Chapter 24 - Good Man
Good Man
"Blake," Sunset said as she stepped into carriage number two, one of the two cars filled with Atlesian Paladins but which, unlike car one, still had its roof intact. "You've heard that we won't be getting an airlift out of here?" A pick-up for them and their prisoners was judged non-critical, apparently, given that they were perfectly capable of riding the train all the way back to Vale. Apparently, there were a lot of demands upon Atlas' airships at the moment.
"Yes," Blake murmured. "Twilight told me."
"Right," Sunset muttered. "Of course she did." Now, how to get from there to what I actually want to talk to you about. "So… um…" She leaned against the leg of one of the towering war machines. "Listen… I need a word."
Blake was sitting on the foot of a Paladin, hunching her body slightly in the process in a way that made her feel small. She was reading a book with a dark cover and a title in a gothic font; she closed it, slowly and deliberately, but kept the page marked with her thumb. Blake looked up at Sunset with a certain wariness, as though she could guess what Sunset wanted to talk to her about before the latter had even opened her mouth. "How's Jaune doing?"
Sunset frowned. Her mouth twisted. "He… he's taking it hard."
"I'm not surprised," Blake said, softly and not without consideration. "It's hard for anyone but especially…"
"What?" Sunset asked.
"Especially a good kid like him," Blake finished. "Some people… some people can deal with it better than others. Jaune… he's a good kid. Not the kind who can shrug it off."
Sunset mumbled something wordless and indistinct. That had been both what she had been afraid of, but at the same time, nothing other than what she had both expected and observed from the funk into which Jaune had descended since the battle. "Pyrrha and Ruby are with him, but… as much as they both want to help him, I don't know how much they can really do; after all, they've never…" She let that sentence trail off. Sunset licked her lips. "I was hoping that you might talk to him."
The gaze of Blake's golden eyes seemed to sharpen and grow claws. "You want me to talk to him."
"That's right," Sunset said. She shuffled uncomfortably. This had seemed a much better idea in her head than when she was standing right in front of Blake, but really, what other choice was there? Who else could she go to right now? Who else did she know who would be able to relate to what Jaune was going through? Pyrrha and Ruby couldn't, and Sunset was willing to admit that she couldn't either, as much as she might mean to one day. "I mean, you have…" The words 'you have killed before' hung unspoken but omnipresent in the railway carriage as it clattered down the line.
"Yes," Blake said archly. "I have killed before. Would you like Jaune and I to compare methods?"
"You know what I want," Sunset said, a little more harshly than she had originally intended. She rubbed the space between her brows. "I'm sorry, but… you must know better than anyone else how to reach him, how to help him… you must remember how you dealt with it."
Blake laughed bitterly. Her ears drooped, and she drew her legs up closer to her chin. "'Dealt with it'? I dealt with it by being told lies by the people that I trusted, and I convinced myself those lies were true. And then, when Strongheart took her first life on a raid, I told her those same lies so that she could get to sleep that night, so you'll forgive me if I'm not particularly eager to lie to someone else."
Sunset was silent for a moment. "Strongheart… the buffalo girl? The one we fought?"
Blake nodded. "The one we fought."
"Younger than you?"
Blake nodded again, forlornly. "She's only Ruby's age."
"The White Fang take them that young?" Sunset asked in genuine surprise.
"Why not?" Blake replied in a tone of weary melancholy. "Apparently, the huntsman academies do."
Sunset snorted, "That's not the same thing."
"Isn't it?" Blake asked. "They're both the same age, and they were both at the same risk of death today."
Sunset cringed. Blake… Blake had more of a point than Sunset would have liked. What could she say? That she would have protected Ruby? She hadn't in the past. That Ruby was a better fighter than that faunus girl? Certainly true, but once you started haggling over the particulars, you'd essentially lost the main argument.
"But she did sleep, didn't she?" Sunset said.
"Huh?"
"Even though it was a lie," Sunset said. "She got to sleep. Blake… I'm worried that if Jaune can't find some way to square what he did, it's going to eat away at him. I don't know what to say to help him do that." I don't have the empathy, for one thing. Somehow, I don't think that telling Jaune that I don't give a damn about some random stranger and he shouldn't either would be a big help. "And I don't think Pyrrha or Ruby know either."
"It's not that simple," Blake muttered. "There's nothing anyone can say to just make this better. It's something that he'll have to live with. The same way you'll probably all have to live with it eventually. Even if you become a huntress to fight grimm, the chances are that you'll have to fight people eventually. And if you fight people… eventually, you'll have to kill people."
"I thought as much," Sunset said. Her expression softened. "I hope… I hope you know me well enough to believe me when I say I don't ask this lightly. Is there nothing you can say to help him out? Not even a little?"
Blake was silent for a moment. "I… I don't know," she said, as the shadows of the Paladins fell heavily upon them. "I honestly don't know. But… I can try." She got to her feet.
"Thank you," Sunset said. "Whatever happens, I'll appreciate that you tried."
Blake nodded absently. "Take me to him. We… we'd better get this done, one way or the other."
XxXxX
Jaune sat on a crate marked with the snowflake of the Schnee Dust Company. He slumped down, his back bent, his head bowed. He barely noticed the way that the railway car shook as it tore down the rails back to Vale, except to dread what would happen when they finally got there.
He barely noticed either Ruby or Pyrrha on either side of him, though Ruby was resting against his left side and Pyrrha had one hand upon his right shoulder. He barely registered either of them.
He could see his face. He couldn't get it out of his mind, those lifeless eyes staring at him, accusing him. The face of the man he had killed.
Closing his eyes, opening his eyes, he couldn't be free of it. No more than he could be free of what he'd done. He'd taken a life, an actual human life. Not a grimm, not a soulless monster, but a person just like him.
Just like him. He couldn't stop imagining just how like him that guy might have been, the guy whose life he had snuffed out. Had he joined the White Fang because he wanted to show his family that he could amount to something? Did he have seven annoying older sisters whom he loved to pieces waiting for him at home? Did he have – did he used to have – impossible dreams? Did he have friends who would have tried to comfort him if things had been reversed and he had killed Jaune instead of… instead of the other way around?
"I'm so sorry, Jaune," Pyrrha said.
That got through to him, the words penetrating into his mind even, befuddled and fogged up as it was by the memory of that face. He looked up into Pyrrha's face, into her green eyes filled with sorrow. "You…you're sorry? Pyrrha… you don't have anything to be sorry about."
"I left you alone," Pyrrha said. "I strayed too far when I fought that Paladin. If I'd been there-"
"Then you would have killed him," Jaune said. If he, Jaune Arc, had managed to… to do it in one hit, then the guy's aura must have been very low when he got up for that last rush. There was no way that one of Pyrrha's blows wouldn't have done as much, been as well-aimed, as powerful. Probably moreso in every respect. He couldn't believe that the guy would be any more alive if Pyrrha had been there.
Pyrrha was silent for a moment, and still, before she nodded her head. "Probably," she said softly.
"But then-"
"I wish that I could take this weight away from you, Jaune," Pyrrha said. "I'm sorry."
Jaune shook his head. "I… I wouldn't wish this on you. I wouldn't… I wouldn't wish this on anyone."
Ruby wrapped her hands around his arm. "It'll be okay, Jaune. You'll get through this."
"Will I?" Jaune asked. "I don't… I don't feel like I will. I can see him, everywhere. There's no getting away from him. There's no getting away from what I did."
"You did nothing wrong," Pyrrha said firmly. "When two warriors fight, there is always the chance that one may fall. Your opponent took that chance and paid the price-"
"But did he know that?" Jaune asked. "I mean, isn't that why we have aura, so that we don't die when we're fighting? What was he even doing fighting with so little aura left anyway?"
"Perhaps he didn't realise, perhaps he was overconfident, perhaps he simply miscalculated," Pyrrha speculated. "My mother was left with a permanent injury to her leg after one hit too many broke through her aura and kept going, and that was in a tournament. These things can happen, even in the most controlled environment, and in the chaos of the battlefield… you had no way of knowing. You did nothing wrong."
"That doesn't really matter, though, does it?" Jaune asked. "He's still dead, and I have to live with that."
"Yes," Blake said as she strode in through the doorway, followed by Sunset, who closed the door behind her and muted the sounds of the outside which had briefly risen as the air got in. Blake looked down at him, her eyes, her face alike inscrutable, before she sat down on an SDC crate opposite his own.
"Yes," she repeated, as she leaned forward with her elbows resting on her knees. "You will have to live with it. All your days."
"Blake-" Ruby began.
"It's the truth," Blake said, though she didn't take her eyes off Jaune. "I'm sorry, Ruby, but that's how it is. It might not be what you want to hear, it certainly isn't something nice to hear… but it's the truth." She paused. "And I won't lie, not about this."
Jaune stared at her, his eyes into hers as she stared right back at him. Nobody else in the car said anything. He barely noticed anyone else. There was only Blake and her eyes staring into his soul.
"Who…?" he murmured, the words dropping quietly from his lips. "Who was he?"
"An SDC security guard," Blake said. "It was my first raid. I came around the corner and saw him there; we practically bumped into one another. He reached for his gun. I drew my sword. I was faster." She closed her eyes as her ears drooped. "When they found me, Sienna was willing to finish him off herself, but Adam… Adam told me to do it. He said… he said that it would teach me something important."
Jaune was rendered speechless for a few moments. "How old were you?"
Blake stared at him without replying, her chest rising and falling. "A little younger than Ruby."
Ruby squeaked in… what? Sympathy? Pity? Both? Jaune didn't know for sure. He didn't ask her to find out. He didn't look at her. He couldn't tear his eyes away from Blake, from her eyes, those eyes that looked a little wetter now than they had been.
"How…?" he hesitated, but he had to know what she'd done, what he could do to get through this; Blake was able to move forward and keep fighting. He needed – wanted – to do that too. Even if he had to carry this with him then surely Blake knew how he could, maybe put it away sometimes. "How did you deal with it?"
Blake sighed. "By being young and stupid and idealistic," she said. "By having a cause that I believed in so much that I was willing to justify almost anything, rationalise away all of my misgivings or concerns. By believing in Sienna Khan and Adam; Adam, most of all. I was told… I told myself that… that our cause was just, that anyone who opposed us was evil and that they deserved to die for their part in oppressing our people. I told myself that everything I did was for the sake of our freedom and that a noble purpose justified all actions, no matter how dark, in pursuit of it. I told myself that I could live with it for the greater good."
Her eyes began to fill with tears. "I know that we're not friends, I know that we don't know each other very well, but I'm asking you: don't do what I did. Don't convince yourself that the people you fight are monsters no better than the grimm and so it's okay to cut them down like they were beowolves." She glanced away from him for a moment, looking up at Sunset, and in that moment of broken eye contact, the spell was also broken long enough for Jaune to notice the other people in the room besides Blake: Ruby looked both sad and uncomfortable; Pyrrha was trembling with a quiet fury; Sunset looked as though she was going to be sick.
Blake looked back and Jaune, captivating him with her gaze once more. "It might seem like the easy thing to do; it is the easy thing to do, and it might even help you to get through the nights… but when you realise that you're wrong, and you will… it will hurt you so much more."
"So what do you do?" Jaune asked. "What… what did you do?"
"I ran away and left my life behind," Blake said. "That isn't something that I'd recommend for you," she added, as Jaune felt Pyrrha's grip upon his shoulder get just a little firmer.
"In my… in the White Fang," Blake continued. "There was nobody around me who could… who would have wanted to help me once I realised that what we were doing, what I'd done, was so wrong. Even the ones who thought that they were my friends or more… I couldn't tell them that I didn't want to kill any more, that I'd started to see our enemies as people, I couldn't… even those who thought they liked me only saw me as a weapon, a killer… one of the monsters that we'd made of ourselves.
"You're so much luckier than I am," she said. "You have good friends, friends who will stand by you and help you, even if they don't know what you're going through. Let them. I can't tell you how to feel better or deal with it because… because I don't know the answer myself. All I can say is that… I think we have to keep moving forward and do better next time, or else… else it was all for nothing."
Jaune said nothing. He barely nodded his head. That… that hadn't really helped him too much, but at the same time, he found it was impossible to blame or resent Blake for that; it sounded, honestly, as though she needed as much if not more help than he did.
Judging by the way that Sunset sat down beside Blake and gently took one of her hands, it seemed Jaune wasn't the only one who felt that way.
XxXxx
They were holding the prisoners in car six. Some of the security droids had been destroyed during the battle and so there was room to hold the captives they had taken. Plus Rainbow was keen to hold the prisoners in one of the cars that wasn't filled with potential weapons that an enterprising bad guy could get some use out of.
Not that androids weren't deadly weapons, but they would be a lot harder to turn against their masters than, say, a crate full of rifles or a combustible container full of dust.
So the prisoners – Torchwick, the girl who was apparently called Neo, the White Fang leader whom Blake had named Billie, and the mouse faunus pilot of the Paladin – were held in car six. Their hands were restrained and their auras cut off, leaving them to squat or sit in a clump of four in a gap left by wrecked AK-190s. The remainder of the 190s were deactivated for now, but Rainbow Dash hoped that none of these guys were unaware that what was deactivated now could easily be reactivated if they started to cause any trouble.
Of course, they had also been dumped in such a way as to give their living captors a clean shot, if necessary.
Ciel was standing almost – but not quite – leaning against the wall near the door, maintaining correct martial posture despite what must have been an enormous temptation to lounge a little bit. In her hands, she held Blitzjaeger, her cut-down rifle which was slightly more appropriate for the tight quarters than Distant Thunder. Rainbow had Unfailing Loyalty gripped tightly in both hands as she paced up and down, keeping out of Ciel's line of fire as her footsteps echoed upon the metal floor of the train.
"What's the matter, kid?" Torchwick asked. "You waiting for a train or something?"
Rainbow ignored him. Rainbow tried to ignore him. She would have rather handed their prisoners off as quickly as possible, but since that wasn't going to happen, they were stuck with these guys all the rest of the way to Vale. And she could already see how the entire rest of that trip was going to go.
She wasn't really looking forward to spending a train ride with Roman Torchwick or prisoners from the White Fang, to put it mildly.
"Come on, rainbow," Torchwick said. "I've got nothing else to do but talk; you might as well talk back!"
"Who do you report to?" Ciel demanded.
Torchwick was silent for a moment. "Well, I don't want to talk about that," he muttered.
"Then keep your mouth shut."
"Fine, sheesh," Torchwick replied as he fell silent. That lasted for all of thirty seconds before he said, "I don't suppose one of you lovely ladies would mind fishing a cigar out of my breast pocket, would you?"
"This is a no smoking train," Ciel informed him.
Torchwick's eyebrows rose. "I don't see a sign anywhere."
"It's above you," Ciel said. "And to the right."
Torchwick looked up and to the right, to where there was indeed a sign proclaiming 'No Smoking.' "Well, will you look at that?" he exclaimed. "Gods, you Atlesians are a bunch of killjoys."
"And you are a man who takes pleasure in wicked work," Ciel snapped. "I know which I would rather be."
Torchwick chuckled. "Blue Eyes, you got no idea what brings me joy."
"You are correct, of course," Ciel said calmly. "And I care not."
Torchwick's chuckling escalated into full on laughter. "Well, aren't you an icy one? I knew a girl like you once, she was an Atlesian too, as cold as the tundra's heart. Or so it seemed. As it turned out, three glasses of Mistralian tokar, and she turned hotter than a pepper sprout; my gods, we had some times. I'd go into more details but, you know, there are children listening."
The girl Neo rolled her eyes.
Torchwick continued. "What does it take to thaw you out, Blue Eyes?"
"Shut the hell up," Rainbow snapped.
Torchwick's gaze flickered from Ciel to Rainbow Dash. "Or what, rainbow."
"It's Cadet Leader Rainbow Dash to you-"
"Oh, wow, your parents were really struggling for a name, weren't they?"
"-and if you don't shut your mouth, I'll tape it shut all the way to Vale!" Rainbow growled.
A smirk played upon Torchwick's face. "I remember you from the docks," he said.
Rainbow growled as she tapped her earpiece. "Can somebody get in here and bring me some duct tape?"
"And from the bookstore," Torchwick continued. "Tell me something, what's a little mustang like you doing at Atlas Academy."
Rainbow sighed. "Ugh, not this again," she muttered. Someone hurry up with that duct tape.
"Don't be like that; you're about to throw me down a hole and then throw away the hole," Torchwick said. "The least you could do is talk to me first."
"You could talk to all of us," Billie said. "What's a faunus doing-?"
"If you say 'betraying your race,' then so help me-"
"We're your brothers and sisters!" Billie cried. "You should be fighting alongside us!"
"You assholes tried to kill my sister because she was in the way!" Rainbow yelled down the carriage at them. "Don't you talk to me about brothers and sisters. In fact, don't talk to me at all, or I will tape all of your mouths shut."
"Do they at least give you a nice kennel and treats for being a good dog?" Billie demanded.
"Oh, please," Rainbow spat.
The door into the car opened, and Ruby walked in, holding a ring of duct tape in her hands. "You asked for some tape?"
Rainbow grinned. "Thanks a lot, Ruby." She propped Unfailing Loyalty up against the wall and reached out to pluck the tape from Ruby's unresisting hands.
Ruby frowned. "What are you doing to use it for?"
The smile didn't waver from Rainbow's face. "I'm going to tape the mouths shut on a few of these idiots so that I don't have to listen to them anymore."
Ruby walked to stand beside Rainbow, looking down the train at their prisoners.
"Well hello there, Little Red," Torchwick said, nodding affably to her. "We just can't seem to stay away from each other, can we?"
Ruby's hands balled into little fists. "Why?"
Torchwick smirked. "Why what? You're going to have to be a little more specific."
"Why are you doing this?" Ruby demanded. "Why are any of you doing this? Killing people, hurting them, stealing dust and weapons so that you can try and kill even more people later on down the line? Why? What's the reason behind any of this?" She paused for breath, her chest rising and falling. "The grimm are driven to destroy humanity. But you're not grimm. Your human, and faunus, you know that what you're doing is wrong, but you still do it anyway! Why? What could be so important to you that you would do things like this?"
The smirk remained on Torchwick's face, even as his eyes narrowed. "Let me ask you a question, Little Red. Why is it that you do what you do? Let me guess: you want to protect humanity, you want to save the world, you want to be a righteous hero that everyone can look up to, and for what? Some day, you'll be dead, just like every other huntsman or huntress in history; you'll be dead, and no one will remember your name; meanwhile, the rich will still be rich, the powerful will still be powerful, and they'll keep on grinding us down while useful idiots like you fight their battles for them! Do you like cookies, Red?"
"Uh, yeah," Ruby murmured.
"Imagine that you've got a plate with one cookie on it, and your rainbow friend there is sitting across the table with no plate and no cookie. And then sitting between the two of you at the head of the table is Jacques Schnee, with every gods damn cookie in the world on his plate, and he has the audacity to turn to you and say 'careful there, kid, that animal wants to steal your cookie.' And it works! Rich assholes play the poor off against the faunus, and the morons buy it! Well, me and my new pals in the White Fang, we're done being morons, we're done buying into that crap; we're going to change the world together, and we're going to tear down the rich and their huntsmen and their cops and everyone else who tries to get in our way."
"No matter who gets hurt in the process?" Ruby demanded. "Even if they're faunus? Even if they're the people you claim to be fighting for?"
"Don't expect them to care about stuff like that, Ruby," Rainbow said. "People like this talk a good game, but that's all it is: talk. Talk to justify all the crimes they commit, because the truth is that they just want to hurt people."
"I take offence at that," Torchwick declared. "I only hurt people when I have no choice."
"There's always a choice," Ruby said.
"I don't regard dying as much of a choice."
"Some things are worth dying for."
"Careful, Little Red," Torchwick replied. "A statement like that, you might have to put your money where your mouth is some day."
"And I will," Ruby cried. "Because that's what a huntress does, that's what-"
"That's enough!" Rainbow said, her own voice rising to cut across Ruby's before she could blurt out something she'd regret. "That's enough," she repeated, more quietly as she put a hand on Ruby's shoulder. "You don't… you don't need to answer this guy, and you don't need to know what their reasons are. He wouldn't tell you anyway."
"Are you calling me a liar?"
"She is saying that the truth is not in you," Ciel said.
"Any time you open your mouth offends me," Rainbow snapped. "Which is why I'm taping it shut." She took a step towards him, starting to unpeel the tape from the roll.
Before she could take another step, she stumbled forward a few paces as the train shuddered to an abrupt halt.
"What the-?" Rainbow began.
"Why has the train just stopped?" Ruby cried.
Rainbow tapped her earpiece. "Everyone report in! Does anybody see what's happening?"
XxXxX
The Paladins filled the railway cars three abreast, lined up shoulder to shoulder, their knees bent and their hands retracted to expose the guns at the end of each arm. They loomed in the darkness of the badly-lit carriages, casting long shadows across an already gloomy space and over one another.
It was weird; they had just taken out three of these things and found them to be not nearly so tough as advertised, and yet all the same, as she stood in the doorway to car two and looked at the serried column of these war machines, shrouded in darkness, Sunset could not restrain a slight shiver up her spine.
Apparently, while Atlas was redesigning their androids to be a bit more cute and cuddly than the old models, it seemed that whoever was in charge of designing the Paladin hadn't gotten the memo.
Sunset glanced down at her scroll again. It was a text from Twilight, although why Twilight would be sending her a text was something that Sunset would have to find out, because the message itself was very short and simple.
I need to talk to you, alone. Find me in car one.
Cryptic, sure, but that was no reason not to do it. It might be important, or at least, there would be a reason for Twilight to behave this way. Sunset ducked beneath the legs of the Paladin directly in front of her and weaved underneath, around and between the docile, slumbering walkers who did not wake at her approach.
She reached the end of car two; a brief open gap confronted her, a space open to the world separating the two carriages, with only the coupling below connecting them both. The Forever Fall rushed northwards as the train rumbled south, every league carrying them closer to Vale and Beacon and home.
Sunset leapt nimbly from one car to the other, pushing the green button beside the door into car one.
Once more, she was confronted by row upon row of Paladins, hunched and poised and ready to fire, and once more, Sunset threaded amongst their ranks as she looked for Twilight Sparkle.
Sunset found her kneeling beneath the hole in the carriage roof that she had made in the course of their battle with Roman Torchwick; the light streamed down into the otherwise unlit car like a spotlight, illuminating Twilight even while all the rest of the world was shrouded in darkness.
"Are you trying to make yourself look ever more angelic than you do normally?" Sunset asked as she walked towards her.
Twilight looked up. She was wearing most of her suit of mechanical armour, but she was missing the helmet and both gauntlets, leaving her face and hands uncovered and her hair free to fall down her back in its long ponytail. Her scroll was on her lap; she had been typing something out on it, but what, exactly, Sunset couldn't see. Twilight frowned. "You… think I look angelic?"
Well, that was a stupid thing to say out loud. "That… is not at all what I meant," Sunset replied. "I was just… talking about the lighting, that's all." She waved her hand up towards the hole in the ceiling, then downwards in imitation of the light filtering down on Twilight.
"Oh," Twilight replied, in a tone that left it unclear whether she believed Sunset or not. "How's Jaune doing?"
"Not great," Sunset admitted. "I asked Blake to talk to him, but I'm not sure how much it helped."
"I see," Twilight murmured. "Poor Jaune. I can't… there's a reason why Rainbow and Applejack didn't want Pinkie or Rarity or Fluttershy to become huntresses, and it's not because they were afraid they might die. Well, it's not just because they were afraid that they might die… it's that they were afraid that they might have to live with… this."
Sunset sat down opposite Twilight, legs crossed and Sol Invictus resting against her shoulder. "I suppose I can understand that. I can't see Pinkie as a killer somehow."
"I don't want to see Pinkie as a killer," Twilight replied. "None of us do." Her brow furrowed. "If Jaune is… has he considered therapy?"
"I don't know what's going on in Jaune's head right now," Sunset admitted. "But I could suggest it, if you thought it would do any good."
"It really works," Twilight assured her. "It helped me out a lot."
"You've been in therapy?"
"I've seen a therapist," Twilight corrected her. "There have been… a few things, most recently starting when I was fifteen."
"The wedding," Sunset said; it was a statement, not a question.
Twilight nodded. Her smile was tight and taut and tense. "It really helped me to come to terms with what happened that day. With what almost happened. I know I wasn't the only one who needed it. Rainbow Dash… she said that she didn't need to talk about it, but I'm wondering now if I should have refused to take no for an answer."
"You can't help those who don't want to be helped," Sunset replied. "And besides, Rainbow seems to be doing okay."
"She did kind of fly off the handle with Blake for a little bit."
"And then she calmed down again," Sunset countered. "Unless you're saying that therapy left you completely cleansed of all your issues."
"No, of course not," Twilight replied. "I don't think that's possible."
"Well then," Sunset said, "we all have to be allowed our hang-ups." She paused. "Do you really think it would help Jaune?"
"I do," Twilight declared.
"Then I'll suggest it when we get back to Beacon," Sunset said. "Thank you."
"You don't need to thank me," Twilight said quickly. She ran one finger quickly through her bangs. "Anyway, that's not really what I wanted to talk to you about."
"Okay," Sunset said. "So what did you want to talk to me about?"
"Well," Twilight murmured."It's about your… it's magic, what you can do, isn't it?"
Sunset's ears straightened up, becoming longer and more pointed. Her tail went rigid with worry, even as her stomach chilled like juice in the fridge. "I don't know what you're talking about," she said.
Twilight gave her a very knowing look. "The power that you've been passing off as your semblance, the power that you played down when you were at Canterlot but have started to show off a lot more since you got to Beacon, that's not a semblance. The most versatile semblance ever recorded is the hereditary semblance of the Schnee Family, and as far as variety goes, your powers knock theirs into a hat-"
"Oh, so because I'm a faunus, there's no way that I could have a better semblance than the illustrious Schnee Family?" Sunset demanded.
"No, there's almost no way that you could beat the law of averages like that," Twilight said. "In all the years that semblances have been recorded, in the entire historical record, there is no account of a semblance as wide ranging as yours; even the Schnee semblance is pretty straightforward: it's glyphs; it just so happens that the glyphs can be used to accomplish a great many different things. But your power? It's magic, isn't it?"
Sunset was silent for a moment, and silently, she pondered how she ought to respond to this. It was true that she had already confessed the truth to her own teammates, but Twilight wasn't one of her teammates, and Sunset wasn't as close to any of the four members of RSPT as she was to Ruby, Jaune, and Pyrrha. She could deny it – it wasn't as though Twilight could prove anything, after all – she could deny it and walk away.
But if she did that, then she wouldn't be able to find out what Twilight knew that would make her say such a thing. And Sunset wanted to find out. She had been a little… lax in delving into some of Remnant's mysteries. Preoccupied with her own uniqueness, it hadn't actually occurred to her to wonder what hidden traditions of magic Remnant might possess; Ruby's silver-eyes had opened Sunset's eyes to the existence of the same, but by that point, she simply hadn't had a lot of time to investigate further. Twilight might be offering her a window into such a world.
"Yes," she said. "It's magic, what I can do."
"Oh my goodness!" Twilight let out a little squeal of delight as both her unarmoured hands flew up to cover her face. "Oh my… I knew it! I knew it, I knew it, I knew that it was real! This is incredible! This is the greatest-!"
"Are you going to start hyperventilating?" Sunset asked.
"Sorry," Twilight said with a sheepish laugh. "It's just… after all my years of search and research, I never thought that… I mean that I always had faith that one day… but to actually meet… oh my goodness, this is so awesome!"
"Yes, I am, aren't?" Sunset asked, preening her hair with one hand. "I must say I'm surprised; you're the first person I've ever met to ask me something like this. Even Pyrrha, when she started to think that my semblance was a little overpowered, she never stopped to think that it might be something more than a semblance, let alone pin the name of magic to it."
"Yeah, well, there aren't that many people who believe or will admit to believing," Twilight explained. "To be honest, I would never mention this in the lab, and even my friends-"
"Think you're crazy?"
"They're all far too nice to say that," Twilight said. "But they don't believe… they don't believe, not like I do."
"And why do you believe?" Sunset asked. "Why do you believe in something that most people would find utterly ridiculous?"
"Because it's not just a belief," Twilight insisted. "Just because I never met anyone willing to admit that the power they have is magic until right now doesn't mean that I've been holding onto blind faith all this time. There's proof if you're willing to look for it: stories of prophets and saints that are dismissed now as religious propaganda, but if you look at the commonalities across cultural and vast geographic boundaries, it makes just as much sense to say that there is at least some truth to them." She gasped. "Is that you? Are you a saint?"
Sunset laughed. "I am a lot of things, Twilight Sparkle, but I'm pretty sure that 'saint' isn't one of them. Nor is 'prophet,' for that matter." She paused. "Keep going; all of this is new to me."
Twilight's eyebrows rose. "You have magic, but the evidence for the existence of magic is all new to you?"
"I never needed to look for proof of the existence of something that I knew perfectly well that I had," Sunset explained.
"But now you're curious?"
Now I want to know if you've come across anything about silver eyes. "Humour me," Sunset said. "Please."
"Well," Twilight began, "after the prophets and saints, you come to the Red Queens: why were there never more than four queens at any one time, how did they rise to power, and how did they maintain it until their deaths? And it's not just ancient history either; there are eyewitness accounts of inexplicable happenings that just… they don't make sense under the current rational schema of the world, but that doesn't mean that those who say they saw it are liars or deluded or clueless. People aren't stupid; they know what they saw, and what they saw – what I saw – was just incredible."
Sunset leaned forward. "What did you see?"
Twilight was silent for a moment or two. "I don't remember exactly why we were on the road; I was only a young girl. I only remember that we were driving from Canterlot to Crystal City when suddenly… the grimm. I think my parents were knocked out in the crash – they were fine later, but they… I remember screaming for them as the grimm started to claw their way in, and I remember that they didn't answer. I remember how scared I was, the way I clung to my brother… and I remember her.
"I don't know who she was. She never stopped to tell us her name. But I remember her. Her hair was as white as the snow that was blowing all around us and as long as she was tall; she was dressed in blue, and her dress, her hair, they both billowed all around her, and she… this may sound crazy, but she was flying. She flew overhead, and the things that she did were just… I've never seen anything like it since. Wind, water, lighting, they were all at her command. It wasn't a semblance; I'd be prepared to bet everything I have on that. I don't know what it was; I just know that she saved all of us… and I know that I want to find out what it was that she did and how she did it." Twilight smiled, as if she was embarrassed. "I suppose I should probably tell you that being saved by this mysterious hero, who defeated the grimm without saying a word, inspired me to become a hero who'd save everyone myself… but that would be a lie. That's Rainbow Dash, that's my friends, that's the people around me who are so much better than me. All I can do is help them, make things they can use, support them with my mind… and find out the truth. Because there's more to this world than we know; I saw that with my own eyes. I know there's more out there, and I'm going to find it someday."
"I hope you do," Sunset murmured, because as far as she was concerned, only one person benefited from all the secrecy surrounding the magic of this world, and that was someone she didn't particularly care for. The more that was out in the open – within reason – the better. She considered telling Twilight about Ruby's eyes, but that… even telling Twilight that she ought to talk to Ruby might be construed as betraying a secret that wasn't Sunset's to reveal, and while Ruby might not mind, Pyrrha almost certainly would.
And Twilight didn't even mention silver eyes once. That was the most incredible thing about her account, the way that it ignored the one magic native to Remnant that Sunset knew of while hinting at a whole other, different kind of ethereal power, one which seemed much more like the magic that Sunset knew from back in Equestria. Could it be that Sunset was not the first pony to come to this world from her own? The mirror portal had been devised for some purpose, after all. And yet, if all magic bar silver eyes were Equestrian in origin, then how was it being propagated? Intermarriage? It was possible, but what Twilight was describing didn't really fit with descent through bloodlines. It seemed random, or at least to obey rules that Sunset lacked the information to get her arms around at present. "Do you have any books on this that you'd recommend?"
"Uh, sure," Twilight said. "But what about you? Come on, I asked you here to ask you questions, not the other way around. Have you always had these powers? Is there more you can do with them that you still haven't revealed yet? Is it linked to your aura in any way?"
Sunset was interrupted before she could answer by a colossal metallic screeching sound, like the whining of some beast in immense pain, coming from further down the train.
"What in Remnant is that?" Twilight asked.
Sunset didn't reply as she got to her feet. She made her way under and around the Paladins until she reached the side door out of the railway car. She pushed the button beside it, and the door slid outwards and across the carriage wall, allowing Sunset to stick her head out and look down the rails.
Down the rails where she could see most of the rest of the train falling away behind them, as an ever-increasing expanse of empty rail line separated the engine and the front three cars from the rest of the train from which they had been decoupled.
Sunset and Twilight were borne onwards and southwards, while all the rest of their comrades were left behind.
"Well, that's not good."
