"... So… Oscar…" Ilia started awkwardly, clearing her throat and looking around as she sat in the living room of the refurbished barn house that she was now sharing with her girlfriend, her girlfriend's mom, and the random kid who was just there for some reason.
"Uh… yeah?" Oscar blinked, looking up from where he was reading in an armchair a few feet away, completely ignoring the TV in favor of just looking through what looked like an encyclopedia of all things plant related. "Uh… what's up?"
"You uh… got any hobbies other than reading? Feel like I might as well try and get to know you if I'm gonna be living here for the foreseeable future…" Ilia continued, shrugging a little as she kicked her feet up onto the coffee table and turned the TV on to whatever dumb bullshit they had on last. In this case, it looked like the Xiao Long/Rose/Branwen family's shared Webflix account, which… given the amount of profiles and names, meant that it'd spilled into being the general RWBYP account as well… as well as the JNPR and CMNE account. Neat. As she waited for Oscar to answer, she queued up Blake's profile, given that the two of them had similar tastes and…. Nope that was all stuff that Oscar shouldn't have been looking at nevermind try Yang's instead. "Fucking hell Blake-"
"Uh… I mean… I don't know. There wasn't a lot to do on the farm other than work all day and read and occasionally play games with the other kids in the area?" Oscar shrugged, having not at all seen what filth Blake watched in her free time, thankfully (seriously, why was Blake's Webflix full of traumatically horrifying documentaries and actual horror movies, Ilia didn't remember her being into that kind of thing back in the White Fang-). "There wasn't a lot to do on the farm. Go to school, come back, work the fields, sow the crops, harvest the hay for the ranch down the road… pump the water, feed the chickens… that kinda thing."
"Sounds boring, but also kind of idyllic if you're into that kinda thing," Ilia huffed, leaning back and scrolling through the bevy of trashy action movies that Yang favored before getting tired of it all and swapping to Ruby's profile again… and that was just engineering documentaries and children's movies. Mostly the former, with very few of the latter. Lots and lots and lots of weapons documentaries… wow. "I know I spent a lot of time wanting to just run away and live on a farm back when I was in the White Fang…"
Oscar snorted, shaking his head as he shut his encyclopedia and stood up to join Ilia on the couch, vaguely eyeing the TV before settling back and just staring at the ceiling. "Trust me, the experience isn't worth it. Sure, it'd probably be novel at first, but it's just work, work, work. Day in and day out- and you'd think that taking care of a bunch of vegetables is easy, but it's so much checking and checking and then panic when a blight hits the area or there's locusts or bad hail storms… least in Mistral there was always rain so we never had to worry about severe droughts…"
"Eh… maybe, but it's not that different from the White Fang, just… differently so. Working day in, day out. Combat training and stealth operations and you'd think being a terrorist organization is a lot of downtime between bombing runs or whatever, but there was so much strategic work. Go here, do community outreach, bring new recruits, steal this, lift that, run here, run there- even without being one of Adam's lackeys, it sucked and they ran it like a militia instead of what it was supposed to be," Ilia shrugged again, finally settling on Cinder's profile of actually good movies and starting one just as background noise- some kind of crime drama involving the mafia or some shit? Whatever. "I'm not a stranger to repetitive work. Might be nice to grow something instead of constantly tearing shit down."
Oscar… just paused and gave her an odd look. "... Yeah, probably. I wouldn't know. I guess the guy in my head would but… I dunno. Life has been really confusing and weird for the past year or so."
"Trust me, it only gets worse from here," Ilia snorted dryly, crossing her arms and giving Oscar a flat, tired look. "Life never gets any less confusing. Also, what guy in your head? Is it that Ozpin guy everyone talks about when they think no one's listening?"
"Uh, yeah, but… I mean technically you're not supposed to know about him because it's… supposed to be a secret but at this point Ozpin has…" Oscar shrugged. "I don't think he wants to keep too many secrets anymore. After keeping so many secrets for so long, I think he's… sort of… more or less gotten tired of it because of how many betrayals it's led to."
"Mmm… I getcha. Still weird that you've got an old guy's soul stuck in your head now, though," Ilia huffed, then turned her attention back to the movie for a bit. "... This movie is ass. What the fuck? I thought Cinder was supposed to be the one with good taste in movies… or at least, she acts like she is."
"No, that's Emerald. Cinder just likes bad crime dramas- trust me, I would know. I've been dealing with her since… last year ish," Oscar winced, shuddering a little and making a face. "Emerald is the only one on that team with good taste in movies and gods does it feel weird saying that when I barely ever watched movies before meeting any of them. But yeah, Cinder likes shitty crime dramas and really gratuitously violent stuff where bad people have bad things happen to them, Mercury likes popcorn flicks and spy movies, Neo watches way too much anime, and Emerald is the only one with balanced, actually good taste."
"... yeah, that tracks. Ugh. What kinda stuff does Neo even watch anyway?" Ilia asked, morbidly curious about the whole thing.
"Did you know that Webflix has an R18 hentai section?" Oscar deadpanned.
"... Oh my gods Neo exclusively watches anime porn!?"
"No, it's just that the majority of her time is spent scrolling through that section because…" Oscar sighed, palming his face as he tried to put the entire sequence of events into words. "... She finds really crappy old hentai anime with shitty plotlines and then uses them as angry research because she has an obsession with writing fanfiction to fix the plotlines and, I'm going to be honest, I have no idea why I of all people needed to know about it but I do and it's weird and it's literally the only kind of fanfiction that Neo writes and-"
"... I really feel like I shouldn't be as invested in the fact that all of the people around me are online weirdos but somehow this is really compelling," Ilia interrupted vaguely, blinking a few times and feeling as though she was in something of a fever dream with how stupid the words coming out of Oscar's mouth were. "Does- does anyone else in that family write fanfiction?"
"Blake. She writes smut. Also technically Ruby? She has a blog where she talks about weapons and writes really long essays about weapons in whatever she watches," Oscar shrugged again and leaned back, sinking into the cushions of the couch with a heavy sigh. "This family is fucking insane."
Ilia nodded slowly with an ever so vague wince. "Yeah… and the family tree is gonna look even worse later. I mean, what, Weiss' mom is dating Blake's parents, and my boss is dating Blake's parents again too, and then there's the fact that Weiss' sister is probably going after Robyn Hill? And then there's the adoptions and…"
"... I hope I don't get adopted in. I still have to go back to my Aunt at some point," Oscar grumbled quietly, looking away as he subtly stole the remote from Ilia and swapped Webflix profiles to his newly made one, whereupon he resumed watching that old monster movie series he'd gotten into lately. "Having the shared Webflix account is nice, though…"
"It is. Oh shit you watch Gozira?" Ilia gasped, immediately scooting closer to Oscar with a little squeal of glee. "Holy shit, yes! Which one is your favorite? Actually don't answer- there's a lot of them and they're kinda schlocky garbage sometimes but they're so fucking fun to watch do you wanna have a monster movie marathon?"
Oscar blinked. "Uh… okay?"
"Great! I'll go call Vernal, she loves this shit too!"
"... Alrighty then. I guess we're having a movie marathon…" Oscar murmured, watching as Ilia ran off to go get her girlfriend, who was still chopping wood in the backyard despite the fact that they had plenty of firewood already, and decided to go make some popcorn.
"Mind if I join?" Raven asked once he entered the kitchen, the older woman currently in the middle of buffing out the scratches in her armor- or, at least, she was .
"... Why are you doing that in here?"
"It's cold as shit outside and Ruby won't let me be alone in her fucking workshop because she says I'll mess it up and I refuse to let someone else touch my armor."
"... Alright then. Uh… well… there's plenty of space in the living room so…"
"Cool. Want a beer?"
"... No thanks."
"Suit yourself."