turned to examine the occupant of the hospital bed. "So, we ran the DNA check to confirm, and it looks like this unfortunate fellow you picked up yesterday really is Roman Torchwick."

Ruby finished stowing her weapon and joined him at the side of the bed, smirking a bit. "Well, I knew it had to be either him or his heretofore unknown twin brother. Poor guy though. My guess is that he finally ticked off the wrong person, or people, badly enough that they decided to get rid of him. I mean, like I said in the report it really didn't look like he was put out there as any kind of bait for us - more like he was just discarded there and left to die of either Grimm or exposure. Oh, and one other thing - I think we should send someone back to that alley to check it out more thoroughly. I would bet there's an entrance to their underground network somewhere near there, and if there is it would be the closest one to the wall we've found in a while."

"I don't doubt you're right" Ozpin agreed. "We'll send out a scout to assess the area immediately. As for Torchwick, I've decided to wait and see what he has to say before making any final decision as to what to do with him. In the meantime Ruby, would you mind terribly if I asked you to keep an eye on him? It would be as your schedule permits, of course, but if you could check in on him every so often and see what you can learn from him once he wakes up it would be a great help to me."

Ruby nodded and grinned. "Sure! I mean, I was going keep checking on him anyway so this just means I can put it down on the time-log as 'Official Business'."

Both leader and subordinate chuckled at that, but any further conversation was interrupted by the arrival of two nurses who immediately began checking over the still-unconscious patient. One of them hmm'd in dissatisfaction at Torchwick's temperature then glanced at Ruby and Ozpin, stating "Looks like he's started to run a fever after all. We'll have to change the dressings and up the medication to try and get it under control, so if you could both please excuse us for now…"

Ozpin and Ruby nodded at this, and with an "of course" and a "sure" respectively, left the room and went their separate ways.

For the next two days Ruby checked on Torchwick as often as she could, getting increasingly worried as the hours ticked by with no visible improvement to show for it. Torchwick was wracked by fever, wandering in and out of consciousness, and sometimes muttering about people and things of which Ruby had no knowledge – though every so often there would be a name she recognized such as 'Cinder', 'Neo', or 'Adam'. Once, he half-cried out something like "Junior! No!" and Ruby wondered if he was referring to the club owner whom Yang had enjoyed a few dust-ups with.

His fever finally broke around dawn on the third day (according to the nurses), but a training session with some new recruits kept Ruby busy for much of the day. She wasn't too worried about it though. He was no longer in imminent danger of dying, and people with injuries as bad as his generally spent at least a day or three sleeping before coming back properly to the world of the awake and living.

Thus, when she finally found a free moment to check on him before dinner she was quite (happily) surprised to be greeted by the sound of Torchwick's weak but perfectly lucid and still smoothly sarcastic voice -

"For the fifth time, yes I'm fine and no I don't… Oh, hello Red. Fancy meeting you here."

And there he was, staring up at her with one verdant green eye (the other was bandaged – like much of his body, seemingly) and giving her that condescending smirk she remembered so well from the first time they had met. She crossed her arms and put on an accusatory look.

"You were listed as dead!"

"Well, sorry to disappoint darling, but apparently I'm a bit harder to get rid of than you all obviously hoped. Looks like you'll have to do the job yourself if you want me properly gone."

Ruby couldn't help but grin a bit at his banter. She had sorely needed a bit of this sort of thing as a break from the serious business of war. "Oh, please. Killing you myself would take way too much effort. We'll just put Plan F into motion."

Torchwick quirked an eyebrow at her. "Oh? And what would 'Plan F' be?"

"Construct a mountain of paperwork and bureaucracy for you which will slowly kill your spirit and suck out your soul, thus rendering you harmless."

"You do realize that I can't exactly do any paperwork in my present state, yes?"

"All the more time for us to think up really horribly hard forms for you to fill out in quadruplicate. And no mistakes, mind you, or you'll have to start over from the beginning."

He made a sound which fell somewhere between a laugh and a groan. "Well, Red, thank you for the advance warning. And as much as I'd like to continue this discussion - (here he paused, apparently re-gathering strength to keep speaking) - about what fate awaits me on the side of lightness, good, and excessively creative code names, it seems my sadly broken body disagrees and wants to sleep now instead."

His visible eye closed when he was done speaking and Ruby took it as her cue to leave.

"Alright. I've got to be going now anyway, but as soon as you're doing a bit better I'm going to hold you to that promise of yours to give us information." There was no response from the man upon the bed (he looked like he was already asleep), so she quietly slipped out of the room and headed for the dining hall – not knowing if he had heard the last thing she said or not, but confident that he was on the mend.

Roman woke again hours later to a mostly-dark room. The bit of light filtering through the drawn curtains looked more like that of early morning than late evening, but he couldn't be completely sure. Unfortunately there did not appear to be any clocks within his current field of vision, and the quantity of casts and bandages he was wearing prevented him from looking around much for one.

There was nothing preventing him from mulling over his situation, however.

His memories of the time directly following Cinder's henchmen essentially beating him to death were … vague at best. He could remember getting dumped outside somewhere, with the brutes leaving him with a parting shot of "Enjoy getting eaten by Grimm, you pathetic carcass!" Then their raucous laughter had faded along with Roman's consciousness and he could remember nothing until the time he woke up in this room just long enough to spot a girl who looked like Ruby Rose sitting in the chair across from him. He must have gotten picked up by one of their patrols, which meant Cinder's animals (human and faunus) had dumped him somewhere in The Zone. Made sense if their hope had been for Grimm to take him. That no-man's-land was prime habitat for them.

As for the Sweetness-and-Light side in this war picking him up, Roman guessed they hoped to get information from him then maybe put that standing order for his execution into effect. Well, he'd give them what information he could (anything to get a bit of revenge on Cinder and Adam at this point…), but he wouldn't give it all at once. Maybe he could even draw things out long enough to get a chance to escape, or at the very least get a better idea of what was going on with the war in general. He'd been mostly kept in the dark towards the end there – both figuratively and literally.

…Ugh…

Moving on.

The only thing that rather confused him about this whole situation, was where Ruby Rose came in. Sure, the two of them had had a few run-ins back in the day (…what a little fresh-faced annoyance she had been…), but beyond that he couldn't think of any particular connection between the two of them.

So what was she doing here now? Judging by what he had seen so far, she almost seemed to care about him.

The thought was somewhat disturbing.

Perhaps she had been the one to pick him up out there, and now she felt some kind of nice-person obligation to make sure he was all right. He didn't know her well enough to speculate further than that.

As he felt sleep taking him again, Roman finished his musing with the thought that he would just have to ask Red about it when she appeared again.

Somehow, he was certain she would.

.-.-.-.

Finally! The chapter in which Ruby Rose and Roman Torchwick have an actual conversation!

Also, Katsucon was fun and crazy as ususal. P

So, thank you to everyone who has reviewed, faved, and followed – keep it coming!

And lastly…

In memory of Monty Oum. May he continue to inspire us all.