Hello all. If you know who I am from my crossover work, well this is something sorta new I decided to try. I got the idea in my head to write something WW2 or WW1 related, and then RWBY snuck into my brain, as it is wont to do. Anyway, I hope you enjoy. If you like this, let me know and I just might turn it into an actual story, because this is more or less a one-shot.

Disclaimer: If I own RWBY, I'll eat Rooster Teeth's hats.

Full Summary: June 28, 1944 - Hi, my name's Ruby Rose and I'm pretty far away from home. Blake, Weiss, my sister, Zwei... They're all missing and I have no idea where I am. It's pretty scary here. Everywhere around me there's people fighting and... killing... each other in the empty husks of cities... But! On the bright side, this nice man, Captain Barker, is telling me that everything's gonna be all right! I hope everything's gonna be all right...

June 6, 1944, Normandy, France.

Private First Class Jeremy Greene's hands trembled as he sat in the Higgins boat as it trembled, buffetted by the waves of a particularly rough sea. The ocean air was more frigid than any wind he'd experienced back home in Minnesota, and his uniform, soaked in the ocean sprays, did nearly nothing to keep the chill from settling into his bones. Greene's fingers were interlocked and he clutched his steel helmet to his stomach, breathing out a whispered prayer that he would make it out of this alive.

The others in the landing craft weren't faring much better. Private Dutch clutched his Garand rifle in white-knuckled hands, compulsively checking, double-checking, and rechecking the weapon's chamber. Corporal Mason held a silver cross in his hand and looked up hopefully at the sky. Private Donnelly just threw up over the side of the boat. The rest of the thirty-three men with Greene were one of those three examples, or some mix of them. The only one who wasn't outwardly terrified was their CO, Captain Barker, who calmly sipped from his flask and, though it was hard for Greene to hear it, hummed to himself as if he wasn't a soldier about to crash into one of the biggest military invasions in the history of warfare. In fact, he looked the same as when he was sitting around back at Schofield- that is, whenever he wasn't looking physically ill as he waded through mounds of paperwork at his desk.

It was Barker who finally broke the silence, which up to that point, had only been permeated with the sharp click-clack of weapons, wet retching, muted whispers, and frantic breathing.

"Hell of a day we've got ourselves into now, right boys?" he muttered. A few heads nodded at his words.

"Thirty seconds!" shouted Connors, the coxswain, "Clear the ramp, now!"

"Keep yourselves stocked, eat your rations, shoot the enemy," Barker said. "Be good little boys out there, and I'll see you on the other side." He capped his flask, tucked it into his shirt, loaded his rifle, and slung it onto his back.

Greene had mentally started counting down the seconds till arrival ever since Connors had warned them.

It was fifteen seconds in when he heard a rather high-pitched, feminine-sounding yelp from somewhere in the back of the boat.

It took him until seven to find a glimpse of red and black fabric amidst the drab greens of the mens' fatigues, and a pair of bright silver eyes staring back at him.

A whistle shrieked at five, and the craft's ramp started to lower.

At three, something slammed into Greene's back and suddenly the boat had a lot more red in it than just the girl that shouldn't've been there at all.

At one, PFC Jeremy Greene hit the floor of the Higgins boat, dead from a 7.92x57mm Mauser bullet to the heart.

Ruby Rose wasn't having a good day. Not a good day at all.

First, the Huntress-in-training woke up to the sensation of falling onto something that felt colder and harder than ice. She opened her eyes to the sight of men, all wearing olive green clothes, each looking even more sickly than Jaune did on the Bullhead ride to Beacon Academy. Judging by the rocking and battering the thing they were all standing in was experiencing, it was some sort of boat. The men around her also had weapons. That almost made her start fawning over them, but two things stopped her from doing so: the fact that they were archaic things- rifles with wooden stocks and pistols without any sort of rails or accessories- , and the fact that their uniforms were all, well, uniform with literally no difference between each man.

That meant that none of these men were huntsmen, and their battle dress looked nothing like Atlesian, Valic, Mistrali, Vacuan, or even Menagerie's military. They had to be some sort of civilian group.

That begged the question: what exactly were they doing?

Furthermore, where exactly in Remnant was Ruby Rose now, anyway?

Ruby met the eyes of one of the men, who stared with incredulity back at her. Then a whistle screamed out from somewhere she couldn't see and their boat's ramp started lowering with a series of clicks.

Then, the air around her erupted into gunfire and explosions and screaming, and the man's chest exploded into a shower of bloody, meaty chunks and splashes of blood, some of which even splashed onto her face.

Ruby Rose, Huntress prodigy and weapons extraordinaire, did the only thing she could think of at that second.

She screamed in pure, abject horror.

Every single one of Captain Raymond Barker's muscles were tensed as much as they could be, prepared for the battle ahead.

Well, any conceivable battle he could face, anyway. No one ever truly prepared for the death and destruction and pain of war and conflict. Everyone just coped as best they could.

And Barker found his coping mechanism in his flask, filled with the best whiskey he could find at any given point.

But now, he couldn't give himself the ease of a bottle. He had a job to do. These men needed a leader, and by God they would get one.

Or at least they would get Captain Barker.

The grizzled 32-year-old wasn't quite jolted from his thoughts by the gunfire and explosions and screams around him. Instead, his mind was ripped back to reality through his ears receiving a sound that was utterly impossible here, of all places.

A girl's scream.

Barker whipped his head around frantically for the source. There, in the back of the Higgins landing boat, cowered a teenage-looking young girl with a definitely out of place black and red corset and dress, complete with a frilly and large skirt and a rose red cape. On her back was some weird-looking boxy thing that bore colors that matched her outfit.

A civilian, for sure. And a strange one at that. But strange or no, Barker had a duty to fulfill: keep everyone under his watch safe, be they the highest officer or the lowest private in the Army. And this girl came under his watch the moment she'd stowed away in his boat.

Barker twisted around and made his way to the back of the landing craft, shoving the other soldiers of the 29th Infantry Division out of the way and out of the boat, as well as snatching up the late PFC Greene's helmet and rifle and ammo packs. When he finally reached the whimpering girl, he slapped the helmet onto her head and thrust the spare rifle and ammo into her arms. The action made her let out a startled yelp, and she looked into his blue eyes with surprise.

"C'mon! C'mon!" he commanded, "Move your pretty little ass! Go! Go or you'll die!" He started shoving the girl out of the craft, and after a couple of seconds, she got the hint and started stumbling out of the boat.

Barker and the girl splashed into grimy water, forcing the two of them to swim and wade through it until they hit the beach. A sight straight out of a psychopath's mind stretched beyond them, spread out over the sands of Normandy.

Big, ugly, gnarled hunks of steel that served only to block tanks shared space with the water and sand. Farther up ahead, past some seawalls and barbed wire, were clearings completely free of cover and bare to everything except for mines, obstacles, and sand.

And past that, on the cliffs of the beach, protruded pillboxes where Hitler's very own Nazi troops opened devastating firepower onto the invading force, and therefore Barker's comrades.

He turned to the girl. "Can you use a rifle, kid?!" he shouted to be heard over the sounds of fighting. She nodded, tears in her eyes. "Good! Stay low, stay in cover, and we'll get through this! Everything's gonna be all right!" She nodded again, slightly stronger this time.

The two of them moved up, surrounded by their comrades, who gawked and stared at the unusual appearance of a girl on a battlefield, but they sure as hell didn't have much time to do so, as they were being cut down by MGs by the dozen. And so, they crawled through the sand, making the most out of what little cover they had. Barker took as many potshots at the Krauts as he could, quickly slamming fresh magazines of .45 into his trusty M1A1 every time it ran dry. So did the rest of the men around them with their weapons. The Captain took notice that the girl wasn't nearly as trigger-happy as the rest of them, but chalked it up to timidness.

All around them, men lay dying and screaming for help. Barker felt something cold settle into his stomach as he made the mistake of whipping his head around at the sound of a particular call for help and saw a Private with his legs rendered to bloody chunks and his guts spilling out through his fingers. He looked away and tried to keep the dead and dying from his mind as he and the girl pushed forward up to the seawall.

A nearby explosion ripped the breath from Ruby's lungs and the huntress-in-training frantically cleared her eyes of debris and sand kicked up by the blast as she tailed the man who had dragged her from the boats. Looking back at them, she noted how the thin metal and wooden, splintering walls had been thorougly torn apart with the force of the many, many bullets being sent their way. Ruby was far from confident that her Aura could stand up to so many rounds and silently gave thanks for the man who had pulled her out of the vehicle.

The man who had saved her life.

Ruby gritted her teeth and continued crawling for all that she was worth. Her mind raced with possibilities as to finding cover, routes, and ways to avoid being shot at quite so much.

One of the only two things not running through her mind was the fact that there was just so much ground to cover. If she had to guess, she'd say that the distance from the boats to the cliffs spanned a good 800-to-900 yards of sheer length. Ruby was sure that she would have a mental breakdown just thinking about how much farther they'd have to travel.

The other thing was the cacophony of death surrounding her. Again, she was sure that she would just shut down at the sights and sounds of so many people just... lying lifelessly and dying helplessly. Currently, she was blocking out the sight of a man lurching on his side, having been blown away and ripped apart by machine gun fire, his clothes covered in... red and his... inner parts flopping uselessly on the sands as he called out for...

Ruby scrunched her eyes shut and grit her teeth. No. No no no no no no. NO! This shouldn't be happening. This can't be happening! She was a huntress! A champion and defender of the people! If she was going to do anything to stop this madness, she'd have to get to those cliffs as soon as she could, or more and more men would... cease to be.

As she crawled on, the seconds turned to agonizing minutes turned to torturous hours until finally, she and the man who had saved her life had reached the seawall and proceeded to huddle behind it, waiting for an opportunity to breach the shelf leading to the cliffs.

A line of men, miraculously uninjured, stretched across the seawall, fervently pushing their bodies against its limited cover. Barker and the girl joined them, following suit.

Giving her a once-over, he was surprised to find that she didn't look like she even had a scratch on her. He figured that she would have gotten shot at at least once, given the garish colors of her outfit, but evidently she made it to the seawall with little more than rips and tears and scratches and bruises.

Lucky you, Barker thought bitterly, thinking back to the men who had started today nervous and tired, but alive, and who now were on Death's doorstep, if not already having supper with the family.

"Who the hell's she?!" demanded a soldier somewhere to Barker's left.

"Doesn't matter!" he responded, shutting him up. "What's the holdup?!"

"We managed to clear the obstacles for the tanks," cried out a helpful voice, "But now we gotta get through all this shit!"

All of a sudden, a wave of new faces threw themselves at the seawall, having just gotten off of some new landing craft.

Reinforcements. Just what the doctor ordered.

A few of those men ran up, toting long metal tubes. After a minute of preparation, several shouts of "FIRE IN THE HOLE!" were heard, and the explosives in the tubes were activated in a series of deafening, reverberating BOOMs.

"Move up! Move up!" came the shout of a fellow captain, and as one, the men of the 29th Infantry Division did so, moving their way into the renewed chaos, debris, and cover caused by the detonations.

Men to their left and right fired at the enemy in front of them, neither willing to give an inch for several minutes until something in the Germans' defenses just slipped and the 29th charged through the German lines, forcing the remaining enemy to fall back into secondary positions.

Barker was followed by the girl and eventually they made it to the cliffs, though a lot of good men didn't make it as well as they did. Eventually, the immediate group was reduced to seven, yet they made it to a pillbox, where one of the troops, wielding a flamethrower, cleared the nest with a jet of angry flame, causing two bodies to come tumbling, screaming, out of the opening and off of the cliffs of the beach.

Barker was in the process of moving up, his legs pumping furiously in an effort to avoid death, when he stumbled and fell into a trench and became half-submerged in a pool of filthy brown water.

And standing above him was a Kraut, his rifle poised high to strike with its bayonet and a snarl on his face as he went for the killing blow.

It just happened so fast...

One minute Ruby's only familiar face was sprinting across the muddy ground and running to a crater in the dirt that would have served as cover when he tripped and plummetted into a trench of some sort. She could hear him let out a groan of pain as he fell, and with a burst of her Semblance, she made her way to her friend's position in a speed that no ordinary human could achieve.

Of course, Ruby Rose was no ordinary human.

Her silver eyes grew to the size of dinner plates when she saw her friend lying on the ground, staring with wide, blue eyes and a snarl at an unfamiliar man, who wore an unfamiliar uniform and had raised a rifle, fitted with a bayonet knife at the barrel, clearly intending on ending her new friend's life.

Without thinking, Ruby threw down the rifle the man had given her into the mud, drew her beloved Crescent Rose from the small of her back, transformed it into the full profile of her iconic scythe, fired a round behind her to propel herself, and... bisected the would-be killer in two with another round to power her swing.

POOM! POOM!

And suddenly, the Kraut was standing above him no more. The enemy soldier simply fell in two and lay twitching in the mud as his dead body steamed in the cool air and his blood pooled underneath the halves.

Barker skittered away until his back hit the wooden walls of the trench, breathing hard from the adrenaline rush of the close encounter. He looked up and locked eyes with the girl who he had just met and who had just saved his life.

However, gone was the look of terror and surprise from her silver orbs. That was replaced with a look of grim determination and... worry? The girl stowed something away on her back, too quickly for Barker to see exactly what it was, and retrieved Greene's rifle from the mud where it had, evidently, fallen.

"C'mon," she spoke softly, yet her high-pitched voice carried even through the cacophonous noise of the battle happening outside the trench. "C'mon," she repeated, "Let's go. We've gotta get out of here if we want to live, right?"

She extended her hand to Barker, who looked at it for a second before gratefully taking it and using it to get back to his feet. Barker retrieved his fallen Thompson and the two of them nodded at each other before climbing out of the German trench.

Well, that sliver of Hell was finally cleared. Reinforcements finally arrived in the nick of time and Omaha Beach had finally been secured for the Americans. Huzzah.

Now, once the remaining Germans had either surrendered or had been gunned down trying to surrender, the only gunfire that rang out in the area was the occasional sniper shot. Otherwise, it was finally peaceful. The soldiers now huddled deep within captured trenches, trying to reacquaint themselves with their own comrades and awaiting orders.

Captain Raymond Barker found himself in an entirely unique situation compared to the rest of the men that had survived the invasion of Omaha. He sincerely doubted that anyone else there had found himself caring for a girl currently having a mental breakdown.

The girl, whose black hair that ended in reddened tips and pale face drew more than a few stares and raised eyebrows, wept quite loudly and passionately, if Barker had anything to say about it.

He offered the poor girl as much comfort as he could, giving her a shoulder to cry on, but little else. Finally, after an eternity, the wails died down to mere sobs, and Barker let out a sigh of relief. They sat there for a little while longer before she finally mumbled something.

"Hmm?" Barker asked.

"I said thank you," the girl repeated, louder this time.

"For what?" the Captain grumbled.

"I don't know," she said. "But you did help me get through all this. I doubt even my Aura could have let me survive through all of that."

Aura? Barker filed the term away for later, when the girl was sure not to be in such a... volatile mood. Instead of pressing for information, he just grunted and nodded an affirmative.

"You know, I didn't get your name," he said instead.

"Um, it's Ruby. Ruby Rose."

"I'm Barker," Barker supplied, brushing a few strands of hair out of Ruby's eyes. "Listen. Whoever you are, we're gonna get you out of this. All of this... This fighting, this agony... I promise you, we'll get through it. I personally promise that you'll get to see your mom and pop again. Everything's gonna be all right."

Somehow, these words only served to make the girl cry more. Whether those were tears of despair or joy, Barker was far from qualified to know. He just looked down at his boots and sighed.

Oh, this was gonna be a long war, wasn't it?

AN: Hello again! Life is still trying to kick my ass, who regardless of that I managed to finish this concept for a story. Like I said, if you like what's happening here, I might just turn this into a real story. To show your support, put reviews on this story and I'll be able to gauge your reactions. If I have any historical errors, chew me out for them, please.

Beta read by: CrazyQuilava

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-AnonymousInsomnia