They Called Us Heroes: A RWBY One Shot
They called us heroes.
To be fair, we probably deserved the titles.
They called many things.
Witch Killers, Grimm Destroyers, Remnant's Defenders, but the title I liked best was heroes.
I always wanted to be a hero as a child. My mom was my hero, and when she died, I wanted to be like her. She died a hero. She was one of the lucky ones, if I may say.
They never really tell you what you're supposed to do after you save the world.
I mean, congratulations, you beat the big bad, you stopped the Grimm, you saved Remnant, what next? Once you stop the bad guy, there's nothing left for the heroes to do. What are you supposed to do? Go home? Raise a family? Nothing really compares to saving the world, that's kinda your peak, you know? Basically, we get told to go home, take a rest, well we certainly did enough to deserve that. But, the body doesn't want rest after you've been at it for so long. It gets restless. So, now you're sitting at home, reliving your glory days in your big fancy mansion they gave you, letting your abilities waste away while you reminisce the good ol' days where you could just stab your problems with a sword.
It's honestly a surprise it didn't happen sooner.
Weiss was both the first and the last of us to fall.
It started off slowly, with her retaking her family business a couple years after the war. She was really good at it, much better than her father. She made sure all the workers had good conditions, hired Faunus for just as many jobs as humans, and all was well. Then, she started staying a couple hours later once a week. Then it was every day. Then it was weekends. Over time, we didn't see Weiss anymore. Well, we saw her every so often at the events she would invite us to, but it wasn't Weiss, it was Ms. Schnee. A while after she became Ms. Schnee, she started to change. Slowly but surely, she became more and more like her father. More cutthroat in negotiations, less willing to help the workers, cutting salaries across the board. Years later, the Schnee Dust Company was bigger than it ever was, and Weiss was even worse than her father.
The second person to fall was Blake.
Blake had big dreams after the war. She had an idea for the future, and she was damn well gonna work for it. She took over the White Fang and turned it back to theWhite Fang. Back to when she was a kid. They were peaceful for a while, made some pretty big waves in the political sphere. There's a picture somewhere with Blake shaking hands with Weiss, both in pressed suits, a glimmer in their eyes of hope. They knew they were going to change the world. It was awful to see that light leave Blake's eyes. It always started slowly. Tensions started to rise a couple years after the war, some businesses started to fire their Faunus employees after it went out of vogue to hire them in the first place. The White Fang started getting pushier with their protests, bigger demonstrations, more speeches. I think it was after a man shot up a Faunus neighborhood when they finally snapped again. Blake herself fired the first shot on the police that were holding back the protest. Bada bing, bada boom, now Blake's a terrorist, and the White Fang is worse than ever.
After Blake, was Yang.
Yang had nightmares after the war. She played them off when we stayed in the same house on Patch, joking that it was no big deal, that she could handle it. Spoiler alert, she couldn't. They got worse as the years went on, and Yang took up Uncle Qrow's hobby of whiskey. That started slowly too. It started with going out to party on Friday, then Saturday, then it was a drink with dinner, then a handle at night. Soon enough, Yang was going through a bottle a day. I think this wasn't long before Blake snapped, definitely after we lost Weiss. We stopped hanging out with each other, we didn't notice Yang's decline. Next thing I knew, Yang was on the news for blowing up half of Vale in a drunken haze. She started a fight, blew up the bar, the police got called, and there's no way in hell that the police are gonna stop one of the greatest Huntresses to ever live, so they got killed. Ended up causing millions in property damage killing dozens, and overnight, Yang was a fugitive.
They called us heroes.
I was the worst of them.
When it came down to it, I didn't have a slippery slope, I didn't have an breaking point, I didn't have a secret decline.
No, I never had any justification.
...
I just ran
END
