RWBY Through Worlds

63: Won't Give Up

Long before the younger teams were awake, Qrow snuck into the hallway outside team RWBY's room.

It wasn't for any weird reason--he just wanted to assure himself the girls were in fact still there. After the week he'd had, he half expected his mind to have just snapped and be hallucinating their return.

He could hear the girls sleeping from the outside and breathed a sigh of relief.

"Checking to make sure they're still there?" someone scared the crap out of him by saying in a low tone.

Qrow spun around--but it was Winter.

She looked tired still, but she had a wry expression instead of a frustrated one.

Qrow had only one thought: This is not what it looks like.

No...wait, it was exactly what it looked like.

Well, this was going to kill his remaining street cred... Hopefully none of the other kids were awake.

Winter interpreted the silence to be a yes.

"The whole story was a little hard to believe," she shrugged. "But I don't think I imagined it."

"I was patrolling," Qrow lied.

Not that he cared if Winter caught him--it was just...kind of pathetic to admit it.

"So was I...in this particular hallway." Winter didn't buy it. "But don't let me stop you."

She walked away.

Qrow made sure to walk the other direction in a hurry.

So the Ice Queen did have a heart under all that cold regimentation. Who knew?

[You can't tell me they both wouldn't do this. They're pretty alike when it comes to worrying about their family.]

* * *

Winter didn't bother returning to her room after checking the hallway, she just went downstairs.... Coffee was a friend in Vacuo.

She didn't expect to find Shine and three of the kids down there, reading and singing songs.

Shine was trying to teach them some, and Pyrrha was typing the lyrics down on her scroll notes app.

"Give thanks to the Lord, our God and King. His love endures forever..."

"And then," Shine was saying, "you see here, this is the chapter it's based off..."

She read aloud:

"Oh, give thanks to the Lord, for He is good!
For His mercy endures forever.
2 Oh, give thanks to the God of gods!
For His mercy endures forever.
3 Oh, give thanks to the Lord of lords!
For His mercy endures forever.

"So they change mercy to love, but the idea is to commit it to memory with the songs and add something new. So we sing 'forever God is faithful...' and so on."

"I see," Pyrrha murmured.

"We should do that for other stuff," Oscar said. "I've heard some music, like on trains...but not a lot on the farm."

"How can you grow up without music?" Shine sounded horrified. "It's essential!"

"To be honest, a lot of it is kind of dark," Oscar said. "The songs you know are way more upbeat."