Remove ads

I, Jaune: Or, Underpowered Alcoholic Makes Huntsman School Noticeably Worse [RWBY]

Reader mode
hey

how much money do i need to throw at you to make it so that the fun gang makes it out alive and relatively okay?

cause i will make an onlyfans
 
pingas plight said:
hey

how much money do i need to throw at you to make it so that the fun gang makes it out alive and relatively okay?

cause i will make an onlyfans
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Not nearly enough, my bro. I've been making the guys on my Discord suffer as I keep digging the grave deeper. I enjoy this kinda thing.

Just wait! Next week we're gonna reach Peak Ruby Moment, and even she shall suffer!

Suffering for everyone!

And also Ruby being a precious minx. But also pain

Just wait for when Jaune and Blake actually talk to each other about Weiss dragging their feelings for each other out in public for everyone.
 
Well then, that went pretty well, all things considered.
Weiss calls them out for their feelings. Everyone gets out of the sea of teeth. You name drop yourself while having a character arc. Thats all good.

We are still stuck in a cave with a literal sea of teeth, confused teammates, and caught between skinwalkers, political wranglers, and terrorists. Thats bad. The thing is only one of theese things is new, and its the confusion.

I bet they are going to live, if only for Simmone to get to mess with everyone now that shes pulled a fast one on Salem.
 
pingas plight said:
hey

how much money do i need to throw at you to make it so that the fun gang makes it out alive and relatively okay?

cause i will make an onlyfans
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Make the only fans and hire @Eric d'Orléans a real therapist, bc I can't be his therapist anymore, its affecting my mental stability.

This Is not a joke the more I read the more convinced that he is writing this story in lu of seeking proper mental and emotional care.
 
esseresse said:
Make the only fans and hire @Eric d'Orléans a real therapist, bc I can't be his therapist anymore, its affecting my mental stability.

This Is not a joke the more I read the more convinced that he is writing this story in lu of seeking proper mental and emotional care.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
you think that the man who thinks he compartmentalizes emotions and has the memory of an 80 year old can help with mental/emotional care?
 
Remove ads
Volume 6, Chapter 7
  • Threadmarks
    • Chapter 7: Whiskey Tango Foxtrot
    "Anyone who runs is White Fang. Anyone who stands still is smart White Fang."

    — 18 —​

    Staff Sergeant Marcus Sabès Pétion thought the burning city of Montluçon smelled homey. He flicked his forked tongue into the air as he fell through the sky, and thought it tasted like Catchfire. He doubted many of the men with him knew what that was like. They were by-and-large humans, which meant most none of them were either from or had ever been to la Ville Lumière. It was a pity. The city had gone to shit over the last twenty-four hours. He'd been guarding a tunnel and comfortably enjoying being dead inside before orders came to pull back. Pétion supposed that meant those eight Huntsmen kids were dead or something. The staff sergeant didn't care to ask. Orders were orders, and it meant he got out of that goddamn sewer. Then the tunnels exploded. There was a river of liquid Grimm, somehow, leaking from the ground like the aftermath of a burst Dust pipe. And those damn demons were pouring through the tunnels and generally ruining everyone's day. He'd gotten exactly two hours of sleep before being told to put on his battle rattle, drink something with a near lethal dose of caffeine and amphetamines, and prepare to jump.

    Just another day in the life, Pétion supposed. He wasn't paid enough to have "opinions" on things one way or the other.

    Grav Dust harness tight to his chest, he watched the bullhead they'd all jumped from become like a speck above him. He pulled the cord on the harness, and felt the Dust sing to life and shove him against gravity like the kick of a beowolf. Jump boots did the rest of the work. Pétion and his men hit the roof of the Pavot Rouge hotel soft enough that no one broke their knees, which meant it was a successful jump. Didn't mean it didn't send shockwaves of pain up his spine, but learning how to jump and land was part and parcel of being air cavalry.

    "We good?" he asked, scanning the seven other men on the rooftop. Most had hit the ground on or around the hotel's bullhead landing pad. The question was almost entirely a formality, but it never hurt to be sure. Just because everyone was able to stand up didn't mean they were good to fight. A fireforce tactical insertion wasn't kind to the body, even with a grav harness.

    "Only broke one hip that time, sarn't," a soldier said candidly, rubbing his back.

    "Don't worry; you got a spare," Pétion said.

    The soldier flashed a thumbs-up, unfolding the stock of his assault rifle. Like most of what the Royal Army used, it was a Volikov of some description.

    Another bullhead soared over the rooftops, shooting ordinance towards a street a few blocks over. He and his men were one of the few teams on special assignments like this, instead of working with the rest of the Army to protect civilians and limit the damage from the Grimm. They were high enough that blowing the street up didn't rattle them, even as fire and dust spewed into the air. Even if it was closer, he knew these men had their éperons, their spurs. Like him, they'd done the trial and earned the right to wear spurs and wide-brimmed hats outside of combat. They were the toughest of the tough. Loyal brothers to one another.

    Specialist deSilhon whistled. "Whoever just blew up is having a bad day."

    "I'll make yours worse unless you shut up and move," Pétion said, gesturing to the only door up on the roof. It led to a sort of rooftop bar. The door was unlocked, which upset him. He'd really wanted to kick open a door.

    His squad didn't really need to speak any coherent language. All they needed were gestures, nods, and the occasional grunt to figure out what to do and how to approach. Point at the man, point towards a door, and he covered it. They covered each other with overlapping fields of fire as they entered the roof. Nothing of interest beside bottles of alcohol in the bar that had fallen off the shelves and shattered where the city started going to shit.

    "RIP in peace," deSilhon said, making the sign of the saints over the bottles.

    Next step was the stairwell. Sure, there was the elevators, but you'd be stupid to take that. At the top floor, the only button on the lift was a singular one labeled Appeler. That was how you knew for sure you were in the Valean heartland. Pétion's mother tongue, like most kids from Catchfire, was Valais. While the royal government might officially use the language of Patch for all administrative and trade purposes, in his experiences serving on the wider continent of Sanus, Pétion estimated only a third of the people in the country fluently spoke Vale's own official language. It was a prestige thing; the most well-off people in the country wouldn't speak Valais or any form of Graadian, and it was what they insisted foreigners learn if they wanted to work with Vale. So learn it growing up Pétion had.

    The men burst into the stairwell and found it empty. It went down several stories. Drop a coin down the space between the stairs and it'd kill a man by the time it landed. There were so many floors they could go from here. So the sergeant checked the list.

    Staff Sergeant Pétion's direct superior officer, First Lieutenant Sousan, had stressed this was an order Pétion should take to his grave. Not in so many words, just in his body language and tone. Pétion understood the Eranstani officer's mannerisms enough to get the message. As far as he was concerned, he was just following orders that came from thin air, and maybe making up a few of his own along the way. Nobody knew anything incriminating. And as long as no one knew anything, the people who did know anything would protect that. That was how these things worked. He'd been around the block before.

    Out on the frontier, there was an unspoken understanding between soldiers that a lot of what they did in pursuit of the mission were somewhere between ethically questionable and internationally illegal. He'd committed some crime in Vale, and the judge offered him a choice between labor camp or the service. The justice system patted itself on the back for being "tough on crime" and sending dangerous men like Pétion far away for such horrible crimes as "felony trespassing" (refusing to leave a no-faunus-served breakfast joint while severely hungover) and "sleeping with the wrong human's daughter." He'd hardly been alone, either as a penal legionnaire or in choosing to re-enlist once his sentence ended.

    The Royal Army was, one way or another, still a primarily conscription force drawing mostly service treaties with the disparate parts of the Valean empire. As the core of the nation, for some reason, Vale and Patch themselves were generally exempt unless you found yourself on the wrong side of the law. Something like "you are to provide us so many men every year in exchange for being otherwise left alone to govern yourselves." A superior once explained it as a scalability thing to him. The high turnover rate of soldiers combined with limited resources forced the Royal Army to be highly efficient and innovative to survive during peacetime. And even if Parliament was highly skittish of militarism publically for the votes, in private they knew that if Great War Two or whatever broke out, Vale could quickly mobilize millions of former servicemen into a military that could punch way above its own weight class with minimal effort. An all-volunteer force like Atlas couldn't respond or compete with that.

    The Army's backbone, though, remained the officers and NCOs like Pétion who decided to stick around past their original conscription because it wasn't all that bad once you were institutionalized into it. At least the Royal Army didn't care what you were born as so long as you shot the animals on the frontier who shot at you first. Someone once told him, and he believed it, that there were more faunus in the Royal Army and its reserves than all Menagerie.

    He flicked his tongue. The stairwell air tasted of concrete dust and old solvents. He checked the list for a room number and put it away. They went one floor down before bursting into the hallway. The electricity worked in some places, but not in the building right now. Most people would have to follow the illuminum paint near the floors to navigate. But there was a reason the Royal Army liked to make use of faunus like him. He didn't need the light to see. Pétion had an uncomfortable view of the hotel's luxurious carpets. He'd never be able to afford staying in a place like this. He doubted any of his men ever would.

    But Pétion knew it was all so much a mummer's game. People could come to Montluçon for its veneer of high society and fashion outside the capital. The ideal destination resort far enough away to be nearly foreign, but close enough to be a couple hours' flight back home. Never mind the factories towards the end of town, the workers laboring in mines or refining, or the faunus girls working in the bunny ranches that his fellow soldiers liked to visit. For everything that the city pretended it was, and the people who came here thought of themselves, Pétion couldn't help but notice this hallway still had those same generic vending machines in the end like every other hotel.

    He took point, moving ahead of his men. It wasn't proper technical procedure, but he could see better than them. The flashlights mounted to the rifles just made a dizzying mess of his vision. He kept flicking his tongue, tasting the air. And then he tasted something wrong just around the corner.

    Sergeant Pétion liked to think he was one of the few people in the world unfortunate enough to know what licking Grimm was like. It wasn't an exact comparison, as one human annoyingly tried to explain to him. It wasn't so much that he could taste things in the air as some kind of weird thermal lizard sense. But what the fuck would a human know about being faunus? As far as he was concerned, Grimm tasted like putting a leather glove over your tongue and sticking it out under the exhaust of a motor carriage.

    Pétion tasted just one, and held up his hand in the sign for freeze. And then he made the gesture for Grimm, holding up one finger. The soldiers behind him obeyed and took position without question. It was the benefit of being drilled and experienced. They might not be the superhuman Huntsmen who had apparently just gone into the caves and died, but that didn't mean he and his men couldn't handle Grimm. The only thing separating this instance from the countless other times the Army had dealt with them by themselves was the close quarters urban nature of the hotel.

    Slowly, he put his hand on the wall and extended himself away from it, a common tactic to increase how much you can see of the bad guy and how little they can see of you when you turn a corner. In movies, the military for some reason liked to face targets at an angle, positioning your body so that your side faced the foe and you looked more cinematic. But body armor was thickest on the front and back. You wanted your torso to face the bad guy directly. Or the inhuman abomination of evil, depending on the situation. He braced the stock of his rifle into his shoulder, snapped his eyes to look through his reflex sight, and counted his breaths before popping the corner. Pétion had never been a particularly good shot standing up. He hoped the close distance would alleviate that. Or feeling that, overwhelming firepower from his men.

    The creature was a black morass in the hallway, scratching at one of the doors. Covered in red veins that acted as a kind of highway, its four eyes traveling up and down them instead of being able to move around in some kind of socket. It looked almost like a cocoon, its several limbs stretched out and grabbing the floor, the wall, and the ceiling. Pétion didn't know what to call it. Exact information about Grimm was something Huntsmen liked to keep for themselves. Maybe it was called Clarence for all he cared. Its four eyes circled around its body and formed a kind of bony face looking right at him. If he hadn't known it was there beforehand, it probably would have gotten the jump.

    The sergeant depressed the trigger at the bottom of his breath, and then kept firing. The Grimm gave a deep pitched wail, its smokey arms retracting from the walls and shooting out towards him. It grabbed onto the ceiling and launched itself towards him and his men. He didn't think about it; he just kept shooting quick single shot after quick single shot.

    The heavy ammunition blew its arms off. And the hail of gunfire from him and his men ripped apart what was left of it. Its eyes shattered, spewing chunks of Grimm bone across the hallway. It sailed forward on its inertia and crashed into a door. Pétion didn't stop firing until the creature started to turn to ash.

    They reloaded quickly and waited for any other kind of trick. You never presumed these things were actually dead. You never presumed anyone was dead, really. As a young private, his own sergeant had told him that if someone looks dead to you, keep your rifle trained on them, and step on their balls. If they so much as flinch, it's legal cause to shoot them. That was the practical method, even though, legally speaking, the manual recommended doing some kind of weird rubbing motion against someone's sternum to see if they were really dead. But nobody had time for that out on the frontier. A quick and efficient double tap was all you needed.

    "Que dalle," Pétion said, aiming his rifle down the hallway.

    "Rien," slowly came the echo back from his men. Nothing to see. The area looked clear. Although his men were being somewhat less crude.

    "Hold up," Specialist deSilhon said, gesturing at the door the creature had been clawing at.

    The sergeant lowered his rifle and walked down the hall to examine the door. The Grimm had been making half-hearted scratches all around the door frame. The handle itself was clawed to oblivion, the card reader destroyed. He was about to dismiss it as anything of value when he noticed the room number.

    He checked it against his list and swore under his breath. "Merde! Cover me." Pétion lowered his rifle to knock on the door. He heard someone gasp from within. "MP Jouhaux, are you in there? This is your rescue."

    Someone tried to say something behind the door, but it came out muffled.

    "Jouhaux, the Grimm are gone. I need you to open this door."

    Another muffled response. "I can't. The handle is broken from this side too." Male, adult. Probably the MP. Pétion didn't actually know the proper way to address a member of the House of Commons. He supposed it didn't matter.

    Pétion let out a sigh. "Sir, I need you to stand back from the door if you're there." with his men covering him, looking down the hall, he allowed himself a small smile. He was going to get his fantasy of kicking down a door today one way or the other. And Pétion was a big man.

    With a single heavy kick, the door broke open. He pushed it aside and flicked his tongue, tasting the air. There were three people inside the room. The entire thing was a mess, with bits of furniture haphazardly used to barricade the door, and not done very well. He pushed a dresser aside, keeping his rifle by him. His men didn't go in with him. Only one of them bothered making eye contact with him before he turned away and focused on getting into the room.

    Three people. The Grimm had attacked late enough at night that everyone on the list should have been in their respective rooms. They were all in various states of undress, probably woken up by this mess. Adult male standing in the front, looking rattled. Behind him was an adult female, crouching down on the floor clutching a girl who couldn't be older than seven.

    "Oh thank the Saints!" Jouhaux said with a frantic little laugh. "It's the army. Leonette, we're going to make it! Gods above, thank you!"

    Jouhaux extended his hand to shake and took three steps towards Pétion. Honestly, he only got that far because the sergeant was making the left-hand sign to ask Celiphie for pardon. Three steps before he got his rifle up and fired. The man's wife screamed.

    He supposed he should have felt something more. But honestly, why would Staff Sergeant Pétion care for some Tory MP? These were the same bastards who put Pétion behind bars and drafted him into the military as an oblique form of execution. The same military they had no love for, and outright banned from Vale itself. Pétion hadn't seen his mother in nearly a decade because of men like this. It had just been one thankless assignment after thankless assignment against frontier animals and Grimm after another. The MP was paying for his own short-sighted idiocy with a bullet through the heart.

    But no matter how Pétion rationalized it to himself, he knew he was doing this because orders were orders. It wasn't like he really cared about politics or the people who ran the system. He didn't have a say in it, one way or the other. A criminal record permanently disbarred him from voting. But apparently it didn't prevent him from wearing the Valean twin axes on his shoulder and dying for his kingdom.

    Funny how that worked.

    The orders hadn't said anything about the family, but he wasn't stupid. He knew what he was doing. And so he made up a couple orders all on his own.

    The kid went first. Honestly, he was aiming for the mother, but it was like she was trying to use the kid of the shield, the way she was holding her. The next shot stopped the harridan from screeching and screaming.

    Three people. Three bullets. Three corpses.

    Pétion felt his heart throbbing in his chest. He ran a hand down his face, wiping off the sweat. He looked upon his works, and felt a detached sense of nothing. That was always the worst part. The first time he'd killed a man, he'd been in uniform, and he distinctly recalled not being upset that he murdered somebody, but hating himself for feeling nothing. He couldn't even say that he felt numb because they were human and he wasn't. First person he ever killed was a frontier faunus, just another animal out there in the wilds.

    He took a long breath before making the sign of the Saints. He picked up his bullet casings and pocketed them before stepping out of the room.

    "Sarn't?" deSilhon asked, not looking him in the eyes.

    Pétion took out his list and crossed the name off. But there was so much more to do.

    "Dead when I got there," he said loudly. No one was fooled, but everyone would pretend they were. It was better for their souls and their careers that way. His team had been chosen specifically for that reason. They knew which way their bread was buttered. "Eaten by Grimm. C'mon. Maybe we can get there in time for the next one. It's a long list of VIPs we need to extract."

    — 19 —​

    Subject: Death Certificate of PM Ayden Jouhaux

    Date: January 19th, '52

    Personal Details: Age 46, male, of mixed Patch-Valais phenotype. A Conservative MP representing the 43rd district, Les Jardins. Former Liberal-Democrat. MP Jouhaux, his wife, and their daughter were attending the Midwinter Gala in Montluçon. Jouhaux was reportedly found in his hotel room with his family, who similarly perished. He is survived by no children. His seat in the 43rd district is up for a snap election.

    Cause of Death: Lost to Grimm. No reason to suspect foul play. Corpse never recovered, presumed eaten.

    — 20 —​

    Pyrrha Nikos found Ruby sitting on the wall behind the crowd of people, staring up at the low white clouds. While Nora and her partner, Yang, were closer to the stage, closer to General Ironwood's demonstration. Ruby was lost in the sky. She reached a hand out and closed her fist over the nothingness above her.

    "I don't think you got them," Pyrrha said.

    Ruby blinked. "Huh?"

    She made a gesture. "Whatever you're doing, I don't think you captured them or anything."

    Ruby looked back up at the sky. "It's not something you can really capture. We've got a Forgiven Field rolling in on the forecast."

    "I think you should be paying more attention to our mission," Pyrrha said, nodding towards the throngs of people gathered before General Ironwood and his stage demonstration. Not that the mission was hard or anything. She'd chosen it because it looked interesting, not difficult. The only really hard one was the assignment Team CFVY brought Team BASS along with for.

    All they really had to do was act as a sort of public goodwill liaison for a diplomatic mission from Atlas to Vale. There was some politics wrapped up in it that was beyond Pyrrha. The general wanted to show off Atlesian technology and mechs or something. If it was actually dangerous, actually worth major attention, this would have been a mission for licensed Hunters. As it was, it seemed mostly a social event down in the city that had become Pyrrha's temporarily adopted home.

    General James Ironwood was the power behind the Kingdom of Atlas as General of the Armed Forces of Atlas and their elected Chancellor too. Pyrrha mostly knew of him due to Atlas' rather overbearing influence in Northern Mistral, particularly her home city of Argus. To Pyrrha, that was just the way the world had worked for as long as she could remember. But older denizens, like her mother, remembered when Atlas wasn't on everyone's doorstep. Even back home, a lot of people referred to Mistral's prime minister, the "Prostatis," as the Pimp for the way he seemed to sell out his own nation to Atlas. Pyrrha couldn't deny the positive influence Atlas did have, and it seemed like General Ironwood and the Valean Tory party were working on trying to normalize relationships between their two countries for similar mutual benefits. Thus this public display of technology to try to impress the voting populace of Vale and get them to see the benefits of international cooperation.

    Her own opinions on Atlas only went as far as how Atlas treated her own people, the Akhaioi. Really, everything north of the Throat of Pereiklon was its own country. Akhaia, as it was properly called, possessed too distinct a people. In a vague sense, the Akhaioi, Joseon, Nuang Bao, Hua, Yamato, and the dozen other ethnicities in Mistral didn't belong together. It reminded me of her brief stop in the former Tsardom of Graad on her way to Beacon, marveling at how such distinct people were such fiercely loyal subjects to the crown of Vale. At least Mistral could claim the Argeiad king, Megas Alexandros, had brought Mistral under one law when he conquered it and forced himself on the last daughter of its Chrysanthemum throne and united the bloodlines of the North and South. Megas Alexandros was a red-haired god with the full blessing of the Glory; he forged one nation through fire. What did Vale have holding it together?

    But, like she said, politics. It wasn't her business to have opinions on how two foreign nations interacted. She just did the missions Beacon asked of her and called it there. Her focus laid squarely with her team, VYPR, and what things like this meant for them.

    "They're fine," Ruby said absently, kicking her legs idly on the wall. Pyrrha always thought how strange it was that Ruby's attire seemed to prioritize leg mobility, given her rather subpar cardio. That black corset really didn't do her core any favors. She wondered how the girl could breathe in something that tight. She probably couldn't even really bend over. It just seemed a terrible outfit for a Huntress to wear. "It's a rare phenomenon in Vale."

    "I didn't take you for a weathergirl," Pyrrha said with a slight smile.

    Ruby shook her head. "It's a lucky sign, y'know? A Forgiven Field."

    "I'm unfamiliar."

    Her partner frowned. "When the clouds come in low like that, it's called the Forgiven Field, because from above it looks like white tulips. They're the symbol of forgiveness, of worthiness. Not as cool as roses, in my humble opinion, but still a pretty cool flower." She pushed off the wall and landed on her boots. "See, there's legends of a Huntress who launched herself into the sky during an epic battle. Feet bare and dress swaying in the wind, inertia stopped there in the low clouds. She hung in the sky for what felt like forever before gravity remembered her. She looked down at Vale through the clouds and thought they looked like white tulips.

    "See, up in the clouds, it puts everything into perspective. We're so small, all of us. Our problems look like everything when we're all we can see. But in the air, seeing the whole world, you can see your problems for what they are. They look like nothing you can't live with, overcome, and forgive."

    Ruby made an expansive gesture to the crowd. "Sometimes when life seems too much, things look like they're going to crush me, when it's all so… y'know? I like to think that up there, all my problems look so small. That I just need a little perspective. We all need that. Sometimes that perspective is high in the Forgiven Field. Sometimes it's just talking to a friend and realizing you have options. You have people who'll stand by your side."

    Pyrrha folded her arms, feeling her weapon hanging at her hip. "If the weather's such a good omen, then come on. It means we can't go wrong with our little assignment."

    Ruby shook her head. "Oh, it can. It's dumb to think it can't just because you saw a good sign or found, like, a seventeen-leaf clover. Yang and Nora have that angle of the stage covered, so I figured it'd be smarter to be back here where no one's looking." She shrugged. "See, in the original Valais legend, the King of Patch, Robert Damecrown, won. He defeated the Huntress. He burned her and her cause at the stake. Conquered Vale. Just because her problems looked so small in comparison, it didn't mean she didn't have to fight for them for all she was worth. She let perspective poison her. And she burned for it. Never let the big picture distract you from giving your problems all you're worth. Or you'll end up another nameless, forgotten martyr."

    Pyrrha folded her arms. Not quite hugging herself, but still. "Something bothering you, Ruby?"

    Ruby made an incoherent gesture, a half-hearted attempt to point at something, and gave up. "Maybe? Dunno. Just got a bad feeling about this whole thing. It's too easy, this mission. We're not fighting Grimm. Not saving people. Just playing eye candy to some guy from Atlas and his robots."

    With a gesture for Ruby to follow, Pyrrha started walking the edges of the plaza. The place had been chosen well for the demonstration, and the crowds had turned out in droves to see the Atlesian general and his show of the so-called "Atlesian knight," a humanoid type of combat robot that gave Pyrrha a weird feeling to look at. This was only one such demonstration, Pyrrha knew. The holographic recorders were taking the general's physical image from this plaza and projecting it to a dozen other places across the city.

    "That's why when we had a choice for our missions, I went with this one," Pyrrha said. "Sure, there were missions to dangerous places to do dangerous things. But, I think we could do those easily."

    "So why didn't we? I'm bored. And feeling weird." Ruby slumped her shoulder theatrically. "And stop walking so fast. One of your steps is like two of mine. Stop having long legs."

    Pyrrha smiled. "It wouldn't be a problem if you had better cardio."

    Ruby made a sour face. A moment later she evaporated into a storm of rose petals and zipped across Pyrrha's field of vision to a bench just in front of her. A man standing by the bench yelped in surprise. "Sorry!" she said.

    The man held his hands up and slowly backed away.

    Ruby frowned. "Look what you made me do, Pyrrha. I scared someone trying to make a point!"

    "Could it have really been such a good point if it scares the people around you to make it?" Pyrrha asked, hands behind her head.

    "Yes! Because it has to be made. And that point is, cardio's overrated," Ruby said, blowing a bang of dark red hair from her face. Pyrrha used to think it was black, but Ruby was very insistent it was a super dark red, which wasn't entirely convincing. "Why should I work on something useless when I can turn into roses and just zip around. I'm, like, I'm one of the best, fastest members on this team, and I have the cardio of a malnourished pug. And pugs are awful dogs. They can't even breathe right by design. They were bred to die. I mean, literally!"

    "Ruby," Pyrrha said, reaching out to put a hand on her partner's shoulder. Ruby was getting carried away again with one of the seemingly random things that would set her off. She had really strong beliefs about the most inconsequential of topics. Sometimes trying to bring her back to reality was like fishing for sky-eels, a self-defeating task.

    "No!" Ruby said loudly. "This has to be said. Pug owners should go commit unalive. They were bred just so you can watch something you love slowly suffocate to death in front of your eyes. If you own a pug, you're evil. And that's a fact. Someone has to say it!"

    Pyrrha rubbed her forehead. "Just like someone has to say there's more to being a Huntress than mindless violence and fighting Grimm. That's why I chose this mission."

    Ruby rolled her eyes so hard that her entire body shook with the gesture. "Ugh. You're such a mom, Pyrrha. And not even the cool or mean ones. I thought you were from Mistral; why aren't you a rough tiger mom?"

    Looking over at General Ironwood as he made a speech to the oddly quiet, unenthused crowd of Valeans, Pyrrha said, "I'm not going to let you distract me. And tiger moms are a southern stereotype in any case. If you're going to be culturally insensitive, at least get my culture right."

    "Got it," Ruby said dryly. "Learn about the diversity of foreign cultures so I can be racist more accurately. Good talk, fearless leader."

    "My point is, there's a lot more to being a Hunter than violence," Pyrrha said, shaking her head. "I think I learned this the first time a little girl came up to me and asked for my autograph after I won my second tournament. I realized that being a champion fighter and being a Huntress were a lot alike. It wasn't so much about being able to fight, as what you represented to people. Do you see the crowd there? They don't view us like they do their military, like that soldier general they're all here to see. They view us as being different. We are a living symbol. And as symbols, we can either be something they fear, or something that inspires them. Are you afraid of the Grimm?"

    Ruby made a face. "No. I go up against some all the time. It's not that they're not scary, I'm not stupid. But…" She shrugged.

    "Familiarity," she said. "It's like exposure therapy. The most tried and true method of overcoming trauma is repeated exposure to it until you become used to it, until it can't hurt you anymore."

    "Yeah, I know. I cheated off your notes to pass that exact same psychology test, Pyrrha," Ruby said.

    "Studying with me is not cheating."

    Ruby nodded enthusiastically. "It's the only way of cheating they can't prove. I go into my tests having read the books and notes. I've memorized all the answers beforehand. It's the perfect crime."

    Pyrrha sighed with content. "So it's the same way with us and people like them. They're terrified of Grimm because they're just some demons beyond the walls of their cities. So the people who fight them have to be even scarier, they must think. That's why Beacon wants us to go out into town and help with the Vytal Festival. They want people to see us as people like them. Not terrifying warriors of the night or whatever. But just people with a special gift doing their best for everyone else. We have to mingle with them. We have to let them see us. We can't ever get it in our heads that we and they are different on any fundamental level. So when I saw a mission to go out and mingle with people, to get ourselves out there, I chose it. We can all kill monsters all day and be fine. But it's things like this that, sure and that we are there for the people, that grounds us in reality."

    "You mean we'd get our heads up our butts if we didn't do this kind of stuff," Ruby said, folding her arms.

    Pyrrha nodded. "That's how I think about it. When that little girl came up to me for an autograph, she didn't see me as a fighter exactly. She didn't see the weeks and months I put into training, strict dieting, and practice. She just saw someone like her who could be a hero. And I never want to forget that feeling. That people aren't afraid of us and look up to us. This is valuable."

    Ruby cast her silver eyes to the Forgiven Field and sighed. "You don't want me to lose perspective."

    "You could think of it like that," Pyrrha said with a little smile.

    "Doesn't mean I don't still have a weird feeling about this all," she said unhappily.

    "You're out of your comfort zone, and that's good," Pyrrha said. "If I had wanted to stay in my comfort zone, I wouldn't have left Mistral. I wouldn't have traveled across the world to experience a whole different culture and way of thinking and everything else. Everything from the fashion to how you think of citizenship is alien to me, and that's okay. It's out of my comfort zone. And learning to understand and become comfortable with discomfort will make me a better person."

    Ruby looked out at the crowd. She scowled slightly as the robots kicked down older models of Atlesian machines. The crowd gasped, whispering and making uncomfortable noises. "I get the fashion. Pretty much nobody but me knows how to dress good."

    "You're wearing a corset and a combat skirt," Pyrrha said.

    "Because I am stylish and delicious and deadly," Ruby huffed. "We need to bring capes back into vogue. Civilization lost something when we all stopped wearing capes and began wearing jackets."

    Pyrrha raised an eyebrow. "Next you're going to tell me that we should bring back trench coats."

    Ruby shook her head vehemently. "Heck no. Trench coats are for losers who like to jerk off in public. Capes are for people who are dangerous and mysterious, and don't jerk off in public. It's a scientific fact."

    The crowd got rowdier. More people talking, sounding generally displeased, and occasionally yelling out questions to the general that he ignored. There was a general malaise to the entire mood of the crowd, and nothing the general could do with his show of robots and talks of political cooperation seemed to mollify them.

    "Ruby," Pyrrha said, and sighed. "I think we're getting—"

    The girl held up her finger, staring intently at the crowd. "That's a Szolacs jacket."

    "What?" Pyrrha tried to ask, but Ruby was already breaking apart into a cloud of force petals. The girl moved faster than a lubed pegasus, scaling up a drainpipe and reforming at the top of a three-story building overlooking the plaza. She watched as Ruby pulled out her scythe and adjusted the scope so she could look through it.

    That gave Pyrrha a bad feeling. She looked around to try to find another way out, before just giving up and going the easy route. Pyrrha found it in the drain pipe, which was a predictable feature of Valean architecture. While there were parts of Vale that were beautiful, so much of it felt devoid of soul. In the quest to be efficient and modern, Vale had become gray and hollow. It reminded her of the newest parts of Argus, rebuilt after the Great War, and how it just felt like a carbon copy of this heartless style.

    In the oldest parts of Argus, Pyrrha had fallen in love with how her people used to be. The ancient harbor and the city walls were a clean, polished white, accentuated with bright red tiles the same color of Pyrrha's own hair. It was important, symbolic of how the Akhaioi were the descendants of the red-tailed dolphins. They swam across the world's oceans to escape extinction at the hands of the Final Empire's fishermen; their blood was important to several of their profane rituals. The red-tailed dolphins swam until they ran out of ocean, and made a deal with the Great Miscreant, Ouzakhi. He made humans spring from the dolphins' wombs so their children could escape onto land in exchange for stealing their ancient songs.

    It was what separated Akhaioi from any other race, human or faunus. It was why they were able to conquer and drive off the native Mistrali, the Pelasgians, from the North and make it their new home. Why citizenship among her people's cities required you to have two pureblooded Akhaioi parents of the polis. And it was the Akhaioi who gave Remnant red hair, true red hair exactly like Pyrrha's, instead of the black hair Ruby insisted was red or that flamboyant mop that Nora had.

    Pyrrha focused her Aura and used it to get a solid grip on the drain pipe. Credit where it was due, people in this country were serious about drainage. The pipe didn't collapse as she climbed up it, although she did leave several finger dents in the tin before pulling herself up onto the roof. She felt her heart rate elevate; even if she was fit, it wasn't exactly the easiest task.

    "Ruby!" Pyrrha snapped. "Put that scope away; there are people down there."

    Ruby flexed her fingers, demonstrating that they weren't anywhere near the trigger. "Trigger safety observed. Weapon isn't loaded. The bolt is pulled back just to be safe. I'm using the sight," she said as if she thought Pyrrha was somehow stupid. "See that jacket?"

    Pyrrha scowled. She had to admit, this was a great vantage point. Something about the way the plaza was built gave them surprisingly good audio reception up here. She could hear the general talking, and even some of the louder voices in the crowd. But she shook her head. "I see lots of jackets, lots of coats. No capes, though, sadly. What are you talking about?"

    Ruby had a weird way of looking through her scope. She kept both of her eyes open. It was a way to prevent losing depth of field, Pyrrha knew, but it had the unintended effect of making Ruby look almost comically focused. Like the one eye should see was bulging out of the socket from just how intently she was staring.

    She'd always wondered how a girl like Ruby could so effortlessly swing and fire a weapon so massive. Pyrrha preferred something lighter and more efficient. It was why she was happy with her weapon, Miló, and shield, Akoúo. Sleek and mobile, able to transform to handle threats at close to medium range. With a symbolic importance beyond just cool and badass like Ruby seemed to focus on. On the recommendation of an Oracle of the Four-Eyed Sky-Eel, Pyrrha had forged Akoúo with an abstract symbol for Eriginio, the god of music and violence.

    "It's the off-white, sun bleached jacket," Ruby said. "Look at those two guys making their way to the front of the crowd."

    Squinting, Pyrrha had to pay particular attention until she saw them. They were a little too distant to make out clearly, but their jackets stood out. They looked almost dirty; white leather jackets and blue jeans. Pyrrha thought the aesthetic somehow in poor taste. She had never been a fan of leather jackets; they made too much noise and you couldn't really wash them. Plus they were sweaty and too tight.

    "I see them both, but why does it matter?" she asked.

    "Because they're Szolacs jackets," Ruby said.

    Pyrrha gave her a go on expression.

    Ruby took her eyes off the scope and looked a little flabbergasted. "Uh. You're a foreigner. Right. Hm. They're a kind of homemade leather work jacket. The material tends to get a bleached white color from sunlight. Débardeurs in Szolacs tended to wear them, keeping them around for generations, and the look stuck for lots of dockworkers and laborers. The lefties like to wear them. Union-Labor dudes."

    "There's something really weird about hearing you of all people talk politics."

    "I'm not; I'm trying to avoid politics. You're the one who got us on this stupid political mission. But colors have meaning. And those two guys who are wearing those white Szolacs jackets who just made it to the very front of the crowd and are currently heckling Ironwood are probably there for political reasons."

    Pyrrha inhaled sharply, whirling around. "They're what?!"

    If not for the peculiar acoustics of the plaza and the rooftop, she might not have been able to hear them. Honestly, if she hadn't known to listen for it, she would have gotten lost talking to Ruby about jackets again. It meant that she missed the start of the conversation, but it really wasn't a chit chat. It was a human and a faunus in sunbleached jackets yelling at the general.

    "So how come you Atlas military types get to walk into our city, when we don't even let our own army here?" the human asked with a local accent that Pyrrha needed to process to understand. The crowd seemed to yell in agreement.

    Somewhere in the background, she saw Yang and Nora lurking behind the stage. They were hanging back, out of sight of the main crowd, but in the area. In front of them were the humanoid combat robots the general had been trying to show off to the people of the city.

    Then General Ironwood made a mistake. He tapped his microphone and talked to the man. "Because our two great nations have nothing to fear from mutual cooperation, and everything to gain. Atlas stands behind me. They voted me into this position, and I speak with the authority of my nation. It doesn't matter that I'm a soldier. What matters is that I'm here as a friend, as the voice of my nation. Merely look around you and you'll see the benefits cooperation can provide. How many of the stores and shops here are owned by Atlesian citizens? How many jobs in this city alone does industry from my country provide you?"

    The jacketed faunus snarled. "You can take your racist slave industry somewhere else. How many of the jobs actually bring a living wage? How many actually care about this kingdom, instead of the bottom fucking line? Why the hell are we letting this war criminal into our city?"

    Ironwood shook his head. "Please, there's no need for that. I know you have your misgivings. I truly can't blame you. The relationship between our nations has been rocky at best. But between the hardest rocks lay the smoothest water, the deepest harbors. I was invited by Martin Gladstone—"

    "Fuck the prime minister," the human said.

    "And fuck the Tories for letting you into our city. For letting you and all your cronies in."

    "Let me guess, the slaves are getting too uppity in Atlas, so you're outsourcing here," the first man went on. "Schnee Dust blood money invested back here, out-competing local businesses with your cartels. You think we'll just roll over for you and show you our bellies?"

    The crowd surged in agreement.

    Ironwood raised a hand. "I understand your misgivings. You're not wrong to feel that way. But old Mantle is dead, sir. The Kingdom of Atlas is striving towards a better future for all mankind."

    "What about faunuskind?" someone in the crowd jeered.

    The general seemed to realize his blunder. "Are they too not people, not human? A rising tide will lift all boats. What is good for the individual will be good for everyone between our two great nations."

    Even to Pyrrha, who had no particular stake in this argument or this country, they sounded like regurgitated political soundbites strung together on a shoestring. As if the man was just trying to fish for the most politically pleasant platitudes he could manage, devoid of any deeper meaning.

    "Oh great, now I'm just another human," the jacketed faunus said. "Next you'll tell me things are so bad for everyone in Atlas, that their White Fang recruits humans too."

    "Don't be ridiculous," General Ironwood said with a small laugh.

    But the laugh seemed to set the crowd into a frenzy.

    As the men in the jackets just stood there, they listened and occasionally egged on the voices spurring from the crowd. "Tyrant!" "Slave driver!" "Chez les Valais les rois sont morts!" "Racist prick!" "Invader!" "Get that foreign soldier out of our country!" "Que veut cette horde d'esclaves?" "If one of us ain't free, ain't nobody free!"

    "This is bad," Ruby said. She looked at her partner. "What do we do?"

    Pyrrha stared, mouth dry. "I… This wasn't supposed to be difficult. I was just trying to get us—I mean, we're supposed to help the general."

    Ruby shook her head. "I'm not about to get involved in arguing politics."

    "No, that's not what I—we're supposed to keep them safe. He has soldiers and he has those robots, but we're…"

    "So you don't have a plan?"

    Pyrrha bit her lip, hesitating. "I… no, we can handle this. We're not going to involve ourselves unless it gets violent. People yelling and getting angry is probably part of the game. We can't let people think we're taking sides. We're just here to make sure no one gets hurt. We're Huntsmen, not police."

    "Pyrrha?" Ruby said slowly.

    "What? It's a good plan! We're simply going to wait and not rush into this. These are people, not Grimm."

    "That's not what I meant." She pointed down at the crowd.

    Pyrrha could hear it echoing in on the breeze. A steady, distant chime of alerts. Everyone's individual scroll getting a message. It seemed to roll through the crowd like a wave. At first no one seemed to notice, but then it became something you couldn't not notice when everyone's scroll was blowing up. She even saw Yang and Nora check their own scrolls.

    And then it finally got to her and Ruby.

    Pyrrha took out her scroll.

    Alert! Valean mass notification system! Major Grimm Attack in the city of Montluçon. Registered Huntsmen are to report to emergency mustering grounds. Suspected incursion has potential to leak over into Vale. All citizens should remain indoors until All Clear is given. Remain protected with loved ones. Remember that you are safe in Vale. Hope is our strongest weapon against the Grimm. The Saints watch over us all.

    Alert! Valean mass notification system!    —

    Pyrrha put down her scroll and looked at Ruby. Her partner's eyes were wide, her face looking oddly gaunt.

    "Coco and Jaune went to Montluçon for their mission," Ruby said hoarsely. "We have to do something!"

    Pyrrha felt her guts roiling. "Ruby, we're not licensed. We're just students. If everyone has to remain indoors, then the mission has changed. We—we need to—to—"

    Someone in the crowd screamed. "Holy shit, Atlas has its army in our city, and right next door there's a Grimm invasion."

    "Why aren't they doing something about it?"

    "Because they don't care!"

    "They wanted this to happen!"

    General Ironwood looked around. His was the only scroll that hadn't gone off, presumably because he wasn't a native and didn't have a local service provider. "What?"

    "Those Atlas fuckers are behind it, aren't they!?"

    "Why else are they wasting time here with their robots?"

    "Because it's a bloody invasion!"

    The crowd broke out into screaming, calling for Atlesian blood. No one was following the alert and trying to disperse or run and hide. No one listened as Ironwood tried to regain control of the situation. Instead, the crowd became a singular organism, focusing with anger on the general. They howled and screamed and demanded answers, getting increasingly frantic, increasingly bizarre and paranoid. Blaming Atlas for everything from increasing Dust prices to political deadlock in parliament to the Grimm.

    Until somebody picked up a rock and threw it at Ironwood.

    Ruby burst into a cloud of petals. One moment she was there, and the next she was gone. The little ball of roses flew over the crowd and the shape of a helix, like DNA. Until rematerializing as a girl right in front of the general's podium and slapping the rock out of the air.

    "Oh gods, Ruby, that's not what I meant!" Pyrrha said under her breath.

    Someone in the crowd wearing a white jacket cupped their hands and yelled, "Saints' blood, even the Huntsmen are working for Atlas! Those fuckers are with them!"

    The panicked crowd turned into a full-scale riot.

    a/n Peak Ruby Achieved! And my favorite take on Pyrrha is Boring Nice Girl who is actually extremely judgmental and bitchy in her own head, and does not like Cyberpunk!France.
     
    Last edited:
  • Threadmarks
    • Eric d'Orléans said:
    BANNED for Corgi denial. The Queen of England will have words with you, young man.
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...
    As I am neither Anglican or a citizen under her general purview, I have to say a hard pass. Besides, I'm an Irish Colonial of Connacht descent, so any words that I could spare to her and her inferior breed [of dogs] would involve a pint of Guinness, a leash on an Irish Wolfhound, and some old rebel, IRA anthems. ~Come out ye- ~
    Besides, it's her dad's dog. The family's friend. She didn't adopt him.
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...
    ...oh dear lord, she's your standin for Jake Peralta ain't she? You thought you could sneak it by but now I see through your honeyed words! You've hidden clear references and analogs to characters within the series, Ruby to Jake, Zwei to Cheddar, Blake to Diez, Jaune to the Vulture (reformed), and now I can clearly state you sir have been stealthily inserting Brooklyn 99 reference after reference within this body of work!

    BTW, sidenote, where's the Arnold Schwarzenegger or Daddy Noel analog?
     
    Orion Ultor said:
    As I am neither Anglican or a citizen under her general purview, I have to say a hard pass. Besides, I'm an Irish Colonial of Connacht descent, so any words that I could spare to her and her inferior breed [of dogs] would involve a pint of Guinness, a leash on an Irish Wolfhound, and some old rebel, IRA anthems. ~Come out ye- ~
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...

    I already made that joke in V1, the worst volume!

    ...oh dear lord, she's your standin for Jake Peralta ain't she? You thought you could sneak it by but now I see through your honeyed words! You've hidden clear references and analogs to characters within the series, Ruby to Jake, Zwei to Cheddar, Blake to Diez, Jaune to the Vulture (reformed), and now I can clearly state you sir have been stealthily inserting Brooklyn 99 reference after reference within this body of work!

    BTW, sidenote, where's the Arnold Schwarzenegger or Daddy Noel analog?
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...
    Joke's on you, I never watched B99! I have no idea wtf is going on with this entire comment
     
    Eric d'Orléans said:
    I already made that joke in V1, the worst volume!
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...
    Gosh darnit...too slow on the trigger again.
    Eric d'Orléans said:
    Joke's on you, I never watched B99! I have no idea wtf is going on with this entire comment
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...
    Schwarzenegger and Daddy Noel's aren't part of the B99 comment, they were their own thing. Like, what does the home gym scene look like? Whose VHS tapes are stashed in the back of the Beacon Academy Gym, to be played for those YMCA classes where the instructor don't give no damn.
     
    pingas plight said:
    How did i only just now realize your pfp looks like something from warhammer?
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...
    It's Australian fitness coach Julius Kieser wearing Ultramarine Power Armor. No cap, I just found it on 4chan like a decade ago, randomly saved the image, and just sort of selected it as my pfp when I made my first SB account the first time I ever used the name Eric d'Orléans. I used to go by an old xbox live gamertag that I made up when I was literally 9 years old. But when I was 19, I decided to change over to the modern name and never looked back.

    Did some googling and found the image reversed.

    Since adopting it, it's somehow become iconic for me as incredibly disappointed in you, all hope waning, and being obsessed with fitness. It's the image everyone just associates with me at this point.

    It's intense.
     
    Volume 6, Chapter 8
  • Threadmarks
    • Chapter 8: Bulls on Parade
    "After careful consideration, I have decided to become worse."

    — 21 —​

    If you asked, his name was Haroun ibn Yousef. It was a good, strong Vacuan name. And even if Haroun was in Vale, there was enough cultural cross contamination that no one would look too seriously at Haroun. If someone saw a bald man in a Vacuan coat, with a turban riding low over his face to obscure the eye he'd once lost; at most he'd probably get a smug "Welcome to Vale!" The headgear helped him move, too. Fewer people in the wrong part of town would take kindly to a faunus walking in their midst, but those were his favorite haunts in all of Vale.

    Haroun had only been to Vacuo once, despite the disguise he preferred. There, he'd stayed as the guest in a temple of the Yamin Allahi, the so-called Right Hand of God. They were a strange people who claimed God as their own right, and insisted with perfect frankess that unbelievers would spend the afterlife drowning in sand, clawing through it as it drowned them over and over, and would only find release if they realized the truth of their One God. Despite that, they didn't demand your conversion, and openly protected and housed all travelers in Vacuo, be they human or faunus. It was why he'd sought shelter there.

    Religion had never sat right with Haroun. That was why he'd never fit in right with the Menagerie branch of the White Fang. While he idolized the work Ghira Belladonna had done, Haroun never shook off how creepily the people clung to their pagan gods. You didn't have to be a convert, naturally, but after Sienna took over, she leaned too heavily into the religious aspect for Haroun's comfort. Where Haroun was born and raised, God was dead. It was Atlas' policy. You were no more valuable than the meat on your bones in Atlas. The afterlife didn't matter; it was just an opium to make you accept suffering in this world for the promise of something better and incredibly vague when you died. You had to focus on the here and now, this life, and the people around you. You had to make life better on this rock for your people, no matter where they were.

    But right here, what he was doing now? That mattered more than promises of divine pleasure.

    "Hey, Haroun, what took ya?" the girl with the squirrel tail asked as she saw him enter.

    He took the apron she offered and smiled. "Got sidetracked, Marianne. The snow is lovely out there. We got enough food?"

    Marianne blew a strand of strawberry bangs from her face. After a thought, she put on a hairnet, one for her head, and one for her bushy tail. "And then some! We might even have some left over for us today."

    Haroun walked into the kitchen, looking over the workload for the morning. Stoves, pots, and everything else they'd need in nearly industrial quantities. The eggs and bacon alone could feed a smaller army. And milk and cereal too, but the low-sugar, high-fiber kind. This was supposed to be a healthy breakfast to keep the kids going all morning.

    One of the faunus in the kitchen met Haroun with a fistbump. "Sup, nimma?"

    Haroun met it back. "Nothing much, man." He saw the pistol tucked into the man's waistband, and made a gesture. The guy realized and adjusted his apron to hide it. There wasn't anything wrong with them being armed here, but it was better not to look like it in public. Haroun's own sword was carefully hidden under his jacket.

    "How's classes doing, Marianne?" Haroun said, getting to work on the meat.

    She was loading eggs into a giant pot to cook. "Terrible!" she said happily.

    "Why's that?" he asked, frowning.

    "Winter break's over," she said with a huff. "Now I gotta actually study again. C'est nul!"

    "Education major, right?" Haroun asked.

    She nodded. "It's not like I gotta remind you every time."

    A bell rang as someone entered the front of the building. Marianne looked over past the kitchen to the room beyond. "Ah, crap. They're early. Vite, cassons-nous, guys!"

    Standing there in the front, looking lost, was a faunus kid no more than maybe seven. His backpack looked nearly twice as big as he was, his winter boots a little ragged. He was here for the White Fang's free breakfast. It had come to the White Fang's attention that faunus children were falling behind, even in especially poor regions like here in Catchfire where the humans didn't do very well themselves. It hadn't actually been his idea, this kitchen, not at first. That had been her idea once she realized the kids couldn't pay attention to class because they were starving. So the solution was community outreach. Although they weren't technically the White Fang here, everyone in the know understood what was going on. That was why the mix of volunteers were people with the White Fang, people who just wanted to help, and even the odd uptown college girl like Marianne. It counted for the community service hours she needed for her major, the girl said.

    The Fang had worked to get a couple of kitchens like this up and running, siphoning off money and donations to provide a filling, healthy breakfast for the poorest faunus kids in Vale. The White Fang needed to build communities. If the government was going to let its faunus suffer, the faunus themselves had to band together to provide for each other. Even the niceties of the "compassionate conservatives" in power didn't really care to help the faunus. The humans would always try to placate the faunus with symbolic victories of no particular importance, while ignoring actual issues of equity and economic justice. That was why they had to do it themselves.

    Haroun sometimes wondered what other ideas they might have had if she hadn't left them. How else they could reach out and help their fellow faunus in need.

    He closed his eye and let out a breath. And then it was back to preparing kids the food they needed to do good in school. By the time the first batch was ready, the line of kids and sometimes even their parents was out the door. Marianne took the first shift at the front counter, providing trays of hot food, a little box of cereal, and a carton of milk to the kids. Something about the near universal squeak in their voices as they thanked the girl made Haroun smile. It helped banish the memories of different times.

    There were a lot of kids in this part of Cathfire. Only most of them really spoke the official government language. Marianne's native Valais came in great help. It made Haroun wonder if he couldn't work on something to help the kids pick up the official language better. If they were well fed and could actually understand all the material, they'd probably be able to outperform their human peers.

    Sometimes, Haroun found himself speaking in his native Mansk by accident. In Atlas, a faunus worker was supposed to speak in the same language as your taskmaster. If the foreman couldn't understand Mansk, he might presume you were planning to unionize, an unthinkable sin in an SDC factory. For him, learning Vale's language came at the end of a whip; or, as the general tried to improve working conditions, at the end of a docked pay. Over the years, he'd lost most of his mother language, and didn't even have a notable accent anymore.

    "Uh, Haroun?" Marianne asked, shaping him from his thoughts as he fired up the ham and bacon. She was grimacing as she looked over her shoulder.

    He looked over to see the children on the other side of the counter. It was a little faunus girl holding hands with a human boy. The girl looked more scared than the boy did.

    "Please?" the girl said, bouncing back and forth on one food. "I know you feed faunus, but my friend is really hungry too, and his mom can't afford breakfast, and school food is super expensive, and you have food, and please?"

    Marianne frowned, looking at him. Or maybe it was more a pleading grimace. Her tail looked a little thinner. "We have enough."

    Haroun thought on some level there was something scummy about anything as young as that kid being terrified by words like "expensive." But still, the White Fang operated this for their own people. Haroun never had any human friends. People stuck to their own kind most of the time. Even if there wasn't a legal rule for it, self-segregation was the rule anywhere you went, and the laws just reinforced that. Even in Menagerie, the artificial homeland for all faunuskind, most people stuck to faunus like them.

    He looked at all the food they had today, and sighed. "Yeah, go ahead, Marianne."

    The girl beamed, her large tail bushing up as she served both kids a breakfast.

    The breakfast rush took a full hour to get through, and Haroun's team were fast at what they did. Kids, sometimes alone or accompanied by their parents, had been helped as best the White Fang could. In the end, as the team was closing up shop for the morning, Marianne sat down beside Haroun and handed him a plate.

    "Here. Like I said, enough for us today!" she said, shoving lightly salted eggs into her mouth.

    "Don't you have class to get to?"

    She swallowed, shaking her head. "Nope! You can choose classes in university. I only go to class Tuesday and Thursday, with a language class Friday. Saves a ton on fuel money, which, y'know, really important on a student's budget as the prices go." She made a sound like artillery, arcing her finger through the air, before making an explosion with her mouth.

    Haroun looked away, idly chewing on some ham. "Dust getting that bad for people these days?"

    The girl shrugged. "What, you don't have a car?"

    He shook his head. "I walk most places. Where I live the streets are old. Too small for a motor carriage."

    "So you are a local!" she said with enough enthusiasm that Haroun had to scoot away. "Bet you don't get out much, huh?"

    "I get out," he said, folding his arms.

    "And I'm the Queen of Vale," she said, rolling her eyes. Another bite of bacon. "Hey, I'm off today. You wanna, I dunno, go somewhere? Do something? Better than sitting around being grumpy all day, Haroun."

    "What's there to even do in Vale?"

    Marianne scoffed theatrically, putting a hand to her breast. "Why am I glad you ever asked! I don't know either!" She leaned towards him and whispered loudly, "I was hoping you'd be the kick in the ass I needed to flex my improv skills."

    Haroun laughed. "Oh no, awful date ideas, my one weakness. How did you know?"

    She pretended to be shocked. "Date? I didn't say that word. That is the least likely word I'd ever say. I just said hanging out, getting lost in the city, probably causing problems, and then agreeing to never speak to the police about whatever we do." Marianne beamed, her tail looking like she'd touched an exposed outlet. "Normal stuff!"

    He finished his breakfast and smiled back. "Love to, Mary."

    She frowned, puffing her cheeks out. "I'm sensing a but."

    Standing up, he said, "But I actually have work to do today. Not all of us can schedule a day off. Some of us have to do stuff if we want to afford food."

    Marianne blew air through her lips. "I'm going to interpret that not as a no but at face value, and will try again later. You cool with that?"

    Haroun grabbed her empty plate and tossed it in the garbage. "Don't think I could stop you if I wanted. Think about the weekend. You have my number." Then he left for the dumpster out back with a tied-up trash bag.

    In truth, he doubted he'd ever find time for Marianne. For one, he was still lying to her by omission about who he was and what he did. You couldn't build a healthy relationship with someone if you weren't being honest with who you even were with them. Marianne was a sweet girl who didn't deserve that. For another, far worse reason—well, there was her. On some level, he knew it was ridiculous. It'd been over half a year. Haroun should have been over her. But even as he left the morning shift and tossed the garbage out, even as he ran his hand over the sword he had hidden on his person, he couldn't forget her. Even saying her name felt painful.

    What was worse, he knew it was pathetic. They hadn't even really been an item, not really, not exactly. He'd known her since they were kids, but he'd only really been paying attention to her father, his hero. The man who built the White Fang into what they were today, before more aggressive leaders took charge. So when she had come to him, asking to join, wanting to help, he'd only seen her father behind her eyes. And had been happy to take her in and teach her everything he knew.

    All he asked was that she wear the Grimm mask he'd made the uniform of his branch of the White Fang. His people wore Grimm masks not because he identified with Grimm, but as a symbol. It made him faceless. It let other faunus imagine themselves behind the mask in his own place. They were all equals in the White Fang, all wearing the same face, the mask, the same cause. As far as Haroun was concerned, any other symbolism was merely a happily adopted accident.

    Haroun remembered his own training not long after escaping Atlas and joining the White Fang. They were an international organization, but the local branches all operated radically differently. In Atlas, a faunus named Logan Rawne was the terror of the kingdom. But even Haroun couldn't stomach an organization so angry, so desperate, that suicide bombing was a valid tool in their arsenal. There were limits to sanity.

    Like that Cinder bitch.

    He got back to walking. It was maybe a half hour's stroll to his next destination for the morning. And the crisp winter air helped remove Cinder from his thoughts.

    He wondered what the Wolf would think of him if he knew he was working with Cinder and her cronies? What would Sienna or Ghira or Ghira's daughter think? Haroun knew he hated himself every moment he let that woman live and influence him and his people. All but the Wolf would probably be ashamed by what he's been forced into. The Wolf would probably laugh at him.

    The Wolf had the head of a beast, the body of a man. One of those rare faunus more bestial in nature through some fluke of the genetic lottery. He had called Haroun "Meat" and took him far to the northwest, a place many faunus claimed to come from if they were hiding their race, so that Adam could see what humans were really capable of. Atlas was still alive. But the city of Misery? He recalled following the Wolf through a bombed out city destroyed in the Great War, running past the giggling shadows of children the Godhammer had turned to ashes, and trying to survive the mutant Grimm who called those ruins home.

    Haroun had come back from Misery a changed man. Broken in some ways, reformed in others. The Wolf had said it was like the Mistrali art of Kintsugi, where you repair something broken with gold, making it better, repurposing something destroyed for your own reasons. That was what good training did. And it was using what he learned in Misery that made him a success, the terror of the Royal Army out on the Sanus frontier, and eventually the leader of Vale's branch of the White Fang.

    Haroun had broken the White Fang and reforged it with gold. Making it into something stronger than Ghira ever could have. Able to bare its teeth and strike from the shadows against the worst atrocities, and then provide food for the hungry another minute. Sometimes they were big acts, like destroying a train; and sometimes they were small, like insisting no faunus in Vale buy tobacco from anywhere other than from companies based in Menagerie.

    Haroun made it to the White Fang compound down by the Catchfire docks. It was in a warehouse that they had bought and then repurposed into a kind of barracks command center. Out of the way from any kind of police department, only the local Catchfire Citizens' Militia actually came out to try to enforce law in this part of town. And the local precinct were all sympathetic faunus. He knocked on the right door, gave the password, and entered. The inside was a rather claustrophobic warren that they had built with prefab structures arranged into a kind of building within a building.

    So many of the soldiers seemed distracted by something on their scrolls. Most of them weren't in uniform; there was no reason to don the combat garb outside of official hours. A lot of them lived and slept in this place, just like a lot of them were volunteers who showed up when there was work to do. Haroun passed by the recreational room, seeing the gorilla faunus and his feline friends sitting around the pool table smoking cigarettes and watching something on the news. It just seemed like a normal day without any serious work to do. No one even had their masks on hand.

    But that was going to change tonight.

    Haroun found his office, his bedroom and armory, and removed his turban. And with it his entire assumed incognito personality. As soon as it was off, Adam Taurus saw himself in the mirror, with the SDC brand over one of his eyes turning it into a ruined mess. One last scar from the old homeland. Adam disrobed and found his armor next to the documents on his desk.

    According to this, tonight there was a Dust shipment coming in from Atlas to be loaded into Harbor 3. He had gotten this information from a leak in the Débardeurs Union. But that was to be expected. The White Fang knew when the Dust was entering the city and where it was from thanks to their connections with the socialists. It had been an interesting case of corruption that Adam was happy to exploit. The exact opposite way he felt about what Cinder thought of him and his people.

    Adam remembered sitting down with one of the most important men in Union-Labor in a secret meeting somewhere in Catchfire. Everyone had arrived in secret, and Adam had been surprised to learn it wasn't some kind of corrupt functionary he was meeting, but Twinblue Sokolov himself, the twin brother of the official leader of the party.

    There had been rumors about this, Adam knew from his connections in the underground. Twinred was the irreverent revolutionary who was the face of the party. The poor son of a millworker who rose to power the correct way. Organizing and speaking and assisting labor disputes that had been illegal to address before socialist parties were allowed back in elections. But in the right circles, the most important member was his twin brother. The man who got the dirty work done. Who helped cover up the lynching of an abusive factory taskmaster. Who helped with voter suppression and gerrymandering in contested districts. And who had no problem meeting with men like Adam to get things done, to put pressure on the electorate, and increase voter turnout.

    Twinblue had sat down across from Adam, adjusted his Szolacs jacket, and spoke without any preamble. "Until every last faunus is free and equal, no one will be. The system is broken and would like us to think that you and me are not the same. Keeping us divided means we can't put a united front against the bastards that put us where we are in life. Can't put them on the end of a rope where they belong. How can we help you, Mr. Taurus?"

    For a human, the man wasn't bad. That kind of naked hatred was something Adam could relate to. And in exchange for nearly anything Adam could want, from getting a little extra money for his pet projects, to the information on Dust shipments from Atlas, all Union-Labor asked was that they keep their relationship secret, and that Adam did his part to ensure faunus districts voted White when elections rolled around.

    Someone knocked on the door as Adam was cinching his pants. "What?" he asked.

    A man opened the door by a crack, looking at Adam with wide eyes. Adam recognized him as one of his lieutenants who had been with him since the frontier days. "Hey, Adam, you seen the news?"

    "I try not to. It's better for my mental health."

    The man grimaced, thumbing over his shoulder. "I think you really should. This kind of affects us."

    "Are we in trouble?"

    He shook his head. "It's somebody we used to know. And it's real bad."

    Adam grabbed his coat and followed the lieutenant out. He was still putting on his coat and buttoning it up when he entered the recreation room. The men inside had smoked their cigarettes nearly to the filter. One of them made space for Adam, gesturing his head towards the television.

    At first, Adam didn't know what he was looking at. It looked to be aerial footage from some kind of natural disaster. Some city in ruins, until he saw the Grimm. It made him unconsciously go and rub the mask over his eyes.

    The lieutenant pointed. "There."

    The other men in the room didn't seem to understand. They hadn't been with the White Fang that long. They didn't know the old demons.

    But Adam did. He saw her on the screen, Blake Belladonna, and felt his mouth go dry. At first he thought maybe it wasn't her. Maybe it was just a girl who looked like her. With that hair bow on, maybe it wasn't—who was he kidding? He recognized that outfit, that build, even the hair bow he had once bought for her as a gift to help infiltrate a settlement. Blake didn't look good, beaten and haggard and ragged. And fighting Grimm down a city street that was practically on fire.

    What the hell was she doing out there? Honestly, a part of Adam had convinced himself that Blake was dead. It was just easier that way not to think about her. It was a faux pas to speak of the dead; that helped him control the thoughts he had about her and the way she had betrayed everything they worked for in a fit of sentimental hypocrisy. But there she was, on the city street, almost acting like a Huntress.

    Any doubts he had ended as soon as he saw the people beside her. Adam watched as Blake used her weapon and the ribbon attached to it to wrap around the arm of a heavily armored boy. Together they practically launched themselves like a bola against a storm of Grimm. She would land and use her sword, and then jump away with her shadow clone. The boy would cannonball into the horde next, using his body and sword to rip them apart.

    Then he saw the other girl. She was wearing what had once been a white dress, now stained brown and black and filthy from combat. He knew this girl from paintings, from pop culture, from his old homeland. From the brand over his eye.

    Weiss Schnee summoned a glyph, catching Blake and the boy in midair, just in time to block the projectile from some Grimm. A fire bomb went off in the background.

    Blake became a Huntress? he thought.

    And then: Blake Belladonna is working with a Schnee!

    "Sir?" his lieutenant said.

    Adam thought for a very long moment as he watched the disaster unfold on television. Saw the airships flying over the city, the soldiers trying to keep control of the streets, and the Grimm rampaging through the streets. A card at the bottom of the screen said Unfolding Grimm Attack in Montluçon.

    "Contact our agents in Montluçon," he said, teeth grit. "Now. We have people in the city who need help."

    — 22 —​

    Once upon a time, a man named Oz had taken a knife and carved it into himself. It began with One. The left shoulder every time. And with every new face, he added to the tally.

    When he was a young man attending Beacon Academy, Ozpin's partner Glynda Goodwitch had asked him why he'd gotten a tattoo of a 73 on his arm. Back in those days, tattoos were still ghastly things, considered a more humane way of branding slaves instead of self-expression. With the Great War and the great emancipation of men and beast still in recent memory, why would one of the rare and powerful Huntsman have the mark of a bonded servant on himself?

    But the truth was… complex.

    The average human for most of history rarely lived past his twenties, so conventional wisdom went. But that was always an aggregate of life expectancy. Most people in history died as children. If you lived past that, your forties or even sixties weren't hard to reach. Doubly so if you had your Aura to knit your sagging, torn-up flesh back together time and time again. If he died here at forty-three years in the flesh, that'd be an average lifespan. Over three thousand years, one way or another.

    73.

    The number of faces who'd stared back at Ozpin in the mirror. The number of times he'd marked himself just to keep track since the bronze age. The number of mothers he'd forgotten, the families he'd lost, and the times he'd been denied release of the death all men but him were promised by birthright.

    The Number burning a hole in his shoulder.

    Ozpin could do nothing but let the tattoo fester on his arm as he stared numbly at the footage on his scroll.

    "Only I can hear your prayers here, sweet children. And I am afraid I shall not answer them."

    Officially speaking, tapping scrolls and electronic communications was illegal without a warrant. That was the official government policy, and in an abstract way Beacon was part of the royal government. But that only applied to private citizens and their private devices. Every student at Beacon was given a scroll and a call plan free of charge. The same went for the other academies. Which meant that every single scroll a student had, everything they texted or looked up was a matter of record that the headmaster and certain relevant professors could examine. It was all spelled out very explicitly in the privacy agreement that every student legally claimed they read and agreed to when first booting up their scroll. The official policy was that it allowed the staff to monitor students' health, making note of their Auras, their locations, and other things that would be useful to keep them alive out in the field.

    In practice, it usually meant Glynda and Ozpin sometimes had to look a student in the eyes and try to pretend like they didn't know what their penis looked like.

    The video came from Velvet Scarlatina's scroll. The V in Team CFVY. He had been trying to keep abreast of the students he had sent to Montluçon since the entire city exploded, and getting this video meant that she was back in the network, meaning she was alive. He could monitor her Aura and confirm that. It didn't take much digging from there to locate them on a map, and Team BASS as well, separated and looking worse for wear, but most certainly alive. Really, that had been his original intention, locating his students so he could coordinate efforts to find and keep them safe, not spying on their cloud storage. Until somebody had texted him this very video.

    One of his allies close to Kieran LaChance had reported the Monster of Montluçon getting his hands on this video. A video of two dying teams deep underground, a conversation with a strange blonde girl Ozpin couldn't help but feel was eerily familiar, and Jaune Arc bringing that magical feather to an old altar. The architecture was ancient. It didn't belong in this time period. It belonged in the place he was from. But the questions about ancient archeology didn't really matter. What mattered was that someone was apparently tapping his CCTS tower, saw the video, and forwarded it to LaChance one way or the other.

    Ozpin thought about the soldiers who were stationed on campus to repair and do maintenance on the tower. And he thought about Jaune Arc, who pulled weekend shifts there as a form of detention, and so had had intimate access to the network. The same boy who had done something and brought about her appearance. Too many things were lining up, and right now he didn't know what to make of it. Nothing except to just watch it happen helplessly.

    He felt numb. As if someone had opened a pit in his stomach, and he was falling into it. Tumbling end over end into an abyss that never seemed to stop. Because at least if there was ground, he could splatter into it and maybe die.

    Before him, on the television live streams from his various monitors, he watched the rest of the world fall apart.

    Team VYPR, especially Ruby Rose, defending General James Ironwood from a crowd. Trying to escort him to safety to his airship as the entire city turned into a panicked riot, looting stores, burning property, and refusing to heed the curfew. Montluçon becoming a battleground between soldiers and Grimm, with official Huntsmen from Vale hours away, and military units from outside the city converging on its location. Reports of agitated Grimm and smaller attacks all throughout the region.

    Parliament was no better. It looked about ready to turn into a street brawl. Of the five-hundred-seventy-six members of the House of Commons, fully one third of them were reported dead or missing in Montluçon, mostly from centrist Tories. While the Conservative Party continued to have legislative dominance in Damecrown, the little white dots on screen representing Union-Labor MPs were nearly equal. The ominous black dots showing everyone who was missing loomed in the center between them and the Tories' blue dots. No one could agree to anything, between how to deal with the massive riot, Grimm, or Montluçon. A huge number of the people currently arguing in parliament, like Kieran LaChance, were only present through hologram. A majority of MPs were local to Vale or Patch; only representatives from distant places like Eranstan, Vytal, or Graad tended to use holograms.

    He watched the entire government paralyzed with inaction and factionalism. Ozpin poured himself a glass of bourbon.

    He watched the Whites' leader, Twinred Sokolov in his Szolacs jacket, accuse the government of treason for allowing Atlas into Vale, claim he and his party would personally end the riots in violation of constitutional convention, and then storm out of the House of Commons. Ozpin ignited a cigarette.

    He watched the remaining Tories pass a vote of no confidence to remove his friend and ally, Martin Gladstone, from the position of Prime Minister. And as a frantic Gladstone rang Ozpin's scroll, he let it go to voicemail, and took his first pull of alcohol.

    Cheeks rosy, he laughed mirthlessly as the surviving Tories rallied behind the Monster of Montluçon, voting the colonial hologram to leadership of the party and de facto prime minister, and watched as a man who mistrusted Ozpin and knew of Salem took control of the government. Ozpin exhaled smoke into his third glass of bourbon to flavor it.

    "Ozpin!" Glynda shouted in a panic. He hadn't even noticed her arrival in his office. She'd always been able to run even in high heels, something that no matter how many faces Ozpin wore, he'd never been able to master. There was once a time when high heels were male fashion.

    She rushed to his side, a tablet in her hands, and quickly looked at the screens he was watching. Her eyes fell down on his scroll, and the video that kept repeating of Salem.

    "I believe I have miscalculated terribly," he said mildly, smoke rolling through his teeth.

    Glynda looked at him for a moment that seemed to last eternities. She didn't need to be told what was going on. The woman had been by his side for over two decades. She knew more than most anybody else. But what she knew and what she thought she knew were two entirely separate matters. He didn't know what he'd do if he lost her because of the truth.

    Weakly, he offered her his tumbler of bourbon. She gave him a look that could wither away the balls of lesser men, men who were still capable of fearing for their lives, and backhanded him across the face.

    "Get that away from me!" she hissed, grabbing him. He dropped his bourbon, the alcohol spilling across his suit.

    Ozpin blinked, moving his hand up slowly to rub the mark on his cheek. "I thought we agreed years ago it was better for both of us to keep our hands off each other."

    Glynda looked down at him, adjusting her glasses, and gave him the barest hint of a smile that was all teeth. "Please. I'm not attracted to bad decisions anymore."

    He picked up his glass and put it on his desk, tossing his cigarette into it. "Attracted, no. But still making them. After all, here you still are." He shrugged with one hand.

    Glynda rubbed the bridge of her nose. "I know. I miss the simple days when the only messes we were cleaning up were mine."

    "Those were far more entertaining," he said, his eyes going to live news feeds from Montluçon and Huntsmen staging grounds here in the city. "The world didn't try to end nearly as many times."

    "I don't know about that one," she said, crossing her arms and watching the screens with him. "I like to believe I died that night of the school dance when we spiked the punch bowl and I threw up in the middle of the building and everyone saw. Everything that followed has been a persistent, ongoing nightmare."

    He eyed his decanter of bourbon mournfully. "I'm glad to see I've been a permanent fixture of that nightmare ever since."

    She sighed, running her hands through her hair. "Don't be. Knowing you has kept me consistently traumatized on a daily basis."

    Ozpin looked down at the video repeating on his scroll. "I believe I have an ex or two who would agree with you."

    "Why am I not surprised?"

    "Because you know me."

    "Hm," she said, and nothing more. They both continued in silence, watching Vale come undone before them in real time. From the soldiers in Montluçon, to the socialists now attempting to resolve the riots to merely only target foreign owned businesses, to scenes of BASS and CFVY struggling to make it through a war torn city.

    "So what do we do?" Ozpin finally said.

    Glynda cocked an eyebrow. "You're asking me?"

    "I value your ability to tell me what I'm doing is stupid," he said, licking his teeth.

    "That requires you to first be doing something," she said. "I'm afraid I'm not much help when you're about to perform your best Qrow imitation."

    He drummed his fingers on the desk. "Is he assisting the attack in Montluçon?"

    Glynda picked up her tablet and looked at it. "No. He's still in Patch at the moment. Professor Port was the official liaison for Team CFVY on their mission. He's currently in charge of whatever Huntsmen happen to respond to the all-call mission. I've sent him the children's scroll data to track and rescue."

    Ozpin tapped his fingers harder, lost in thought. "And James?"

    She gestured to one of the live feeds, showing Team VYPR arriving with the general to his docked airship and its accompanying troopers. It was hard to miss the people who watched them go by, jeering and occasionally throwing things at him and the escort. He shuddered to imagine just how terribly it must look for Taiyang's kids out there.

    "I somehow doubt the people are going to look favorably at anything he does, helpful or otherwise," she said.

    "Contact him all the same. We've lost our strongest ally in Damecrown," he said. "The new government isn't going to ask for help and look weak. Ask him to provide escort and any other services to Montluçon and the Huntsmen going out there. We might be able to salvage some goodwill out of this debacle."

    "Even if that makes politics worse? We're acting independently here. That doesn't bode well for what should be a politically neutral academy."

    He took a breath. "Normally, I'd care. But right now, we've just witnessed the entire government collapse and reform around someone known as a monster. We're sitting on the largest collection of professionally trained Huntsmen in one solid location anywhere in the city, and they answer to me. I could hardly give less of a damn right now about political handwringing when my students are in danger." He sat up a little more straight. "While we're at it, request the assistance of any and all professors on hand able to help. We're going to need all the manpower we can get to solve this situation and get those kids out."

    Glynda nodded approvingly. "Consider it done."

    "And get Doc Croaker out of bed or wherever that old mercenary is," he said. "Tell him to get the intensive care units ready. If not for the students when we recover them, then for anyone else who gets hurt out there. Offer our services to anyone. From the riot, Montluçon, anyone."

    She tapped on her tablet, nodding. "And then?"

    He looked down at his scroll, and finally touched it to make the video pause. It ended on the screen of Jaune touching the altar and summoning an image of Salem. An action which couldn't have been accidental. It had to have been deliberate. Ozpin had seen the feather, had sensed the magical potential inside of it, and he hadn't known had to act. He had continued to let the boy amble around in the CCTS Tower because the soldiers there hadn't minded him, and now the video had leaked from within, and it was a miracle that only the ultranationalists in Parliament had gotten their hands on it instead of it spreading like wildfire on VidTube. Now Ozpin saw what the feather must have been for.

    Throughout all the chaos, all the uncertainty, things were starting to come together in his head.

    He looked at the world collapsing around him, and knew Jaune Arc was somehow in the center of it. From this video getting to LaChance, to the burning of Montluçon, to the way the boy had consistently worked to make ties with and undermine Ozpin's influence over the most prominent students in Beacon.

    "And then we do what we do best," Ozpin told her. "We improvise."

    The truth was, Ozpin needed to do everything in his power to save Teams CFVY and BASS. He needed to debrief them and truly understand what Jaune had done to them. Try to guide them to less destructive interpretations of anything they had learned. And because he needed Jaune Arc back under his thumb if he wanted to finally confront the boy and get the answers to the rest of his myriad little questions ever since the magical pulse months ago that had knocked out everyone with an activated Aura. He needed to focus on what he could control, what he could save, and what he could destroy to stop Salem in her tracks.

    Ozpin needed to finally confront the boy and cut the head of this hydra once and for all.

    After all, if it saved the world, what was one more dead child to a man like him?
     
    Last edited:
  • Threadmarks
    • Eric d'Orléans said:
    "Got it," Ruby said dryly. "Learn about the diversity of foreign cultures so I can be racist more accurately. Good talk, fearless leader."
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...
    Oh dear god Jaune is rubbing off onto Ruby.

    Soon, we are going to have the most based cinnamon to have ever been baked and not even the brothers, hell, NOT EVEN JAUNE would be able to stop her.
    Eric d'Orléans said:
    He eyed his decanter of bourbon mournfully. "I'm glad to see I've been a permanent fixture of that nightmare ever since."

    She sighed, running her hands through her hair. "Don't be. Knowing you has kept me consistently traumatized on a daily basis."

    Ozpin looked down at the video repeating on his scroll. "I believe I have an ex or two who would agree with you."
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...
    Holy shit, is Ozpin a successful Proto-Jaune? Well, Jaune D'orleans.
     
    Last edited:
    Volume 6, Chapter 9
  • Threadmarks
    • Chapter 9: Weiss is Having Zero of this Knightshade Shit
    "The age of consent is like the number of rat hairs you're legally allowed to put in a hotdog. If you have to look it up, you're doing something fucked up and need to stop."


    — 23 —​

    It had been a long day, and Shamrock nearly collapsed onto the cold ground once Team BASS was finally safe. Waking up from what felt like days inside that reality marble, as Jaune called it, had taken a lot out of everyone. But it was mostly mental, mostly spiritual, with the exception of the damage Jaune had caused himself. The fatigue and nausea subsided once adrenaline and Aura caught back up to everyone. Being surrounded by so many Grimm will do that to a body.

    And then it had been violence and violence and violence all throughout the day. The news airships hadn't helped much, just recording footage of the action. Watching as streets blew up, as crowds of refugees were evacuated to safe zones, and as the military did its best to restore order. For all the damage in the city of Montluçon, it looked like the human cost would be relatively minor. Faunus too. Montluçon apparently had early warning systems for this kind of event, had several layers of walls throughout the districts like in many bigger cities in more precarious locations like Tesifon, and for some awfully convenient reason the 1st Cavalry was here. Most of the damage to the city was property. Which, at Shamrock was thankful for, meant dealing with far less torn apart bodies and human remains than he might have feared.

    But that didn't make safeguarding the city any easier. The team had briefly floated the option of just trying to make it to an evacuation site, somewhere secure, but had quickly discarded that. As injured as they were, they had Aura, and they had the training, and they had a duty to do something however incompetent. Not to mention that team CFVY might be out there, or might still be trapped in the Grimm liquid for all anyone knew. They couldn't just give up and go home. But after a full day of what felt like complete grind?

    Okay never mind, Shamrock definitely was falling to the ground. Bleh.

    Team BASS had eventually found itself holing up in the ruins of a house somewhere in the nicer part of town. And by nicer, that meant it was a small mansion. But damage from small arms fire, light artillery, and a couple of Grimm, had rendered the place rather open to the snow as evening began. They found somewhere where they could check their corners, block off the exits, maintain easy escape routes, and weren't about to freeze to death.

    The kitchen, in other words. Weiss was curled up by one wall, hugging herself. She was dressed for exploration, not prolonged exposure to the cold. Blake, huddled by the kitchen sink, didn't look much better. She kept casting furtive glances toward her partner, who seemed completely unable to get rid of a quiet hum of Aura. Probably meant he was the most comfortable, or realistically speaking, the most injured. He had been limping through most of the day, and would almost certainly need time in the hospital when this was done. His fingers had been bent and broken, and his solution was the overly macho idea of just biting and pulling them until they snapped back into the correct position. Even here, sitting against the fridge with the remains of his sleeping bag as some kind of blanket, he kept fidgeting with his hands, and Shamrock wondered if the boy's fingers would ever properly realign if they weren't treated quickly.

    No one was talking. They had made this huge mess and hullabaloo about Jaune and some kind of deep secret he was hiding, and then how it didn't matter, and how they were going to talk about it, and then… so much had happened. It just didn't seem pertinent. But that didn't stop everyone from occasionally looking at each other, then looking at Jaune, and then just kind of giving up. It was almost like Weiss or Blake or even Shamrock himself would have the idea to ask something, but it just felt wrong, or inappropriate, or just silly given the circumstances.

    Shamrock looked at Weiss and she shivered slightly. With a force of effort, he stood up just so he could drape his suit jacket over her.

    She blinked. "Wha'?"

    Shamrock sat down beside her, as much for the close human proximity, as the fact that another human body was pretty warm out in this cold. "It's a suit. It comes with layers. You look like you need it more than me."

    The girl looked like she wanted to protest, maybe out of some sense of pride, but just bit her lip and pulled the jacket over her shoulders. "I bet I look like a lot of things."

    "None of them good," Shamrock said happily. "You look awful."

    Weiss looked almost disgusting in her outfit, sullied with dirt and dust and bits of liquid Grimm. To say nothing of the knots in her hair and all the filth, like someone had turned her white hair into a ticks' nest. The ticks back home in Vacuo were rather large; he recalled once coming across a dead giraffe so covered in the little crawling blood suckers that it almost looked like scales. That was what Weiss' hair reminded Shamrock of. She looked downright ugly. All Weiss could really do was scowl. There was nothing she could say and she knew it.

    Shamrock tried to smile. "Hey, look at it this way. If you can't wash it out of your hair, there's always the barber. The pixie cut would look great on you."

    She touched her hair, a weak smile on her thin lips. "I've… never worn my hair short. You think it would look good?"

    "I mean, the season's been changing," Jaune said. "Maybe we could all use a new outfit. Change up our style."

    Blake looked over at him. "Says you. You've been slowly losing part of your wardrobe for months now."

    "It's called experimentation," he said with faux wisdom. "And fashion. Get with the program, tights. Theater club is that way."

    The girl scoffed. "The word you want is petards."

    "Why, yes, I am a retard, thanks for noticing," he said, hand to his breast.

    "You're welcome," Blake said dryly, rubbing her shoulders. Part of her outfit had been torn in the fighting.

    The two gazed at each other for a long moment, and then laughed. Only to suddenly sense something weird between themselves. They fell silent, looking away.

    Shamrock rolled his eyes. "Is that going to become a recurring theme?"

    "Is what?" Weiss asked.

    He gestured at Blake and Jaune. "Those two. Making some weird, unfunny joke that they both aim to enjoy, gazing longingly at each other, and then awkwardly looking away. Our life came dangerously close to a soap opera today. I don't want it to keep happening."

    Jaune grimaced, shuffling his makeshift blanket over himself.

    Blake said slowly, "I… it's complicated. I mean…"

    Everyone did that thing again. They all took furtive glances at each other, questioning looks, but didn't seem to be able to make the questions appear. Everyone had queries bubbling to the surface of their mind, but no one could make them take the journey down to their tongues. It was like a Vacuan standoff.

    But the thing was, Shamrock was from Vacuo. He knew had to handle this kind of thing. And hated teen drama as a rule.

    He rolled his eyes, sighing. "You know what? Fuck it. Let's get through this bugbear or destroy the team. Who's with me?"

    Jaune swallowed, looking pale as he eyed Shamrock back.

    Shamrock made a mocking expression. "Jaune, are you, like, some living saint or godling?"

    He snorted. "Ah Jesus Christ, no. I'm not really anything. Just an idiot with catastrophically unfortunate timing. I don't really have any special powers, or really any particular knowledge you couldn't get from just a thorough reading of everyone's HuntsHub page."

    Blake was aggressively staring at her feet.

    Shamrock asked, "So why didn't you tell us you had this whole weird thing earlier?"

    Jaune hesitated. It was different than the way he hesitated back in the reality marble. He wasn't trying to buy time, or talk in circles, more like he genuinely didn't know how to reply at first. "Because I don't know how to explain it. And in some ways, the closer we all got, the less it mattered. It's just kind of a thing, y'know?"

    Adjusting his top hat, Shamrock said, "Yeah. A 'thing'. A thing which was incredibly sappy and lame to learn. You could have at least had an interesting secret, like maybe you were a cannibal, or used to be a terrorist, not I don't know what's going on but I still love you guys."

    "It's not lame!" Jaune said, sounding genuinely hurt. Which only made Shamrock laugh. "And besides, we all had a super cool coming together team moment. It was a crowning moment of badassery. We all came together to support each other, rejecting nihilism and embracing our love for each other and anti-nihilism. What could be more badass than that?!"

    Blake let out a slow breath. "I'm with Shamrock. I can't believe we were all involved in your darkest personal moment, and it was just that lame. Next time come up with a cooler dark and edgy secret."

    Jaune looked offended, moving his hands around like he couldn't quite figure out where to put them, and might have fallen down if he wasn't sitting against the fridge. "Weiss, help! I'm being bullied."

    Weiss shifted in place, rubbing shoulders with shamrock. "No, they're making a good point," she said, gesturing around the broken kitchen of this random mansion. "All of us, this team, there's nothing normal about us. Maybe this would have destroyed us early on before we really knew each other, before we were, I don't know, a family, I guess. There would have been questions and drama and all that nonsense. But now? I don't think it really means anything. It's almost just like trivia. Something else to add to the conga line of trauma that makes up Team BASS, and not even particularly special. I mean, look at us! We have an ex-terrorist still not over her abusive ex, a gender-indeterminate shapeshifting witchdoctor, and a wannabe pornstar who might be a soul-hopping parasite."

    "Hey!" Blake snapped, her hair bow wiggling as her ears probably fell flat like a cornered cat.

    "That's actually kinda hurtful," Shamrock said, frowning. He hugged himself in discomfort.

    Jaune just removed one of his armored gauntlets to play with his recently reset fingers, hissing in low pain as he touched the joints. He couldn't even muster a proper response.

    "Am I wrong?" Weiss asked.

    Everyone looked around nervously. Weiss just seemed smug. It was a terrible look on someone who was so filthy.

    "Facts don't care about your feelings, guys," Weiss said, folding her arms. "We're all a bunch of weirdos with enough baggage to be an entire luggage claim. So what?"

    Shamrock said, "At least I'm not, like, uh—Blake, help me insult Weiss back!"

    Blake blinked. She made a weird, confused expression before saying, "At least I never thought I was pregnant with a dog?"

    Weiss laughed. "Ha! I've cringed so many times at that memory that it can't hurt me anymore. Do better, sweetie."

    Shamrock scowled. "At least I don't have daddy issues!"

    Weiss cocked a brow. "You don't even have a dad."

    Shamrock made a Vaudou gesture, and then a middle finger. Weiss made a truly hideous face as she returned the gesture.

    Jaune stared at Weiss. "At least I don't make subpar bagels."

    Weiss gasped. "Alright, that's crossing the line. Too far!"

    "Oh hey, look," Jaune said mildly. "I found her weak spot."

    Blake jumped up, enthusiastically saying, "Yeah. Actually, yeah! And she can't even bake a cake to save her life."

    Weiss scoffed. "Only because you punched me. In my face. I would have figured out the cake without you eventually. Probably."

    "It's a definite no because she never said maybe," Jaune said.

    With an exasperated look, Weiss said, "Oh sure, yeah. 'I would have figured out how to make a cake yes.' That sounds stupid. You're stupid!"

    Jaune gave her a look like she was dumb. "Obviously, you put the maybe in front of the sentence, not after it. It's basic English."

    "That's not what this language is even called, you reincarnating buffoon!" She put her face in her hands. "And suddenly I understand why you don't know literally anything about anything. I hate it."

    "Luh ya too, boo," Jaune said with a wink.

    Shamrock just laughed. It wasn't even particularly funny. Weiss was correct; this was just stupid. None of it even really mattered. And in a way, that was why it was so enjoyable. Here all of them were, at death's door, beaten and exhausted, having just been through a potentially existential and theologically nightmarish situation, and the only thing they could do was give each other shit.

    Jaune looked around curiously. "I feel like this is the part where all of us just break out laughing, and then decide to do a group hug."

    "Ha!" Blake snickered. "Gay."

    The boy blew air through his lips. "There's two girls, one boy, and whatever it is Shamrock feels like at the moment. How is that gay?"

    "I'm a boy, thanks for asking," Shamrock said, rolling his eyes. He removed his hat and put it in his lap.

    Blake put a fist under her chin, staring intently at Jaune. "Wasn't it you who said that girls were gay by definition, because we like dick? Therefore anything with us makes you gay."

    "I said that in confidence!" Jaune put his hand to his cheek, mouth open.

    Blake just rolled her eyes, smiling.

    "Why do the things that I say have consequences?" Jaune asked, sulking.

    "Because we have better memories than a goldfish?" Weiss said dubiously.

    Jaune kept sulking. "Goldfish actually have very good memories. You can teach them to do tricks. Y'all are perfectly on par."

    For some reason, that seemed to take the wind out of everyone's sails. It wasn't that it was particularly depressing or insightful. It was just that no one seemed to really know how to keep the conversation going after that. Blake shivered, and Weiss pulled Shamrock's jacket over her tighter.

    Shamrock met eyes with Jaune, giving him a curious look. He seemed almost to dissociate for a moment, phasing out as he looked back. Until he stood up, drooping his sleeping bag over his shoulders like a coat.

    "I don't care if it's gay," he said with a sigh. "Y'all worth it. C'mere."

    Nobody moved.

    The boy shook his head. "No, not the group hug. Not exactly." He walked over to Blake, who was just staring back at him. Jaune spread his arms cruciform, holding out the sleeping bag.

    Blake blinked, and then looked at her feet. "I… I don't know."

    "Well, I do," he said, draping the bag over her. He pointed at Shamrock. "Convince your partner to join us. It's goddamn freezing out and I have the only blanket here. It will be just like that time back in the hotel, when we all decided it was better to sleep in the same room as a team, together. Only this time it's to prevent freezing to death. We're all about to collapse and I don't think we can make it any further. Might as well try to survive the night."

    Somewhere in the distance, gunfire. The howls of the Grimm.

    To Shamrock's surprise, Weiss actually stood up on her own. She held a hand down to pick Shamrock up, who accepted it dutifully.

    "I think I dropped my pride somewhere back in the caves," she said. "And I am cold."

    "I thought you said the cold didn't bother you anyway," Shamrock said, smiling.

    Weiss sank to her knees against the sink, beside Jaune. "I was lying. That's a thing people can do. I hate the cold. I liked it better when it was summer. The seasons in this country are so nice, because it has them. Even summer back home feels dreary. The sun doesn't even entirely set sometimes."

    As Shamrock sat down, Jaune managed to drape the entire sleeping bag over everyone else. If they huddled together, shoulder to shoulder, they could all fit snug enough. No one was entirely wrapped up, but the body heat helped. And the thick layers of the blanket kept them warm. He leaned against Weiss for support, and she leaned back. It wasn't the most comfortable position, but it was safe.

    Shamrock looked over and saw Blake and Jaune shoulder to shoulder. At first he thought the girl might lay her head over him like they had that night in the hotel. Instead, she just sat rigid, knee to her chest. Neither she nor her partner really looked at each other.

    The two briefly met eyes, and then looked away. Shamrock had that feeling like he was watching something intimate about to happen, and almost shouldn't be here. He felt his face changing slightly with that thought. Until they just decided to roll with it, and wrapped their arm around Weiss just to stay tight and comfortable. Weiss gave a quiet noise of surprise, but quickly just settled into the position.

    Shamrock might almost have thought it was silent, if not for the distant sounds of monsters and battle. But that would be a problem for tomorrow. Or, more likely, a problem for the next couple of hours, depending on how much sleep they would actually get here.

    "Hey, Blake," Jaune whispered.

    Blake made a non-committal noise, still refusing to look at him. "I know. A lot of things happened. A lot of things were said."

    "You were angry. But you had every right to be. I was in the wrong," he said. "I don't think I made a single good choice these last few days. Mostly just a series of fuck ups I've been making the best out of. But I guess it really didn't click until I saw the hate and anger in your eyes. It… I'm sorry, I guess."

    Shamrock tried to fall asleep, but it was hard to do when they wanted to roll their eyes so heavily. It was like every time those two started to talk, it turned stupidly sappy.

    Blake turned to face her partner, giving him a weird kind of smile. "This is the part where you ask me, 'But does that really change anything?'" She gave the barest laugh. "You're starting to get predictable. And the answer to that, is I don't know. We—you—I—"

    Jaune put his hand on her shoulder, and she shut up. "No. This was going to be the part where I apologize for the worst birthday present in the history of birthdays."

    She blinked. "My birthday?"

    Jaune nodded. "Yeah. It's today, the eighteenth of January. Happy birthday, Blake."

    She touched her cheek. "You remembered… I… huh."

    "Nah, I cheated. I put today in my scroll's calendar," he said, smiling softly. "Sorry I couldn't get you anything good. Alternatively, it was the best gift a girl could ask for, the gift of emotional trauma. I understand it's in vogue this season. If you make it out of this, I promise to actually get you something, or take you somewhere, or whatever. Figure it might be fun?"

    "Are you…" She sighed, leaning her head against his shoulder. "You know what? This entire year has been a mess. I want a do-over."

    "That'll give me time to finally get to know you so I can get you a real gift."

    Shamrock and Weiss exchange glances.

    Weiss pretended to gag. "God, you two are insufferable. Blake, happy birthday. We'll have a party when we get back and I will absolutely make the cake and it will be the best cake ever, and you shall eat it and taste nothing but despair."

    Blake winked, flashing her a thumbs up. "Thanks, best teammate a girl could have. Way better than Jaune. All he gets me is suffering."

    "Congratulations on the birth year day," Shamrock said, waving. "Now would you two shut up? I'm trying to peacefully freeze to death in my sleep, not get hypothermia while I'm awake."

    "I am physically incapable of closing my mouth due to a genetic defect that keeps me rambling," Jaune said, frowning.

    "I believe that," Shamrock said.

    "Blake, if you make him shut up right now so we can all go to sleep," Weiss said, "I'll buy you two of whatever gift he gives you for your birthday."

    Blake laughed. "Jaune, buy me a pony."

    He put his hand to his chest and scoffed. "What do you think I'm made of, money?"

    "No," she sighed, getting comfortable as she leaned against Jaune, head resting against him. "I think you're made of bad decisions."

    "I'm rubber and you're glue," he singsonged with a pout. "Anything you say to me bounces off and sticks to you!"

    "Yeah, I'm also made of bad decisions." She smiled. "It's why I'm still here."

    "Wouldn't have it any other way, birthday girl. After everything that happened, you're still okay."

    "I can be okay because you're okay," she said, tucking some of her hair behind her ear.

    "And there is no one in the world I'd rather be okay with than you," he said.

    Blake hummed in thought. "I don't know. I'm still not sold on us as partners. Next time we nearly die and almost time travel or whatever, I'm going to test my options." She gave him a smug little look.

    The boy frowned theatrically. "No givesie backsies. You're mine. I called dibs."

    She reached her hand up and pushed his face away. "You know what, they're right. Jaune, shut up."

    "Make me!"

    Weiss gave Shamrock a suffering look. She made a mouth with her left hand and kissed it to her own lips, rolling her eyes. Shamrock snorted.

    Which was the exact perfect time for the barricade they had set up by one of the doors to break down. A white gloved hand reached through the hole and opened the door. Shamrock barely had time to register the fact that they were probably fucked, again, before she realized she was looking at that goddamned Humming Lady from the caves, with White Fang soldiers behind her.

    "You should really stop lying there. I've come back to help you all," she hummed, her metal whip hanging over her shoulder. Those two black birds with steel on their beaks rested on the shoulders of her bridal gown. The woman was giving an incredibly toothy smile towards Blake. "Sorry about trapping you to die, though. Come along now and I promise it probably won't happen again."

    a/n Enter the help Adam has in the area. Next chapter, we end this volume, and make a cat cry!
     
    Last edited:
  • Threadmarks
    • Wait, when did she find Bass? and why does she care about Bass? We were pretty thoroughly left for dead in the cave.

    Blake and Jaune are going on a date, assuming they don't die.

    If the volume ender is as good as the last one, I am going to be over the moon and I can't wait.
     
    Last edited:
    Eric d'Orléans said:
    Volume 6, Chapter 9
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...
    Nice.
    Eric d'Orléans said:
    "No, they're making a good point,"
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...
    Weiss: No no, They've got a point.
    Jaune: Oh god damnit, even the shitty memes follow me!
    Eric d'Orléans said:
    "Facts don't care about your feelings, guys," Weiss said, folding her arms. "We're all a bunch of weirdos with enough baggage to be an entire luggage claim. So what?"
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...
    God damnit eric i was making a joke-
    Eric d'Orléans said:
    Here all of them were, at death's door, beaten and exhausted, having just been through a potentially existential and theologically nightmarish situation, and the only thing they could do was give each other shit.
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...
    It is only at 0 hp that the Flagellant attains it's true might.

    This was brought to you by a Darkest Dungeon fan.
     
    Last edited:
    Volume 6, Chapter 10
  • Threadmarks
    • Chapter 10: Simultaneous Release
    "I hope your wife gives birth to a centipede and you have to spend the rest of your days slaving away to buy shoes for it."

    — 24 —​

    Yang Xiao Long's shirt stuck to her chest, bunching on the creases of her joints. The mix of sweat and the occasional ocean spray gave the cold a way to crawl under her skin, like winter itself was stripping her flesh away with a flensing knife. Her Aura did nothing. Once upon a time, as she set off alone into Catchfire to chase rumors of her mother, she'd been reminded of just how easy things and people were to break. To someone like her, if she stopped to stare at the changing color of her eyes in the mirror, the entire world could be like Catchfire. And if she got cold feet, she could always remind herself that in this house of rotten wood and dry bones, she was a goddamn flamethrower.

    She flexed her fingers, hoping for maybe one last bit of heat from the friction of her muscles. And realized it didn't help right now. This wasn't something she could try to reason or fight her way through. Because it wasn't something she could do anything about, period. Neither the weather nor the disaster she was watching from distant safety. Yang shivered, and far ahead of her, the city of Montluçon shivered too—the wail of sirens, the roar of jets, and the occasional pop of gunfire for the last holdouts of Grimm left in the city.

    For all her time slumming it in Catchfire on her weekends, on and off again going into the worst parts of Vale whenever the idea struck her, Yang wasn't a city girl. While Patch did have big towns, like its capital city of Five Wives or the endless steels mills of Magneria at the center of the island, nothing it had had prepared her for the warren of concrete, highways, light rails, and the dizzying smells of civilization. Sure, she'd seen the gritty gangster and crime movies all about Vale's seedy underbelly. Her friend and compulsive card cheat, Indigo Jack, had been raised there and had even shown her around areas she might find more interesting in Catchfire.

    Instead of what she'd expected, she'd just found a city constantly building over itself in a mad rush to violate the latest building codes in new and exciting ways. She'd found people in the land of plenty fighting for scraps of food, money, and other things she'd always just taken as granted. Where using her Aura hadn't made her stand out as an icon, but made people start to run away as if she'd opened fire in a crowded theater. She remembered getting into a brawl with a pair of girls known only as the Malachite Twins, and the way Jack had claimed that half of all serious violent crime in Vale was caused by washed-up Huntsmen.

    Montluçon reminded Yang of that, in a distant, abstract way. She was seeing it here from a distance, but its glamorous hotels and industrial districts reminded her so much of the parts of Vale she found uncomfortable and alien. She wondered if maybe it had something to do with her half-Mistrali heritage. Her uncle Qrow told her she was a descendant of the Branwen tribe, one of the fiercely nomadic people from the Mistrali steppe. People who took what they wanted and didn't believe in fences. Sometimes she wondered if she would've been happier growing up with her mother, born and raised in a saddle instead of the island of Patch. Maybe that was why she was so fond of her motorcycle, some kind of genetic memory surrogate or whatever. But then again, who would have looked after Ruby all those days when her dad just couldn't?

    Yang supposed maybe it didn't matter. It was one of those theoretical questions. She'd actually been talking about it with her partner Nora, about life in Mistral and the infamy of her mother's tribe, when everything went to hell. It had all happened so fast and had been incredibly chaotic. Near as Yang could tell, Team VYPR's leader, Pyrrha, had made a bad call. She had gotten Ruby front and center of what became a riot just to defend their little corner of their mission. Sure, it had been boring, mostly just walking around and trying to look impressive, occasionally trying not to look like she was schmoozing with the most powerful man in Atlas in order to sate her curiosity about the country. But Yang would have preferred that to things turning into a riot that weirdly appeared to have been instigated by the Whites. If Team VYPR hadn't been forced to evacuate the general to his airship, Yang probably would have liked to stick around that riot to try to figure out if it was natural or not. Because it smelled like a rat.

    One thing had led to another. Before she knew it, she and her team had nowhere to go but stick around on a foreign aerial warship. They were just sort of existing there in awkward silence as the ship took off and provided an escort to Huntsmen flying their way to Montluçon. She spent the time on her scroll, looking at the news and social media, trying to figure out what was going on as Ruby went through various stages of panic attacks over her friends, Coco and Jaune, who were supposed to be in the city. And while she wasn't a fan of the boy by any stretch, she didn't think anyone deserved to be eaten alive by Grimm. Especially considering that because VYPR were students, they weren't supposed to get involved in the fighting.

    Yang had spent the afternoon high in the sky, watching the city engulfed in combat. What started out as somewhat irritating, became almost morbidly fascinating. As evening fell, she could actually pinpoint the areas most infected with the occasional demon by pockets of light from Dust, explosives, and gunfire. But as the lights just kept roaming across the city, it stopped being fascinating and became almost depressing. Yang couldn't do anything as people fought and died throughout the night. The best she could do was make out communications from the ship's bridge as she just kind of ghosted the command tower, having nowhere else to go. She learned the exact number of Huntsmen who had shown up, and their casualties. Yang listened as the Royal Navy provided artillery support, clashing with Atlas over fields of fire. Other army corps trickled into the city as they arrived in the region to support. There was even some talk that a ceasefire had broken out between the military and the local White Fang, which was typical in a way. It was ancient custom for two sides in a battle to broker a temporary peace when Grimm showed up.

    And by the morning, when everything was said and done, the Valean guns had turned towards the Atlesian airship. One of the boats fired a warning missile salvo to make it leave their airspace. Ironwood had, rather offensively, used Team VYPR as collateral. A sort of "hold your fire, we have Valean nationals onboard."

    Yang almost felt like some kind of prisoner of war as Ironwood apologized to her team, and then negotiated their safe passage back into royal custody in exchange for leaving the region. But another part of her felt vaguely flattered that the military of all people was that concerned for her. She wondered what might have happened if no one on her team was from Vale.

    One way or the other, as Huntsmen and soldiers cleaned up the city in the aftermath of the battle, she found herself on a massive carrier called the HMS Risk of Rain. With most of the fighting ended, the Navy had docked in the harbor to provide medical services. Apparently an airship carrier could double as a kind of hospital as well as provide other miscellaneous services, like opening up their cafeteria to supply refugees meals. Yang didn't really have an opinion on the military, but she supposed she was glad Vale had them and Huntsmen to deal with trouble like this.

    VYPR had scattered to the wind upon being released. Pyrrha wanted to stay put. Nora had been curious about all of the missile batteries currently floating in the harbor. Ruby had turned into a storm of rose petals and left to try to find her friends among the wounded and refugees either on the ships or the mobile army surgical hospitals scattered throughout the docks.

    And in the end, like always, Yang was alone in a strange place, not sure how she was going to get back, and only vaguely able to keep up with her team via text. But even her scroll was barely useful. The Hunters and soldiers had protected the city's CCTS Tower, but that just meant all of her friends back at Beacon were blowing her scroll up with texts.

    Yang stood there by one of the elevators going from the carrier down to the docks, watching men in blue sailor uniforms transport material and wounded personnel. The scent of gunsmoke and old combustion Dust burned her nose. The occasional splashes of ocean water and the snow chilled her to her bones.

    She kept her Aura up to stay warm, and shivered.

    Yang looked at the last text in her scroll, seeing who was buzzing her this time. She was about to ignore it before she read who sent it.

    Jack: Our friends good?​
    ​
    You: what do u mean?​
    ​
    Jack: You're texting me, so you're good. What about Shamrock and the Schnee?​
    ​
    You: oh crap they're with one of the teams here​
    ​
    Jack: Yeah I tend to remember people who owe me money​
    ​
    Jack: Send me a depression selfie if you find out they're dead​
    ​
    You: yeh sure​

    Yang collapsed her scroll, running a hand through her hair. She knew Ruby had been in a complete panic over Jaune and Coco. So much that Yang really couldn't stop her or keep her on lockdown before she ran off. But she'd forgotten that her other card partners were with Jaune on Team BASS. It had simply slipped her mind with all the chaos and stress inherent to all of this deathly nothing. At first she would have texted them to see if they were okay, but then it occurred to her that she'd never really gotten their scroll numbers.

    She rubbed her arms and sneezed. Then texted Ruby. But as was often typical, Ruby didn't even check the text. Yang stood there and watched the message get left on sent until she just gave up. Weiss and Shamrock might be here, and they might be someone she could talk to. If for no other reason than to have something to do other than stand around and wait for someone to remember Team VYPR and bring them home.

    Yang looked around the deck of the massive ship and just picked a direction. In a weird way, Yang felt like she actually knew her way around the boat. During the last days of the Great War, or perhaps some kind of sabotage during that failed Revolution, one of the last great supercarriers the Royal Navy built had been run aground against Catchfire. Unable to recover the ship for whatever reason, the Say My Name had just turned into an extension of the city as denizens built out towards and through the ship. Until an old weapon of war had been repurposed by the people it had been designed to protect into a claustrophobic warren of houses and shops. She'd been there a few times, looking for leads on her mother; it was a big ship, and almost a kind of tourist trap despite its hellish nature. The boat was almost a city unto itself, it was so big and packed.

    This ship looked to be about the same design. Minus the endless shanty towns on the deck and below.

    So Yang suspected she knew her way below deck. None of the sailors who looked at her seemed inclined to stop her. They were more concerned with refueling and repairing bullheads, and tending to wounded. One man with an anchor symbol on his chest even bumped into her, squinted for a moment, before apologizing and calling her ma'am. The dude had to be nearly twice her age and it felt weird. It seemed a somewhat more tired form of respect that Hunters got everywhere except from the slums. Everyone just presumed Yang was exactly where she belonged and wasn't worth questioning.

    It would probably make finding Weiss easier. Jack had called her and Shamrock their friends, but Yang had never really thought of it like that. She hadn't thought differently, on the other hand. They were people whose company she enjoyed playing cards with, trying to win money off of and best. And Weiss had incredibly deep pockets and was often too stubborn to know when to quit. But Yang had never really been tempted to grab their numbers and ask them to hang out outside of cards. They barely spoke to each other in class. Most of the people Yang actually hung out with by choice were people she knew from her days at Signal Academy: old partying buddies, guys who still thought they had a chance with her after all these years of nothing, and the members of her old combat school team, BYRN. But aside from her little sister, Ruby, there really weren't many people Yang felt especially close or attached to in Beacon. Even her partner, Nora, seemed to prefer hanging out with that Ren boy from Team CRDL.

    Maybe if Weiss and Shamrock were alive and well, and not too mentally scarred from whatever happened his last couple of days, she should actually invite them out for something. Hang out with them and get to really know them. In a pinch, Yang could typically rely on Indigo Jack's streetwise know-how to find an interesting bar, restaurant, or club worth spending time in.

    Yang smelled the cigarette smoke, and for some reason felt an almost supernatural hand on her shoulder guiding her in its direction. She opened a doorway onto a kind of balcony below the flight deck or whatever it was supposed to be called. On the Say My Name, this part of the ship had been turned into a hanging noodle bar and garden, suspended with ropes and bolts to the side of the ship. Here, it was just a kind of walkway with a little fence to keep sailors from falling off.

    She looked around for a brief moment, before she nearly stumbled over the familiar blond boy sitting on the ledge, feet dangling over, holding a cigarette in one hand as he looked out across the harbor.

    Jaune gazed up at her, looking beat to shit and then some. He was nearly half naked, covered in bandages over burns and cuts that covered up nearly his entire body. She was pretty sure he had a couple more scars since the last time she had seen him about a month ago back in the Fishery, dancing with Ruby as they tried to mess with his weapons, equipment he was still carrying on his body right now. These weren't just regular scars, but obviously battle scars. Those were usually a mark of pride for a Hunter.

    To have truly vicious scars meant a Hunter had been in a life or death situation so bad that his Aura broke, and they were badass enough to still come out of their alive due to their wits and talent. Yang knew of a couple of boys trying to cook up fake battle scars to try to look more sexy and badass. A scar across the eye like Weiss had was kind of hot. The patchwork this boy had was almost kind of vulgar. Seeing them and the glow of Aura behind his tired eyes as he looked up at her, Yang once again found herself worrying about all the time he spent with her little sister.

    "Hm," he said, giving her a lazy smile. "Cigarette's a bust."

    "Is that supposed to be a clever joke?" she asked, defaulting to a kind of weary hostility.

    Jaune shrugged. "No. Usually when I get all up in my feelings and light a cigarette, someone shows up to tell me smoking is bad and then we have a heart-to-heart. Was trying to find my partner in this mess, and thought lighting up my emergency cigarette might summon her. Instead," he said, compressing a sigh, "I get you. Therefore my last emergency cigarette is broken. All this can do is give me cancer. Which sometimes unfortunately includes you, I guess."

    "Aren't you going to ask me why I'm here?" she asked, crossing her arms. She was very consciously trying to ignore that jab. Not that she really knew why. Half of the time she was just looking for an excuse to bite the boy's head off. Other times, she was just after a way to grab Ruby and bring her away from the boy. Something about Jaune never sat right with her. And just walking up on him like this wasn't doing her mood any favors.

    Instead of doing anything like asking her the obvious question, he held up his scroll for her to see. It was a text conversation with Ruby, including a picture from a couple of days ago when VYPR was out in Vale for the early parts of what had been their mission.

    "Nah, I know all, I see all, and I don't really care-all," Jaune said with a kind of laid back attitude that ground her flowers into flour. "Ruby's out there playing some kind of elaborate game of hide and seek with me. I got the story from her. You don't owe me an explanation, and honestly I wouldn't expect you to ever be straight with me anyhow. You're a lost cause."

    Yang bristled, feeling at once like she had better things to do, and yet like she didn't want to walk away letting him think he won. "I'm not a cause. And who'd want to be straight with you? You're like the living definition of a turn off, Jaune."

    He eyed her for a long moment. It was a force of effort to keep her eyes locked with his, the uncomfortable glow of Aura behind his eyes and the way it made her skin crawl at the edges of perception. It was almost like the spiritual equivalent of taking a bite of something spicy right before you realized it was about to destroy your sinuses.

    "So what are you?" he asked simply, gesturing with the cigarette between his fingers. He hadn't smoked it once.

    "I—" Yang pulled her face away in a half scoff. "I don't even know—what?"

    Jaune shrugged, looking back out towards the city. "What are you, Yang? Pretty much all I know about you are the things you don't like. But basing yourself on what you dislike and won't do idn't the same as having a personality."

    She scowled. "Okay, dial it back a notch. That's both weirdly personal and creepily existential. Stop it."

    He idly kicked his legs hanging over the side of the ship. "You're the one who approached me. You've got all the power in this interaction. I happen to be in one of those rare moods where I'm wondering about yadda yadda, girl trouble, my friends, this whole fuckery. Thus the cigarette." He held it up to her. "It's a cry for help. Care for a drag?"

    Yang brushed the smoke away, looking down at the boy. The way he just seemed almost pensive, lost in his own head, had her feeling self-conscious as she grimaced at him. His lack of any particular reaction made her feel like doing anything at all was by definition an overreaction. Usually, before, their interactions had been a bit more loud and angry. She'd tried to punch him the first time they met, when she had thought Jaune stole Ruby's necklace. Instead, she learned she had simply given it to him. Even now, wrapped up in patchwork first aid, Yang saw the slanted crucifix hanging from the boy's neck. It made her uncomfortable just to consider it. It didn't belong to him. Ruby didn't belong to him. Yet here he was, wearing the necklace, texting her sister, and having the audacity to feel sorry for himself?

    Then she saw the flask at his hip. She recognized the leather on top, the worn cap, and the symbols carved into the side. Even the little dent from where she had bitten it as a little girl in a childish attempt to wrestle it away from its owner.

    Jaune had Uncle Qrow's flask at his hip.

    Yang stared long enough that even Jaune seemed to get uncomfortable under her gaze. "Is that my uncle's flask?" she asked.

    He pulled it free from his belt. "Yeah. Gave it a' me last time we met. Filled me it wit' Dust since I don't drink."

    "He gave it to you?" she asked, shaking her head. Her mouth wouldn't close right.

    He shrugged. "Mm, well, y'know. Your sister's necklace, dad's virginity, uncle's flask. I'm collecting gifts from your family to adorn on myself like some kind of raven. What are you gonna give me after we finally see eye-to-eye and vibe?"

    "Why would I give you anything?" she scoffed. "You're a douche!"

    Jaune looked down at Qrow's flask contemplatively, giving it a little shake to hear the liquid inside slosh. "Yeah, but what girl doesn't need a douche in her life at least once a month?"

    Yang gagged. "But, why? Why would he give you anything?"

    He reattached it to his hip. "We had a talk. Don't know if he meant it, but I think he wanted to get a handle on his drinking. Gave me this as a result of what we said."

    She couldn't help herself. Yang laughed, her expression anything but happy. "You had a talk and he wanted to give up drinking? Yeah, sure. He says that every time he comes over. 'Yeah, sure, I'll cut back,' he'd say, filling up that damn flask with Deathstalker-151."

    Jaune shook his head. "Well, he ain't got his lucky flask on him no more to pour into. Maybe it'll help. Maybe it's just symbolic. But symbols mean things to people."

    "As if anything he said actually meant anything," she hissed. "I bet he's drunk right now. Just bought a new flask to take on the go."

    He put his hand on the flask like it was a revolver he meant to quickdraw on her. "We talked about that, actually. When he was driving me back to Five Wives."

    "When was that?"

    Jaune looked back out at the city. "Long story. Not terribly interesting. Just two pieces of shit talking." He sighed. "He's an addict, and to an addict, there's a special kind of high you get when you tell yourself 'this is my last one.' I would know; I'm still one. Your last drink, last cheat meal before a diet, last cigarette." Jaune gestured the cigarette he wasn't smoking at her. "It's a kind of guilt-free enjoyment of something you know is killing you. You savor it on your tongue, as addiction becomes a kind of release unto itself. And then what? That feeling's something you want again. That's what Qrow and I talked about."

    "Going clean?" She laughed again. It sounded somehow desperate. "Gimme a break."

    "No, it's more than that. It's the ability to enjoy a vice guilt-free because you can keep telling yourself 'I can quit whenever I want' that becomes a special kind of vice itself. So you do another cheat day. You have another drink. You light up one last time. Over and over. The fact that you can quit at any time, so you tell yourself, makes that feeling the true addiction you're after. You can't really be addicted to something unless you tell yourself it's not a problem and that you can quit whenever. Has to be done spur of the moment, almost. Or else the anticipation of your last fix becomes the new drug."

    "He didn't quit just because you had, like, what, one talk with the man!"

    He looked at her with blue eyes that seemed oddly old, oddly sad for a boy her age. "When he came back from the last bar run on the Long Night, did he bring any booze home like he said he was?"

    Her eyes went wide. "How do you—"

    "Answer the question," he said dispassionately.

    She folded her arms tight enough it was like she was hugging herself. "He… didn't. Everyone was kind of disappointed. He just came home super late and we were all worried for him. Then he just hugged us and tried to play it off."

    He shrugged with one-hand. "Then maybe I did get through to him. But changing is a man's own business. Can't nobody make him change and have it stick unless he does it for himself."

    "That's—" Yang laughed, shaking her head. "No, that's stupid. That's crazy. You're just some random asshole. A complete creep that likes to hang out with my sister. You don't get to talk about my uncle like that! He's my family. Ruby is my family. And you don't just get to show up once or twice and screw all that up because it's funny to you or whatever."

    He didn't seem angry or bothered. He just sighed, resting his head on his arms on the shipside balcony. "I don't get to talk about my friend just because he's your uncle or she's your sister?"

    "He's not your friend!" she said, slamming the side of her hand into the hull of the ship. "Uncle Qrow is always drunk, and it's killing him, and we all know it. No matter what me or Ruby say, no matter how many times we tell him to stop. No matter how many times we've had to clean up his messes, we never get through to him! He'd always just fill that flask up again no matter how many times we tried to help him!"

    She stabbed her finger at him. "You really expect me to believe that you, some random asshole, could have one chat with him and, poof, he's cured! His family, nothing. His nieces, whatever. His brother-in-arms, whatever. But talking it over with some piece of shit like you, that's what makes him rethink his life? He never listened to me. He doesn't listen to anyone like that!"

    When she was done, she was panting. She felt her Aura bubbling up, more than just what she was using to try to stay warm through all her cold sweat. She hit the wall again, and Jaune didn't even flinch. He just looked sad, a little surprised. Like he fucking pitied her. On some level, she knew what he was doing. It was like when he and Ruby acted super buddy-buddy just to piss her off, and she was taking the bait. Hook, line, and sinker, but Yang just couldn't not take it, not here, not with him, not over something this serious.

    She felt ridiculous

    She felt pathetic.

    "That's," he tried, and faltered. He swallowed and let out a slow breath. Slowly, fingering the flask, he said, "That's not surprising. That he couldn't listen to you."

    "What?" she demanded, feeling her eyes shift color. Her Semblance burned a hole through her heart. She just wanted him to finish that thought. To give her an excuse, any excuse, to throw him off the ship into the harbor. Anything so she could brain this cocky creep.

    "Because you're put together, Yang. You got things figured out, you and Ruby both," Jaune said softly, like it hurt him to say. He grimaced, this uncomfortable expression that put goosebumps on her neck. "Qrow loves and cares for you both. I mean, he really does. Did whatever he could to make sure you both wouldn't end up fuck-ups like him. And that's why whatever you tell him about his problems means so little. Despite himself, he feels he did right by you two. You're better people than he is, he feels. And a man like Qrow just can't relate to people like that. You've never been where he is, and he considers that his only real source of pride: that you are better than him because he did his best to do right by y'all. To turn you and your sister into people worth respecting. Into everything he feels he could never be. It's why we got each other, in a way."

    He ashed his cigarette over the railing. "I have a knack for worming my way through to hearts, promises, and other broken things."

    "I—I just—I," Yang stuttered, a sputtering of useless attempts to reply to that. Half-formed ideas she couldn't really put coherent thought to, let alone try to speak. She felt her Semblance retreating. The cold seeped back into her bones, and she shivered.

    Finally, in a low, quiet voice, she felt her hate and anger collapse beneath her as she asked, "What would have made him listen to me?"

    He stared at her for a long time. "That he didn't meant he loved you. Meant he figured he was a fuck-up who was still doing his best for you in spite of himself. That he listened to me meant he was so, so afraid of how far he could still fall. That for everything he's done, he could still find a way to hurt you."

    Yang took two steps forwards before her knees gave out. She fell down on her ass beside the boy, staring out at everything and nothing. "Is that why Ruby listens and hangs out with you no matter how much I tell her not to? Is she broken too and I—I don't know. Is that why?"

    He looked like he wanted to put a hand on her shoulder and then reconsidered. Hanging his hands into his lap, he said, "If I'm Qrow's second coming like she says I am, then I guess she's kind of my Summer. Someone better than me who's got things more figured out than you'd give her credit for. Takes a certain kind of person to realize just how fucked up everything around her is, and choose to smile and face it head-on with full knowledge. In a way, I'm jealous. You and Qrow, you did right by her."

    "Us?" she laughed.

    "Who is Ruby to you?"

    Yang looked at her hands, slowly flexing fingers in thought. "She's my sister. She's family. She's…" She let herself smile a fraction. "She's a precocious little brat who's usually more trouble than she's worth, but she's always been there for me, because I've always been there for her. She's my sister, and she's my friend, and she's someone I'd do anything for. And it feels like…"

    She stopped and let out a breath. "Feels like I've been losing that, I guess. I tried pushing her away once, y'know? Back when she first came to Beacon after somehow skipping grades and impressing the right people like she always does. I thought, I don't know, that giving her a nudge towards other people would help her. Then Initiation happens. We wind up on a team together. And I felt like she took me trying to help her a little too close to heart. We share classes, study together, go out together, but it feels like she's more distant than ever before with new friends, new experiences, but she's still the same girl I grew up with. She got screwed over by Pyrrha and instead of being sad, she focuses all her energy into making sure her friends are safe and okay, not thinking about herself or anything. I don't know. It sounds stupid. Stupider yet because I'm talking about her with you of all people."

    "There's lots we don't know," he said. "Both of us. No two ways about it, but it's all stupid shit. Stupid that we don't talk. Stupid that we put so much of our self worth into how other people see and need us. Stupid that I was once afraid of you because you tried to kill me."

    She cocked a brow. "When was that?"

    "First time we really met," he said with a sigh. "Fishery, remember? Couldn't tell if you were trying to flirt with me or tell me to fuck off, until you nearly brained me."

    "You woulda been fine," she dismissed, waving a hand.

    Jaune stared at her for a long moment before shaking his head. "Sort of poisoned any well we coulda had. I don't like you, Yang. I still really don't like you."

    "Thanks, you too, dick," she said without any heat.

    "But we got something in common worth respecting."

    "Being?"

    "We got people in common we care about," he said. "Sometimes they're the same people, like Ruby. Sometimes they're not, like Blake, my partner."

    "Mm," she hummed.

    "But now do we know we have that together, do you still want to kill me?"

    She made a so-so gesture. "A little."

    "Good. Because after this, just talking or whatever, I don't think there's anything about you worth being scared of. All you've done is flail at me or start screaming. But it's like, so what? Just putting off trying to actually deal with each other as people just made it worse, hasn't it? I just kept thinking of you as this violent bitch, and you kept thinking of me as some unnerving creep who keeps sniffing around your sister."

    "You are a creep," Yang said. "Categorically. Check off every box on the list."

    "Do you like me?"

    She snorted a laugh. "Gods, no!"

    "But do you hate me?"

    Yang opened her mouth, then hesitated. "Still not cool with the stuff you and my sister do, but, I don't know."

    He looked out over the railing for a long moment. "And we only got this far, this bad, because I let this fester. We got in our feelings and let them build and explode, and it's a miracle you're actually a sane human being and this didn't come to blows. Mostly because I'd win and then Ruby would be sad."

    "Ha! As if, Jaune. I'd kick your ass six ways till Sunday."

    He pretended to check a watch he didn't have. "Think today is Sunday. You'll need to pull overtime to make it six ways before night. You up for it?"

    Yang let out a breath, looking away. "No. It's… it's stupid. It's not worth it. You're not worth it."

    Jaune pulled his legs up and got to his feet. He stretched, his bandaged straining over his body. Her eyes went to the fragments of tattoo hidden beneath the gauze. "Good. Because there's someone out there who is worth it, for me at least. And, I think I've realized after finally dealing with you head on, that letting that sit and fester because I was afraid of it is only gonna make things worse. It's shit I need to face head-on and just get it over with. Rip the bandaid off and hope the bleeding ain't none too bad."

    He offered her his hand up. "Thanks, Yang. You're the last person in the world I ever wanted to talk with, but, yeah. Thanks for being willing to hash out words conmigo."

    Yang stared at his hand for a long moment, eyeing the scars on his knuckles. Before she hesitantly reached out and allowed him to haul her to her feet with surprising strength. "I'm going to just pretend that sentence made any sense."

    His unsmoked cigarette was down to the filter. He flung it into the ocean. "Don't. Trying to understand me is detrimental to your own spiritual wellbeing."

    "I'll keep that in mind," she said evenly.

    Jaune nodded. "Smart call. I gotta go find my partner and see if any of us are going to survive today. You should find Ruby and do whatever yourself, blondie."

    And with that, he went through the door into the ship, leaving Yang alone with the cold and her thoughts.

    Yang shivered one last time.

    — 25 —​

    Soldiers made Blake's skin crawl. They had ever since her months fighting to survive against them with the White Fang out on the frontier with Adam. Sailors weren't much better, but for a reason that made her press her palms into her eyes and try to forget.

    Blake had grown up in the shadow of her father, the former leader of the White Fang. She had learned about injustice and the evils of the world, about boycotts and civil disobedience and protesting, before she ever really had any understanding of what that actually meant. She had come to understand that humans were bad, and faunus were victims before she'd ever met her first human.

    The first human she'd ever met had been a sailor, an officer with the Royal Navy whose carrier had docked in Kuo Kuana, the capital of Menagerie where she had grown up. It towered over the fishing vessels, more steel in one place than she had ever seen anywhere in her life. Its captain had come to talk with her father, and she had been struck by the way he didn't have a tail, or claws, or ears like a faunus. Humans just looked wrong, like a race of cripples. She couldn't understand how people like this were somehow stronger and oppressing people like her around the world. When he saw her hiding behind her mother's legs, he had crouched down and smiled, offering her a king-sized bar of chocolat Valais he had apparently brought just for her.

    She had promptly just bit his hand. It just seemed like the thing to do. Growling and snarling, she tried to dig her teeth into his glove, but all he did was break out laughing. Somehow the kids in town found out she had just bitten a stranger, and boy was that something hard to live down.

    In some sense, Blake supposed she had left home just to reinvent herself as someone besides the girl who just bit people with candy.

    Instead, she had found a world of insanity, injustice, and soldiers. Adam had been there, but all he had been party to was cycles of violence that bred more violence and hatred. People got hurt, and people died. Sometimes good, sometimes bad. And always with flecks of blood getting on her hands no matter what she tried to do.

    Blake wondered if the ship that had docked that day was the same one she was on right now. When she looked at her hands now, raw and chafed from days fighting in street to street combat with demons, she saw past them to the ship's flight deck below. And beyond that, the city only recently saved through death and violence.

    She remembered the Humming Lady, the woman who had trapped her and her friends in the cave to die. How that same lady had shown up with a smile beneath her mask, saying that things had changed all the way at the top, and that somebody had a special interest in Blake and keeping her alive. Trying to parse out her motives had been a confusing mess, whether she was loyal to the White Fang, or with LaChance as some kind of double agent, or what. Maybe it didn't matter. Maybe she was just an opportunist. Maybe she was playing every side to avoid getting her and her people killed, liberally interpreting LaChance one moment, trying to kill her and her friends another, and giving her a wink as she made veiled references to Adam.

    She didn't like the idea of Adam knowing she was out there. But it wasn't hard to realize how he knew. The news airships had been keen to record everything. Even her and her team.

    She pulled out her pistol, examining it. When she had crossed the point of no return, even she didn't have the guts to shoot Adam like he deserved. Because maybe a part of her remembered the good times. Remembered when he was capable of being her friend, someone she could respect, someone who did care for her. Just like she could remember when he had lost himself to everything she hated.

    And yet, in that confusing mess beneath the rocks and liquid Grimm, when she thought she'd seen him again in Jaune, she hadn't backed down. She had been afraid, but hadn't run away. She had held her gun in hand and faced him head on.

    And then she had tried to shoot him.

    And then she told Jaune that she trusted him.

    Her ears perked up as she heard someone climbing up the metal ladder. She felt goosebumps as she stared, suddenly feeling heat in her chest and sweat on her back.

    Until Jaune hauled himself up. Blake stood up on reflex, watching him rub his hands together. He was covered in bandages and gauze that wrapped around the muscles of his body tightly. More than that, he was bruised and scabbed in a way that was almost repulsive. She stared at the claw scars running over his stomach and chest, remembering when they first locked eyes during Initiation and she'd bitten down her disgust and hatred of him to tend to his wounds.

    "Fuck," he said, breath misting. He folded his arms, putting his hands under his armpits to keep warm. "Did you have to hide all the way up atop the command tower? I get that you're a cat and all, but this is ridiculous. These ladders are freezing."

    For some reason, she felt her cheeks flush. "Hi."

    The creases of annoyance left his face. He smiled, rolling his eyes. "Really? After all this time together, now is the moment you get all awkward and flustered?"

    She continued to stare at him, unsure what to really say, what to do.

    Jaune didn't have that problem. He put his hand on her shoulder and pushed down. They sat down together like that, looking out across the ship and the city.

    "Honestly," he said flippantly, "I feel betrayed right now."

    Her eyes fluttered. "Wait, what! Why? Although we had an entire talk about things being cool between us!"

    He mimicked the gesture of dragging on a cigarette. "That was before I lit my emergency cigarette. You know what happened? You didn't just randomly appear at my beck and call to tell me smoking was bad before having a deep conversation with me. Some other random girl showed up and had one with me."

    And suddenly, the fear and tension just melted away. Blake groaned. "Ugh. You're the worst. You actually had me worry for a second there."

    "About my inevitable lung cancer or talking to other girls?"

    She scoffed. "Are you stupid?"

    He considered, hands in his lap. His leg was touching hers, and it was warm. "I mean, broadly yes, but what prompted you to ask this time?"

    "It's a recurring theme between us," she said dryly.

    "I think the term at this point is motif."

    "A persistent character flaw?" she suggested.

    "It's not a flaw; I'm the team's himbo." He turned his nose up. "You need my optimistic, bubbly personality and dominant chest size to really round out this team and make us a family."

    Blake blinked, making a series of expressions as she tried to reason out just how dumb that sentence was. "Thanks for that. God, talking to you is like huffing exhaust fumes. Because of you, I have exactly two brain cells left, and they're both competing for third place."

    "Yeah, but would you really have it any other way?" he asked, poking her cheek. The entire cheek went red, and boy was that frustrating.

    She couldn't keep the smile away, even as she played with her hands and tried to look away. "No. No, I wouldn't. You bring just the right amount of stupidity and lame drama to keep my life interesting."

    "I aim to impress."

    "Usually you fail," she said helpfully.

    "Lucky for me, you have low standards."

    "Mm. The lowest there can possibly be!"

    "Don't know about that one. We could always invest in shovels and just keep digging!"

    She tucked her hair behind her ear. "Hard pass. I think I've had enough of being underground for the rest of my life."

    He squinted up through the clouds. "I don't know about that. Up here on the surface, there's a giant ball of fire in the sky trying to give me radiation burns."

    "The sun? Sunburns?"

    Jaune nodded, looking like he was about to go on some inane rant, and she couldn't help but smile. "I think people would actually use sunscreen if we called it by its proper name; sunburns are just a form of radiation damage. In any case, that's why I bit the sun's fingers off to protect you."

    And just like that, Blake felt a pit welling in her stomach. She bunched her hands together, staring into her lap. "Oh. So this is going to be about that."

    He eyed her seriously. "Did you really just think I came up here to ruin your day with my very presence?"

    "For a moment, I let myself pretend. It was… nice to imagine."

    With a sense of distant panic, she watched Jaune root around in his pocket. The sweat on her back fell the worst, and the cold chill of the sea breeze turned into something unbearable. She shivered, and her throat felt dry as he pulled out a compressed bullet. The caliber she used, dented and smashed from an impact with a hard object it couldn't pierce.

    "I meant to return this to you," he said, tossing it.

    Blake lunged to grab it before it fell off the edge and tumbled towards the sailors working on the deck below. But holding it felt hot and cold at the same time. Like softly running her hand across the edge of a blade, not enough so that it cut you, but enough that you could almost feel it. With just a little more pressure, you would slice your finger off.

    "It's been a complicated couple of days," she said weakly, the words just sliding through her teeth.

    He shook his head. "We talked about that already. You tried to shoot me. I had it coming. You always were the more sane of us two. Even if things were complicated and confusing, if I had just stopped and listened to you from the start, maybe the worst of that shit could have been avoided. But I kept trying to do what I thought was right, because I failed to realize that you're the one who knows right from wrong of us two. I don't blame you, and I'm sorry. But we still agree that, one or the other, that it doesn't really change things between us, birthday girl."

    She felt her ears go flat beneath her hair bow. Everything felt hot.

    "But even talking about this, I think we're avoiding the issue," he said.

    She sat up rigid, staring at him. Her heart couldn't find anywhere to rest in her chest. It was like it was constantly trying to dig a way out of her rib cage. She felt her body rocking side to side, one moment bouncing towards him until they were rubbing against each other, and the next moment shifting her away. Like some kind of metronome.

    Jaune was warm and firm, like some kind of implacable rock. Like something Blake knew would always be there for her. Whenever she felt her heart rub her against him, something in it was comforting. Just his presence and touch. It reminded her of that night in the hotel, when she'd slept with her head on his bare chest, and how it'd be nice to go back to something simple and reassuring like that again.

    "What Weiss said," she whispered.

    Her hands started to shake. Until he took them in his calloused palms, rubbing his thumb over the back of her hand.

    He was giving her one of those boyish smiles of his. "I mean, I'm only dense because I choose to be. But it's." He laughed awkwardly. "Been kinda obvious for a while now. Been kind of weird?"

    Blake wanted to cross her arms and look to find, but wasn't willing to remove her hand from his. She settled for a skeptical expression. "What part of it was weird?"

    "Fussing over my injuries."

    She scoffed. "You were hurt. The first thing we really did as partners was me trying to save your dumb ass. It's par for the course!"

    Jaune cocked an eyebrow. "The way you're adopting my lingo."

    Blake pouted. "I'm highly impressionable. Shame on you for taking advantage of me."

    He tapped his thumb against her hand. "The way you kind of grabbed me that one night in the hotel and used me as a body pillow."

    "I—" She made a noise in the back of her throat. "Okay, yeah, I guess I was kind of weird and obvious. But also, you're very comfortable. So really, I'm the victim here."

    "Are you?"

    She snorted. "Oh please, it's not like you don't know what you're doing. The way you're always there for me. Your completely brain dead sense of humor that somehow always gets me to laugh. Hell, just the way you seem to be pathologically allergic to wearing shirts."

    He made a face. "Are you saying I had this coming because I dress like a slut?"

    Blake elbowed him playfully. "More like how you don't dress. Ever. Not that I'm complaining."

    Jaune scoffed. "You saw the other version of me who never got into weight lifting. He had a body that was designed for wearing shirts. I have built myself into a man who can't be contained by mere cotton blends!"

    She rubbed her eyes, trying not to laugh. "See? That right there. You're doing it again. I'm trying to be serious, and you're making it stupid."

    Jaune idly kicked his legs over the edge, rubbing against hers. The way he sighed gave her a bad feeling. "It's because I don't really know how to deal with things. When shit bothers you, you just have to find a way to laugh about it. Otherwise you let it consume you. You let it destroy you until you rot and fester with it. But I'm done pussyfooting the issue. I had a talk recently after I lit my emergency cigarette. Came face to face with someone I was avoiding, and realized that the longer we put off our problems, the longer we just assume that maybe our problems will just go away if we keep piling more and more problems onto them and ignoring them—all that does is make it worse. For everyone involved. And you're the last person in the world I want to make things worse for."

    She gave his hand a squeeze, and both of them said nothing. Whenever they were trying, they would meet each other's eyes, and just kind of falter from there. Slowly, she allowed herself to lean against him, idly running her finger across his hand. Savoring this moment before either everything collapsed or everything went perfectly, and she doubted either of them knew how it would go. She liked to think it would go great. But that pit in her stomach wouldn't go away. And trying to face it head on like this felt both weirdly inappropriate and yet the only way forward.

    "So," she finally managed, feeling her heart strangling her vocal cords. "Are we… something?"

    "Yeah," he said distantly. "I just don't know what that something is. But that we have, I guess, feelings or whatever."

    For some reason, watching him flounder over his words made her smile in a weirdly sideways manner. "Oh, don't give up at the finish line, boy. Weiss is right. I hate to say it, but she is. Feelings could be anything. Just say it."

    He frowned. "Why do I have to say it?"

    Blake put a finger to her nose. "Because not it."

    "Fuck," he hissed. "That's an inviolable law of the universe! Best two out of three?"

    She spread her hand until she had two fingers on her nose. "I still win."

    Jaune rolled his eyes. "Can't believe we fucking love each other when this is how we act."

    And somehow, there it was. She always expected this kind of moment to be somehow magical and breathtaking. Someone she cared about admitting that they loved her, and her agreeing. She had pictured it taking place at night, in a few of the fireflies, with her hair done up all nicely. Or maybe laying together under the stars, having barely survived a heated battle with only each other for support and comfort in the aftermath. Someone would confess to her, and then press his lips to hers, and then the story would just end there. Because really, what were you supposed to do in a story after that moment?

    But instead, here it was. In the most back-handed way she could imagine. That somehow left her smiling and laughing more than something genuine and heartfelt. She both hated it and kind of preferred it this way. It didn't feel like a moment of world shattering truth. It just felt like someone was giving voice to the obvious, putting things into place where they belonged.

    "Worst birthday ever," she said, nodding.

    "Yeah, well, I aim to disappoint."

    "I thought you said you aim to impress?"

    He shrugged. "I'm impressively disappointing."

    Blake let out a long sigh. "Remind me again why I love you?"

    "Potential daddy issues, I'm hot, penis envy, attraction to leadership, a bond formed over months physically training together, our frankly startling codependency." Another shrug. "Really, just spin the wheel and guess. The psychologically worrying implications are your oyster."

    She eyed him skeptically. "I'm pretty sure most of those aren't true."

    He put a hand to his chest. "Are you saying I don't have penis envy? How dare you deny my very real self-diagnosed mental illness."

    Blake rested her head comfortably on his shoulder, closing her eyes. "Stop trying to be funny. You know what I told you about your sense of humor."

    "It's your biggest turn-off, I know," he said, compressing a breath. "But that's kind of the thing. When my thoughts are a mess, I just start rambling. Because I'm doing that thing again where I'm trying to avoid the issue."

    She opened her eyes, staring at him. Slowly, Blake asked, "You mean figuring out where we actually go from here. It's like, I don't know. I don't think we're just friends anymore. I think the point for it, even pretending we are, is gone. But I don't know if this means we're dating now or—"

    "We're not," he said with the steel finality of a guillotine.

    And just like a headless corpse, she felt all the blood draining from her face. Until the only warmth she had left in her body was from contact with his. She found herself pressing up against him tighter, grabbing his hand as if afraid he would remove it.

    "What?" she asked, voice creaky. "But we just—this whole conversation—you and I, after everything—what?"

    He screwed his eyes shut and swallowed as he searched for words. "We keep dancing around it, because I don't know how to bring it up. I'm terrified of losing you, of hurting you in any way. Because I think the problem is I do love you, and you love me. But it's not the same way. I love spending time with you, giving you bullshit and a hard time, and you doing the same with me. I love training with you, figuring out how I work, and how to be a better Hunter. Love that you're someone I can support and be there for, because it gives me this sense of personal value, of being worthy. Like I've tied my entire self-worth into you and how you feel about me. But."

    Jaune did the unthinkable and took his hand away from hers just to rub his face again. "It wouldn't work. Couldn't work. And I love you too much to pretend otherwise. To make believe that this wouldn't end a disaster. That it wouldn't be horribly toxic for both of us. Wouldn't end with us hating each other. That it's just—"

    She felt as though every joint were unoiled pieces of clockwork as she sat up straighter, until they were barely touching anymore. "Oh. I. Ha! Oh." She stared ahead aggressively. "This is about Adam, Simone, the whole soul parasite thing too, right?"

    He laughed without any humor. "I mean that's a factor, yeah. I mean for one thing, I'm your team leader, so any kind of relationship would inherently be a bit one-sided and abusive."

    She shook her head with a disbelieving expression. "Now that just sounds stupid!"

    "And also the age and experience gap between us, which is just inherently unsettling."

    She thought back. "The other you said you were maybe twenty-five."

    He rocked side to side briefly. "Six months ago I was fifteen. Six months before, nineteen. At some indeterminate time I was around twenty-four. But for some reason everyone thought I was eighteen. Because that's what an effective skin care routine does for your face!" He threw his hands up. "I'm not positive how old I actually am, but I've had me a lot of faces. It almost feels like you're kind of a child by comparison and I'm an adult and that's just a can of worms I'm deeply uncomfortable with."

    Blake couldn't believe what she was hearing. "It's like you're just making up excuses because you're scared! Each one just sounds stupider than the last. I've spent nearly a year fighting and surviving and somehow not dying. I was a goddamn terrorist! Exactly what part of who I am makes you think I'm a kid? You have the sense of humor of a five-year-old. I'm still not convinced this isn't cradle robbing from my end!"

    He scowled. "Don't pull the ara ara card on me. The idea makes me deeply uncomfortable and, y'know. You can't try to peer pressure me into this."

    She blinked. "I'm not! I'm trying to say you're just making excuses because you're scared. But you know what, I'm scared too. Fucking terrified. I have so many questions, so many things that don't make sense, so many fears and worries, but you're still you and—" She rubbed her face. "We're still each other. And at this point, I don't know what I'd do without you."

    Jaune's shoulders slumped. "I don't know what I would do without you either. That's why I don't think it's a good idea. That this could be toxic, poisonous, and leave us both miserable—I'm just not into that, y'know? I love talking with you, spending time with you, and all this shit we would do. We could literally be doing nothing together, and I'd just be happy to have someone I can do nothing with. And I don't want that to change. But the genie's out of the bottle. Cat's out of the bag. If we didn't bring it up, the knowing but inability to talk about it would have been poison. The same kind of poison it would be if we acknowledge it and ignored the red flags. Blake, I love you, but—"

    "But I love you," she said, and instantly felt a rush of embarrassment. She wanted to hide her face in her hands. But she was a little too angry to do that, to look like she was backing down. "And you know what, sometimes you are a piece of shit. Sometimes you're narcissistic, lose sight of things, get in your feelings and destroy yourself. But that's what makes you you. Makes you someone worth spending time with and having fun with. All these other supernatural or whatever things that I can't explain, that's just some weird quirk about you. I used to be a terrorist, you might be a soul parasite thing. But who cares? I mean that, Jaune—you and me, after all we've been through an all we're still going to go through, who the fuck cares?"

    He raised his hand. "Does caring about you count?"

    She gestured wildly at him. "Look, there, see what I mean? One moment you tell me we have feelings, the next moment you're trying to push me away, and the next moment you're flirting with me with all the skill of a grade schooler."

    Jaune frowned deeply. "I can seduce girls on at least a high school level!"

    "You're thinking of yourself. You know how I feel, how we both feel, how we feel together, and you're still thinking of yourself because you're scared. And I—" Blake laughed frantically. "I really don't care. Because I know what you want. And I know what I want. It's like you said, just dancing around the problem only makes it worse. It's complicated and stupid and inevitable, and all we're doing is being afraid of it because I don't think either of us knows what to do at this point. We're not really, I mean—"

    It was so hard to speak. Blake didn't even think she was making a coherent argument. Just an argument for its own sake. Trying to get through to the dense core of Jaune, through the pain and the fear and the confusion and the other emotions that people hadn't yet discovered words for. These weren't red flags. These were just the way things were. For both of them. And there was only one way it could end.

    "Fuck it!" she growled, grabbing him. "Do you love me?"

    "Do you?" he asked, eyes wide.

    "Answer me!"

    "Yes," he breathed. "But—"

    "Then love me, you stupid, inconsiderate, handsome, thoughtful, considerate, unfunny piece of shit! Because I love you!"

    "Well now you're just being hurtful," he said, and she pulled him towards her.

    Blake kissed Jaune, tasting the salt of his lips. The heat of his face against hers. The scent of his breath and old gunsmoke. His body as she held and pulled him into her.

    And then she felt everything crack and break. How she felt all of her hopes and her dreams and her expectations shattered one by one upon his lips. As she realized that despite everything, this stupid, confusing, perfect moment, Jaune wasn't kissing her back.

    He grabbed her and, almost gently, pushed her away. She didn't want to let go. She thought she must have messed up. Maybe done something wrong. This wasn't how this was supposed to work. None of this was how it was supposed to work.

    "Blake," he said distantly, his voice echoing as if she were falling out of her own body. "I love you, but I'm not in love with you. We need to talk."

    END OF VOLUME 6​

    See you next week for the final chapters of this story, for the very final volume. See you in Volume 7: Thirty Second Till Midnight. It'll be as long or, hopefully, as short as it needs to be. In some ways, V6 saw the end of Jaune's story. This is just a long epilogue bringing it all back together for one last hurrah.

    I hope to continue to live rent-free in your head until then.
     
  • Threadmarks
    • Reader mode
    You must login or register to reply here.
    Remove ads
    Back
    Top