Qrow Branwen was a man filled with regrets about the past. The last thing he expected when Tyrian Callows poisoned him was that he might have a chance to go back and fix those mistakes, and maybe to make a few more along the way. Team STRQ rose and fell, but this time its weakest member will make sure that doesn't happen. No matter what lengths he has to go to.
— FanFiction.Net summary
Wise as an Old Qrow
is a Mental Time Travel fanfic by Coeur Al'Aran where in a battle with Tyrian Callows, Qrow Branwen is sent back into the past when he was a young child in the tribe of thieves and killers.
Wise As An Old Qrow contains examples of the following...
- The Ace: While in canon he was seen as one of the best huntsman in Vale, now sent back in time to face petty bandits and children, Qrow easily beats any enemy he finds with the only limitation being his younger body. At Signal he is seen as a prodigy by the staff and students.
- Ambiguously Evil: Lionheart; his brief appearances leave it unclear if he's defected to Salem yet, and Qrow is very wary of him.
- Ambiguous Situation: From when exactly Qrow has come back to the past isn't entirely clear, as Qrow has fought Tyrian multiple times and there's conflicting evidence that could suggest any of them. He's only been poisoned by Tyrian the one time in Volume 4, but another poisoning could be the Point of Divergence from canon, and Qrow consistently knows information that he canonically only learned after the Volume 4 incident.
- Beware the Nice Ones: After a couple of weeks of constant bullying, Raven confronts Summer on Qrow's fixation on her. Summer snaps when Raven starts to insult her and is suddenly pulled off of Raven with her knuckles bloody.
- Big Brother Instinct: While he's the younger twin, a mentally older Qrow in his younger body uses his knowledge and skills to help his sister and him find a better life.
- Child Prodigy: Qrow in the past appears to others to be a prodigy, due to him having all the engineering and practical skills of a well-trained 30-something huntsman, despite his failed efforts to hide it; and he's easily at the top of almost all of his and Raven's classes.
- Curb-Stomp Battle: Raven begs Qrow to stand down from fighting the tribe's leader and second, knowing that it would be a complete slaughter. It is. Qrow dances around his adult opponents' clumsy flailing and kills one, then the other, in minutes without taking a scratch beyond a surprise attack before the fight started.
- Dramatically Missing the Point: Qrow goes to much stronger efforts to deprogram Raven from the bandits' twisted strength mentality. But instead of showing her the tribe's whole ethos is nonsense, what she consistently takes away is that the bandits themselves are much lower on the food chain than they acted, but the ethos is fine. In Chapter 29, Raven has shown signs of partially growing out of this mentality after five years of living among civilized society.
- Freudian Excuse: When Qrow travels back in time to the day his parents died, he realizes that that day was probably the day that permanently set Raven on the path to becoming who she became in the future; not only did she lose her parents and all of her possessions in the same day, but she had to swallow her grief to take care of Qrow, which forced her to build her strength up and indoctrinated her to the tribe's philosophy. Here, Qrow instead lets her grieve their parents' deaths, hoping that it helps deter her from the issues that plagued her into adulthood in the first timeline.
- Future Badass: It's not exactly a Bad Future yet, but Qrow comes from a point in time where things are the worst they've been in a many years and poised to potentially get worse. He was one of the main parties on the front lines of everything going to shit, because up to that point he'd become one of the most competent people in his field.
- Gone Horribly Right: Qrow tries to get himself and Raven into the Huntsman pipeline early to get a head start on training and acclimating Raven to normal society, and the easiest way for two unidentified orphans to get noticed is to enter the amateur fighting tournament circuit. He demolishes the competition and Raven places second, drawing too much attention and requiring him to fend off the same offer Ruby would eventually take to attend an academy years early, thus bypassing Summer and Taiyang and defeating the whole purpose.
- Has a Type: As ever, Raven goes for badasses with blond hair and blue eyes. During a field trip to Beacon that the twins didn't have the opportunity to go on the first time around, she's introduced to one Nicholas Arc and instantly gets butterflies.
- I Need a Freaking Drink: Despite that his child self's body is practically teetotal, Qrow still finds himself frequently yearning for a drink — and getting frustrated that the authority figures keep barring him because he's legally underage, and because of an incident at Signal where he demonstrates how much he can drink and how much he wants to.
- In Spite of a Nail:
- The day of the Branwen twins' parents' deaths was the day all the family's possessions and resources were stolen because there were no strong adults to enforce their claim anymore, forcing the siblings into a long period of awful subsistence living on the outskirts of the tribe before they could earn their way back in. Qrow desperately tries to stop Raven from repeating the mistake, but fails.
- Invoked. No matter how drastically Qrow plans to change the course of his and his love ones' lives, he also plans to do everything in his power to keep Yang and Ruby from being Ret-Gone in the process, no matter how convoluted it will be to get Taiyang to bed Raven and then Summer without the team breaking up.
- It's well established in the Coeurverse that the major turning point that got Raven to respect Summer as a leader was when the wholesome girl finally got fed up with Raven's insubordination and just clobbered the shit out of her. This time around, the event that causes Raven to accept Summer in her posse occurs several years early, in a slightly different setting, and is kicked off by Qrow fixating on Summer instead of by Summer being elected Raven's team leader, but it's pretty much the same thing.
- Klingon Promotion: Qrow fights and kills the tribe's leader and second in impromptu duels, thus making him by tribal law the new leader. The problem is that the bandits are still scummy, sadistic brutes, and won't let themselves be ordered around by a child in the long term, no matter how intimidating his display was in the moment or what their paper-thin rules say. Qrow knows full well that they're going to try for a promotion themselves the moment his guard is down, and doesn't even give them the chance, taking advantage of that brief intimidation to pack up and leave with Raven.
- Male Might, Female Finesse: Inverted in the Branwen twins. Qrow fights with graceful and precise moves to outmaneuver the enemy without even trying. Raven fights "like an Ursa mauling a child", all aggression and wild haymakers.
- Mental Time Travel: The story starts with an adult Qrow battling Tyrian and waking up several decades in the past when Raven and he were children.
- Mythology Gag: Qrow jokingly muses to himself that he could try to derail the Fall of Beacon via Defusing the Tyke-Bomb if he can find Cinder when she's still a child before she falls under the villains' sway. This is basically exactly what Jaune did to Emerald when he was in a time-traveling Peggy Sue position of his own in one of Coeur Al'Aran's earlier fics, Relic of the Future. It also references a story idea which Coeur considered but never executed, wherein Jaune tries to do the same for Cinder, as described in the In Your Wildest Dreams Chapter 16 author's notes.
- No Social Skills: Raven is naturally still a product of the tribe's upbringing and makes law-abiding urban authority figures pull their hair out with her maladaptive attitude and behavior. Qrow has social skills... specifically, those of an extremely jaded middle-aged man who's come back in time with an agenda, which means he can barely interact with other kids, and to everyone else he comes off as just as messed up as Raven but displaying it differently.
- One-Steve Limit: Averted. Summer's grandfather Arthur Rose has the same first name as Dr. Watts from canon.
- Pædo Hunt: Mentally discussed by Qrow. Although he's now back in his pre-teen to teenaged body, he still has the mind of a middle-aged man and still perceives himself as such — thus, he's uncomfortable when his and Raven's female school peers are crushing on him, and he's completely mortified when a teenage Willow kisses him before he can realize what she's doing and stop her.
- Paper Tiger: By the present, Qrow is acutely aware that the feared bandit tribe that would eventually become the Branwens is in reality a rabble of unpowered thugs boasting of imagined strength but helpless when pitted against anything more threatening than frightened civilians. Raven would eventually come back with her training from Beacon, take over the tribe, and build them up to be a bit more dangerous, but back in the twins' childhood they didn't even know what Aura was, or how powerful a real Huntsman could be. They don't even know how to actually fight, they just swing their weapons around menacingly to cow unarmed villagers. Even a child like Qrow, with only a little bit of skill, is able to kill both of the tribe's leaders in just a few minutes.
- Parental Abandonment: In both timelines, Qrow and Raven's bandit parents were killed in a raid when the twins were only ten, and the rest of the tribe subsequently threw them onto the outskirts to fend for themselves.
- Point of Divergence: At some point in the future, Qrow was poisoned by Tyrian in one of their battles, and his consciousness was sent back in time to his childhood.
- Promotion to Parent:
- In the original timeline, Raven forced herself to take care of Qrow, who was the more emotional twin, after their parents died, at the price of icing down her own grief and setting the early foundations of her adult self's turn for the worse.
- In the new timeline after Qrow goes back, he takes on this role to Raven instead, allowing her to grieve while he looks out for her and keeps her alive. Raven eventually admits to Summer that he essentially filled the hole that their parents' deaths left.
- Raised by Grandparents: Summer's parents died when she was quite little, leaving her in the care of her surviving set of grandparents. Her grandmother has already passed several years before Qrow meets Summer leaving her elderly grandfather, Arthur Rose, as her only surviving relative; he dies of a longterm illness months after she’s befriended the Branwens.
- Set Right What Once Went Wrong: Qrow's life basically went to shit after he graduated from Beacon. With a second chance, he wants to stop all the good things he had from falling apart while at the same time keeping the good things he has now (Yang and Ruby).
- Troubling Unchildlike Behavior: Raven approaches all social interaction as a dominance hierarchy. Qrow has issues socializing and also drinks heavily... though the people troubled by this don't know the whole story, and don't realize that he looks like an example but isn't.
- Used to Be a Sweet Kid:
- Okay, not really. But Qrow muses that Raven's attempts to keep up the image of strength and brutality just come off as cute and endearing when she's a little girl who can't back it up, as opposed to an extremely dangerous adult who can and does.
- Qrow doesn't know how to connect the future Willow Schnee, who by reputation grew up to be a passive business figurehead and in private wound up a depressed alcoholic wreck, with the Huntress-in-training teenager he meets in the past, who makes him think of a more sophisticated Yang.
- Weak, but Skilled: After a little bit to get used to his smaller size and adjust his muscle memory, Qrow ends up by far the most dangerous member of the tribe, even though he's an Aura-less preteen and the rest are big experienced adults. Not only is he the only member who knows how to fight period rather than just push around civilians, but he's one of the best in the world at it to boot. He can, and does, easily kill any of the bandits one-on-one, though he's fully aware they could gang up on him just as easily.
- What the Hell, Hero?: Qrow recalls that just after the canon incident at the shack where a young Ruby and Yang were almost killed by Grimm, the first thing he did after saving them and taking them home was to literally knock some sense into Taiyang for neglecting them to the point where that incident was able to happen in the first place, until Tai finally summoned the willpower to fight back against Qrow.
