She was concerned.
She'd realized, very early on, that Miss Cheshire was driven by something out of her past. She'd seen the woman focus on her goals with unsettling intensity, and She drove herself harder then Usagi had ever seen, ever even thought was possible. And she'd tried to help, where she could - she tidied up Miss Cheshire's office, when She'd passed out from a weeks worth of sleepless nights. She'd created reports and filed papers and performed research, all to try and reduce her mentors workload, and it was never enough. The moment any slack appeared in her schedule, She just filled it with yet more projects! It was insane!
But... but... it was working, was the thing. In Vale, protection and prosperity, military strength and research and medicine and social services and so many other things, and they were all improving, all being rebuilt and revitalized after the War, and it was in large part in thanks to Her. Even Usagi had gained some residual recognition, just from being in Her vicinity - in academic circles, she was recognized as the originator of mecha-shift technology. She, a Faunus, had her name spoken by professors and lecturers!
And Usagi had suspected, become all but certain, as she quietly assisted her mentor however she could, and slowly, somehow, worked her way into the position of being the only one that Miss Cheshire ever let her guard down around, but it was the documents that She gave her on the war, drafted in Her own hand, that all but confirmed it.
With human turning against human, spreading fear and hatred, with the weapons and armies meant for the Grimm occupied fighting each other in distant lands, with the "Great Kingdoms" focusing on each other, and the hinterlands left to fend for themselves... The greatest death tolls of the war didn't come from any of the Great Battles that her other books talked about.
El-Secreti, considered to be the next region that might rise to be a Great Kingdom, overrun almost to the last. Nearly two hundred thousand killed, as promised support from Mistral never arrived. Bylanda. Terennes. Meiscovo. Brahva. Grandi. Midherscht. Four points of light, slamming into one another, as the rest of the world trembled under a flood of black.
It was difficult to gather true statistics, with the bulk of casualties taking place so far from the centres of learning where bookkeeping took place, but conservative estimates put the death toll at over 9% of the global population.
The reign before... she had little personal experience of. Certainly, the Faunus were treated no better - any rights they managed to obtain since the transition would certainly not have been afforded to them if the Revolution had not happened... right? And yet...
The former Princess of Mantle. That's who her mentor was. And it made it so much harder, to look at the stories of the Royal Families and their disdain for everyone beneath them (and especially the lowest of the low, the Faunus, was the subtext, the thing that brought the Faunus out in droves to fight for revolution). She wasn't naive. She could see how the Princess had used dissatisfaction amongst the Faunus to gain a base of support. But it was in Her eyes. She didn't see Faunus as any different from anyone else, she chose her to be her student, her protégé.
And she couldn't help but wonder, what would have happened if her mentor had become Queen? What would She have done? For the World, for the Faunus? And somehow, she couldn't see the answer as being bad.
But now... Miss Cheshire was broken inside. She was like broken glass, sharp thoughts that hurt Herself almost as much as they hurt others, wrapped up in guilt and hate and then smothered and hidden away. She did what she could, and hoped She would get better. The world would be a lot brighter if She did.
But for now... she looked at the Jewel of Winter, and sighed. So much pain spread, so much loss, and yet regaining this had hardly seemed to make her mentor happier. It was silly - what good was power, if you just spread the hurt you felt to others with it? She turned it over, examining another facet, and comparing the intricate etchings to the notes she'd taken on the Dragon ritual - notes on how to oppose it, notes on how to prevent it, notes on how to reverse it.
She'd show her mentor that happiness could hold more power then sadness, that this wasn't the only path. No matter what it took!
