Author's Note:

So I haven't written in, basically, years. I haven't ever uploaded anything before, but this is something I felt like putting out there. While rusty at putting words in rows, I'm doing this partly to deal with some things of my own, so I intend to finish this better than I start it. I've always wondered how this interaction – between S3 and S4 – would actually go down, but I've figured Ren and Nora would spend a lot of time making sure both Ruby and Jaune knew their friends were there for them. When Jaune finally got talked into coming to visit, would Tai spot the grief he carries with him? Would he find it familiar? Would FFNet recognise italics on an OpenOffice document?

Let's find some answers.

'Hey, guys. C'mon in.'

Taiyang stepped back from the doorway, allowing the two visitors entry. They were familiar by now, though he still occasionally found himself wrong-footed by the sheer diversity in personality traits he often found under his roof.

They were here to see Ruby, of course. Yang, three months after Beacon fell, had barely moved from her bed. She was refusing visitors, and there'd been more than one brief flare of temper from her when pressed on it – flares that, after a moment, went out and left her as slumped and withdrawn as before. Tai couldn't decide, some days, whether or not he was glad to see she could still get mad.

Thoughts snapping back to the present, he greeted the pair of youths crossing his threshold. He had a lot of time for the boy, Ren, whose calm, well-mannered exterior – I can never read that kid – spoke of quiet competence. Lacking any sort of info on what their families were like (and having seen his queries about where they were from deflected with an expertise that told him yes, they were experts at dodging that question and no, he absolutely didn't want to know the answers) left him without too much to say to the dark-haired young man; on the other hand, since his role in their visits often boiled down to providing a snack or two for the company and then leaving the kids to it, he wasn't usually caught up in awkward silences.

Ren did, however, act as a great parking brake for his partner. Nora Valkyrie loved to talk, in a way that reminded him of Ruby the few times she'd got hold of cotton candy as a little girl. She seemed permanently wired, and he thanked the gods frequently for Ren making sure she took a breath – though those still seemed minutes apart sometimes. His training had come to mind when he saw them – not as a Huntsman, but as a teacher, where the scope of the profession occasionally led one to spot the effects of trauma in a student. Both of the kids seemed to have adapted to their mysterious difficulties in ways that left them near polar opposites, but Tai had no doubt from looking at them now that they complemented one another well. He did, once or twice, wonder if either of them could see what Ruby had told him everyone else could see...not that their apparent blindness to their mutual emotional bond was any of his business.

'...came with us today,' Nora finished, then paused and leaned a little closer. 'Uh...Mister Long? Hello?'

Tai snapped back again. Damn it, tuning this girl out was a bad habit. 'Sorry. I uh – my head went other places for a second there. Teacher stuff. Y'know.' Bad cover, Tai.

'Oh. Well, here he is.' Nora stepped aside, and Taiyang focused on the doorway – and came face to face with himself. He froze, staring for a second, before some part of his brain kicked the rest of him in the shorts and ordered him closer. 'Hi,' he began, suddenly wishing more than anything he'd listened to Nora for the past minute. 'Call me Taiyang.' He offered his hand, and it was taken as the new boy with the old, familiar pain in his eyes stepped into the house and let the door close behind him. Gods, but he knew that expression from old, bitter experience.

'Jaune Arc,' he introduced himself, forcing a smile of greeting. Tai shook his hand firmly, noting that there was strength in the kid's grip – noodly limbs, but he'd long known that size didn't always indicate power – and a brief, almost unnoticeable gap between the grip and the strength.

'Friend of my girls, huh,' remarked the older man, as the other two watched the introduction. 'I feel like as a father I should be concerned, but I guess I can trust you from what I've heard.' Jaune winced and lowered his eyes. Taiyang paused, but no response was forthcoming. Not even when Ren's hand came to rest on Jaune's shoulder.

'So, hey, is Ruby around?' asked Nora, brightly – earning a grateful look from the two boys, and a dumbstruck nod from Taiyang. The older man waved vaguely in the direction of his younger daughter's bedroom, and managed a half-hearted 'Sure, go on through' to the kids, while trying to come to terms with the enormity of the foot he'd just put firmly in his mouth.

There were only three of them here. Oh, gods. The pieces fell into place immediately. Ruby's stories home, of Team JNPR. Her memories of the Fall of Beacon. The Nikos girl. The look ingrained on Jaune's face, the look Taiyang wished he didn't know so well, didn't have to see in the mirror day after day. The grief, going beyond a lost friend, that had turned Jaune from a shy young man meeting his buddy's dad to a silent, withdrawn child as soon as some total moron in cargo shorts had poked it with a stick five seconds after meeting him.

Taiyang leaned against the wall, gazing at nothing, and brought one hand up by his head. He went still for a moment, and then did what Summer would have done if she'd seen him be so tactless to a bereaved kid. The slap's impact knocked his head to one side, and he remained still for a moment before hauling himself wearily upright. Summer wouldn't have been done with him yet.

He headed into the kitchen to busy himself with putting together some snacks for their guests, scolded the whole way by the woman he wished was there to kick his ass for this, and tried to figure out something he could do to apologise to the young man who'd stared at him across a decade and a half with a hurt he'd never escape from.

Maybe he could help the kid deal, at least.