Ciel Soleil failed her mission to mind Penny, and both died at the Fall of Beacon.
The Fall of Beacon hasn't happened.
Stuck in a day full of horrors that won't let her stay dead, Ciel slowly determines there's only one way she can break free: Team RWBY must win the Battle of Beacon. Maybe, by helping them, Ciel can save Penny—and herself.
The Fall of Beacon hasn't happened.
Stuck in a day full of horrors that won't let her stay dead, Ciel slowly determines there's only one way she can break free: Team RWBY must win the Battle of Beacon. Maybe, by helping them, Ciel can save Penny—and herself.
A RWBY fanfic by BryonNightshade
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Ciel Soleil fights hard at the Battle of Beacon against the invading force of Grimm and White Fang. She is crushed when the Emerald Tower falls, and is unceremoniously killed.
Then she wakes up.
Having finally discovered her Semblance, Ciel now needs to use it to save Penny, to save Beacon, and to defeat a threat she can't possibly comprehend. She can't fight her way out of this. The Atlas military can't help her. Every time she talks to someone, she seems to make things worse. Her only option is to keep working hard, to keep to her schedules, and to find the solution.
There has to be a solution.
Breathe. In, tick, tick, tick, out, tick, tick, tick.
Can be found here.
This fanfic provides examples of:
- Category Traitor: Adam calls Velvet a "collaborator" for working against the White Fang, nevermind the things he calls Blake. Velvet's rather unimpressed reaction implies she's heard similar things before.
- Death-Activated Superpower: Ciel has the ability to go back in time by about two days... but only after she dies. Understandably, she had no idea what her Semblance was until she died at the Battle of Beacon. She dryly notes that all her time spent in Aura class trying to meditate to discover her Semblance was largely a waste, and the uncivilized bandit clans who throw kids off cliffs would have had a much better chance of discovering her Semblance.
- Fantastic Racism:
- The people of Atlas are rather dismissive of "Mantleborn." Ciel doesn't express any such opinions herself, but she notably doesn't even blink when her fellow soldiers do so.
- While Ciel isn't openly racist against Faunus, she does seem to ignore them as a default. It takes her a couple loops to learn Velvet's name because it simply didn't occur to her to ask, and she never suspected that Blake was a Faunus herself until it was shoved in her face.
- Fatal Flaw: Ozpin's is, once again, failing to extend trust to others even as he encourages them to trust in turn. In hindsight, it's blatantly obvious that Ciel could have solved the loops much faster if Ozpin had told Qrow what was going on. Qrow only got involved in the last loop because Ciel was late and accidentally barged into their meeting. Without one of Ozpin's most talented subordinates involved, the task was much harder.
- Foreshadowing:
- Ciel mentions a few times she has an extremely low Aura, and one of the first things noted about her time looping is that Semblances are supposed to only work when you have Aura. Ozpin theorizes that she's holding the bulk of her Aura in reserve, so when she dies she still has enough to send herself back in time. But that also means she has a stockpile, which is being depleted. She's going back less and less each time, and soon will run out.
- The "bird strike" that delayed the Manta picking up Penny turns out to have been Qrow, scouting the Atlas airships.
- For Want Of A Nail: The implication is that the only difference between this fic and canon is that Ciel died at the Battle of Beacon. In canon, she survived, never discovered her Semblance, and continued with her life. Here, her death activated her Semblance, and she had an opportunity to go back and try again. And again and again...
- Game-Breaking Injury: Ozpin and Ciel come up with the idea for Penny to throw her fight, taking a bad but non-lethal injury instead of being torn apart. Unfortunately, this leaves her unable to fight for the rest of the battle, which is a problem because she's one of their best combatants. Once they bring Phyrra in, the two of them instead go for an injury to Penny's arm. She's able to easily replace it, and is combat-ready for the rest of the battle.
- Non-Action Guy: Ciel is a skilled marksman and melee combatant who can fight half a dozen Grimm by herself... but in this world, she's barely a few steps up from a noncombatant. She briefly tries training herself up to be strong enough to fight, but fails, and focuses on getting the more powerful combatants into position.
- "Not So Different" Remark: Weiss says that she knows exactly who Adam Taurus is: An abuser and a bully, just like her father. Adam screams and attacks in a blind rage.
- Pyrrhic Victory: In the second to last loop, Beacon wins the battle, but many people died, and the Academy is only still intact in the loosest of terms. It's only a victory because Ciel saw all the other loops, where they were completely curb-stomped. Even though she knows she might not have enough time left, she kills herself to loop back one more time and try for a better outcome.
- The Power of Trust: Ozpin encourages Ciel to extend trust to others to gain their help. Furthermore, the loops let her take shortcuts, so she can learn what people value and offer them that in turn in a later loop. For example, above all else Weiss trusts her team, so Ciel doing everything she can to help gets her on board. Furthermore, the ultimate solution to the loops turns out to be letting teams RWBY and JNPR in on (most) of the conspiracy so that they can properly divide tasks and get everything done far faster than she could alone.
- Traumatic Superpower Awakening: Subverted; it's a common belief in-universe that danger and trauma can activate a Semblance for the first time. Ciel's Aura teacher explains this is incorrect. Your Semblance is what it is, and you'll only activate it in a circumstance that makes sense for your actual power. Throwing kids off cliffs seems to have a decent chance of activating a Semblance, but only because plenty of people have a Semblance that will let them survive being thrown off a cliff. Professor Absinthe also explains that many people activate their Semblances and don't even realize it, because it's too subtle or they've never lived without it.
- Trust Password: Ciel tells Ozpin about her Semblance early on, and is surprised when he believes her. He tells her about a man named Listing with a similar Semblance, and to use the phrase "I have Listing's Semblance" to explain things as quickly as possible. The author notes in the afterword that it's no coincidence that the only one who could get Ozpin to trust Ciel was Ozpin himself.
