The Fairest
Chapter 1
“Do you like snow?”
It was too poetic, Blake thought, this girl in white with too-pale skin, holding a hand out to try and catch the snow falling in fat flakes all around them. It had been snowing for hours now, and she had to be cold. Even the corpse lying facedown in a drift, or the bloodied sword she held in her other hand, could not ruin the picture. It didn’t seem real, Blake coming upon her like this.
“No,” Blake said, watching the flakes fall. “The winter never brought any good for us.”
To Blake’s surprise, the girl cracked a smile at that. A small, weak thing that did little more than draw Blake’s attention to the fresh looking scar on her face.
“I think I’m meant to kill you,” the girl said, looking at her. She looked down at the sword in her hand, and back to Blake. “Or he was supposed to kill you.” She sighed.
“Why?” Blake asked, making sure she knew exactly where Gambol Shroud was. If she had to, she could have a shadow clone prepared and both the sword and its sheath ready to defend herself with.
The girl looked up, all of a sudden bringing her free hand to the side of her head. “I think,” she said, “because you’re a faunus?” She took a step closer. Blake tensed, unthinkingly bringing a hand up to her own ears. “I think we don’t like them that much?”
Blake glanced at the girl’s hand that held the sword, an expensive looking dust-sword that, considering the body still lying between them, the girl knew how to use. She realized as she looked at how the girl was gripping it that even if she wanted to attack Blake, the way she was gripping it was all wrong. “Who are you?” Blake asked.
“Why would you be out here? The snow is falling,” the girl asked instead of answering.
“I’m hunting,” Blake said, unsure if she wanted to specify for what exactly.
That gave the girl pause. “Oh,” she said, “strange, I thought I killed all the huntsmen they sent after me.”
“Someone sent hunters after you? A person?” Blake asked, incredulous. If the girl was telling the truth, that was odd, to say the least. Blake had heard of less scrupulous hunters going after faunus for lien, but never humans. And never humans so obviously wealthy as this girl.
The girl shrugged. Her focus seemed to wander back to the falling snow, before she visibly made an effort to shift it back to Blake. “You weren’t sent to try and kill me too? I was sent away, but that wasn’t enough,” she said, and frowned. She brought her free hand to the scar Blake had noticed. “I understand why she did, though,” the girl said.
She sounded as though she were struggling to speak through something, though Blake still had no real way of knowing what exactly was wrong with her. “I don’t want to hurt you. I wasn’t hunting for people,” Blake said. “Would you rather I leave you to deal with...” she could not tell the corpse’s gender from this perspective, so she chose a pronoun at random, “her?”
“No, don’t leave, I’m not sure where I’m meant to go,” the girl said, “do you know how hard it is to use glyphs like this?”
“Do you want help removing her?” Blake asked, trying to see if she could get the girl to focus.
“No, leave her to the snow, it fits,” the girl said. “I’m Weiss,” she said, finally answering what was honestly the most important question. “I’d rather that my father thought me dead,” she said. “It’d make things simpler.”
“Do you have somewhere to go?” Blake asked. Considering the state that Weiss was in, whether it was from some kind of substance or just being in the cold for so long, Blake didn’t think she could pose any real danger, even if this were some bizarre kind of trap.
The girl shrugged, “Don’t you have hunting to do?” she asked, and Blake shook her head.
“Not anymore, with you in this state. Would you accept an offer of a place to sleep?” she asked. A flicker of confusion passed over Weiss’ face, gone almost as quickly as it appeared.
“Yes, of course. Do you know who I am?” she asked, not in a haughty way, but out of genuine confusion.
“No,” Blake said, though Weiss did look somewhat familiar, as she assumed seeing a relative of a celebrity would. “Come on, the snow is just going to keep falling, no matter what we do.” She stuck out her hand. “To guide you,” she said, “I can see better in the dark than you, anyway.”
Weiss closed the last bit of distance between the two of them, and grabbed Blake’s hand. “Where do you live?” she asked.
“A camp, for now,” Blake answered. Weiss’ grip was surprisingly strong, and Blake noticed how as they began to make a careful, treacherous way through the darkening forest, her grip on the dust-sword became much more like what Blake would expect someone intending to actually use her sword would hold it.
Weiss stumbled a few times as they walked, each time tightening her grip on Blake’s hand for a few seconds as she regained her balance. Blake wasn’t sure if it was from unfamiliarity with the terrain, or from the same thing that made her occasionally try and pull away, forcing Blake at times to tighten her grip on Weiss’ hand.
The walk to the camp took a little under an hour. Blake could have run the distance, even in the current weather, in much less time, but short of picking Weiss up bodily and carrying her as she ran, there was no way for the other girl to keep up. Not in her current state, at least, but Blake wondered what she was like when her mind wasn’t obviously under the influence of something. As they walked, it seemed to be slowly wearing off, but there were still moments where her focus would suddenly be somewhere else else.
Arriving at the camp, Blake noticed Adam standing near the entrance. He had his arms crossed. He was still wearing his mask, so she couldn’t tell if he’d noticed her yet or not. She assumed he had.
“What are you doing with her?” he asked, and Blake felt Weiss tense. It was nearly full dark now, and Blake realized she probably could not see Adam all that well, nor would she know who he was.
She also realized that she had brought a human to a White Fang camp. Shit.
“You know her?” Blake asked.
Adam nodded sharply. “She’s a Schnee heiress,” he said, “don’t know why she’s been let out of her gilded cage, though. You get bored with lording over all of us freaks, Princess?” he said. The derision in his voice wasn’t directed at Blake for once, but she still flinched.
Weiss dropped Blake’s hand. “You’re White Fang,” she said. She turned to Blake. “Why didn’t you just kill me?”
“Yeah, love,” Adam said, “it would have made things a lot easier for us.”
“She’s more with it now, but she was almost incoherent when I first found her. She didn’t try to hurt me.”
“Then why didn’t you kill her?” Adam asked. “Don’t tell me you felt pity for a Schnee.”
“I didn’t know who she was,” Blake said. She realized she was clenching her fists, so she forced herself to open her hands. “And I thought we agreed we wouldn’t kill people who don’t attack first.”
Adam laughed, and Blake saw Weiss tighten her grip on the dust-sword. “What world are you living in? She’s a Schnee, she might as well have attacked you already.”
“He’s right, the company is... cruel. Or it was, and I doubt much has changed in the days since my access has been removed.” To Blake’s surprise, Weiss sounded about as contemptuous of her family company as Adam.
“Well then, they won’t mind if their little princess is killed then, will they?” Adam said. “Sweetheart, would you like to do the honors?”
“What the fuck, Adam?” Blake asked, staring at him. “I came back so you could give her shelter, not so that you’d ask me to kill her.”
“Give that bitch shelter?” Adam asked, “and why are you so sympathetic to her anyway, she’s human.”
“I thought the point of all of this,” Blake said, gesturing at the camp behind Adam, “was for us to gain equality.”
“Why should we, when we’re better than humans. She’s just human, Blake, killing her should be easy,” Adam said. He sighed. “Look, love, if you won’t, then I will. Who knows, she might be a spy.”
He rushed at Weiss. Blake immediately grabbed Gambol Shroud and unsheathed it, but to her surprise Weiss shifted into a fighting stance, using her sword to summon swirling, orange glyphs. These exploded with enough force to send Adam sprawling.
Before, Blake had decided against picking Weiss up and just running, when she’d still been functioning under the apparently inappropriate assumption that the camp would be safe for her to go to. Now, Blake assumed that Adam would not let her enter the camp proper unless she killed Weiss, so she grabbed the other girl in a fireman’s carry and fled, feeling one of her shadow clones break apart as Adam swung at them.
“You can’t leave!” he yelled. Blake ignored him. “You’re nothing without me!” he yelled again, and Blake kept running, ignoring both him and the surprised protests of the girl she was carrying.
It was a terrible idea to just flee deeper into the woods again, but for the first time in a long time, Blake had no idea what she was supposed to do, or where she was meant to go. As soon as she got far enough away, she’d see if Weiss knew anyone they could run too.
-
The snow stopped some time after midnight. It took Weiss a moment to notice the flakes were no longer falling. “Put me down,” she said, doing her best to not sound like a petulant child (difficult, with how tired she felt, though the fog was slowly clearing from her thoughts). “Please?” she added, not really thinking about it, old training in politeness kicking it.
Part of her was frustrated that - Blake, that was what the masked man had called her - that Blake had picked up like this, insisting she could have won against that man like she had against the huntress. Most of her, the sane, actually intelligent part of her, assumed that Blake knew the masked man well enough to know his power level, and considering the other girl was aware of Weiss’ less than optimal state of mind, her decision to flee was probably the correct one.
This didn’t make being carried any less weird, though.
“Oh, right,” Blake said, and she stopped running. Through a combination of Blake letting go but not entirely and Weiss moving, Blake managed to drop Weiss so that she landed on her feet.
“Thank you,” Weiss said. She tried to smooth her skirt out.
“What are you doing out here dressed like this?” Blake asked, and Weiss considered making a snarky comment about the other girl’s outfit, but she was still sort of convinced she might kill her at any moment. Even though she hadn’t yet, even though she’d just run for Oum only knew how long through a forest in the snow to save her life.
It had been a bad day.
“I didn’t exactly plan this out,” Weiss said, gesturing vaguely around herself. “I woke up with Myrtenaster in my hand, a woman I did not recognize pointing a similar weapon at me. I fought her, she died. You found me.”
“So you were drugged,” Blake said, sounding not terribly surprised.
“I would assume so,” Weiss answered. It fit with what she had been experiencing for the past several hours. It fit with what she was currently experiencing as well, though to a much lesser degree. “I assume it was to make me easier to kill.” She smiled grimly, “That didn’t happen.”
“I’m sorry about Adam,” Blake said, resisting the urge to explain the White Fang leader’s actions. They were strange, even to her, but in retrospect, not all that surprising.
Weiss shrugged, “It’s alright,” she said, “though I’m sorry you’ve lost your home.”
Blake sighed. “I don’t know how long I would have stayed with Adam, anyway, if he’s gotten that bad,” she said. She reached out her hand towards Weiss. “Do you know anyone near here?” she asked, “or should we go looking for the few non White Fang I know near here?”
Weiss gave her a tentative smile, grasping her hand. “Let’s do that. Lead the way.”
The faunus girl grinned, and the two girls began to walk, hoping to both avoid Grimm and reach a place of safety.
Chapter 2
The forest was big, and deep, and covered miles and miles and miles of land. Most of this entire section of the continent was forest. Blake knew that, she’d hunted here so often that she knew her parts of it as well as she knew the inside of the White Fang camp. And so, she knew that to find any sort of safety, even at the faunus village she knew existed a little ways from the camp, the two of them would be forced to go on a many days long walk.
Perhaps somewhat ungenerously, Blake had assumed that Weiss would complain about this fact a lot more, being the (apparently former) heiress to a staggeringly wealthy company that partially ran a kingdom, if what Adam had told her was true (which was looking less certain, but that was irrelevant). Instead, to the faunus girl’s surprise, Weiss turned out to be almost as competent at moving across rough terrain as Blake was, even if it occasionally seemed as though she were working more from theory than actual experience.
Blake had found her a little after noon- not that there was much differentiation over the day in brightness, until sundown everything was a flat, white brightness, the clouds scattering the light so much that there were barely even shadows. This far into the woods, at least, the thick trees gave some protection from the snowfall, but it also meant that there was not as much light. This was fine for Blake, but she worried about Weiss. No matter her skills in fighting, once night arrived, which by then point would be in a short while, the human girl would be operating blind.
“Do you think we should camp?” Weiss asked as the sky began to darken. Blake stopped walking, and as she did she realized with a start that she hadn’t eaten all day. Nor did they have any supplies with them, and considering night was falling the Grimm would be out soon. What had she done, and had she doomed Weiss, too? “Hey,” Weiss broke into her thoughts, “you said you were hunting, when we first met, do you think you still can though it’s night? I know you can see better than me.”
“Yes...” Blake said, and Weiss gave her a tiny grin. “Can you climb trees?”
The other girl gave a started laugh. “Oh, yes, why?” she asked.
“We sadly don’t have anything to really make camp with,” Blake said. “I just- assumed that I would be able to go back to camp when I first set out. I didn’t know I would meet you.”
This was a problem, definitely, their distinct lack of supplies. Considering the condition Blake found Weiss in, it made sense that she would not have anything conveniently awesome to have out in the woods in the winter at night, like a tent, or some easy way of making fire, or an easy source of dust- Blake paused, remembering what she had previously noted about Myrtenaster.
“Can the dust in your sword be removed and put to different uses?” she asked, “because if it can, there is definitely enough to make fire, if you have the right kind.”
Weiss immediately began spinning the cartridge by the hilt of the sword, rapidly looking through each to see how much of each kind of dust she had left. To her great relief, the two kinds of dust she had the most of were fire and lightning. Apparently when she was dumped in the woods whoever did that was so confident in that huntress’ ability to kill her that they had not bothered to tamper with her sword. Which was nice, because it would definitely been incredibly upsetting had it been messed up.
“I have enough fire dust for warmth, though that’s definitely not its purpose,” Weiss said, frowning.
“I know, but we’re in the woods in the snow and no amount of aura will keep us from dying of hypothermia forever. It will only keep us from dying of hypothermia for a little while,” Blake said, sounding worryingly experienced enough to know this first hand.
“Where do you want me to set it up? I could presumably make a small controlled combustion, but it would be best somewhere not too overly flammable.”
“I doubt you’ll be able to catch the snow on fire,” Blake said, and Weiss rolled her eyes. “You sure you can take care of yourself while I’m off hunting?”
“You sure you can find me again?” Weiss asked instead of answering. She kept her tone carefully neutral, but the idea of being left here in the woods alone at night was upsetting.
“Of course,” Blake said, “I don’t know how long it’s been since you’ve showered but you stink, and it’s not like there are any other humans near here.”
“Oh,” Weiss said, laughing a little. She hadn’t thought of that. “Sorry.”
“No, it’s fine.” Blake made a face. “The smells aren’t much better back at the camps.”
She smiled at Weiss again, before giving her an almost-wave and turning to go. “Please don’t die of hypothermia,” she said, and Weiss gave her a smile back.
“I won’t, I promise.”
She watched the faunus girl retreat out of where her eyes could see. Weiss exhaled, and got to work trying to set up a viable fire using nothing more than the dust she had on her. This would be interesting, to say the least.
Chapter 3
Note: Fix the error in naming on this chapter on ffn.
It worked. Surprisingly, but it worked. The fire sputtered at first, because the few twigs (and admittedly, some saplings, possibly, oh well) that Weiss had managed to collect were wet from the snow, and green still in some places, but eventually it caught, and it was warm, and gave more light than what filtered through the evergreens.
Weiss rubbed her hands together near the fire, trying to ignore the nagging little voice that kept trying to tell her that Blake had run off, that the faunus girl would not come back, that she would be left alone to starve and freeze out here in the woods. She could probably scounge for food, and using glyphs to ease hunting the few animals that would be running around at this time of winter would not be difficult, as the drug wore off more and more she would be fully back to her full power. It would be strange using Myrtenaster to hunt, it was not exactly a weapon built for that sort of thing, it was honestly barely built for fighting Grimm instead of other people, more of a conduit of glyphs and dust than anything, but it would do.
It would be like a fairytale, maybe. Hopefully not like the ones with the bad endings, which seemed to be as common as the ones that ended well, but now she had her prince, at least. Or princess, anyway, which for Weiss was all the better.
In the silence and stillness, for the purpose of distracting herself from worry more than anything else, she tried to piece together the hours that had led up to her finding herself so cold and alone, the strange feeling of driving her sword through someone, insteading using her glyphs for it, being the first sensation she had as she began to form memories again.
She knew she had angered Winter, and perhaps father as well, but how? There was no reason for her to die, and... she brought her hand up to touch the scar. Would that be could enough to get her killed? It would not make sense, but stranger things, or so she’d heard, had happened to extended members of the Schnee family.
She sighed, deliberately making it an ugly, unladylike sigh, failing at the urge to check around herself immediately after she was done. Apparently those sorts of habits were incredibly difficult to break
There was a prettiness to the snow, a softness in the cold, which Weiss could now appreciate much better as she was no longer desperately trying to not die and she laughed at herself a little at her own paranoia.
She also didn’t let go of Myrtenaster, however. That would have just been stupid.
Blake had not yet returned, so Weiss forced herself to consider the potential logistics of the two of them finding a place to stay as best she could. There wasn’t much to think through- Blake knew this area better than she did obviously, and Weiss did not have the resources she was used to having- but it was a good enough distraction from the ever encroaching darkness, now only held at bay a little by the fire.
She was still very proud of that fire, she knew the theoretical uses of dust inside and out, how could she not, growing up as she had, but that she had actually managed to use fire dust in such a (relatively) controlled manner was very impressive, at least to her own mind. It was probably desperation more than anything, really, that had given her the push there. It was now glowing functionally, burning through the wood she’d managed to gather despite the snow, giving off a little light and just enough heat to for there to be a circle of bare, damp earth around it.
Funny, now that she had a worse consequence than anything Jacques Schnee had ever threatened she actually worked with far more ease than the relatively light pressure of her training back home. Weiss, however, being already rather full of complicated emotions towards her family already, decided to rather emphatically not think about the implications of that too deeply.
It was while Weiss was making these rather circular thoughts, and also still trying to tentatively plan ahead, that Blake returned. She was holding something furry and definitely dead by the legs at her side, her weapon in the other hand.
“I have food,” the faunus girl declared. She lifted the animal. It was a rabbit in full winter coat. “Do you know how to skin a rabbit?”
Weiss blinked at her. “No...? It’s never something that came up in Atlas.”
Blake frowned. “Alright, then.” She sat down by the fire in the dry patch, on the opposite side of it from Weiss. She put her weapon next to her. “I’m not going to teach you, by the way” she said.
Possibly because of her complete lack of knowledge in the area, Weiss watched in somewhat morbid fascination as Blake skinned the rabbit. That she was watching it through the smoke from the fire only added to the odd nature of it.
First, she broke its back legs with her thumbs. After that, through some kind of technique that Weiss didn’t have enough knowledge to follow entirely, she found a grip on the animal that let her peel off the skin from the place where she’d broken the back legs down to about half way up the forelegs. “This is always the tricky part,” she said, apparently mostly to herself. As she said that, she gently worked the skin off the last part of the forelegs and the head. The skin was now separate from the carcass. She lay the skin on the snow next to her.
“Do you have any water on you?” Blake asked. At Weiss’ blank look she added, “to clean it with,” with the kind of head gesture that indicated this was an obvious thing. Weiss shook her head. Oh. That would also become a problem, wouldn’t it. Damn.
“Alright, that’s fine,” Blake said at the head shake. “I’m not going to be cooking for taste, anyway, and I’m assuming your aura’s as decent at helping you avoid infection as mine is. Even if you are human.” The last sentence sat oddly in Weiss’ head, but she decided she probably shouldn’t comment on it.
After all, that encounter with Adam Taurus just a few hours before had shown her that Blake’s sympathy towards her was a fluke in this part of... wherever she was, not a given.
“You’re going to share it with me?” Weiss kicked herself for how surprised she sounded. Blake wasn’t Winter, she wasn’t going to withhold sustenance to prove a point or teach a lesson. “Even though I didn’t help you catch it?”
Blake looked genuinely perplexed. “You built the fire,” she said, “out of dust I might add, in the middle of the woods, at night, in the snow.” Gripping the skinned rabbit, she quickly removed its head, then managed to pull the organs out through the stomach.
“So?” Weiss wasn’t sure why it was praiseworthy. Sure it was somewhat impressive, but it wasn’t as though anything less than impressive was expected from her.
“I can’t do that kind of thing, and I have survival training.”
Weiss shrugged. “Still, thank you.”
Instead of making any sort of specific preparation, Blake shoved the now dressed rabbit into a part of the fire that had mostly burned down to coals. It was surrounded on three side by sticks that were still very much ablaze, creating a sort of impromptu stove. “This isn’t going to taste very good,” Blake warned. She grabbed a stick from the small pile Weiss had collected but not used in the fire. “It’s also going to be rather scorched on the outside, and you’re going to have to pick the meat from the bones yourself.”
“I don’t care,” Weiss said, “I don’t know if I should care, but I don’t.”
That caught Blake by surprise. “You are Weiss Schnee, right?” she asked as she moved the cooking rabbit around with the stick, trying to get it into an optimal position so it wouldn’t just catch on fire. “This can’t be usual for you.”
“Nothing’s been usual all day,” Weiss said. She frowned. “I think compared to killing someone while drugged to gills is worse than eating rabbit cooked over a fire.”
Blake didn’t look at her for a few moments. “If you want to feel useful,” she eventually said, “figure out a way to dispose of the organs. I don’t trust myself enough to prepare them in a way that won’t be completely inedible.”
Weiss nodded. “Okay. Are you sure we don’t need the extra food?”
Blake shrugged. She stared into the flame, focusing on the rabbit. “We’re not actually that far from a human village. A day or two’s walk, at the most. The snow might make it a little harder, but I can guide you if we travel by night.”
“Oh,” Weiss said, “that’s good.” She hesitated a moment before asking, “Where are we, exactly?”
“Oh.” Blake looked surprised, as if she hadn’t realized just how lost Weiss was. “We’re in the forest to the north-east of the city of Vale.”
“The White Fang are camped out that close to a major human city?” Weiss asked, genuinely curious. For all that her family had been at war with them for as long as she could remember, she only had familiarity with the actions of the members of the group who were active in Atlas. It was disconcerting, however, to realize that she had been moved rather a great distance while unconscious. She decided to have a good, long, healthy freak out over that once she was no longer at risk of dying of starvation in the woods. Hopefully, she would be able to hold to that decision.
“The section Adam has the most direct control over, yeah,” Blake answered. She poked at the rabbit again. “I’m not exactly proud to admit it, but it’s not easy to feed a group as big as the White Fang, especially in the winter, so for all the separatist- for all the violence, and everything, at least the groups I’ve been with tend to stay near human cities or settlements.”
“Oh.” That made sense. Or, it made a twisted sort of sense, anyway.
“Why didn’t you run away from me? Or avoid me, in any case?” Blake asked. She wasn’t looking at Weiss anymore. She had reached up to touch her cat ears.
Weiss gave Blake a tiny, grim smile. “Oh, you know,” she said, “I don’t know if I could have if I’d tried.”
Chapter 4: Through the Snow
Weiss fell asleep almost as soon as she finished eating. Blake expected her to object to eating the rabbit, considering it was probably nowhere near what the heiress usually ate, but Weiss instead wolfed it down with as much enthusiasm as anyone back at the White Fang camp after a particularly bad week.
She yawned, and apologized, and said, “I think I’ve been awake for a very long time.”
Blake agreed to keep first watch. She could see better than the heiress, and she wanted some time alone to think.
Catching the rabbit had not counted-- she had a task, and she had spent most of her thinking on completing it.
How long had Weiss Schnee been in the woods? It had been hours-- Blake had lost track of how many, exactly-- since their flight from Adam’s wrath, and Blake had no way of knowing how long Weiss had been standing there, dazed, above that woman’s body.
She felt bad about making her sleep out in the open like this, but there was little else they could do. The winter was not the best time for scrounging for sticks.
“Good night,” she told no one. The stars were hidden by trees and heavy cloud cover.
About an hour before dawn, Weiss woke up. Blake dragged a hand over her own face-- she was still awake, of course, but tiredness had crept in around the corners of her eyes.
“Klein?” Weiss asked quietly. Her eyes opened. “Oh.”
The sadness in that one syllable made Blake’s heart sink. “Sorry,” she said. “Hello.”
Weiss went from groggy to alert with a rapidity which struck Blake as odd for the wealthy heiress of evilcorp.
She stood, hand already on the hilt of her sword. “How long until dawn?” she asked, “I can take over.”
“We should keep moving,” Blake said. “I’m not that tired.” She’d hunted on less sleep, before, and it had only been a little over a day since the last time she slept.
Weiss looked at her with what could have been skepticism, but did not press. “You said there’s a human village a day’s walk from here?”
“I think so. That or a faunus village, a little farther out.” She shrugged, “I can drop you off at the human village, either way”
She had considered the faunus village first, in her panic by the White Fang camp, because she was uncertain of her reception anywhere else. It had been a while since she’d encountered a large group of humans without the goal of robbing from them.
But if she could recognize Weiss as a Schnee, there was no telling how other faunus would react. Even those who did not affiliate themselves with humans were obviously hostile to strange humans, and bringing a Schnee, no matter her age, was a bad idea.
“You’d leave me behind?” Weiss asked. Her lack of surprise at this upset Blake.
“Wouldn’t that be preferable?” Blake asked. She realized something, “why aren’t you more upset with me?”
“What?” The sudden change of topic confused her. “Upset with you?”
“I’m a faunus,” Blake said. “You’re a Schnee.”
“Oh.” Weiss’s grip on her sword tightened further, “are you going to kill me?”
“What-- no, of course not!” Blake backed a few steps away from Weiss to prove her point. “I promise.”
“Not even to go back to your family?” There was something very small in how she said that. Blake felt her heart clench again.
“It’s not worth it,” Blake said. She mostly meant it, despite her sudden yearning for Adam’s advice on what to do, even though he was partly to blame for her being out here with few resources in the first place.
They lapsed into silence, Blake looking at Weiss’s shoes.
“There’s a part of me,” Weiss said, suddenly, “that’s scared of you.”
“Oh.”
“We... Schnee Dust Company... lost a lot of board members. They were like my aunts and uncles. But--” Blake heard the sound of the cartridge holder on her sword spinning, “I don’t know how I ended up here,” Weiss said after more silence. “And you protected me from-- Adam was it?”
“Yeah.”
“So no I don’t-- I’m not upset with you. Right now.”
Blake nodded. She looked back up at Weiss’s face, at the scar that still stood out against her pale skin.
“I’ll stay with you, once we get there, for a little while,” she said.
She received the same ghostly smile from before; this time it lasted a little longer.
They didn’t bother to clean up their campsite beyond kicking some snow over the sticks. The remains of the fire dust would give them away, if nothing else, and that could not be easily hidden.
Blake walked ahead. She could hear if Weiss wandered off, probably, although for someone presumably unused to the woods she walked with a practiced ease and grace through the snow.
“I keep expecting you to complain,” Blake said after an hour of walking. It broke the silence that had fallen over the two of them again.
“I’m not going to,” Weiss said. “How long until we’re there?”
“If we keep walking like this, another few hours.”
“Okay.”
“Why did you save me?” Weiss asked after more quiet.
Blake did not answer for a while, listening to hers and the other girl’s footsteps in the snow.
“You were so--” beautiful, Blake did not say. “You seemed so alone.”
“Oh.” There was the sound of the cartridges spinning. Was that something Weiss did to soothe herself? “Thank you for helping me,” she said, “even though I’m a Schnee.”
“Of course,” Blake said, meaning it. “And you should probably not bring that up when we get to the village.” Schnee Dust wasn’t just awful to faunus.
Weiss laughed, which surprised Blake enough that she stopped walking and turned around. She shook her head. “I don’t--” she sighed, “I don’t know who tried to kill me,” she said, “I don’t want anything to do with the company.”
Was that like losing Adam?
“I’ll definitely stay with you when we get to the village,” Blake said impulsively.
They stood there, staring at each other, before Blake looked away and continued walking.
An hour or so out from the village, Blake heard a growl. “Do you hear that?” she asked.
“No,” Weiss said. “What did you hear?”
“It could be nothing,” Blake said. Fighting anything was the opposite of what she wanted to do in that moment.
“I doubt that,” Weiss said.
“I heard a growl.”
Blake, without really thinking about it, unsheathed Gambol Shroud. She heard again the sound of the cartridges spinning.
“How far off?”
“Close.”
“I’m surprised we’ve managed to avoid them this long.”
Blake looked back at Weiss. There was a tightness around her eyes. Again, Blake noticed the scar. It had faded some.
The growl again, and this time Weiss noticed. She flinched. Just barely, but Blake saw it.
“I guess I do have a lot of despair in me.”
The source of the growls was two Beowolves. One was a little bigger than the other. The bigger one was limping slightly and lagged behind the other one just a little.
Weiss turned to Blake. “Which one do you want to take?” she asked.
“I’ll take the one that isn’t wounded,” Blake said.
Weiss nodded. Without another word, she launched herself at the Grimm.
Blake turned to the smaller one.
It noticed her. As its companion sped up to confront Weiss, it hurtled itself at Blake, swiping a claw down at her mid-section. What it hit was solid for only a few seconds, before it dissolved into a black afterimage. It howled in frustration, but did not move fast enough to dodge the sudden swipe at its back.
Blake struck first with her blade, then with its sheath, one after the other. The Beowulf growled again, twisting to slash at its own back. It failed utterly at defending itself from Blake striking directly at its neck, slashing once more with both her sword and its sheath. Quickly following these strikes came two shockwaves, and the Beowulf dissolved quickly after she sliced its head clean off.
Weiss, meanwhile, raised the same orange glyphs she had used against Adam the day before. Using her weapon more to direct the glyphs than directly to attack, she destroyed its good leg in a flash of orange light.
It screamed at her. It lurched forward, slashing at her.
She dashed at it, lunging Myrtenaster up through the base of its head.
It dissolved much like the other.
“You’re very good,” Blake said, “that was fast.”
Weiss shrugged awkwardly. “It’s just some Beowulves,” she said. “It’s nothing, really.”
Blake sighed and shook her head. “Come on, we’re nearly there,” she said.
Weiss nodded. “Alright, let’s go.”
Chapter 5
Weiss half expected to find the village burnt down to embers. It would fit the theme of the past few days.
Instead, it was only half abandoned, which was only a little better. The Inn, at least, was shuttered.
Not that Weiss had any money.
Her cards, and her scroll, were missing, and it wasn’t as though the Schnee dust company was in the habit of paying the cost of living for dead girls.
“Is this usual?” Weiss asked Blake.
Blake shook her head, distracted. “There are usually more people,” she said. “A lot more people.”
Near the closed Inn stood two older women in what looked to be religious clothes. One was hooded, horns just visible under it. The other just had wire-like gray hair up in a bun.
Blake started in their general direction. She grabbed Weiss around her wrist. “Come on,” she said, “let’s go talk to them.”
“Who are they?” Weiss asked.
“Allmothers,” Blake said, “you know, the ones who swear to serve the needy, and the like?”
At Weiss’s blank look Blake sighed. “Wow,” she said, “Atlas must really be dreary. In any case, they’ll help us.” Weiss was probably meant to miss the “I hope” said under her breath. Blake dragged her the rest of the way towards them.
“Hello,” Blake greeted the two women. She bowed her head slightly, looking as still as Weiss had ever seen her. “We need help,” she said.
Something like hurt pride boiled in Weiss’s chest. “What are you doing?” she muttered, jerking her arm out of Blake’s grip.
“Making sure we don’t starve to death!” Blake answered. “What are you, twelve? Pride isn’t going to help either of us!”
“I don’t--” Weiss stared at Blake, “I don’t want her help.” She felt her breathing speed up. She didn’t want to say the horned woman; she couldn’t hide from the fact that Blake was a faunus but these were the people she had always been taught to fear.
The horned women stood impassively, her expression unreadable.
“I don’t care,” Blake said. Her eyes hardened. “I don’t care about whatever bullshit you’ve swallowed from growing up, I threw away my family for you and I’m not letting you starve to death!”
“Your family?” Weiss asked, incredulous, “he threatened to kill you! How is that family?”
“I found you drugged and close to death!” Blake answered. “How is that any better?”
“I don’t know!” Weiss brought her hands up to cover her face. She was so, so tired. “I don’t know.”
“Children,” the gray haired woman said. Her voice was barely above a whisper but Weiss felt compelled to listen to her. “Miss Schnee,” she spoke to Weiss directly, “we understand the situation you grew up in.” The compassion in her eyes hurt more than Blake’s anger, even though Weiss didn’t know her name yet.
“How do you know who I am?” Weiss asked.
“You are the public face of the Schnee Dust Company,” the woman said. “We may live far outside any city, but scrolls still work out here.”
“Oh,” Weiss said. She scrubbed at her face with her hands. “I’m sorry,” she said to Blake. Would she leave? Weiss wasn’t sure that she could make it if Blake left. Not just because Weiss had no means of getting food, or new clothing, or shelter, or anything for herself, really, but because it would mean she would be back where she started. Alone, in the woods, with nothing but Myrtenaster.
Blake didn’t answer her, but she didn’t leave either.
Weiss couldn’t bring herself to repeat Blake’s request for aid. She stood in an imitation of her father’s parade rest, and looked down at her feet.
“Ours is a Wayfarer's house,” the woman with horns said. “And we take in anyone, no matter her situation.”
“Thank you,” Blake said. “Thank you, Allmothers.”
The women turned to leave, and Blake grabbed Weiss by the wrist again. This time, however, she turned to Weiss and asked, “You will come, won’t you?”
“Yes,” Weiss said. She followed along after Blake. “How can you trust them so easily?” she asked.
“I just do,” Blake said. She would not give any further explanation.
Blake recognized the Wayfarer’s House from the symbol above the door. “We cannot put you up long,” the woman with gray hair said. She had, along the walk, introduced herself as Naya and her companion as Aria.
“I understand,” Blake said. She pushed aside her frustration with Weiss for a later date.
“We can, however, give you new clothes,” Naya said. She looked significantly at Blake. She looked down at herself.
“I was hunting,” she defended herself.
“I understand,” Naya said, “but also, Miss Schnee needs less-- recognizable clothing.” She had a point. Pure-white dresses and the like were not exactly the norm in small villages on the edge of the forest.
“I--” Weiss began to protest, “I don’t--” Blake saw the switch in her head, “Can you call me Weiss, please?”
“Of course,” Naya said. “And I will merely give you the clothes-- you are under no obligation to wear them.”
The inside of the Wayfarer’s house looked like an inn with less alcohol and more religious symbols.
More people than Blake had seen out and about were scattered around the main room, some alone at their tables and others in groups.
“We get more travelers than we have villagers,” Naya said, which wasn’t as much of an explanation as Blake would have liked. The two women guided them to a free table.
Blake sat down heavily, grateful to be off her feet.
“Do you have room for us?” Weiss asked. Suddenly, she gasped and put a hand on her chest, coughing. “I’m sorry,” she said, “I just--” further words were interrupted by another fit of coughing.
“How long were you out in the cold?” Aria asked. Her voice was much lower than Blake expected. It felt like home, strangely enough. Perhaps that was the point.
“I... I don’t know, I built a fire I don’t--” Weiss coughed again. “I don’t remember.” Her eyes widened in fear.
Aria turned to Blake. “How long have you two been traveling?”
“About a day,” Blake said, “but her aura should’ve lasted longer than this.” It was cold outside, and Weiss’s clothes were not the most appropriate for traveling but she had seemed fine, at least since-- “Wait,” she said. “Weiss, how long were you outside before I found you?”
“I don’t remember,” Weiss repeated. “I remember waking up and she was de-- and you were there, watching me.”
“You have amnesia?” Naya asked. She turned to Blake. “Why didn’t you tell me anything about this?”
“I didn’t know it could still affect her,” Blake said, feeling very young. She should have thought of any of this, but she had been so focused on getting Weiss somewhere relatively safe, somewhere with other people, that she hadn’t really thought of anything else.
“I was drugged, I think,” Weiss said. She swallowed. “There’s a reason I’m hiding, sort of. I still don’t really know where I am.”
“You’re not going anywhere until I check you over,” Naya said. “Stay here, I’m getting you new clothes.”
She disappeared through a door in the far wall.
“I’m sorry,” Blake said. “I shouldn’t have...”
“I don’t like this!” Weiss interrupted, not really looking at Blake. “I don’t like not remembering.”
“Your memories will either return or they will not,” Aria said. “For now, you must rest.”
“I-- I guess.” Another coughing fit.
“I’ll stay with you,” Blake said, “I promised.” Weiss grabbed Blake’s hand.
“Thank you,” she said.
Their room was plain, and small. This story in general appeared built with the specific purpose of having as many rooms as possible. There was a small cot, a small window, and not much else.
“The rooms don’t have individual bathrooms,” Naya said.
“I’ll wait outside,” Blake said hastily, as Naya pushed the clothes into Weiss’s hands.
“Ah, yeah,” Weiss said. Suddenly awkward, she said, “yeah, I’d prefer that.”
Blake found herself standing outside the door, unsure of what to do. “Wait,” she said out loud, seeking desperately in her pockets, “do I...?” She found what she was looking for. She had not, as she had almost feared, lost her scroll in her flight.
This didn’t mean much, exactly, but it meant if nothing else they might have a better means of orienting themselves than they had currently.
They obviously couldn’t stay in this village for long. But, Weiss was sick. She was sick. And it was possibly Blake’s fault-- no not possibly, definitely Blake’s fault. If she had just thought, maybe convinced Adam that Weiss was a faunus with an easily hideable feature who just happened to look a lot like the Schnee heiress, if she had just asked her how long she’d been out there-- if she’d just thought...
“You’re panicking,” Naya said simply, breaking Blake out of her thoughts. “Or otherwise spiraling.”
“Ah, yes,” Blake said, blinking vaguely. “What did Aria say about Weiss’s condition?”
Blake hadn’t paid as much attention as she really should have. She was-- no she wasn’t tired.
“She’s just a little bit sick,” Naya said. “Which mean bedrest, and a fever reducer, and food and liquids, all of which we can provide temporarily. She’s also probably not infectious to you,” she said, “since your aura is probably functioning fine. But Weiss’s is badly damaged,” she continued, “whatever it was she was given hurt her badly.”
Blake felt something like anger rising in her chest. “That’s--” she said, “they gave her something that damaged her aura, along with the loopiness?”
“I suppose so,” Naya said. “Do you have any idea who ‘they’ might be?”
“The best I can think of is her family,” Blake said, “or someone trying to hurt her family.”
“Hm,” Naya said. “I have some contacts with people who might be able to give you better information.”
“Why are you helping me?” Blake asked, “beyond just giving us shelter, I mean.”
“Someone tried to kill a Schnee,” Naya said. “We live far from Atlas, but the Schnee Company still has reach here. And I want to know why the heiress ended up a day’s walk from here.” She sighed. “I fear, Blake, that whoever ‘they’ is, as soon as they find out Weiss is in fact not dead, will try to correct that oversight.”
“Oh,” Blake said. “Oh.”
Chapter 6: Unwitting Mirror
A mirror hung in Winter’s office. It was a relatively small one, with an ornate, gilded frame. There were fine cracks in the glass.
Occasionally, Winter would catch herself staring at her own reflection. She looked at her eyes especially-- were they not the same blue as Weiss’s? Was not her hair the same white, was she not, in all ways, a Schnee? Her glyphs were more powerful than Weiss’s, and she could summon. She was an adult. Weiss was still a girl.
She was the eldest daughter, the eldest child, and yet Father had chosen, for reasons she could not fathom, to name his second born as heir.
This was not news, of course. Her Father’s preference had been known for some time, but it had never been official. Winter assumed that, with time, her father would choose correctly.
Instead, on Weiss’s sixteenth birthday he declared her his heir, officially and irrevocably, barring sudden death or blatant misbehavior. He passed Winter over completely, for no good reason that she could see.
So, Winter plotted. A training accident, surely, would be excusable. Atlas was a strange, harsh place, after all, and Father was a strange, harsh man. He would understand certain kinds of accidents.
But instead of dying, Weiss grew stronger. She could not summon, not yet, but her glyphwork began to rival even Winter’s own.
As Winter’s hopes became more and more frustrated, she realized that she would have to resort to more drastic measures. A trip was suggested, a guide picked.
Echo Regent was the sort of unscrupulous woman Father preferred for his own dirty work, all sharp eyes and soft footsteps. She was supposed to be the best, and she was supposed to have returned from Vale with proof of Weiss’s death two days before.
The sound of the door being pushed opened pulled her out of her thoughts. It was her father, unannounced as usual. She stood, putting on her best look of bland affection. “Hello,” she said. “What do you need?”
“I have not heard from either your sister or her guide in three days,” Jacques Schnee said. “I sent her on that little journey South on your recommendation.” He did not bother to hide his annoyance.
“I’m sure they are merely somewhere where signal is weaker,” Winter said. “I hear the woods this time of year are quite lovely.” She did not ask if he had tried to track her scroll. If the plan had gone even a little bit smoothly, it was tossed somewhere along with Myrtenaster.
“Yes,” her father said, “quite.” His eyes narrowed. “It will reflect badly on you, should she be lost due to your actions.” His intent, she assumed, was to shame her into being more proactive. He shouldn’t have bothered.
“Of course, Father,” Winter said, “I will organize the search party immediately.”
“No,” Jacques said, “You will go looking for her yourself.” He looked at her as though she were a particularly sullen child. “I would go myself, but there are some rebuilding efforts I must coordinate. The White Fang continue to be a nuisance.” That, Winter dismissed out of hand. It, would, however, be a nice line for him to say to others. Better ones could not have been written for him.
Heading to Vale would not be the inconvenience her father apparently assumed it would be. It would Winter to confirm whether Echo was successful, and then proceed accordingly.
If it turned out that her sister was somehow alive, Winter was confident in her ability to kill her when they were not so heavily monitored as they were inside the mansion.
“I expect you to leave tonight,” her father continued. “Or at the very latest, tomorrow morning.”
“I assume that I should gather my own supplies?” Winter asked.
“I would certainly be a terrible father if I did everything for you,” he answered. “Now, I really must be off,” he said. He left as abruptly as he arrived, leaving the door open behind him.
Winter closed it, a little resentfully. She sank back into her chair. “Well then,” she said aloud.
It would not be terribly difficult to find Weiss, especially if she was alone. The girl was, if nothing else, sheltered.
“Of course we saw Miss Schnee!” the man behind the front desk of the hotel told Winter, an airship ride and several hours later. “She was here just a few days ago. She and her caretaker are currently experiencing the wonders of the nearby Pilgrim Wood, thanks to their purchase of our complete camping package!” His smile mostly came from the lien Winter had slipped him at the start of their conversation, as did his talkativeness.
Her name helped even more.
“Thank you,” Winter said. “She asked me to pick up some of her belongings from her room, could you show it to me?”
“I’m sorry,” he said, “but that I can’t do for you.”
“She forgot her scroll, you see,” Winter began. The man interrupted her.
“Oh! That I can certainly help you with, that was brought to our lost and found yesterday! Normally I would have to ask for identification, but I doubt anyone would pull of pretending to be you successfully.” This was probably an attempted compliment. Winter very pointedly did not react. “In any case,” he continued, “I’ll call to have it brought here immediately.” He retreated behind his desk and typed something into the console in front of him. “Should be here in about two minutes!”
An equally cheery woman arrived with Weiss’s scroll. “Here, Miss Schnee!” she said. She reminded Weiss uncomfortably of a dog trainer. “Hope you can find your sister, there’s snow all over the place!” The two hotel workers laughed.
Winter left. She had what she needed. She didn’t feel comfortable staying a hotel with a White Fang encampment nearby, no matter how fancy that hotel might be.
The scroll was still functional, which was presumably how whoever had presented it to the lost and found had identified it as belonging to Weiss.
This was both unfortunate and not. Unfortunate because it meant that Echo had not done what Winter had expected—that is destroy Weiss’s scroll and weapon, and then drag her out into the woods to be dealt with out of sight; fortunate because Winter now had the information for the throwaway scroll Echo would have used for this job only.
Using that information, she was able, once she was back in the airship, to find where the scroll had last received signal from the Towers.
It would not give her an exact location, but it would be a start. And that start was, apparently, near the edge of the forest the man behind the desk had mentioned.
She would need a map. She could get a map. This was going to be fun, no matter the outcome.
It had been a good idea to warmer clothes. The forest was bitterly cold, especially at such a late hour of the night. Her aura blocked most of it, but that would suffer the longer Winter went without sleep.
The trees were thinner at the edge.
If she hadn’t been watching the ground with a closeness bordering on obsession, she would have missed the lump in the snow. There was a shock of dark hair attached to the lump. The lump was wearing clothes.
Kneeling next to it, she dug through the snow with gloved fingers near where she assumed the head would be. She took a flashlight out of her bag. The body was already quite frozen from the cold, so the features remained decidedly recognizable. It was Echo, her face twisted in outraged pain.
With work, she dug out the rest of the body. The cause of death was obvious: she had been skewered. Something had worn down her aura and she had died from good old fashioned blood loss and hypothermia.
Could Weiss have done this? Echo, in their only face to face conversation, had told Winter that she was prepared to go so far as to badly impede Weiss’s aura to get the job done. It had been partly why Winter had chosen her in the first place; she needed an assassin who had no scruples about killing a teenaged girl. Not only that, but she needed an assassin who would be then able to lie through her teeth about the whereabouts of said teenage girl. That, obviously, would never come into play.
Echo had obviously greatly underestimated Weiss. This was incredibly disappointing, but some part of Winter was also a little pleased at how well she had trained her little sister.
Tracking by any kind of traditional method would be impossible considering the snow. Any footprints left behind would be gone by now. She could look for the remains of a fire, but not only would they be difficult to find in the expanse of the woods, she knew for certain that Weiss had little real survival skills. At the very least, she had never demonstrated any to Winter.
Seeking information at the White Fang camp was out of the question. Not only was it unlikely that she would get any answers out of faunus in the first place, but those faunus in particular would have a very personal, very specific vendetta against her.
She checked her map. There was a village about a day and a half’s walk from where she was. She could probably get there faster, but she did not want to advertise her presence. That would render the entire exercise pointless before it even began.
So, she headed into the woods, attempting to follow some sort of path between the trees. She walked as quietly as she was able, and did her best to still her emotions. She could not afford to encounter grimm, not when she was already two days behind. It wouldn’t slow her up much, but it would still be a delay, and delays were not good.
As she walked, she found herself returning in her thoughts to the mirror which hung in her office. What was it about her that made her so unfit to be the Schnee heir? She had more Schnee blood than Father and she had been extensively trained by the finest military in all of Remnant. She knew what she was doing, and she knew how to balance what would be good for both the company and for Atlas. What experience did Weiss have? She could fight, of course, because all Schnees were trained to fight, and the girl had always expressed a desire to join the ranks of the Huntsmen. She could sing beautifully, but that was not exactly a skill useful to running a company.
And of course, she was intelligent, and obedient to Father, but these were also traits she shared with Winter. What made Weiss special? Was it that she was younger, and therefore more moldable?
That must be it, and left the unfortunate flaw in Winter’s plan in the shape of a little brother named Whitley. She would have to deal with him too upon her return home.
She was not quite lost in her thoughts—she was aware enough of her surroundings to follow the map generally where it led, and as the sun rose it became easier and easier to see where she was going.
There was not much undergrowth, and what there was, was buried under deep snow.
She would have to pause to eat some of the travel rations she had packed for herself. It would not be entirely pleasant, but it would certainly be necessary if she wanted to be able to think clearly before her next encounter with her sister. This would also be a good time for her first report back to her father.
Nothing yet discovered, will travel on foot to the human village in the Pilgrim Wood. May be my last message until signal improves.
The winter really was beautiful, she thought. There was a stillness to it that seemed unbreakable.
Chapter 7: Impermanency
All of Atlas is in shock after the announcement of the sudden and unexplained disa—the feed cut off suddenly, as the signal from the CCTS tower became too weak to support the words. Now, there was only garbled static.
“Damn,” Winter muttered. She wished for a moment that glaring angrily at her scroll would make it work. She would have liked to know whose sudden and unexplained disappearance had been announced, for that was often code for “died in skirmishes with the White Fang.”
She was now completely disconnected from the outside world, which meant that she would be unable to receive her father’s response to her check-in.
It really was cold out here. She had a few more hours of walking to do, and before then the most interesting thing that could happen to her was an encounter with grimm. Not unlikely, considering her proximity to two different faunus encampments. If those weren’t sources of negative emotion, Winter didn’t know what was.
In any case, the snow was deep enough that any grimm larger than a creep would sink into the snow, as Winter had already done multiple times.
She wished it hadn’t snowed. Footprints she could track, CCTS communications she could track, but these woods were the perfect place to disappear. Her own cleverness come to bite her.
Her left foot sank to the ankle into a particularly deep drift. What was the purpose of her doing this, anyway? Weiss had not returned, or tried to contact Father by any means—she was no longer a threat, even if she was alive.
Was the company worth her little sister’s life?
It was, Winter told herself sternly. Wherever Weiss was, she was still unfairly advantaged. The girl was devious, ruthless; she had killed Echo.
Remembering that, Winter couldn’t help but feel just a little proud of Weiss. Her training really had paid off—no, the cold was getting to her. She had to get to Weiss, had to—
The radio in her scroll crackled to life, just for a moment.
“-ley Schnee, newly declared heir, delivered a statement on the suspected dis-”
The radio shut again. Winter stumbled.
She really had to get to the village—hopefully they would have a better connection somewhere. She was probably mishearing, but it was best to check.
She was angry at Weiss for the moment, but she had to make sure that anger was still justified.
**
“You’ve got a virus,” Naya explained to Weiss. “Have you ever had a cold before?”
She nodded. “When I was very little, before my aura was unlocked.” It was even more miserable than she remembered. She was unaware that a human body could contain as much snot as hers apparently did.
Blake was hiding.
“She blames herself,” Naya explained the first night at the Wayfairer’s House. “Give her time to come around.”
Weiss tried to be understanding, but she had assumed that a promise to stay with her automatically also meant staying in the same room.
She wasn’t exactly confined to her room, and the clothes Aria gave were comfortable and not anything like what she typically wore, but it was still hard to feel herself operating below capacity. If it was entirely natural, that would have been fine, but it wasn’t, and there was a day sized hole in her memory to prove it.
The person directly responsible for her sickness was dead. Weiss had, apparently, seen to that herself. She didn’t remember killing her guide, but she assumed that’s what had happened.
Without thinking, she reached for Myrtenaster where it rested by her bedside. The blade was clean—long clean, but she remembered how red it was, right after.
I did that, Weiss thought, I killed someone. It mostly left her numb to think about. She had trusted Echo, more or less, as much as she trusted anyone. She assumed that since she had been chosen as a guide, she had passed a screening of some kind. Her father at least was known for his security consciousness. That was the explanation he gave for not allowing her or Whitley to leave the house all that frequently.
Unless—unless it hadn’t been Father who had chosen Echo as her guide. It might have been Winter, who had been strangely enthusiastic about a banal trip to Vacuo. It would have been Weiss’s first time camping, had there been no assassination attempt, but that was no reason for Winter to find it at all interesting.
But why would Winter want Weiss dead? Winter was a Huntress and part of the Atlesian military. Weiss was the Schnee heiress who could do little beyond wait and hope she got into an Academy other than Atlas.
Could she be jealous? That made no sense.
Weiss felt another pang of longing for… something. She wasn’t sure what, exactly. Blake, maybe, or at least the companionship Blake represented.
There was a knock on her door. It was probably Naya with more medicine that tasted like dirt, or food that was mostly soup, but still Weiss felt something like hope. Maybe it would be Blake.
It was Naya. “Is Blake still in her room?” Weiss asked. ‘Does she hate me?’ she didn’t ask. She had some dignity left.
“Yes,” Naya said. She handed Weiss a pill and a glass of water. “Take this,” she said. “Congratulations, you’ve graduated to actual pills.”
“Oh, goodie,” Weiss said without enthusiasm. She took the pill. “Thank you,” she said. It didn’t taste like anything, which was better than the liquid medicine.
She coughed into her hand.
“Aria will talk to her,” Naya said.
Weiss stood. “I’m sick, not an invalid,” she said. “Having a stuffy face doesn’t mean I can’t train, at the very least.”
She grasped Myrtenaster again.
“What do you think you’re doing?” Naya asked, but she did not move to stop her. “You know how to use that thing?”
Weiss spun the dust cartridges nervously. “Of course,” she said. “All three of us received combat training.” Whitley always hated his lessons, but Whitley hated most things his sisters were better at.
“I suppose there is a sense to that,” Naya said.
“It saved my life, I think,” Weiss said. “I think I killed someone.”
Naya did not look as shocked as Weiss expected her to. “Ah,” she said. “You don’t remember this?”
Weiss shook her head. “I’m just guessing. I woke up standing over a body.”
“That would do it.” Naya looked at Weiss thoughtfully. “You will be good to travel tomorrow, if I convince Aria to use her semblance on you.
“You’re kicking me out?” Weiss couldn’t help the panic that crept into her voice.
Naya nodded. “Call it a kind of pragmatism, perhaps,” she said. “I have taken vows to help any traveler I find along this path, and this is not a vow I take lightly. But, there are others in this House whom I must also care for. And Aria can make you well in that short of time.”
“Do you think Blake will come with me if I go?” Weiss asked.
“Aria recognizes her,” Naya said, “and Aria rarely recognizes faunus from as far away as Menagerie. You might not the only person with someone after you.”
“Menagerie?” Weiss asked. That was the island they’d tried to put all the faunus on in the last war. If Blake was from there, what was she doing with the White Fang here?
“Yes,” Naya says. “But it means we can’t really let her stay either.” She almost looked sad. Almost. “I hate to leave you out in the cold, but we have contacts and they will be able to help you far better than we could.”
“You sure that Aria can make me well?” she asked. As if for emphasis, she was forced into another coughing fit.
“Yes,” Naya said. “She can fix your aura.”
Wow. “How come she hasn’t done that yet?” She had been sick for a day and a half—surely this was not a semblance only triggered by strong fear of being killed?
“She has her own reasons to be hesitant. I’m sorry, but you’ll have to struggle on sick until just before you go.”
“Tomorrow?”
“Yes.” Naya picked up the now empty glass. “You should rest,” she said, looking pointedly at the bed. She left.
Weiss collapsed onto her bed, still holding Myrtenaster. A half-forgotten melody rose to her mind. “Mirror, can you tell me, tell me who’s the loneliest of all.” She wondered if her father had ever caught the meaning of that song. Probably not. He was convinced of his own perfection as a father.
She sang a little more, finding comfort in it. There was no crowd here to applaud, no… no expectations.
“I didn’t know you could sing,” she heard. She looked up. Blake was standing in the doorway. As Weiss looked, she clambered up onto the windowsill. She sat there, watching Weiss. “I’m sorry I haven’t talked to you,” she said.
“You promised me you wouldn’t leave,” Weiss said, not getting up.
“I know,” Blake said. “I’m not very good at staying.” In that moment, she reminded Weiss very much of the rare stray she saw in Atlas—skittish, and with good reason.
“You can always practice,” Weiss said. “I can help you?” She coughed into her elbow, wincing at the noise.
Blake smiled. “Sure,” she said. “I hope whatever Aria does will make you feel better.”
“I hope so too.”
Chapter 8: Here Be Witches?
“I’m going to put my hands on your shoulders,” Aria said. It was early morning, before the late winter sunrise. Outside the window, behind Blake, Weiss could see a few stars still.
She was sitting up in bed, her head bowed. “Is it going to hurt?” she asked.
“Shouldn’t,” Naya said.
“I’m just healing your Aura,” Aria said. “Like I told you when you first arrived, it was almost completely drained when you got here.”
Weiss sighed. “I know—I know that the military has been experimenting with various… compounds, but why would anyone…?” She knew she had been drugged. A hole in her memory and the state in which Blake had found her could only be reasonably explained by that kind of altered state. But interfering with her aura? Why would anyone go to that extreme?
“Do you know who attacked you?” Aria asked. Weiss noticed her hands glowing a burnt red.
“I guess it was Echo,” Weiss said. She shook her head. “I don’t understand why she’d hate me, though.”
“Who is Echo?” Naya asked. Weiss realized that she had not told either woman of her thoughts concerning Echo, Winter, or her Father. To them, the name Echo Regent would mean nothing.
“She was my guide, and—and,” Weiss looked away from Aria and Naya, which meant she was looking a Blake, who was curled up on the window sill again. “She was the body you found,” she told her. “She was the one who tried to kill me.” Saying out loud made it both more real and worse than when it had just been a thought in her head.
Aria moved her hands from Weiss’s shoulders. Weiss realized she could breathe more easily than she had before. “There,” Aria said. “You should feel better, now.”
“Why would this Echo want you dead?” Naya asked. She had a hard, faraway look on her face.
“I don’t think she wanted me dead,” Weiss said, “I think my sister wanted me dead.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know,” Weiss said. “She was harsh, sometimes, but she was a good teacher and I don’t understand why she would be so angry at me.” She had already dismissed Winter wanting to be the heir as a possibility. Weiss would trade places with her older sister in an instant—fighting real battles and real monsters, not just knights and whatever else Father threw at her.
Remembering suddenly what Aria had just done for her, Weiss thanked her. She ducked her head again. “I’m sorry for forgetting my manners,” she said, “everything has been happening all at once.”
To Weiss’s surprise, Aria laughed. “It’s quite alright,” she said. She sighed. “Remember, you must leave by noon.”
“I still don’t understand why,” Blake said suddenly. It was the first thing she had said since the women had walked into the room. “This is a Wayfairer’s House—you’re supposed to take us in.”
The two women looked at each other. “Yes,” Naya said, “and there are other people in this house who would not do well if this place came under the notice of either powerful families or the White Fang.”
Blake’s eyes widened in surprised. “How do you know who I am?”
“I was a healer for them, once,” Aria said. “When you were very young and I was still rather getting on in years.” She smiled at her own joke, and stood from where she had been sitting on Weiss’s bed. “I recognized you. Your choice in colors for clothing has not changed much since you were little.”
“Why would my presence here put you in danger?” Blake asked. Weiss privately agreed with her confusion. There was no way for either Naya or Aria to know that she was no longer on good terms with the Fang. There was no reasonable way for Adam Taurus to know where Blake and Weiss were, either.
“You arrived at this place in the company of a sick human,” Aria said. “The Taurus I remember would have been rather upset by this.”
“Oh,” Blake said. She curled back into herself, watching something out the window Weiss could not see.
“Look,” Naya said, “there is a village not a day’s walk from this one with a lot more people and a decently mixed population.” She sounded gentler than she had until this point. “We will give you extra clothes, and give you time to pack and rest. You must leave before noon, however.” That made a sort of sense. It would be better to get a head start on traveling before the sun set.
Aria and Naya left. Aria closed the gently behind them.
“Will you go to your room?” Weiss asked Blake.
She shook her head. “If I stay here I assume they’ll bring extra clothes to both of us,” she said. “It’ll save them the trip.” She was looking at Weiss as she said it.
She hopped off the window sill and walked over to Weiss. “Can I sit next to you?” she asked.
“Of course,” Weiss said.
A while later, after the sun had risen, Weiss asked, “Was it worth it?”
“Hm?”
“Is it worth leaving Adam? Saving me?”
Blake sighed. Her ears drooped. “I’m not sure, yet,” she said.
Weiss swallowed the disappointment that swelled in her chest. “Oh,” she said.
“I think it is, probably,” Blake said, “but it’s weird, I guess? I’ve been with the White Fang since I was really, really little. From before everything went wrong.”
Following an impulse she didn’t entirely understand, Weiss brushed her hand against Blake’s. Blake, to her surprise, grabbed Weiss’s hand tightly in turn.
“I think I get that,” Weiss said. “I still don’t understand why Winter would want me dead.” Whitley, she would understand. Whitley hated her and how much better she was than him at everything. But Winter? “And…I keep expecting Klein to walk in, you know?”
“Klein?”
“He’s the butler,” Weiss said. She laughed nervously. “I know this makes me sound like a spoiled rich girl, but I think he was my closest friend in the mansion.” She had never really felt awkward referring to her wealth before, but now? Now casually referring to growing up in a mansion made her feel kind of like an asshole.
“That’s actually kind of sad,” Blake said. She squeezed Weiss’s hand. Weiss dropped her head onto Blake’s shoulder.
“Oh,” Weiss said. “Thank you for staying with me,” she said. She was probably repeating herself, but it didn’t matter. She was glad, in a way, that the time she had spent fighting and alone was erased from her mind. It was frightening, looking at that hole in her mind, but those were memories she didn’t want the details of ever.
“Do you think they’d let you stay if I just left?” Blake asked suddenly.
Weiss pulled Blake’s onto her lap. “No,” she said. “They’re also scared about my family, remember? You leaving wouldn’t fix anything.”
Blake nodded doubtfully, but she stayed by Weiss’s side for the rest of their time at the House anyway.
Blake offered to carry Weiss’s bag along with her own. Along with clothing and food for a few days, Naya and Aria had given the two of them bags to carry everything with.
“It’s fine,” Weiss said. She put the strap of the bag across her shoulder, carrying Myrtenaster in her hand. “I can carry it myself.”
“I was just—“
“Just because I was sick doesn’t mean I can’t do anything,” Weiss said. She seemed embarrassed. Blake couldn’t understand why. Being sick was weird, sure, but it didn’t change the fact that Weiss had apparently managed to defeat an assassin sent to kill her not only while out of her head but with a broken aura.
“That’s not what I meant,” Blake said. “I just feel bad, you know?” It was her definitely her fault that Weiss had to leave the House so suddenly. The White Fang were a far greater threat than one woman from across Remnant could ever be.
“For what?”
“For this,” Blake said. She gestured vaguely at the road, which had yet to leave the remains of the town behind. On the road, the snow was a slushy mess mixed with sand and salt. The trees were not quite forbidding yet, though the forest loomed ahead of them in the distance. They would have to pass through it on the way to the dot labeled Domremy. There they would find friends of the Allmothers.
“They worship the Two Gods,” Aria had explained, “but our word is still good enough to make them trust you, I hope.”
“Thank you,” Weiss had said, while Blake had watched mutely. The Two Gods were ones Blake was familiar with. Some of the more fanatical White Fang had become followers of the Dark Twin as the group radicalized.
“How would any of it be your fault?” Weiss asked.
“The White Fang is a far greater danger to you than your sister,” Blake said. The White Fang had numbers, and was closer geographically. Winter Schnee was one woman.
Weiss shook her head. “If anyone is to blame, it was me,” she said.
“What?” That made absolutely no sense whatsoever. It was Blake who had angered Adam, not Weiss.
“You could still be with your family if I hadn’t showed up,” Weiss said. She kicked at a particularly hard lump of snow. “Maybe you should’ve just killed me.”
“No!” Blake said. “That would be wrong!”
“Is it magically more wrong than all the attacks the White Fang made on my family?” Weiss asked. She turned towards Blake. “Any more wrong than—than how we treat faunus in the mines?” she asked, not at all going where Blake thought she would.
She looked all mixed up. She was gripping Myrtenaster so tightly that her knuckles were even paler than the rest of her skin.
“I never liked the attacks on people,” Blake said. “Infrastructure made sense, but people? That would just make them hate us more. And I didn’t want that.”
“Oh,” Weiss said. “I’m sorry,” she said, “I don’t mean to be so mixed up, I guess I’m more tired than I expected to be.”
They were now much nearer to woods than they had been. It would be noon soon.
“You were pretty sick,” Blake said.
“Can we hold hands again?” Weiss asked. “It was nice.”
“Yeah,” Blake said. She grabbed Weiss’s hand, and they walked side by side. Somehow, this made her a little less scared of the strange forest ahead.
**
It was the day after Blake and Weiss had left the Wayfairer’s House, though of course Winter did not know that.
It had been easy enough to find out Weiss’s whereabouts. A girl with a sword in white made an impression.
She knocked, of course, upon finding the House. Winter was a Schnee, and as a Schnee she was nothing if not polite.
The faunus who opened the door shut it seconds later. There was the sound of a deadbolt sliding across. Winter sighed. She knocked again. “Let me in,” she called, “I have the means to break your door.”
Politeness was overrated if it didn’t work the first time through.
The door opened a crack. “We are here to help the needy,” the faunus woman who answered the door said. To Winter, she looked stupid and uninteresting. Her horns were overlarge and far too obvious. She would have not done well at the company.
“I am needy,” Winter said. She knew she would have to contend politely with the woman, even though she had no desire to. “I am looking my sister. She is lost, and my whole family is very worried.” A half-truth would work just as well as a whole truth.
“What is your sister’s name?” the woman asked. She narrowed her eyes at Winter.
“She’s probably here under an assumed name,” Winter said. There was no reason for her to tell this faunus woman anything.
“True enough, but we aren’t exactly at a loss for lost young women,” the woman said.
“Just let me in,” Winter said in her most commanding tone.
“No,” the woman said. She shut the door.
Winter knocked again. She heard the woman lock the door.
This was fine, Winter thought. She could wait. Weiss would have to come out eventually. And if she did not, Winter decided to herself, she would break down that door.
In the mean-time, she had to find a place with any connection to the CCTS at all. She had something to check.
Chapter 9: Omen
They were still holding hands, a few hours later. Maybe it was just in her head, but Weiss felt her hand was warmer in Blake’s.
“Do you hear that?”
They were an hour into the forest. The trees had not blocked out the light completely, yet, but already the shadows were growing longer.
The last time Blake had said “Do you hear that?” Beowulves had followed. The trees in this forest were packed more closely together than the last one, but there were still grimm who could attack in cramped spaces.
“No,” Weiss said.
“It’s not grimm,” Blake said. “It’s birdcalls.”
A small, black shape sped past them in a flurry of wings in the direction of the village. “What was that?” Weiss asked.
“I’m not sure,” Blake said. “Nothing good.” Her ears flattened against her hair. “How are you feeling?”
“Pretty much okay,” she said. She felt worse about getting Blake kicked out of the House more than about anything else. That, and her shoulders ached some, but that was probably just from the pack Naya and Aria had given them.
“Do you have crows in Atlas?” Blake asked. Was that what she thought the shape was? Her hand (the one that wasn’t holding Weiss’s) went to her weapon for just a moment.
“Sometimes,” Weiss said. Most of the birds were either predators or didn’t stay for long. “The winters are cold.”
“Colder than now?” It was maybe a little warmer, and they were both more reasonably dressed, but there was still the snow, still the damp.
“Of course,” Weiss said. “We’re so close to the poles that in the north there are places where the days last for all of summer.” She hadn’t gone that far north very much. The wealthy mostly stayed in the cities, and the faunus and human laborers in the dust mines tended to not come south.
Not that the cold didn’t bother her. She couldn’t shake the feeling that what Aria had done wouldn’t last.
“The whole summer?”
“Yeah. There aren’t a lot of people who choose to live there.” Weiss realized that she was speaking in the same circles her father did. “I mean, that’s where some of the dust mines are, but there aren’t any permanent settlements.”
The conversation drifts, there. Weiss assumes Blake knows almost as much about the mines as Weiss does. Adam Taurus has always had, according to her father, an uncanny knowledge of where he ought to go to be the least appreciated.
“You still have your scroll on you, right?” Weiss asked. A sudden need to know whether her absence had been noted had seized her.
“Yeah,” Blake said, “but I can’t guarantee it’s going to work.”
“But Naya said—”
“There was some coverage,” Blake said, “but nothing like in the cities.”
“How much time do you spend in cities, anyway?” Weiss’s original image of the White Fang as faceless monsters that stalked through the shadows had not entirely faded. Blake was just one person. The abruptness with which she had abandoned the White Fang pleased the part of Weiss that was still a little girl who read romance novels, but mostly it concerned her.
“Not too much,” Blake said, defensively, “but enough. It’s not as though the middle of the woods is… was our first choice to live.” Despite her frustrated words, she did not let go of Weiss’s hand.
“I keep forgetting people don’t always grow up like me,” Weiss said.
“What kind of bubble did you grow up in?” Blake asked.
“One made out of money,” Weiss said.
Blake squeezed her hand. “I guess this is weird for the both of us,” she said.
“Thank you for staying,” Weiss said.
Blake smiled.
Weiss’s stomach fluttered weirdly. “Do you know how close we are to the town?”
Blake checked the map, yet another convenient gift from the two Allmothers. “Maybe a half a
day’s walk, if I’m estimated these distances right. You hungry or something?” She looked over at Weiss.
“Kinda, yeah,” Weiss said. She would be glad for a rest. It wasn’t that she was weak, or anything.
Being sick had taken a lot out of her.
This time, Blake didn’t need to go hunting for rabbits, thanks to those packs they had been given.
They sat in the middle of the path, since it was well-maintained enough that the snow there was
less deep and therefore easier to clear. “Can you make another fire?” Blake asked.
“With dust, you mean?”
There was a depression in the side of the road that overlapped with part of the “wilder” forest.
Blake pointed at it. “That might be a good spot,” she said. “It’s defensible, and I’d rather not camp out,
even temporarily, off the road. It’s not as though there are too many people looking for us.”
“At least no one with superhuman speed, right?” Weiss asked. Winter was many things, but she
had the Schnee abilities, which thankfully did not include the speed some people had for semblances.
Blake flinched. “I don’t know how I outran Adam,” she said, “when I was carrying you out of
that clearing. He can run faster than anyone.”
The vague anxiety that had been sitting in Weiss’s chest since, honestly, the moment she had
woken up, half-dazed, to find herself in the middle of a clearing in the snow, made itself even more
known. “Oh.”
“I don’t know how he hasn’t found me yet,” Blake said. “He doesn’t like deserters.” Weiss felt
Blake’s grip on her hand tighten.
“Winter isn’t very fast,” Weiss said. “So don’t worry.”
“You’re pretty powerful yourself,” Blake said. She seemed sincere, too, which was strange for
Weiss. She wasn’t all that powerful, not compared to Winter.
“Thank you,” Weiss said. She wasn’t sure what else to say.
**
As it turned out, it was closer to evening than either of them had entirely realized, and setting
up the camp to eat quickly turned into setting up a camp where they could stay the entire night. They
might be close to the town, but it wasn’t worth the risk of total darkness. Well, total darkness for Weiss,
anyway. It was weird for Blake to remember that her companion couldn’t see as well in the dark as she
could. “Grimm don’t really care about fire, do they?” Weiss asked. “It’s all negative emotions?”
“Yeah,” Blake said. “So be careful about that, I guess.” She was unsure what else she could say. There was a pretty good chance that Weiss was either better at fighting than Blake, or knew more
about grimm, or both. Blake had more practical knowledge of things like living in the woods, but
it wasn’t as though her childhood had been all that different from Weiss’s. It just had taken Weiss longer,
and more drastic circumstances, to run away.
“I can’t tell what my emotions are, most of the time, anyway,” Weiss said, in a way that was
probably meant to be joking. The effect was ruined by the sudden tightness around her mouth, and the
way her smile didn’t quite reach her eyes.
“This food is actually okay,” Blake said as a way of changing the subject. She had already
revealed more than she had ever intended to Weiss, over the past… had it only been a few days? “I
liked Aria.” Weiss looked as relieved at the subject change as Blake felt.
“She was pretty cool.”
Blake was surprised with her own lack of surprise at Weiss not saying anything bigoted. The
other girl had picked up one of the sticks that hadn’t caught on fire as was poking at the flame with it.
“When you make the fires—do you use your semblance?”
“Mostly,” Weiss said. “The dust cartridges in my sword alter the effect of my glyphs, slightly, but
yes, most of the energy is from my semblance.” Her voice was flat as she described her powers, and she
stared at Blake with an odd intensity.
“What kinds of dust can you use?”
“Any,” Weiss said, “of any refinement—some are harder to use than others, and take more
finesse, but this is what Myrtenaster is built for.” She smiled as she looked at the sword. “I wanted to be a
Huntress,” she said with sudden emotion. She loosened her grip on the sword. “I don’t know if that’s
possible, anymore.”
“I can’t plan that far ahead,” Blake said. “I just want us to stay alive, for now. We can think about
school later.”
The ‘we’ took her by surprise. “Uh, sorry,” she hastily amended, “I didn’t mean to—”
“—no it’s okay I didn’t—”
“—are you sure?”
“Yes.”
Blake exhaled. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed but I’m not so great at uh… people.”
“Humans?”
Blake should have been offended by the question, but like so many other questions Weiss asked
there was an unintentional innocence that stopped the offense.
“Just… people in general,” Blake said. “There aren’t so many of us… of the White Fang at that
encampment, and we all know each other pretty well. You’re nice, but you’re also new. And I don’t
know. I’ve talked more in the past few days than I have in a while.”
“Am I hurting you?" Weiss asked. “I mean, is it hard for you to talk a lot?”
“I don’t know,” Blake said. “I’ll tell you.”
“I’ll listen,” Weiss said. It almost had the ring of a promise, and the words sat with Blake
throughout the rest of their conversation and into the night. She took the first guard shift again, because of
her eyes, and because there was something about Weiss that reminded Blake of a… a bird, maybe.
Delicate, but also probably made of knives.
**
Winter had found herself a moderately not disgusting hostel of sorts to stay in. She had stayed in
both better and worse places over the course of her career in the military, but it was always good to find
someplace without, say, roaches. Or other insects. That it was currently winter in Vale likely helped with
this.
She was, for the first time since she had left Atlas, uncertain in her mission. If the news reports
she had finally managed to receive were correct (and why wouldn’t they be?), Whitley Schnee was the
new heir to the family fortune. Whitley. A pathetic excuse for a human being who cared for his sisters
even less than they cared for him, who appeared to exist as little more than a younger clone of her father.
He barely even had a semblance, at least compared to his sisters.
This was not at all what Winter had intended when she had hired Echo. She had, perhaps foolishly,
assumed that her Father would be reasonable, and that she would finally get the recognition she deserved. It seemed, however, that Jacque Schnee barely understood the family he had married into.
Nothing was as it should be, and it was all Weiss’s fault. If she had just died when she had supposed to, and if Echo had returned with a tragic tale of inevitable accidents in the woods, Winter could be in Atlas, stacking events in her favor. Instead, she was here.
And what would she do when she found Weiss, anyway? It would be easiest, still, to kill her, but she was Winter’s little sister.
Father had declared Whitley heir with no conclusive proof that Weiss was dead. He had declared Whitley heir while Winter was out of Atlas, in the part of Vale that was only mostly within range of the CCTS towers.
Had Father sent her out here so that he could get her out of the way? That was a distinct possibility, one that she ought to have realized from the beginning. In the moment, her desperate need for a pretense to go and solve the problem Weiss represented had apparently overridden her reasoning.
Winter sighed, realizing she had been standing by the door to the bathroom in her room for a good ten minutes, thinking about this.
She would go for a walk, she decided, and perhaps return to the Wayfairer’s House to see if the faunus woman was any more willing to give her the information she needed.
Outside the hostel, she found herself blinking against the glare off the snow. It was later in the morning than she had realized. A black shape suddenly burst out of the nearby forest, transforming suddenly into the figure of a man.
“You!”
Winter started. She recognized the voice and the speaker.
“Winter Schnee, what in the name of the gods are you doing here?”
Qrow halted only a few steps away from her, his weapon in sword mode.
“Looking for my sister,” Winter said blandly. “Haven’t you heard, she’s disappeared. Father was very worried.” She realized as she spoke that the false casualness of her tone would immediately make Qrow suspicious.
“I heard that you had vanished,” Qrow said. “I don’t know how much coverage you get out here, but that’s the story out of Atlas. You vanished, presumably befalling the same tragic fate as your sister.” He seemed almost entirely sober, which meant he was even more dangerously competent than usual.
“How did you find me, then? If I’ve vanished?” How would no one be suspicious of Father’s announcements? They were, as far as Winter could gather, coming out one after another, in quick succession, drastic alterations to the running of Schnee Dust Company every one of them.
“A wealthy woman in white asking questions attracts attention, especially in small towns. I was in the area, Winter. You were never exactly subtle.”
Winter snorted. “As though you are one to talk. Well, you have found me. Now what?”
“I want you to explain yourself,” he said. He coughed into his closed fist, and drank something out of a flask Winter suddenly realized he had been holding all along. Was he as much of a threat as he had been when they had last seen each other?
“I’m looking for my sister,” Winter said again. “There’s nothing else to explain.”
Qrow shook his head. “There’s something else,” he said. “There’s a woman named Echo Regent who’s gone missing. She’s on Oz’s list of mercs, and she’s not the kind of person to just vanish. And she was last seen with your sister.” He was just as hostile to her as he had been the last time they had seen each other, which did not surprise her all that much.
“Echo was a mercenary?” Winter asked, feigning surprise and hoping she could fool Qrow. “If I had known—what could she have done to my sister?”
“Cut the crap, Winter,” Qrow said. His stare hardened. “Now, I know what it’s like to have a problem sibling, believe me, but Weiss was a little girl.” Qrow was smart. He must have put the pieces together, pieces which were obvious if one knew how to look. Winter had just hoped no one would one.
“Is,” Winter corrected, despite herself. “She is almost certainly still alive, unless she somehow died of starvation quite recently.”
“Walk with me,” Qrow said, suddenly. The bottle was gone, and he held his weapon more tightly.
“Why should I?” Winter asked, raising her saber. Qrow was drunk. He was not a threat.
“I know she’s not dead, Winter,” Qrow said, “because I’ve seen her. And you know who I saw her with?”
“Who?” Winter asked, not letting go of her sword. She hid the little jump in her chest as best she could. Her plans were changing rapidly as is, perhaps if she found Weiss and explained she would understand. It would depend on who she was with.
“You have, of course, heard of the White Fang.”
Winter snorted. “Of course,” she said, “their kind and my family do not have anything resembling a good history.”
Qrow grimaced. “You know the Belladonnas? Former head of the organization, stepped down a while ago?”
Winter nodded. The few defectors Father could tolerate had given the Schnees a basic sketch of the internal structure of the White Fang before being sent off to work in the mines. They had, if memory served, not remained defectors for long, but that was not important. “What of them?”
“She hasn’t been seen outside of rallies in years,” Qrow said, “but I think your sister was with Belladonna’s daughter, Blake.”
**
“Behind you!” Weiss called, raising Myrtenaster to cast glyphs blue with ice dust at the Creep that had suddenly burst out of the denser parts of the forest. There were now three of them, concentrating their attention mostly on the faunus girl. Weiss had not been paying attention, distracted by the feeling of Blake’s hand in hers, when Blake had suddenly gone utterly still, standing and spinning around to face the first grimm that had come rushing out of the darkness in one fluid movement.
“Gods’ sake!”
One of Blake’s shadow clones exploded as the Creep that had just appeared swiped at her. Weiss suppressed a flinch at what her instincts interpreted as the certain death of her friend, especially as Blake appeared behind that Creep, whose back leg Weiss had managed to freeze to the ground, and slashed its head off by cutting first with her sword and then with its sharpened sheath. The grimm fell to the ground headless, body still squirming, before evaporating entirely.
Weiss gave herself one second to look at the two still living grimm. They were both closer to Blake, both on her right side.
“How do you feel about lightning?” Weiss asked, spinning the dust cartridges on Myrtenaster.
“You can use it?” Blake asked, dodging a strike from the second Creep. She stuck her sword through an eye and then into whatever it was grimm had for brains.
“Yes.”
The decision was made for her as the grimm suddenly changed course and began running straight at her. Spinning the lightning dust cartridge into place, she summoned purple glyphs right as it leapt at her.
She dodged out of its way, carefully avoiding the mostly nonexistent fire, as it fell out of its leap, screaming as lightning crackled from its head through its whole body. It was still screaming as it vanished in the same way its companions had.
Weiss exhaled hard, dropping her sword suddenly as she tried to keep herself upright. “I’m still not at full capacity, apparently,” she said. “Do you think it’s safe to sleep?”
“I’ll stay up,” Blake said. “I don’t mind it that much.”
Weiss looked at her gratefully. “Thank you,” she said.
She was asleep almost faster than she could pull out the bedroll-sleeping-bag-thing the women at the Wayfarer’s House had given her and crawl inside it.
Chapter 10: Witches Can Be Nice
Winter had not, initially, taken Qrow’s news all that well. He had guessed this would happen, and was not entirely surprised, but the sheer, almost exaggerated force of her reaction only strengthened his feeling that this was a fucked up sibling relationship that put his various issues with Raven utterly to shame.
“What would a Schnee—what would Weiss be doing with one of them? Was she hurt? Was she a prisoner?”
She got to that point—the point of actually asking questions, after a good five minutes of wordless sputtering and an emotion that Qrow can’t exactly get a read on.
“They were just walking. I couldn’t hear them that well from above.” Winter looked at him skeptically, which did not surprise him. She had never believed that his bird form had its limits, no matter how often he swore that he was telling the absolute truth.
It wasn’t as though bird senses were all super-human. It was mostly his eyesight that improved, and he didn’t exactly have the time to read their lips.
“Did she appear safe, at least?” Winter asked.
“I think so. They both had packs, and they should reach the next village by the morning.” Qrow had hoped that he would not have to explain this next part to Winter, hoping that she would be able to connect the dots, but she seemed totally focused on her sister and her situation. This was understandable, but also made things more difficult. “Belladonna’s daughter wasn’t wearing any insignia. Or a mask.”
“Are you implying she’s left the White Fang?” Winter asked. Her skepticism visibly built on her previous skepticism. “That sounds rather unlikely. As you said, she has not been seen outside of the rallies in almost a decade.”
“I’m implying that if she has left the White Fang, which appears to be a distinct possibility, she could herself be in grave danger. I would concern myself less with the threat she poses to your sister, and more with the threat her former companions might pose to them both.”
Winter’s expression went from unreadable to thoughtful. “It would be bizarre for her to be with any Schnee, if she were still with the Fang, but the former heiress of the company? I can’t imagine her people would be all that happy with that.”
“Do you know why your father has declared her dead?”
Winter winced. “My Father has been making… questionable… choices recently, especially with respect to our family’s fortune. I could not tell you. She is, obviously, not dead at all.”
Was that disappointment? The Winter Qrow knew would not show her emotions this nakedly. How badly had extended interactions with her father affected her? She was usually better at this.
“Yes,” Qrow said. “We need to find them before the Fang does, at the very least.”
Winter pursed her lips, staring at a point in space somewhere over Qrow’s shoulder. “I am fairly confident my sister stayed at the Wayfarer’s House in town,” she said, “but the faunus woman at the door refused to let me inside.”
“Did you call her ‘faunus woman’ to her face?” Qrow asked, biting back a sigh. Winter’s prejudices were going to be problematic, to say the least, if they ever did catch up to Weiss and Belladonna’s daughter.
“I was extremely polite. I don’t understand why she would not let me in.”
Qrow barked a laugh. “I’d say not giving information to a person’s attempted murderer is a pretty good policy.” There was no point in hiding his suspicions from her. He could defeat her in battle, and she was smart enough to know that. Especially out here, in what was pretty much his home turf.
The affected gasp was a bit much. “I would do no such thing,” she said, her voice just a little too high pitched.
“How many times do I have to say cut the crap before you actually do it?” He used this awkward pause in the conversation as an opportunity to take a quick drink. It wouldn’t do for him to be completely sober, not for this bullshit.
“What would be the purpose of my own sister’s death? As you can very well see, my little brother is next in line, not I.”
“Why would anyone assume that? Your little brother is, from all reports, just above utterly incompetent. You, on the other hand, are good at your job and know the company inside and out. And you aren’t a child, unlike either of your siblings.” He was being a little heavy-handed, maybe, but he was trying to hit what he was pretty sure what a major nerve for Winter.
Winter proved him right when she laughed and said, “Oh, why hide it if you already know? I regret my actions, for the most part, if that means anything at all in the grand scheme of things. And I no longer which to kill my sister. I want to find her, if only so that we can both appear at our father’s doorstep and point out that the rumors of our deaths have been greatly exaggerated.”
Qrow was glad they weren’t going to fight. Today was not a good day to fight.
“I’m going after them,” he said. “On the wing, I mean. You can follow me on foot, if you know the way to the next village over.” He wanted to reach the two girls first, in case Winter abruptly changed her mind again and decided it would be best to kill them both. And he wanted to talk to Weiss without her sister present. Maybe then he would get some honesty, or something resembling that at least.
“On the wing? Oh—that’s unreasonable, Qrow, and you know that.” She was getting upset. He was vaguely sympathetic. It was cold, especially if you were big and didn’t have feathers. But did not feel enough sympathy to completely change his plan. Anyway, he was still far too sober to be human properly.
“There’s a path,” was all he said before he switched shapes.
He flew away to the sound of Winter’s exasperating yelling.
**
They reached the outskirts of the village the next morning without further incident. This made Blake nervous. ‘Further incident’ was basically how forest life worked, events cascading into each other to form bigger events, and just because it looked peaceful didn’t mean there was something hiding over the horizon.
As it turned out, the ‘further incident’ was an internally caused one, not external.
“Why would you ever join the White Fang?” Weiss asked, suddenly, as they were passing around a monstrous fallen tree of some kind that blocked the path and was too tall and slick with moss and rot to climb over.
Blake stopped mid-step, taking her foot off a moss-covered stone she had intended to quickly step over. She turned to face Weiss. “I thought you could guess.” She was pretty sure they had already had this conversation, or at least ones similar enough to it that it was not entirely necessary anymore.
Or maybe it was the phrasing of the question itself that brought up the old frustrations from when the White Fang had been more focused on political action instead of attacking organizations like Schnee dust. It was a question human reporter after human reporter had asked Blake, one she had a nice canned answer to. “Because humans sucked, because we couldn’t go on like we were.” It’s how she answered Weiss, too.
“So, you joined a terrorist organization?” The incredulity and disbelief in Weiss’s voice hit Blake somewhere in the chest.
She exhaled, doing her best not to yell. Yelling would only attract Grim, and they were already treading dangerous ground with this argument. Well, proto-argument, but the way Weiss was talking it was heading in that direction. “Is it terrorism to not be confined to one island? To want to be treated equally, not just get lip service from laws that are then not enforced? Is that too much to ask?”
“Maybe not, but you do know what is terrorism? Killing people! With families! Do you think those board members the White Fang assassinated were faceless monsters?” Weiss was yelling, her hands clenched into fists. She was almost in a fighting stance. “I lost the closest thing I had to aunts and uncles whenever they died. They were my family!”
“The Fang were my family!” She decided not to tell Weiss that her father was the former head of the Fang. That would be too much for this conversation. “And you’re one to talk about faceless monsters—you don’t even think we’re people!”
“I trusted you, didn’t I?” Blake watched Weiss’s breathing speed up. Her cheeks were weirdly flushed, throwing that scar into sharp relief.
“Yes! If you hate the Fang so much, why go with me?” It was something she had been wondering this whole time, probably, even if she had never thought about it in those words. “Why trust me to save you? I could have just turned you in!”
“I had nowhere else to turn! I wake up standing in the forest, in the snow, having just killed someone, and you… you show me kindness. You didn’t hit me, or insult me, you saved me.” Weiss took a step closer to Blake, her fists still clenched. Blake noticed that she had yet to go for her sword.
She was struck again by how pale Weiss was. She wondered how much she had gone outside when she was younger, how often she had been able to leave Atlas. It might not have been that often. But that didn’t matter. “I couldn’t just leave you in the snow! I didn’t recognize you at first, and you were this—you looked so lost. I couldn’t leave you.”
“So, if you had recognized me you would have left me there?”
Adam had said something similar, three days and a subjective lifetime ago.
“No!” Blake was shouting too, now. She couldn’t help it. She needed Weiss to understand the White Fang of the last few years was not what the organization was meant to be.
“Why? It would have made things so much easier for you, and then I would be dead and you wouldn’t be homeless and…”
Blake closed the distance between them and leaned down to kiss her, cutting off the rest of her sentence. A few seconds at the most after their lips made contact, she dropped her arm where she had half-curled it around Weiss’s shoulder and backed up a step.
“I’m sorry, I…”
She took a half step back to balance herself as Weiss pulled Blake’s head down to kiss her.
Weiss’s lips were chapped from the cold, dryer than Blake expected. She had her hand on the back of Blake’s head, the other on her shoulder, over where the strap of her pack lay across it.
Blake put her hands on Weiss’s back, trying not to lose her balance. That would break the kiss.
Weiss broke the kiss, but she didn’t move away, instead pressing her face into Blake’s chest.
“I don’t mind, obviously,” she said.
“I couldn’t leave you in the snow,” Blake repeated, maybe uselessly. “I was going to leave the White Fang, anyway, I think. You just accelerated that.”
“The worst part is that you’re right, you had a point. And then you blew it by killing innocents.” Blake realized that Weiss was almost using a general you there.
“The Fang is sick now,” Blake said.
“Can I kiss you again?”
She would have been bothered by how Weiss was changing topics, but the two things were also looping through Blake’s head, tangling into each other.
“Sure,” Blake said.
This time, she opened her mouth, just a little. She’d kissed a few people before, so she had some idea of what she was doing, but still couldn’t help but accidentally knock her teeth against Weiss’s.
“Whoops,” was probably what Weiss said, though it was obviously rather muffled.
Fireworks didn’t exactly go off as they kept kissing, not that Blake expected any, but it was still nice. Really, really, nice, in a way that filled her chest with a strange warm feeling.
Blake was the one who pulled away, this time. Weiss looked up at her. “We should probably not resolve all our arguments like this,” she said.
Blake snorted a laugh. “Yeah, probably not,” she said. “We should probably continue walking.” She suddenly realized they were still right by the tree, and still carrying their packs.
“Ah, yes.” Weiss said. “That was nice.” She smiled. That warm feeling returned to Blake’s chest.
“It was,” Blake said.
They completed their detour around the tree, finding the path again.
Blake wasn’t sure how to bring up the kiss, especially since it had happened in the middle of an argument. Weiss fixed that problem by bring it up for her, about fifteen minutes later.
“I think we should do that again,” she said. “Hopefully somewhere warmer, however.”
Blake turned around again to look at her. “I’m sorry for screaming at you. Not entirely sorry about what I screamed, though.” It was a miracle they hadn’t been set on by grimm again. Maybe it was their proximity to the village.
“Thank you for not leaving me behind.”
Blake exhaled. Weiss needed to stop doing that, because it acted a pretty significant derail and Blake thought she had made it pretty clear by this point that she wasn’t going anywhere. “I’m not going to,” she said. “That would just be cruel.” It had been only what, a day, since she had been healed the Wayfarer’s House?
“I would have been fine, eventually.” The resignation in Weiss’s voice was not what Blake was expecting.
She, and the rest of the White Fang people she had spent most of her time with, had assumed the Schnee kids were pampered assholes with no real-life skills. It made sense, considering just how rich and frankly downright evil the Schnee Dust Corporation could be. What little they knew of Winter Schnee seemed to mostly confirm this. Adam, at least, had assumed she only had a place in the Atlesian military because of nepotism.
It was true that Weiss seemed to be missing many necessary skills such as camping and not getting kidnapped and getting left for dead in the middle of the forest (though that last one was not necessarily under her control). It was also true that she had a rather one-sided view of the conflict between the White Fang and Schnee Dust, though that was to be expected.
But she was also weirdly willing to listen to Blake’s point of view, at least to a point, and she appeared to have an underlying expectation that something would go terribly wrong and Blake would just up and leave. And she had never really brought up going home, had even mentioned hiding her continued from her father.
And if her sister was pursuing them, and was really behind the assassination attempt? Then that spoke to more problems in the Schnee family than Blake could have ever imagined.
At least Blake had the knowledge that even though her parents were probably incredibly disappointed with her, they didn’t want her dead. That was Adam. Which she wasn’t thinking about right now, because she was thinking about Weiss’s much bigger problem.
Also, Weiss was pretty. And nice, when they weren’t fighting, and could handle herself against grimm and could use dust to summon lighting.
“That’s not what I meant,” Blake said. Going off an instinct she wasn’t entirely sure was the right one, she asked, “Would you like to hold hands? There isn’t much path left until the village.”
“Sure,” Weiss said. Was that gratitude? That couldn’t be gratitude, why would Weiss be grateful for something as small as that?
Weiss grabbed Blake’s hand, who turned back towards the direction they were going.
“I wish I had tried to change things more,” she said. “Or thought more about what I had been taught about the faunus.”
Blake looked at her. She felt something like a realization. “You’re just a kid,” she said. She felt something stick in her throat. “I’m just a kid.”
Chapter 11
The town came into view later that day, the cleared area around the path suddenly expanding so much Weiss could see the sky again. She had missed it, she realized. There were fewer thick forests like this in Atlas.
She noticed Blake’s cat ears twitching.
“I can hear people,” Blake said. “Do you have a bow?”
“What?” The question surprised Weiss. She was also now picturing Blake in a bow.
Her companion sighed. “To cover my ears. We’re going into a human village, not a faunus one, I think. That’s the one we’ve been directed to, anyway.”
Weiss checked her pack. She might’ve had a bow in her original luggage, but that was either lost or back at the hotel she stayed at with Echo. “I don’t think so,” she said.
She watched Blake chew at her bottom lip. “Okay, then,” she said.
“Maybe Aria put one in your pack?” It seemed like something the woman would have thought of.
“That makes sense,” Blake said. “Could you go through my bag for me?” she asked. “I don’t want to drop it into the snow.”
The snow was packed harder here, but Weiss understood the sentiment. The packs were heavy, and Weiss didn’t want to put hers down until she was certain she wouldn’t have to pick it up again in a long, long time.
“Turn around,” Weiss said.
Blake turned so that she was facing away from Weiss. Weiss unzipped the front pocket of the pack, trying to be as neat as she could as she looked through it. Finally, after about a minute of searching, she found a simple black bow. It would go nicely with Blake’s hair, she thought.
“Here,” she said, zipping up the pocket. She tapped Blake on the shoulder. Blake turned, and Weiss presented her with the bow.
Blake placed in on her head so that it hid her ears from view, at least from the front. They would be less obvious from the back, Weiss hoped. Or maybe the villagers would be less awful than, say, the majority of the humans Weiss had ever interacted with.
“You look cute,” Weiss said.
Blake looked at her suspiciously. “Did I not look cute before?” she asked.
Weiss shook her head. “Of course you looked cute!” she said. “You just also look cute with the bow.”
Blake scowled. “I don’t want to be cute. I’m using the fact that I can hide my faunus traits to protect myself, something other faunus can’t easily do. Adam would kill me.”
“Then you aren’t cute!” Weiss resisted the urge to throw up her hands. “Look, I am trying here,” she said.
“Trying isn’t always good enough,” Blake said.
“I know!” Weiss said.
“How the fuck would you know?” Blake said.
Weiss recoiled, feeling almost as though Blake had slapped her. “How would I… do you remember how you found me? My sister wants me dead!”
All she had wanted to do was compliment Blake. She had spent most of their walk since they’d kissed thinking about wanting to kiss Blake again, shouldn’t that have been enough reassurance? Shouldn’t the kiss have been enough reassurance?
“What does that have to do with trying?” Blake asked. “Do you want your sister to try harder at killing you? Because that’s not what I want!”
“What do you want?”
“I want—I want things not to suck, okay?”
They were both breathing heavily, and Weiss was again surprised Blake didn’t just flee then. “Me too,” Weiss said. “Me too. And… after the golem shattered my aura—,”
“Excuse me, what?” Blake’s anger abruptly ceased and to Weiss’s surprise, she saw horror where it had been. Weiss wasn’t sure how to deal with that. No one had ever been horrified at that story before. Pity, yes, or disappointment, or Winter’s case a disparaging sort of joy, but never horror.
“I fought a giant mechanical knight as an exhibition,” Weiss said, “only a few months back.” She brought her hand up to feel the scar. The scar was not as sensitive as it had been, and she had not looked in a mirror in a few days, but she imagined that it was as red as it always was. “I lost. Badly. Afterwards, General Ironwood came to me in my rooms and told me he was sorry. That he had tried his best to stop the match, to convince my father that I was too young or too inexperienced or too something, but that it hadn’t worked.” Were those tears? If they were, Weiss studiously ignored them. “Except, if he did try, he didn’t try enough. And I didn’t try enough either, at least not enough to win.”
Blake was staring at her, and Weiss realized to her growing horror that along with the tears she was now blushing. Or at least, she assumed she was from the warmth she felt in her face. “That’s not okay,” she said. “That’s really not okay.”
“How do you mean?”
Blake’s stare became incredulous, which also made Weiss uncomfortable. Apparently, everything was making her uncomfortable in that moment. “You’re just a kid,” Blake said. She’d said that before. It hurt less to hear this time.
“So are you,” Weiss said.
“Yeah, but I chose this,” Blake said. She frowned. “And then I chose to leave it, apparently.” She sighed. “Is that why you underestimate yourself so much? Losing to the knight?”
“It’s why I have a realistic idea of my own abilities, you mean,” Weiss said.
Blake shook her head. “You killed an assassin! While drugged! I’ve said this before, but that’s… that’s not nothing. You can really fight.”
Weiss ducked her head. “I’ll work on thinking through my words more carefully,” she said. “I think you’re cute all the time, is what I should have said.”
Blake smiled. “The bow’s a necessity,” she said. “At least, ‘til we can find some humans I can trust.”
“I’m sorry you have to hide who you are to be safe,” Weiss said. “I think it’s something I’m coming to appreciate more than I ever thought I would,” she added. She had never thought being a Schnee would be dangerous, but now it meant that two very different and very powerful people were after her for completely different, and yet somehow inextricably linked reasons. “Not that it’s the same thing, I mean, but…”
“I get it,” Blake said.
“Can we hold hands again?” Weiss asked.
Blake nodded, and reached out her hand.
The village looked like something out of a movie set. In fact, Weiss realized abruptly, it had quite possibly been a movie set, if she remembered one of the many action films Whitley had forced her to sit through when they were all younger. It was one of those towns that seemed to rise suddenly out of the woods, but where the roads were better maintained and there were actual stores for food and the like. At least, that’s what she guessed from the size of it.
“Did you ever see a movie called Revenge of the Goliath?” she asked. She squinted at the Inn, which was somewhat unoriginally just named that, which sat on the far side of what was essentially a town square.
“Possibly?” Blake said. “I haven’t seen many movies.”
“Of course,” Weiss said. “Anyway, some of it might have been filmed here.”
“It does look rather picturesque, doesn’t it,” Blake said.
They lapsed into silence.
“After all of this is over,” Weiss said. “Or at least, after we find something resembling a temporary reprieve, I would like to kiss you again.”
“I think you’ve said,” Blake said. “Or I’ve said.
“Yeah,” Weiss said. She felt Blake squeeze her hand.
“So, Inn?” Blake asked.
“Yes,” Weiss said. “Inn. We should ask there. You knock or I knock?”
“You knock,” Blake said. “You look slightly less suspicious.”
“I think we both look pretty suspicious, unfortunately.” Two teenage girls with backpacks in the woods. What possible danger could either of them be in.
“That is… very true.” Blake grimaced. “Still, you do the knocking.”
“You stand back and look menacing, then,” Weiss said. “Or, alternatively, try to look as bedraggled as possible. If we both look bedraggled, then maybe they won’t turn us away.”
They didn’t have that much money. They had Blake’s scroll, of course, but that still wasn’t helpful with respect to say, paying for things.
Carefully, they walked up to the Inn, which took about ten minutes. Neither spoke in that time.
Weiss knocked.
The door opened slowly. The person who opened it, a tall, blondish girl with rather striking blue eyes and two small bear ears, had apparently done so with her knee, considering that was what she was holding it open with. In her hands, she held a large basket of laundry.
“Hi!” she said brightly. “You looking for rooms?”
“Yes,” Weiss said, a little taken aback. The girl was very tall.
“Do we have room?” the girl called back into the house.
A woman’s voice answered her. “No vacancies! We’re full up on pilgrims!”
“Sorry!” the faunus girl said. “Like mom said, we’re a bit full! Come back later?”
“Sure,” Weiss said. “Sorry to hear that.” She was too overwhelmed to actually protest as the girl leveraged the door shut before the door had already closed.
“What was that?” Blake demanded.
“I have no idea,” Weiss said. “It doesn’t seem like a very good Inn.”
“No,” Blake said.
At a loss, Weiss found herself wandering down the main street, relishing the feeling of an actual paved road.
What were they going to do? Her sister was following them, and so was Adam, and they apparently had no place to stay, and night would fall eventually. If this were a city, being caught out after dark wouldn’t be such a problem. But this wasn’t a city. This was a tiny village in the middle of nowhere, in the woods, in the snow.
And Weiss didn’t want to spend yet another night in the snow.
“What are we going to do?” she asked Blake.
“I’m not really sure,” Blake said.
As she spoke, a black shape went hurtling past them both. Could it be that bird they had seen in the woods, just as they had been setting out from the village with the Wayfarer’s House?
The shape exploded as it passed Blake, transforming from a black blur to a ragged looking man. The first thing Weiss noticed about him was his unkempt beard. The second was the bottle he was clutching in his hand.
“Who the fuck are you?” Blake demanded.
“Qrow,” the man said. He took a drink from the bottle. He was drunk, Weiss realized. She wasn’t sure if that made him more or less scary. “I want you to come with me. Both of you.”
“No,” Weiss said. “I have no reason to trust you.”
“You’ve already trusted one stranger thus far,” Qrow said. “She had more reason to hate you than I ever did.”
Weiss frowned. “Blake saved me,” she said.
“So will I, if the two of you stop being so justifiably paranoid.” He grimaced. “Your sister’s on her way here.”
“I knew that much,” Weiss said. “I just want a place for the two of us to stay.”
“I can guarantee that,” Qrow said. He pointed at the Inn.
“They’re full,” Weiss said.
“I have a way of getting what I want,” Qrow said. “Mostly.”
Weiss still didn’t trust him, and from the looks of it, Blake didn’t either.
“I don’t have to believe you,” Blake said.
“You don’t,” Qrow said. He looked at Weiss. “I’ve worked with your sister, Weiss Schnee. She’s slipping.” He turned to look at Blake. “I know who your parents are, who your father was. There are other, crazier people following you, aren’t there?”
Blake frowned. “I don’t know,” she said. “Probably. Maybe it’s arrogant to assume he would follow me.”
“You’re going to need help if either of the crazy people you’ve fled show up,” Qrow said, “and I know at least one of them will. Will you let me help you?”
“What’s in it for you?” Blake said it just before Weiss was about to.
“Let’s just say I was in the area,” he said. “Your father is the worst of his kind, I think,” he said, looking at Weiss again. She felt like she ought to make a token protest, but nothing came out of her mouth when she opened it. “Like I said, something’s off about Winter. I know her.”
“You do?”
“Yes,” he said. “So, will you two come with me?”
Weiss looked at Blake for a long moment. The other girl nodded slowly, and Weiss look back at Qrow. “Yes,” she said. “We’ll go with you.”
“Are you sure you’re full?” Qrow asked. This time, an older man had opened the door, his eyes hidden behind dark glasses. “I have the lien to pay for them both, and they don’t have anywhere really to stay.”
The man shook his head sadly, dog ears drooping. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I would take your money if I could, but we really have nowhere to put you.”
Qrow frowned, and looked back at Belladonna’s daughter and Weiss Schnee. They were looking at each other, Weiss with her head down a little and Belladonna with her arms crossed over her chest.
He shut the door.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I said I would be able to get you places, but that failed.” He looked at them both critically, trying to guess what their semblances might be. “Do either of you happen to have transformation semblances?”
Not that he’d ever met someone else who could turn into an animal, but it would certainly be a way of getting them out of the forest a little quicker.
They both shook their heads.
“That’s to be expected,” he said. He frowned. “It took you a day or two to get here, yes? From the village with the Wayfarer’s House?”
Belladonna nodded. Neither of them offered up any more information.
“Alright,” Qrow said. Man, was he doing a lot of talking today. “How would you feel about staying at a stranger’s house until your sister catches up with us?”
“Why would I want to let her catch up with me?” Weiss asked. Belladonna narrowed her eyes. Qrow reminded himself that neither girl had any reason to trust him.
“She’s your best ally against your father. Also, potentially, against Adam, since odds are he’s the one who’s going to find us first. How much have you two listened to the news?”
“Not too much,” Weiss said. “My scroll—I lost my scroll, and Blake’s doesn’t have reliable signal.” So Belladonna’s first name was Blake. Good to know.
Qrow nodded. “Here’s something you should know. Whitley Schnee is now heir to the company.”
Weiss’s eyes widened, in a way that would have been comical if not for the situation. Blake looked blank. It made sense that she wouldn’t know about the third Schnee sibling. He did not seem to have much of a presence outside of Atlas, not until recently.
“Whitley?” Weiss asked. “He’s the least… the least everything of the three of us. If Father wants the company to grow stronger, why would he choose him?”
“I think your sister’s little schemes played right into his hands,” Qrow said. “But I’m not one for politics. Let me see about that housing. Stay here.”
If he remembered this village correctly, which he probably did, because he knew Vale far better than he wanted to, there was a family here who had an almost Romantic respect for Hunters, even if they weren’t terribly capable warriors themselves.
Maybe he would have luck there?
It was a small village, to be sure, and darkness was fast encroaching, so people weren’t exactly out and about, but Qrow didn’t have any real issues with just walking up to one of the houses, a two-story affair that was in okay repair, and knocking on the front door.
A dark-haired, pale-faced man opened it. Qrow noticed his pupils were oddly shaped. “Hello?” the man asked, rather than greeted. “Do you have any idea what time it is? You should be inside.”
“I’m looking for the Arc family,” Qrow said. “Do they live around here?”
The man looked at Qrow skeptically. “Oh, them? They live in the blue house.” He shut the door with a little more force than he needed to.
“Well, then,” Qrow said. He looked back to see Weiss and Blake standing next to each other, talking. They weren’t loud enough for him to hear.
They quitted as he approached.
“Hey,” he said, “would you be alright with staying with strangers?”
It was still getting darker.
“I don’t know if we have much choice,” Weiss said.
Blake nodded.
She was not talkative, that one. At least not with Qrow.
“Okay,” Qrow said, “we’re off to meet the Arcs.”
“The Arcs?” Weiss asked. “You say the name like we should know it.”
“You shouldn’t,” Qrow said.
He just hoped that saving someone’s family from a grim attack was enough of a favor to be returned with letting to fugitives stay for a few days.
“I thought this was a human village,” Blake said. “But all three of the residents we’ve met have been faunus.”
Qrow shrugged. “It’s in the small villages on the edge of the wild where shit like that doesn’t matter,” he said. “Or maybe it does, but you couldn’t see it if you’re not a local.”
Blake touched her bow. They weren’t the best disguise if you already knew the ears were there.
“Are the Arcs human or faunus?” Weiss asked.
“Human,” Qrow said. “Which might explain that man’s hostility.”
Blake dropped her hand from her bow. “I’m keeping this on,” she said. “Just in case.”
Qrow nodded.
“Let’s go, before we lose even more daylight.”
He set off down one of the poorly lit roads fanning out from the center of town, hoping, for once, that he would be followed.
Chapter 12
“How do you know this family?” Weiss asked.
She and Blake were following Qrow with just enough distance that they could get a running start if they needed to. Or at least, that was Weiss’s reason.
“I saved their house from a King Taijitu,” Qrow said. “A few years ago.”
“Okay,” Weiss said. “So that means they’ll let us stay at their house?”
There was some dubious logic to that, though a small village in the middle of the woods was so far out of Weiss’s realm of experience that she couldn’t be sure. There was always the possibility that this Qrow person was just leading them to their doom, though he made himself slightly more trustworthy to her by explicitly siding with her against Winter.
He could have only gotten that information from Winter herself, unless he had witnessed Weiss’s killing Echo, but his reaction to her would probably have been different if that were the case.
“I hope so,” Qrow said. “If all else fails, I can emotionally blackmail them.”
Fair enough.
The house Qrow led them to was small, blue, and in decent repair. Not the kind of place Weiss would have ever wanted to spend the night in, before.
Now, what little sun filtered through the trees could barely light their way, and Weiss was of half a mind to ask Blake for help guiding her.
Like with the Inn and the gruff man, Qrow was the one to knock.
Weiss hung back at the bottom of the steps. Blake stayed with her.
“I hope they don’t recognize me,” Weiss said.
“There’s a pretty good chance they might not, out here,” Blake said. She grabbed Weiss’s hand and squeezed it gently.
Weiss smiled at her. “You recognized me,” she asked, the anxiety returning. “What if they hate me?”
“I was technically at war with you,” Blake said. “I don’t think they are. Unless your family makes a habit of pissing off the residents of small towns?”
Weiss shook her head. “Not this far South, anyway.”
“I’m not gonna ask.”
She heard Qrow knock on the door again.
This time, it opened.
“Hello,” a man said. Weiss could not see him easily from where she was, but his voice sounded timid. “I recognize you.”
“I saved your family a few years back.”
“Right!”
Silence.
“Would you do something in return?”
“What kind of something?”
Weiss realized that the man’s view was also blocked by Qrow.
Qrow stepped away from the door.
“Hi,” Weiss said, hoping she was still mostly in shadow.
“These two need some place to stay for the night,” Qrow said. “It’s getting darker.”
“I can see that,” the man said.
“The alternative for you not letting them stay is them probably getting eaten by Grim,” Qrow said.
Weiss resisted the urge to say that she could defend herself just fine. That would sort of defeat the point of getting them somewhere to sleep.
“How did you get out here?” the man asked.
“Our guide died and this man found us,” Weiss said. This was not, in fact, a lie. Qrow looked at her quickly, his face too shadowed for her to read. “He said he’d saved your life, and that you’d help us.” She tried to sound pitiful. It hurt, a little, because she had some pride left, after everything, but she’d already spent a night out in the cold, and for all she knew her aura still hadn’t exactly stabilized.
“I suppose,” he said, turning to look back into the house. “I’m going to have to ask my wife,” he said. “Please, give me a moment.”
He closed the door.
Qrow walked down the steps and stood between Weiss and Blake, facing out into the darkness. “I’m sorry there’s not more I can do,” he said.
“Where are you going to stay?” Weiss asked. She realized that he hadn’t even tried to negotiate a place for himself.
“Don’t worry,” Qrow said, “Grimm don’t care about birds.”
“Oh.”
The man’s wife, introduced herself as Marie-Anne, turned out to be much less weirdly afraid of Qrow than her husband.
“Don’t mind Jean-Luc,” she said as she led Weiss into the house. Blake trailed after, leaving Qrow standing by the door.
The man was human. That much was obvious. Or, at least, if he wasn’t, he was even better at passing as human than Ilia ever had been, and considering he knew who Blake’s parents were, it made no sense for him to hide himself if he were a faunus. So, he was human.
“Grimm don’t care about birds” implied he didn’t think of himself as such.
And it wasn’t the subtle but sharp distinction between faunus and human, either.
He just thought of himself as something else.
No wonder Blake mistrusted him slightly less than she did most adult humans.
The house itself was nice, especially compared to her most recent sleeping situation. And it would do Weiss good to be somewhere where her aura didn’t have to constantly fight the cold.
The first room Blake saw was a sort of combination kitchen/living room/front hallway, where the different areas were mostly defined by what kind of floor they had. There was a screen in the living room, and glass double doors leading out to a porch beyond it.
Stairs went up into a dark and cramped second floor.
The floor in the front hall, just before the stairs, was strewn with at least six or seven pairs of snow boots, from what Blake could see, along with what could have been animal hair and a pile of jackets in the corner farthest from where the floor became the kitchen tiles.
Weiss appeared to be in the middle of a crisis, or at least that’s how Blake interpreted her suddenly freezing, halting the small talk conversation she had been having with Marie-Anne, which Blake had been tuning out.
“Father would have thrown a fit,” she said, “over the state of the floor.”
“Your dad sounds fun to be around,” Blake said, hoping Weiss would get her sarcasm.
Weiss shrugged. The movement was more awkward than Blake was used to seeing from her. “Yeah,” she said quietly. “My apologies,” she said, turning back to Marie-Anne. “I mean no offense. I am very tired.”
“No offense taken,” their host said with a laugh. “I’ve long been at peace with the state of my house. Too many little ones running around.”
“How many children do you have?” Blake asked. Mostly, she wanted to brace herself for the noise. Presumably, the only reason the house wasn’t a small explosion of noise now was because they were already asleep.
“Eight,” Marie-Anne said. “My eldest, Jaune, is about your age I think.” She looked towards the upstairs. “How do you feel about mattresses in the living room?” she finally asked. “We don’t have much space left upstairs.”
“That’s fine,” Blake said. She looked at Weiss, who nodded.
“I just want somewhere that isn’t the forest floor,” Weiss said.
“I’ll get the cots, then,” the woman said. She sighed. “You’re only here because your friend saved Jean-Luc and I from a Goliath a long, long time ago. Don’t make a mess.”
Blake would have offered to help with the set-up, but Marie-Anne waved her off. “I’ll make Jean-Luc clean it up tomorrow,” she said, which didn’t help much at all in the way of making Blake feel better about just standing around.
The living room was dark. Marie-Anne and Jean-Luc had both gone to bed after setting up the cots and giving basic directions (this door was to the one bathroom, that to the basement, they were not to take any food out of the fridge), leaving Weiss and Blake alone.
“I’m going to see if there’s anything I can change into to sleep in in my pack,” Weiss said. It was a small thing, compared to what else she had lost to Winter’s plan, but she had realized as she prepared for bed that she had not really changed clothing in days. Changing was difficult in the woods, and she had felt too sick and gross while at the Wayfarer’s House to even contemplate changing.
Presumably Blake was used to it, and it wasn’t as though Weiss smelled, at least not to her knowledge, but still her skin crawled at the thought of it.
The odds of being able to shower or bathe were still fairly small, but at least she could take advantage of the opportunity to wear some of the clothes she had been given.
“Could you turn around?” she asked Blake. “I need to change.”
“It’s dark,” Blake said. She was already lying on her cot, so instead of turning around she just pulled her blanket over her head.
“And you have night vision,” Weiss said, changing into loose trousers and a too-big shirt she would not have been caught dead in, were she still in Atlas.
“Do you have horrible scarring or something?” Blake asked, her voice muffled by the blanket.
“Nothing clothes could cover,” Weiss said. “I was generally good enough not to be hurt, even if my aura broke.”
“Where did you change, generally?”
“The bathroom. My room. In private.” It was an odd question, but Weiss supposed it made sense for a group of faunus living out in the woods to be more comfortable with nudity.
“We didn’t have that much privacy in the camp,” Blake said. “Not that I was fully nude around anyone that often but—there’s only so much space, you know?”
Weiss couldn’t imagine growing up surrounded by people, not to that degree.
“I was usually alone,” Weiss said. “I avoided my brother. I spent most of my time with Klein or Winter, and that was mostly training.”
Perhaps it was something about the darkness, but she suddenly remembered something Winter had said after a training session had gone south, years and years ago. This is how you’ll get out of here. Winter hadn’t said that in a long time.
“Your brother must be terrible,” Blake said, “if you prefer him to the person who tried to kill you.”
Weiss, now finished changing, lay down on her cot. “You can pull the blanket off your head now,” she said. “She wasn’t always like that.”
“Are you sure?” Blake asked. Her eyes seemed to shine in the dim light. “Or were you just less good at seeing what was wrong?”
“I don’t know,” Weiss said. “It might be both.”
“I understand,” Blake said. She yawned suddenly, the action taking even her unawares. “I should sleep,” she said. “We don’t need anyone on watch tonight.”
“Yeah,” Weiss said. That didn’t seem right, somehow. “Good night.”
Weiss did not fall asleep easily.
Weiss woke up to moonlight in her eyes. She hadn’t noticed this in the darkness, but the curtains on the window were pulled back.
Blake was sound asleep on her cot, one arm under her head and the other curled under her blanket.
Weiss stood to close the curtains. She realized, moments before she touched them, that this could make noise. She dropped her hand and turned with aching slowness. She was unsure whether the carpeted floor beneath her bare feet could creak, but no matter how unlikely it was she did not want to risk it. The chances of Marie-Anne coming downstairs at a noise were miniscule, she reasoned, but she had grown up in an echoing, often empty mansion where drawing her father’s attention to herself was often the best way to ruin everything.
Carefully, she returned to her cot, and sat cross-legged on top of the blanket.
“You alright?”
Weiss started at the sound. “Blake?” she asked.
“Yeah,” she said. “I wake up sometimes in the night. It’s no big deal.” She sat up, the blanket bunched around her legs. Her hair hung flat against her, a dark contrast to her skin.
“The light woke me up,” Weiss said. “I prefer to sleep in the dark.”
Darkness, at least in her room, if not outside, meant that no one had opened the door.
“Eight children, huh,” Blake said. It sounded almost as though she were speaking to herself. It did remind Weiss of what Marie-Anne had said, however.
“Apparently,” she said. “That must make breakfast interesting. Do you think any of them are our age?”
She didn’t spend that much time around people her own age. Most of her schooling had been with private tutors, and while Whitely technically counted, he was also Whitely.
“Maybe?” Blake shrugged. She sighed, and stretched. Her shirt rode up a little, and her dark clothes contrasted with the pale skin of her stomach, must like her hair had against her face. She looked, Weiss thought, kind of bedraggled, which was probably mostly the bedhead. Which seemed appropriate, considering everything. She certainly didn’t feel all that together herself.
It would have been creepy if Blake was unimpeachably perfect in the early morning moonlight. That would have reminded Weiss too much of Winter.
“I know it’s late,” Weiss said, trying to figure out the words she wanted to use to ask this in advance, but failing pretty hard, “but how do you feel about hugs?”
She knew how Blake felt about hand-holding and kissing, obviously, but right then, in the darkness that wasn’t quite dark enough for sleep, Weiss was mostly just wondering what it would be like to be held for a while.
“I’m okay with them,” Blake said. “Adam was never that touchy-feely though.”
Weiss could see that glow in her eyes, again. Maybe it was a secondary cat trait, to go with the ears. “Could you,” she started to ask, the words sticking in her throat, “could we hug? Now? I’m afraid of waking the people upstairs if I try to close the curtains.” Saying the fear out loud made it seem more ridiculous, but she still couldn’t bring herself to stand up. And the two things weren’t really connected, but she hoped it served as sufficient explanation for why she wasn’t immediately going back to sleep.
“Yeah,” Blake said.
To Weiss’s surprised, Blake moved from her cot to Weiss’s, wrapping her arms around the other girl’s shoulders from behind. “Hey,” Weiss said, as Blake grabbed her hand.
“Hey,” Blake said.
At some point, they went from sitting next to each other to lying next to each other on Weiss’s cot, Blake’s arms wrapped around Weiss’s sternum.
It was suddenly a lot easier to fall asleep.
They both ended up waking up at dawn, the winter sunlight streaming in through the window.
Blake could hear footsteps upstairs, along with muttered voices.
“Do you think we should go to the kitchen?” Weiss asked. She had changed into one of the sets of clothes Aria and Naya had given them.
“I’m not sure,” Blake said. “I haven’t spent that much time at other people’s houses.”
As it turned out, Marie-Anne sent Jean-Luc too fetch them. “We’ll put the bedthings away,” he said. “Don’t worry.”
The kitchen was chaotic enough that it took effort for Blake not to cover her ears. That would give them away.
The smaller children did not introduce themselves, instead either to stare at Blake and Weiss from a safe distance.
The first of them Arcs who actually approached them was a blond boy who seemed incapable of speaking without radiating awkward nervousness in every direction.
“Hi,” he said. The kitchen table was, unsurprisingly, on the biggish side, and he had walked around it to approach them.
Blake did not look up from her cereal.
Weiss did look up, but did not say anything.
He sat, staring at his own bowl. “My name is Jaune,” he said, trying again.
Blake looked over at Weiss. She had grown up in Atlas. She must be good at small talk.
It was as though a bubble of silence had enveloped them. Well, not exactly—she could still hear the chatter of Jaune’s seven sisters—but no one seemed to want to talk to either Jaune nor the two of them.
“Mom said you would just be here for the night,” he said.
Blake wondered how someone her age could be this awkward.
Weiss broke first. “Yes, we just needed to stay out of the woods,” she said. “That’s where we’ve been, the last few days.”
“Oh,” Jaune said. “Why? Have you been camping?”
Blake found herself stifling laughter. “I guess that’s the reasonable conclusion,” she said, despite herself. “But no, we’re actually being chased by crazy people out to kill us.”
It still made her wince internally to characterize Adam like that, but she was distracted by the look of dawning horror on Jaune’s face.
“That’s not…good,” he said. “I have a sword?”
“I also have a sword,” Weiss said. “It’s with my stuff. It’s called Myrtenaster. I can also use it to shoot fire.”
“Oh,” Jaune said. He looked a little crestfallen. “Mine can’t do that.”
“It’s okay,” Weiss said awkwardly.
Blake had to hide another laugh.
“Do you guys hate me?” Jaune blurted after some silence.
“I, at least, don’t,” Blake said. “I just also barely know you. And you assumed we were camping.”
Jaune shrugged uncomfortably. “I… yeah that was kind of stupid, wasn’t it,” he said. He sighed. “Okay, trying again. I can’t be much help, but I can petition my parents if you guys need to stay another night. You’re will Qrow Branwen, right?”
“Yes.”
Jaune nodded. “I only remembered him when he showed up last night. He saved me from a King Taijitu when I was very little.”
“You were the one he saved? Not the whole family?”
Another uncomfortable shrug. “I guess I had a habit of wandering off when I was younger?” A nervous laugh that seemed a lot less insincere than some other nervous laughs Blake had heard, mostly from Adam. Less so recently. He had traded his old personality for ruthlessness in all respect a while before.
“I’m surprised you’re still alive,” Blake said. It was supposed to come out as a joke. It didn’t, really.
“There’s a reason families out here have so many kids,” Jaune said. That, too, sounded like a not-quite a joke.
Breakfast ended about as awkwardly as it began, but Blake found herself warming slightly to Jaune.
There was a small incident while they were washing dishes, Blake having volunteered herself and Weiss to help in an attempt to make herself feel slightly less like a freeloader, and, she admitted to herself, to try and buck some unconscious stereotypes she imaged the Arc adults might hold. What happened was, Jaune tried to flirt with Weiss.
It was mostly funny—the attempt was so incompetent that Blake found it more endearing than awkward—and she had to admit that Weiss flatly stating, “I’m already seeing someone,” while looking at her significantly gave her that same warmth in her chest.
“Oh, right,” was all Jaune said, and it never came up again.
There was a very good chance they were the first people he had met who wasn’t from his village. It was also verbal confirmation that Weiss considered the Thing she and Blake had something significant.
Once they were alone, Blake decided, she was going to ask Weiss if she could kiss her.
“You said you can summon fire?” Jaune asked.
Marie-Anne had, to put it nicely, kicked them out of the house for the day, citing lack of space due to eight children.
Which was probably fair? Weiss wasn’t sure, but she wasn’t going to argue. Qrow had rather strongly implied that Winter was going to show up sometime during the day, and the idea of the Arcs getting hurt on her account was sort of upsetting.
Jaune had followed them outside. He seemed to be mostly harmless, despite his unbearable awkwardness, so Weiss didn’t mind too much.
Also, he seemed like someone who would be overly wowed by her abilities, which might be amusing. Praise from him would carry a lot less complicated baggage than it would from Weiss, because Weiss was pretty sure he couldn’t fight.
“Yes,” she said. She twirled the dust cartridges on Myrtenaster. Winter would have disapproved of showing off like this, which was maybe why she was doing it. She looked around at the crowded houses, and the people who were starting to leave their houses for the day.
“I can’t do fire,” she said, finally, “not with so many people around. But I can do something else.”
She hadn’t done this since leaving the mansion, but that didn’t pose too much of a problem. It was one of her favorite tactics.
Still wanting to show off a little, she rushed right at Jean, faster than he could move out of the way.
“Hey, what the--?”
Just before she ran smack into him, she jumped, somersaulting onto a black glyph she summoned just above his head.
She bounced between glyphs twice, moving from the air above Jaune to the air above Blake. She fell in a controlled tumble and landed on her feet.
Blake laughed, a delighted sound that made Weiss feel weirdly giddy. “That was so cool!” she said. She pulled Weiss into a hug.
Her grip tightened. “Hey, Weiss,” she whispered, “I hear something.”
“Oh,” Weiss said. Fuck.
They let go of each other. Weiss turned around to face where Blake was looking.
“Winter?” she called, her heart in her throat.
“Sorry, princess,” a vaguely familiar voice said, stepping from behind a house. “Not quite.”
Chapter 13
Adam Taurus stood in the morning sunlight, his face hidden by a familiar mask.
“Princess, you’ve got something of mine.”
Blake did not hiss at him, or put her arm protectively around Weiss. Instead, she unsheathed Gambol Shroud and hid her nausea as best she could.
“Yours?” Weiss said. Her voice had taken on a disdainful quality.
She still had Myrtenaster out.
“Jaune, run!”
There was no explosion, but their might have been. Adam darted at Weiss, bypassing Blake entirely.
A white glyph appeared inches in front of her. He slammed through it, and she vaulted backwards, jumping onto a black glyph to launch herself further away.
Blake took the opportunity to hurl herself at Adam. It was not the best choice, strategically, but something had flipped in her brain when he had appeared. She wasn’t thinking, at least not as much as she should have been.
Adam’s aura flared as he unsheathed his sword. “I’d suggest you not do that,” he said, but her first blow, with the sword, landed, slashing across his upper arm. Her sheath, on the other hand, he knocked away easily, leaving her vulnerable.
He sliced at her, and Blake fled, leaving behind a copy for him to skewer.
Weiss landed next to her. “I thought he was a leader of the White Fang?” she asked.
“He is,” Blake said, unsure of the relevance of this fact.
“Why is he chasing you?”
“I don’t like losing what’s mine,” Adam said, suddenly behind her.
“Is that how it always was?” Blake asked. She felt more hurt by that than she wanted to admit. Sure, Adam had always been a little too harsh, or a little too fanatical, but he had the closest thing she had to a best friend for a long time.
“You were great, Blake,” Adam said, “but your father’s drifted so far away that you’re not even useful anymore, and I don’t take betrayal well.”
He lunged at her again. As she dodged, he turned to Weiss. “What,” he said, “you’re not kill me for touching your pet?”
“That’s not how this—” Weiss began, before interrupting herself. “You don’t understand anything!”
“I understand enough,” Adam said. “For example, I know that eventually that fancy dust in your sword is going to run out, and then where will you be, Princess?”
Blake took the opportunity to slice at him with both her sword and sheath, but Adam dodged away, just one step out of reach. He turned to look at her. She wished he was not wearing the mask.
“If only you’d just killed her,” Adam said. His voice a kind of mocking disappointment that hit Blake worse than a blow. “You would have been so good, then.”
“We’re not murderers!” Blake shouted. “It would just prove them right about the White Fang!”
“What’s wrong with that?” Adam asked. “You don’t know anything,” he said. “Or do you just want to stay stuck on Menagerie the rest of your life, be a good little kitten?”
“It’s not like that!” Weiss said.
Blake and Adam both turned to look at her. She stared at Adam. She could not have been more different than that first time Blake saw her, even though they were once more in the snow. “She saved my life. You wanted to kill me, just like my sister. I used to think that everyone in the White Fang—maybe even every faunus—was like the people who attacked us.” Weiss inhaled, exhaled, the cartridges on her weapon spinning. “I was wrong.”
Blake realized that Weiss’s hand that was holding Myrtenaster was shaking.
“Are you sure about that?” Adam asked. He turned back to Blake. “I’ve changed my mind,” he said. “If you kill her, you can come back.” He stepped closer, within arm’s reach.
When he tried to touch her face, Blake flinched away.
He backed away a few steps. His sword glowed the same it did when he unsheathed it. “Well,” he said, “if that’s the case… don’t worry, Princess, I’ll get you next.”
“No!”
Weiss’s scream sounded less like a word and more like something had been torn out of her mouth. Slashing a spot in the air, she tore a hole in the space between Blake and Adam.
The colorless image a massive, armored hand holding a heavy blade appeared between them. It blocked Adam’s strike, dissolving as he turned back towards Weiss, shocked.
“What the?” Adam asked.
“Now, if that isn’t impressive.”
Blake did not recognize the woman who spoke. She was tall, with hair a similar color to Weiss’s. She looked like she could kill Blake with a disapproving stare.
“What the hell is going on?” she asked.
Adam froze. “What did I do to deserve two Schnees?” he asked, but the threat had gone out of his voice.
In that time, Blake had fled, and now stood next to Weiss again.
“What was that?” she whispered, almost too low for her to hear. “The arm and the sword?”
“I think I just summoned,” Weiss said. “I did not know I could do that.” She surprised Blake by grabbing her by the arm and dragging her towards the porch of one of the nearby houses. “Here,” she said, “we can hide by the steps.”
Adam was facing away from them, looking at Winter.
“What are you doing with my sister?” Winter demanded.
“I’m dealing with a personal issue. She’s not important. You can take her and leave.”
Blake wished she could see his face. She was surprised he wasn’t just immediately attacking Winter, but perhaps even he knew that that would mean suicide.
Winter shook her head. Her icy glare was not even directed at Blake, and she felt herself shrink. This was the woman who wanted Weiss did? It said something great about her that she was still alive, despite all that. “I wouldn’t call yourself Miss Belladonna’s family if I were you. How would her father feel about that?”
Weiss looked at Blake questioningly. Blake shook her head.
She watched Weiss fiddle with the dust cannisters on Myrtenaster. What was she doing? It didn’t really seem like the time.
“This is a family matter,” Adam said, ignoring Winter. “It’s not your concern.”
“This more than just a family quarrel.” Winter said. “You were about to kill her until my sister intervened.” She drew her own weapon, a grim look on her face. “Give me one reason not to kill you right now and make my family’s life just that much easier.”
“Your family?” Adam asked. To Blake’s surprise, he laughed. “Your family says you’re dead, sweetheart.”
Winter paled. “How did you hear about that?” she asked.
“Mr. Schnee was very sad to announce the suspected deaths of both his daughters,” Adam said. He turned back around. It didn’t take him that long to see them—the porch steps weren’t so much a hiding place as a barrier, someplace they could crawl under if they were truly desperate. “There you are,” he said.
“I’m not going to let you touch her,” Weiss said. She had summoned once. She could do it again, and better this time. “Either of you.” She didn’t trust Winter, no matter what Qrow might have said, or how she was acting now. She had no reason to.
“Don’t make promises you can’t keep,” Adam said. “Now, get the fuck out of my way.”
“No,” Weiss said. “I just realized I have more fire dust left than I thought.”
A burst of blame hit Adam square in the chest. The flames themselves slid off his aura, but he was still knocked back, surprised. The now snowless ground around him, unprotected from dust-created flame, burned for a few moments before the water from the snow put the flame out.
Weiss would only have a couple seconds before he recovered. There was no way she could kill him, but she could at the very least try to disable him. But how could she do that?
She summoned the same glyph she had used on the knight, not so long ago. He, however, unlike it, could speak.
“Is that all you’ve got?” he asked.
As it turned out, that was not a question she had to answer herself.
The point of Winter’s sword appeared through his chest. He screamed, a wild, pained sound and his eyes widened through the mask. “Do you know what you’ve done?” he asked, staring at Weiss. “Blake, please—”
He collapsed as Winter removed the blade. Her face was drawn and unreadable. “This has been a long time coming,” she said.
His death felt strange to Weiss. She didn’t remember killing Echo, not really, just the sight of her body slumped on the ground.
She felt Blake grab her hand hard enough to hurt. She did not lower Myrtenaster.
“I’m sorry, little sister,” Winter said. The words looked as though they pained her to say. “It’s my fault you’re here.”
“Are you going to try to kill me?” Weiss asked. Winter frowned. She would have stepped closer, if not for the corpse lying between them.
“It’s a reasonable question,” Blake said. She glared at Winter. “Do you know how I found her?”
Winter shook her head. She was too tired to be shocked.
“She was sick,” she said. “If we hadn’t found a Mother with a healing aura—I don’t know.”
“Sick? How could she be sick, her aura should have—”
“How long were you outside before I found you, Weiss.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t remember. Because I was drugged.”
“I told her to make it clean,” Winter said. Her gaze was fixed on Weiss’s face. “Gods, what was I thinking.”
“You weren’t, is the problem.”
“Qrow?”
“Hey,” Qrow said. He had appeared a few feet behind Winter. “I’ve been watching. I’m glad I didn’t have to intervene.” He sighed, looking at Adam’s body. “This is one of those things we should tell your father about at some point, Blake.”
“Yeah,” Blake said. “Along with the High Leader. Adam was important.” More important than maybe he should have been.
“You might’ve just made him a martyr, Winter,” Qrow said. He pulled his flask out of pocket. “But that’s for later. For the moment.” He took a swig. “For the moment, we should go make sure that blond kid’s okay.”
“Jaune,” Weiss said. She had forgotten about him. “I told him to run.”
Qrow nodded. “One of the villagers must have betrayed you,” he said. “But it doesn’t matter who, now.” He looked at Blake. “What are you going to do, now?”
“Well, I’m not letting Weiss go with her sister alone,” Blake said. She didn’t let go of Weiss’s hand. She looked directly at Winter. “There’s no reason for her to trust you.”
“Yeah,” Weiss said. She looked over at Blake. “The last few days have been rough.” She looked down at Adam. “Gods.”
She looked away quickly. She hoped she wouldn’t have to deal with the body. She had dealt with a lot of things, recently.
Weiss only realized a sort of spell had come over the four of them when Jaune came running, breaking it. He stopped short at Adam’s body, staring. “What happened?” he asked.
“He died,” Weiss said.
“Did you… kill him?” he asked. He hugged his arms to himself. He was looking at Weiss. He barely looked at Winter.
“No,” Weiss said. “She did. I helped.”
He swallowed, licking his lips nervously. “Was he the person who wanted to kill you?” he asked Blake.
“Yes,” she said.
“Okay,” he said. He exhaled. “He’s hurt a lot of people?”
It was Qrow who answered him that time. “Yes,” he said. “He was a bastard.”
“He wasn’t, once,” Blake said.
She abruptly let go of Weiss’s hand, kneeling next to Adam. Weiss backed away, unsure how to respond.
“You could have been so much,” Blake told Adam’s corpse. “But now you’re just dead.”
“We have to go,” Qrow said. He nodded to Jaune. “Tell your parents that I am thankful for their help, and I’m sorry for disturbing your day like this.”
Jaune nodded wordlessly and bolted.
“What are we going to do about him?” Weiss asked. “We can’t just leave his body in the middle of the village. It’ll attract animals. Or worse.”
She was pretty sure that Grim were not drawn by corpses, but she didn’t want to risk the village on that belief.
“I think we should bring it back to the camp,” Blake said, though she didn’t really believe it. She did not want to go back, it just sounded like something she was supposed to say.
“Let’s have this conversation at Winter’s airship,” Qrow said. He gestured towards Adam. “Would you do the honors?”
Winter rolled her eyes. “You’ll owe me for this,” she said. She slung Adam’s body over her shoulder like a sack of potatoes. Not that she had ever carried one of those, Weiss thought.
“Where is your airship?” Blake asked. “I didn’t hear anything arrive.”
“In a clearing not far from here,” Winter said. “I walked the rest of the way.” She made this sound like a terrible imposition.
“You’ll have to lead the way,” Qrow said. “I have a terrible sense of direction as a bird, and I doubt the lovely people of this village want us to stay any longer.
“How is this different from every other time we’ve worked together?” Winter asked.
She walked quickly, the weight of the body barely slowing her down. Even so, it took them about ten minutes to leave the village and enter the forest, the trees now blocking out most of the light.
“I don’t know if I’ll miss this place,” Blake said.
“Are you kidding?” Weiss asked. She walked with Blake and Qrow between her and Winter. “Nothing good’s happened here. Except maybe meeting Jaune.” Not being to say farewell to him or his family felt odd—they had, after all, slept in that house—but there was no way of knowing how the parents would now react to the two of them.
Adam’s presence counted, Weiss was pretty sure, as putting their son in danger.
“I lived here, for a while. Well, not here, but around here. And I won’t be able to stay.”
Weiss hurried her pace for a few steps so she was walking next to Blake. “Hey,” she said. “You promised you wouldn’t leave me, and that goes two ways.”
“Thank you,” Blake said. “Are you going to go back with your sister?”
“I don’t know,” Weiss said. “Guess it depends on what she says.”
“I won’t let her kill you.”
“I don’t know if you could stop her if she tried.”
They arrived at Winter’s airship.
“What has your pilot been doing this whole time?” Weiss asked. It was the first thing she’d said to Winter that wasn’t immediately related to the corpse, she realized.
Winter raised an eyebrow at Weiss as she remotely opened the ‘ship’s door. “Pilot?” she asked. “I can fly my own airships, thank you.”
“You generally don’t, though,” Weiss said.
Winter grimaced. “Father didn’t want anyone else to know about this,” he said. “Or so he told me. As it turns out, he had ulterior motives for sending me on this hunt.”
“Like you did,” Weiss said. “Don’t think I’ll forget about that.”
Qrow stepped between the sisters. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I can kill her if she causes any problems.”
That was more comforting than it should have been.
“You have anywhere cold to stow the body?” Qrow asked Winter.
The ship had one smallish passenger area.
“Cargo hold,” Winter said. “I’ll just not turn the heating on.”
The ship lifted off from the clearing.
“Where are we heading?” Qrow asked. He left Weiss and Blake in the cabin.
“Somewhere I can burn this body without it attracting any attention, and then Weiss and I need to have a little chat with my father.”
“This is not going to end well.”
“You are eternally optimistic about everything.”
“Wait until I get a few more drinks in me. Then I’ll really feel good about this plan you have.”
They lapsed into silence as Winter flew them ever northward.
Chapter 14
“So, what do you want to do with it?” Qrow asked her. He had not sat the whole trip, choosing instead to lean against the wall of the cockpit, staring at her.
“The body?”
He had yet to say anything about her piloting abilities, likely because they were completely beyond rebuke.
“Yeah,” he said. He took a drink from his flask.
“Does that thing ever run out?” she asked.
He peered within its depths. “It just did,” he said. “Damn.”
Winter sighed. “Please be somewhat presentable when we encounter my father.”
“Don’t you want to stab him in the gut? You don’t really need to be elegant for that.”
She would have taken that as an insult, had anyone else said it. But this was Qrow, and he viewed anything beyond basic aesthetic coherence (and occasionally, not even that) as too much unnecessary effort. “Some of us prefer looking our best when dealing with family.”
“I think most people don’t have Jacques Schnee as their dad.”
“That is very true. Those people are rather lucky.”
How quickly her opinion had soured. Winter remembered, with growing embarrassment, the desperation she had felt for so long. Would that her father notice her for once, not her little sister or awful brother. The company had seemed so important. And continued to seem important, even after her conversation with Qrow back in the village with the Wayfarer’s House.
It had taken the long walk through the woods, the contemplation that only came with utter quiet, for her to realize the full scope of what she had done. She had remembered why she trained Weiss in the first place.
Killing Adam Taurus was nowhere near enough to make up for what she had done.
Winter watched Qrow watch her. “You would absolutely hate running a company,” he said. “Can you imagine being stuck up there all the time?” He shuddered. “Just being in Atlas makes me itch, at least in the parts you come from. Too damn clean. Starts to eat at you from the inside.”
“You’re more right than you know,” Winter said. “We should drop somewhere in the woods, before we leave Vale. Burn it. Bury what’s left. Give Blake some time to mourn.”
“That sounds reasonable,” Qrow said. “It’s good to have you back, Winter.” He actually smiled, then looked mournfully at his flask again. “You sure you don’t have anything on this ship?” he asked.
“I wasn’t exactly planning a party when I came down here,” Winter said. “And what do you mean, back?”
She had some inkling. “You’re like how you were when we worked together,” he said. “You remember that your family sucks.”
“I never forgot,” Winter said.
Qrow shook his head. “I don’t blame you,” he said. “Sometimes if I go long enough without seeing her I start pretending like Raven had a good reason for disappearing to be a bandit queen. Then, I meet her again, and I remember that there’s a reason we haven’t told Yang much about her. I’m just glad you stopped before you killed your sister. That would have been the worst kind of reminder.”
He was right. She had spent too long in the mansion.
“Hearing that story over the radio,” Winter said, staring out the window, “—I felt something break inside me. When I confirmed it I—” The vista below them was wholly inappropriate to her emotions. The stark, colorless mountains of Atlas would have been better than the infinite sea of dark green. “Even though she’s not dead, she’s killed someone now.”
“Excuse me?” Qrow pushed himself off the wall. He was still a little drunk, but he was focused on her, on her face.
Winter rubbed a hand over her face. She wondered if she smudged any of her makeup. Perhaps it did not matter. “I sent an assassin after her, Qrow. You know that. You know Echo Regent disappeared.”
“I assumed the White Fang caught up to them,” Qrow said. “It’s a valid assumption.”
“I don’t know everything—I have given Weiss no reason to trust me, after all—but I found the body. She was stabbed, and burned, and left to freeze. I don’t know if Weiss has any real memory of the event, however.”
“How do you mean?”
Winter could not look at Qrow as she answered. “Echo drugged her,” she said. “Weiss, I mean. I warned her that I trained my sister better than I have anyone else, and she told me that would be her solution.”
“Gods,” Qrow said. “I would understand if she never forgave you.”
“Yeah,” Winter said. “Do you remember the first time you killed someone?”
Winter could. It had been early in her military career, before she had traveled much farther than one of her father’s remote dust mines. She had been a faunus, potentially a member of the White Fang, potentially not. Back then, Winter had been certain. She trusted the information both the military and her father fed her. She did not ask questions. Now, things were far less simple.
It had not been easy. The woman had fought, harder than any opponent Winter had faced before or since.
“Sure,” Qrow said easily. “I was thirteen, there was a raid on a rival bandit camp. Guy got in my face, stabbed him in the chest. One of the many reasons why my family’s a piece of shit.”
“Why did your sister return to them?” Winter asked. Perhaps it was a foolish question, but she did not want to dwell too much on the image of thirteen-year-old Qrow killing a man. He had told her stories of other deaths years ago, before she had gone back Atlas.
Qrow laughed. “Hell if I know,” he said. “Maybe the thought of being a mother spooked her. Maybe our parents died, I don’t actually give a shit.” His voice was far too light and brittle for him to be telling the whole truth, but Winter did not press.
“Look out the window and tell me if this looks like a good spot to burn a body,” she said, switching the subject.
He moved to stand next to where she sat, leaning his arms with apparently carelessness against the control panel. She did not comment on how he made sure not to touch anything important.
The sea of unbroken green was become patchier, bits of white now lying exposed to the sky. “Yeah,” he said. “I don’t see any sign of a village. If you can find someplace big enough to land—we need to get rid of the corpse before it starts to rot.”
“What do you think of Blake’s suggestion that we return it to the White Fang?”
“I think we should do our best to stay as far away from them as possible.”
Winter nodded. “They don’t tend to like me.”
“That might just be the understatement of the century.”
“Yeah,” she said. “Go tell them we’re about to land. I want some time to plan.”
“Look,” Qrow said. “If you need—if you need anything—” He left without finishing the sentence.
There weren’t too many comfortable places to lie down on Winter’s airship, but Weiss had managed to make something resembling one using what they had been given at the Wayfarer’s House.
Weiss, surprisingly, heard Qrow’s footsteps first. “Hey,” she said. “You should put a shirt on.”
Through circumstances best not thought about while she was pulling on her dress, Weiss and Blake’s clothes had left their bodies and become a combined mess between their sleeping bags.
“Uh,” Blake said, pulling on her clothes with a speed that impressed Weiss. “Hi,” she said. Her expression was still a little vague.
“Did that… knock out your hearing?” Weiss asked. She was only a little bit kidding.
Blake laughed, startling Weiss a little. “I think I’ve just been a little knocked out in general,” she said.
Weiss blushed. “I wasn’t that great,” she said. “This isn’t exactly something I have a lot of experience with.”
Blake took her hand for a moment, before returning to getting dressed. “Hey,” she said. “It felt good. I hope it felt good for you too.”
Weiss nodded. “Anyway,” she said, “like I said, we better get dressed.”
They were mostly presentable when Qrow appeared.
“White looks good you, Blake,” Qrow said. Blake blushed even harder than Weiss had when she realized that some of the clothes she had hastily pulled on were not hers.
“Thanks,” she stuttered.
“We’re landing soon,” Qrow said. “We’re going to burn the body.”
It was Weiss’s turn to grab Blake’s hand.
Blake nodded. “Okay,” she said. “That makes sense.”
“Do you want to do the honors?” Qrow asked.
Weiss couldn’t read Blake’s face when she looked at her. “Do you still have some of that fire dust left?” she asked.
“Yes,” Weiss said. “But only a little.”
“Can I use it?”
The question hung in the air for a few moments. “Okay,” Weiss said, almost like an exhale. “Sure.”
Blake squeezed her hand, and pressed a short kiss on her mouth. “Thank you,” she said.
Qrow grinned, crossing his arms across his chest. “Look,” he said, “I’m sure Winter has more than enough dust to replenish your supplies.”
“Oh, right,” Weiss said. She looked over at Blake, suddenly feeling rather silly.
“Hey,” Blake said. “I appreciate the sentiment, anyway.” She kissed Weiss again.
“You too aren’t going to be too distracted by each other to do anything useful, right?” Qrow asked.
Weiss started. It had taken her only moments to forget he was there. “We should be fine,” she said. She didn’t let go of Blake’s hand. “This isn’t a new development.”
Qrow nodded. “Good to know,” he said. He looked at Weiss with an unreadable expression on his face. “You should be fine, anyway. Didn’t think you had it in you?”
The warmth Weiss had been feeling froze. A knot formed in her stomach. “What do you mean?” she asked.
“Winter told me that you were the one who killed Echo,” Qrow said. “Is that true?”
She nodded. “Yes,” she said.
Qrow returned the nod. “Okay,” he said.
Weiss stared at him. “You’re not upset?” she asked.
“With you?” Qrow asked. He shook his head, answering himself. “I’m pissed off on your behalf, mostly. But it means that you can handle yourself, and that’s something you’ll need to be able to do for what’s coming?”
“What’s coming?” Blake asked. She had yet to let go of Weiss’s hand.
Qrow shrugged. “Winter’s not sure yet, and I don’t know your part of Atlas well enough to come up with a plan of my own. But I’m pretty sure we’re going to be storming your familial castle.”
“Oh, wonderful,” Weiss said. “More fighting.”
“You’ll have more than a day to rest,” Qrow said. “Atlas is still pretty damn far from here.”
“Yeah,” Weiss said. “But still.”
“It sucks,” Qrow said, “but it’s this or your father gets away with murder.”
“I guess,” Weiss said. She exhaled, and looked at Blake. “Have you ever been profoundly failed by your family?” she asked. It was hard to say it even in partial jest, but it was true.
Blake shook her head. “I’ve felt like I was,” she said, “but I think I mostly failed them.”
“You don’t know that,” Weiss said.
“I’ll explain later,” Blake said. “When I have the words for it.”
“Alright,” Weiss said. “I trust you.”
“That’s good,” Qrow said.
The three of them felt the airship begin its descent. “Let’s go get a corpse out of the cargo hold, shall we?”
“We have to wait until after the ship lands,” Weiss said.
“Right,” Qrow said. He looked at both girls. “How did you meet, anyway?”
“She found me standing over a corpse,” Weiss said. Blake looked at her in surprise at her bluntness. Weiss was a little surprised herself, but in all probably Qrow had already guessed. He seemed like the type of person who was good at figuring that kind of thing out.
Qrow nodded. “Your sister said that’s what happened. I didn’t entirely believe her. I’m sorry.”
“Sorry?”
Qrow didn’t so much sigh as exhale the sonic representation of exhaustion. “I had to kill when I was young, too. It sucks.”
Weiss started a little as she felt Blake spontaneously hug her. The touch felt nice, she just wasn’t used to it.
“Something you said,” Blake said, partly into Weiss’s shoulder, “made it sound like you thought there were multiple hunters after you.”
Weiss shook her head. “I think that was being drugged,” she said. She shuddered despite herself. “I don’t remember much, but I remember thinking things that had to be wrong.”
Qrow shook his head. “Fuck.”
The airship landed. After a few moments, Winter stepped into the passenger compartment. “Hello,” she said. “We have a body to burn.”
Winter had landed in a clearing just big enough to fit the airship.
Adam’s body had already started to mottle, and Weiss had to look away as Winter once again picked it up. She didn’t complain, she didn’t even discuss what she was doing, and not even Qrow seemed willing to say out loud who was doing the carrying.
“I saw a smaller clearing not far from here. How controlled are your fires, Weiss?” she asked.
“Blake said she wanted to do it,” Weiss said. She didn’t mention that she had been the one to light the fires the nights they had spent camped out in the woods.
Winter shook her head. “I’m sorry, Blake,” she said. “I can let you help build the pyre, but Weiss has years more experience with direct dust manipulation than you could ever hope to acquire.”
Blake crossed her arms. “What do you mean ‘let’ me? You’re not White Fang, and I am. I should be the one to send him away.”
If they had been back at the camp, or better yet, at one of the permanent strongholds, there would have been two full days of mourning, the pyre, and the release of Adam’s ashes onto the winds.
“I don’t want to burn this forest down,” Winter said. “And I don’t even know if Weiss has enough control. She didn’t, our last training session.”
That would have been before the Knight, Weiss realized. Gods.
“She made us a fire I could cook with,” Blake said. “That has to count for something.
Instead of responding with mockery, like Weiss half-expected, Winter seemed impressed. “Congratulations, Weiss,” she said. “That is quite impressive. Did the fire continue to burn naturally once the dust was depleted?”
“Yes,” Weiss said, “though we snuffed it out pretty quickly, since we had to leave.
“Hey,” Qrow said, breaking into the conversation, “we’re here.”
The second clearing had less more open sky than the first.
“Do you think it’s going to rain?” Weiss asked nervously, looking at the clouds. The cold in Vale seemed to be much less dry than the cold in Atlas, and rain would at the very least set back their plans rather significantly.
“I don’t believe so,” Winter said. “We should hurry up, though, in any case.”
Because they didn’t intend to leave the fire burning longer than necessary, they didn’t gather that much wood. For the most part, the fire dust itself would suffice.
Winter put the body down on the small pile they had collected.
“Hey,” Weiss said, looking at Blake’s shoulder instead of her face, “you can stand with me.” Her heart beat oddly in her chest.
“Thank you,” Blake said.
They walked together towards the pyre, Weiss holding the cartridge of fire dust carefully in her hands.
“Is there anything you want to say?” Weiss asked. She didn’t want to impose on Blake’s funeral traditions more than she already had.
Blake shook her head. “I've already said it,” she said.
She suddenly buried her face in Weiss’s shoulder. Weiss could feel moisture, and when Blake pulled awake again her face was wet. “Sorry,” she said.
Unsure of what to say, Weiss released just enough fire dust to ignite the body.
The two girls walked back to the edge of the clearing, rejoining Winter and Qrow.
“Back to dust, I suppose,” Qrow said.
“Good riddance,” Winter said.
Weiss couldn't help but agree. She reached for Blake’s hand again.
Winter snuffed the flames with a glyph when the body was no longer recognizable as human. “We don't want to burn the forest down,” she said.
All four stood and watched for a moment longer, before beginning the walk back to the airship.
No one spoke. There was not much to say.
“So,” Qrow said. He was back against the wall, having still refused a seat. “Plan.”
“Plan, yes,” Winter said. The ground above them remained a sea of trees. It would remain such for a while yet. “I suppose skewering him through the stomach at one of those awful parties he throws would be too much.”
Qrow laughed. “I thought you liked those kind of things?” he asked. She was the one had done most of the playing nice, when they had worked together. Not that he couldn't clean up handsomely enough if he needed to, Winter thought.
She smiled, though he couldn't see it. “I see their usefulness more than you do,” she said. “That does not mean I find them fun.” She savored the momentary image of the scandal that sort of bold murder would cause, being dismissing it. “I want to say it was all his fault, somehow. That he goaded me into thinking being heiress was worth Weiss’s life. But it wasn't just all him, was it?”
“It wasn't,” Qrow said. “I can blame my family for a lot of crap, but at some point...” He shrugged. “You, at least, can do something.”
“I hope so,” Winter said. “We have a while yet before we get to Atlas. You should get to sleep.”
“So should you,” Qrow said. “I’m assuming this thing has a passable autopilot?”
“That’s not important,” Winter said. “Not for the moment.”
Qrow watched her. “How well do you sleep, anyway?”
“How do you think?”
Chapter 15
Blake woke up to Weiss shouting. She went from half asleep to alert within moments, but she kept her eyes closed.
“--we really doing this right now?” Weiss was yelling. “Considering the past few days were pretty much your fault, I feel like--”
“I’m just trying to look out for you!” Winter said. “And I’m not sure if the daughter of the leader of the White Fang is what’s best for you!” She wasn’t yelling, but her voice still made Blake want to curl up into a very small ball.
“She saved me! And she’s smart, and pretty, and can fight grim and--”
“Grim?” The tone of Winter’s voice changed abruptly.
“We were attacked in the woods.”
“Oh,” Winter said.
Blake took the opportunity to open her eyes and sit up. “It sort of--happened,” Blake said. “We were arguing and--” she stopped, not wanting to give Winter details. “I would never hurt her,” Blake said. “That’s what started this whole mess.”
“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you!” Blake could see that Weiss had her hands clenched at her sides. “She saved me.”
“So is this out of... obligation?”
“No,” Weiss said. “It’s not.”
She sat down next to Blake, dropping her hand on the other girl’s head.
“She promised she wouldn’t leave me,” Weiss continued. She shrugged. “I promised the same.”
Winter sighed. “Okay,” she said, pinching the bridge of her nose. “Okay, fine.” She didn’t quite go so far as throw up her hands, but she did leave.
“What was that about?” Blake asked, once Winter left. “How long have you been arguing?”
“Not that long,” Weiss said. “We woke you up?”
“Only just,” Blake said. She sat up, dislodging Weiss’s hand. “She’s a little bit right, you know.”
Weiss shook her head. “She doesn’t know what she’s talking about,” she said. She leaned her head against Blake’s. “It’s not just ‘cause you saved me. I like you.” She blushed. “And I like you kissing me.”
Blake smiled tentatively, warmth ballooning in her chest. “Maybe we should talk more. About ourselves.” It felt strange, saying that, but the little she had heard of Winter’s words made her worry. Out of the woods, what would Weiss think about Blake, daughter of the leader of the White Fang?
There were also the twin worries of how Sienna and Ilia would react to Adam’s death, but that was for much later.
“If you want to,” Weiss said. “My life hasn’t been very interesting.”
That was probably not true, Blake thought, but she didn't press. “Okay, then,” Blake said, “what kind of books do you read?”
She assumed Weiss read books.
“Oh, you know,” Weiss started. To Blake’s surprise, her blush deepended. “Trashy romances.”
“Oh?” Blake thought suddenly of her collection of Ninjas books, back at the White Fang encampment. She would have to see if they were also available in Atlas.
Weiss nodded, her face even redder. “You know the type. Princesses, huntresses who rescue the princesses. Huntresses who like...” she trailed off. Suddenly, her lips were on Blake’s and they were kissing again.
That was one way to change an embarrassing topic.
Blake grabbed Weiss around the shoulders. She was distracted enough that she didn’t hear any footsteps.
Qrow coughed. “I’m sorry to interrupt,” he said, “but the four of us need to talk.”
Blake’s attempt to break apart from Weiss led mostly to the both of them becoming more entangled. Eventually, both stood, Weiss more rumpled than Blake. This amused her more than it should.
“You two good?” Qrow asked.
“Yes,” Weiss said. She smoothed her skirt. “You wanted to talk?”
“Yes,” Qrow said.
In the cockpit, Weiss shook her head violently. “I want nothing to do with the company,” she said. “And I don’t want Father dead.”
“You were the heiress,” Winter said. “I took that from you.”
Weiss shook her head again. “You should do it,” she said. “It’s what you wanted, anyway.”
Winter sighed. They had finally reached the water, and she had let the autopilot take over. She was turned around in her chair.
Blake and Weiss leaned against the opposite wall from Qrow.
“It’s what I thought I wanted,” Winter said, “after I had spent all that time with Father.” She exhaled harshly. “He is good at getting people to do what he wants.”
“Why Whitley, though?” Weiss asked. “He’s an idiot.”
“He’s young and impressionable,” Winter said. “There’s a difference, if only a slight one. He hates huntresses.”
Weiss remembered him watching her training sessions, a mix of jealousy and disdain on his face. “Do you think he can’t use our semblance?” she asked. This was something she had wondered for a long time, but never asked because it had never seemed exactly... polite.
“He never tried,” Winter said. She smiled a little. “And he worships the ground Father walks on.” Her smile fell. “It would be simplest to kill him.”
“Not in cold blood.”
“I’m just going to point out that most of the world thinks the two of you are dead,” Qrow said. “That, at least, gives us a kind of temporary surprise.”
“He knows I'm not dead, at least,” Winter said bitterly. “He's why I came here.”
“What would you have done otherwise?” Weiss asked. “If he hadn’t asked you?”
“I don’t know,” Winter said, a little too slowly. She was lying, Weiss decided. She could tell from the small hesitation that shouldn’t be there. “But it’s not important.”
Weiss disagreed, but that wasn’t something she could deal with right now. The memory of Winter’s sword sticking out of Adam’s chest wouldn’t leave, and as much as she hated Father she didn’t want to see something like that again. It wasn’t like killing a grim. Those things were mindless evil, pure and simple. Adam was evil, maybe, but his face had changed at the very end.
Of course, there was a part of Weiss that wondered if Father’s face would change like that at all. He didn’t care, after all, not really. “Schnee” was the part of his children's names that mattered. But she didn’t want to risk it.
“What he’s done is fraud, technically,” Weiss said. Maybe those other classes she’d had to take, along with the singing and dancing and fighting, weren’t completely useless after all.
“Isn’t that a currency on your frozen continent?” Qrow didn’t have to say much to express his absolute disdain for said country.
Weiss shrugged. “Only if you don’t do it in public.” It might even work. Something like blackmail, get him to state that it was all a misunderstanding and then maybe Weiss and Blake could just... go, somewhere.
Winter nodded. “I can confront him,” she said. “It’s very awkward when people you’ve declared dead show up.”
“What should I do?” Blake asked. She seemed intent on disappearing into the wall, which was difficult considering said wall was gray so pale it was almost white.
Winter looked at her for a long moment. “Stay safe, I suppose,” she said.
Blake nodded. “I’ll cover my ears,” she said.
“I want to be there,” Weiss said. “Because I’m not dead, despite your best efforts.”
Her sister opened her mouth, and then sagged back into her seat. “That is... fair enough,” she said. “Qrow... I understand if you do not wish to stay in Atlas very long.”
A look passed between the two adults that Weiss did not understand.
He shook his head. “However this goes--it will be interesting to report back, anyway.” That, at least, Weiss could tell wasn’t entirely honest.
Winter nodded.
“I need to write to Sienna,” Blake said. “And Ilia.”
“The leader of the White Fang?” Qrow asked.
“To tell her Adam is dead,” Blake said. She looked down, and then grabbed Weiss’s hand. “And I need to tell Ilia... other things.”
“Were you?” Weiss felt a small twinge of jealousy that extinguished itself fairly quickly as she looked at their joined hands.
“No,” Blake said. “I was... with Adam... somewhat. It was...” she used her other hand to rub at her face. “I was so enamoured with him,” she said. “I thought he was--” she sighed. “I thought I loved him.” She looked at Weiss. “I know I like you.”
“So, touching romantic moment aside,” Qrow said, “I take it we have something like a plan? Though where exactly are we going to hide an airship?”
“I’ll deal with that,” Winter said. “I still have my private accounts.”
“Good to know,” Qrow said. “The two of you can leave and do... whatever. Just don’t jump out of any windows.”
“What excellent advice,” Weiss said as they left.
Ilia-
I'm so, so sorry. Or maybe I'm not.
I write this on my way to Atlas in an airship piloted by Winter Schnee. Before you ask, I am not a prisoner, and yes, I mean Winter Schnee, the woman whose tragic disappearance seems to be the talk of human news broadcasts across the kingdoms.
We’re going to arrest Jacques Schnee, I think. Or possibly kill him. This a point of contention between Weiss and Winter and they keep arguing about it. Qrow and I stay out of it, because neither of us is sure that Jacques is going to give us much choice in the matter.
I think this was the first time Weiss saw someone die. She has nightmares, I can see it in her face when she sleeps even though she doesn’t make any sounds.
Adam is dead. Winter killed him and I helped? I guess. He was trying to kill me. You might already know that. You might already hate me.
I couldn’t kill her, Ilia. Is that what we’ve come to, killing kids our age?
She has a scar on her face from where a giant mechanical golem shaped like a knight shattered her aura. She was fighting it as part of an exhibition. Her parents put her up to it. She thought this was normal.
The Schnee Dust Company is run by bad people, but Weiss... Weiss isn’t one of those people. And Adam asked me to kill her. I brought her to him to let her sleep off the drugs she had been given--she could have been ransom, maybe, I don’t know, but he asked me why I hadn’t just killed her there.
You have a good reason, better than most, to hate Weiss, and to hate her family. But I’m a faunus, and she’s... learning.
And I love her.
I think she loves me too.
I’m sending a much more coherent letter to Sienna when I can put my thoughts into something resembling order.
There is a man with us. I won’t tell you his name, but he knows who I am, and who my parents are. Most people don’t know that, anymore. They don’t know of the Belladonnas. I’m safe with him. He’s going to help us take down Jacques Schnee, however that ends up going.
I’m sorry that it has to be this way. I never meant to run away from the White Fang, but this where I think I should be right now.
Please, take care of yourself. Don’t try to find me.
-Blake.
Chapter 16:
Sienna doesn’t know I’m doing this, but I don’t care.
I have to find you.
You’re not allowed to do this to me. Not without answering the questions you’ve raised.
I’m heading to Atlas.
Your letter seemed urgent. By the time I get there, whatever you’re doing will probably be over.
I don’t care.
I need to see you.
-Ilia
“Winter,” Weiss said.
Her sister did not turn around.
“Winter, before we land in Atlas--”
Still, her sister did not answer.
“Winter, we need to talk.”
“I killed Adam, did I not?”
Weiss stayed just inside the cockpit, grateful Qrow was elsewhere in the ship for the moment. She did not stay pressed flat against the wall. “That’s not good enough,” she said. “Look, I don’t know what exactly Father promised you but--”
“He did not promise me anything,” Winter said. “I merely thought he had.”
That brought Weiss up short. She had always assumed that Winter had made some agreement with their father. After all, Winter had been the one to train her, the one to teach her every trick she had used to survive Echo’s attempt on her life.
She stepped closer to Winter. “Why, then?”
Winter shook her head, an abrupt, violent gesture which almost made Weiss take a step back. “You were always the one he praised in my presence. Never a moment of interest in my achievements in the military beyond how he could use them, but you? I thought he loved you.”
“I thought this was about being the heiress,” Weiss said. She took another step closer to the chair.
Her sister shrugged. “That was what I told myself,” she said. “It is what I told myself even as I spoke to Qrow in the town with the Wayfarer’s House.” She turned the chair around suddenly, and Weiss felt as though she was towering over her, even though she was still seated. “It took hearing the news of my supposed death for me to realize that we were both equally disposable.” She smiled sadly up at Weiss. “I am just glad Qrow and I arrived before you were killed.”
“So am I,” Weiss said weakly. “He never loved me, I think,” she said. “It was only the name he cared about.”
“I know,” Winter said. “You don’t have to forgive me.”
**
“Blake,” Weiss said, touching Blake’s shoulder.
The other girl jumped, nearly dropping her scroll. “Hi,” Blake said.
“We’re almost there,” Weiss said. She sat down next to Blake.
“I’ve never been to Atlas before,” Blake said. She leaned against Weiss’s shoulders. She looked at her scroll again. “I thought Adam’s death would be the end of it,” she said. Her voice had a cracked quality to it that Weiss wasn’t sure how to deal with.
“Wasn’t it?” Weiss asked.
Blake shook her head. “No,” she said. “Did I ever tell you about Ilia?”
“No,” Weiss said. “You haven’t.”
To be fair to Blake, there had always been something else to talk about, or something else to do. And “Ilia” seemed to be of a similarly touchy nature to what exactly Adam had meant to her.
“She’s the faunus girl who was pretending to be human for a long time,” Blake said. “It broke her a little.”
Weiss nodded. She had heard something of that. She had never attended a proper school before Beacon, and so had never known her, but the the “infiltration” had made something of a blip in the news. “You were close?”
Blake nodded, her ears drooping. “She joined up after me,” Blake said. “We were so convinced we were doing the right thing--” she sighed, looking down at the scroll. “I miss her,” she said. “She probably hates me.”
Weiss squeezed Blake’s hand. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“I know.”
**
Winter’s name was still effective, despite her supposed death. Even more effective than her name was her money. Banks tended to be more skeptical of news reports than average citizens, after all, and bribery was a good way of making some extra money if you weren’t part of the Atlesian elite.
This is how she managed to land the airship on their land without alerting her father.
Blake wore her bow. This was not how Ilia felt, she decided, but maybe it was an echo of it. She expected stares, or odd looks, but instead everyone either ignored her or focused on her companions. Qrow drew the most attention.
She had not yet told either adult about the letter from Ilia. She probably should have, but upon sighting land both Qrow and Winter had been busy either planning or arguing almost constantly.
The past few days had already been so strange that the idea that Weiss’s family owned its own fleet of airships, not just the one Winter used plus a few others, felt almost reasonable.
“He’s my bodyguard,” was how Winter had introduced Qrow, with only token grumbling from the man himself.
Outside the private airport, there weren’t that many people. Just a wide, flat road cutting through wide, flat land with fewer trees than Blake was used to and grass that was dead for the winter. She had always had this idea of Atlas as a cold, lifeless continent, steel grey in her imagination.
She was more right than she wanted to be, though there was more blue and white than grey.
“Does your family own all this?” she asked Weiss.
“And more,” Weiss said. She sounded a little embarrassed. “It’s prettier in the summer.”
Qrow and Winter were ahead of them by a few paces. “Are we just going to walk through the front door?”
That was Qrow. He and Winter were arguing about how to proceed, again.
“No,” Winter said. “Obviously. I know an entrance closer to his office.”
“Is that it?”
A building, much, much bigger than Blake’s parents’ house on Menagerie, loomed up out of the distance. “Is that stone?” Blake asked Weiss in a whisper. It wasn’t a castle, exactly, but it made her think of one, of princes and princesses.
“Yes,” Weiss answered. “It’s something Father used to brag about. That, and how old it is.”
“Where did the stone come from?”
“I don’t know,” Weiss said. “I never asked.”
**
The house (manor?) loomed closer still, and Blake realized just exposed they were out here, in the grey plain. If someone looked out, a guard or servant or anyone, there was nowhere to hide from that gaze.
“Won’t they just see us coming?” Blake asked.
“I’ve talked to some of the servants,” Winter said. “They aren’t too surprised I’m still alive.”
“Klein?”
That was Weiss. Blake remembered hearing that name. It was whom Weiss had asked for when she had first woken up, that first morning after they fled Adam.
“And a few others, yes.” Winter turned to Qrow. “He’s... well he’s sort of a butler. It’s complicated.”
“I’ve met him,” Qrow said. At Winter’s odd look, he added, “What? I’ve been to your house before. It was awful.”
“Father and Ironwood?”
“Yes.”
“Gods.”
The conversation continued in that vein as they neared the house.
It was even bigger close up than Blake had expected. The rows upon rows of windows were mostly unlit, even though it was getting darker. She felt the urge to stop for a moment and take it all in, but Winter and Qrow kept moving and therefore so did she.
The door was smaller than she expected, set into the stone. It had no obvious handle. Winter walked up and knocked in an odd, staccato pattern.
A man with a rather enthusiastic mustache opened it inwards. “Ms. Schnee!” he exclaimed, addressing Winter. “It is so good to see you.”
“Klein,” Winter said, with genuine warmth in her voice. “I apologize for all the trouble I have put you through.”
“Oh, no trouble at all, madam,” Klein said, ushering the four of them through the door, looking at Blake only to say, “The friend you mentioned?”
“Yes,” Winter said. “She’s with Weiss.”
Klein nodded.
The hallway the door led into was cramped but well lit by lights that made Blake think of shows set in prisons. “I just want to go to his office,” Winter said. “We shouldn’t be here long.”
He nodded again. “I will show you the way,” he said. He sighed. “I do wish there was more I could do for you.”
“You’ve done enough, Klein,” Winter said. Blake had never seen her this oddly gentle. “I will send for you.”
They cramped passage opened through a small nondescript door into a wide hallway. “Is that an elevator?” Blake asked.
“Yes,” Weiss said.
“You have an elevator in your house?”
“Yes.”
Klein left them, ducking back into what Blake now realized must be the servants section of the house.
“We’re just going to barge in there?” Qrow asked. “I thought you were the one for subtlety.”
Blake could only see the back of Winter’s head. “I wouldn’t call it barging. I am going to knock.”
**
“I haven’t been here in a long time,” Weiss whispered to Blake as they walked down the hall after leaving the elevator. “Has it really only been a week since you found me?”
“I think so,” Blake said. “I’ve lost track of time, somewhat.”
The woods had a habit of doing that, but this had been worse than any extended hunting exhibition.
Winter knocked on the door, which looked less ostentatiously ornate than Blake expected. She did not bother to wait for a response. Pushing the door open, she strode in.
“Hello, Father,” Blake heard her say. She went to follow Weiss into Jacque’s office but Qrow held her back, shaking his head.
“Can you hear them?” Qrow asked quietly.
Blake stood with her back to the door.
She heard a male voice, and what could have been Weiss’s name, but nothing more distinct than that. She shook her head.
“Figures,” Qrow said. “Jacques Schnee doesn’t seem like the type to allow for easy eavesdropping.”
He withdrew a little further down the hall, and gestured for Blake to follow him.
“Why didn’t you let me go in?” Blake asked. Winter was no longer any threat to Weiss, but still Blake didn’t feel comfortable leaving her alone in there with her family.
“Jacques hates my guts ‘cause I work for Ozpin,” Qrow said, “and you’re the daughter of the former leader of the White Fang. You especially give him an excuse to call security and blame whatever happens next on us. I don’t know about you, but I’d rather this stay a family squabble than a diplomatic incident.” He went for his flask, before remembering it was empty. “After all this is over I’m going to see if Atlesian prudery extends to their alcohol.”
“I would just be defending myself!” Blake answered hotly, realizing moments later what she had just said. She sighed. “Would he really do that?”
“The children he’d rather were dead are in his office,” Qrow said. He shrugged. “Seems like a rather nasty interruption to his plans, if you ask me.”
There was a shout loud enough that Blake could almost hear the words. It was the male voice from earlier. “Should we intervene?”
“Did you hear something?”
Blake nodded. She had no way of knowing whether Qrow was telling the truth about not hearing, but she made the choice to trust that he couldn’t. “I heard a shout,” she said. “A man’s voice, again.”
“I think we should stay out here,” Qrow said. He looked over at the door. “They can handle themselves.”
Blake paced down the hall away from him. She stopped mid-turn, realizing why exactly this place felt so empty. “Where are all the servants?” she asked.
“Hm?”
“I’ve never been in a mansion before,” she said, “but I’ve read books. Shouldn’t this place be absolutely crawling with them?” If she had been in the Schnee mansion for any reason other than the current one, Blake knew that she would have been absolutely overwhelmed by the sheer everything of it. Now, she was mostly worried about a possible ambush.
“I don’t know if any of them would go out of their way to help Mr. Schnee, to be entirely honest,” Qrow said. “He’s not his wife.”
“Did you know her?”
Qrow shook his head. “I just hear about her from Winter sometimes.”
Blake wasn’t sure how to answer, so she didn’t.
There was another yell from inside the office.
“Are you sure we shouldn’t check what’s going on?” she asked.
“It’ll sort itself out,” Qrow said.
It wasn’t fear that kept him in the hallway. Whatever drove Qrow to drink was not the man he so casually disrespected.
“What if they get hurt?”
“They won’t,” Qrow said. “Weiss and Winter definitely didn’t get their semblances from their father. Whatever he tries to do, they’ll stop it.”
What could he do, though, unless there were people in the office other than the three Blake was certain about.
“What do you mean get their semblances?” Blake asked. She had never seen Winter use hers, just her sword.
“The Schnee semblance is genetic,” Qrow said. “Jacques married into the family.”
Another shout, and a loud thump. Without consulting Qrow, Blake rushed over to the office door, trying to open it.
It wouldn’t budge. Shit.
“Weiss?”
She knocked on the door.
A higher voice shouted, still indistinctly.
The door slammed open so quickly Blake barely had time to get out of the way. Weiss shoved past her, and shut the door behind her.
“Shit, shit, shit, shit,” she was whispering under her breath, mantra like.
“What happened?”
“They’re fighting,” Weiss said, looking back and forth between Blake and Qrow. “They’re fighting and Winter shoved me out the door and I think he wants to kill her.”
She collapsed against the wall.
“Your father can fight?” Qrow asked.
Weiss nodded. “Not as well, I think, but we’re all so tired.” She rubbed a hand over her eyes, and Blake saw that she was holding Myrtenaster in the other. “I used to watch her train,” she said, fiddling with the sword’s handle. “I’ve never seen him fight. Us being dead... it would make it neater, I think.”
“We could break down the door?” Blake asked. “I... can’t, but you could. Either of you.” Gambol Shroud was not built for that kind of thing.
Qrow crossed his arms. “I guess, but we don’t know where--” There was another shout, and what could have been an explosion. The door flew open. A spectral Beowulf walked out, just barely able to fit through the door.
It dropped the limp body of Jacques Schnee before dispersing. Winter followed it, and shut the door.
“He’s not dead,” she said. She did not look as though she had just been fighting. She looked at Qrow. “Take him to Ozpin, or just out of the Kingdom.” She sagged for just a moment, exhaling sharply. “Please.” The moment passed.
“What about you?”
Winter looked back, towards the office door. “We hope the board strips Father of his position and replace him with someone better.”
She looked over at Weiss. “If you wish to leave--” She looked at Blake for a long moment. “I understand.”
“I’ll stay for a little while,” Weiss said. “If Blake can.” She looked over at the other girl. “If you want.”
Blake nodded. If Ilia was coming here, she didn’t want to seem like she was running from her, too.
“I should go, before he wakes up,” Qrow said.
“Yes,” Winter said. “I’ll get Klein to show you back to the airfield. You can use one of the family’s ships.”
“Thank you,” Qrow said. “Don’t kill your little sister in my absence, okay?”
Winter did not answer.
Chapter 17
Weiss’s room looked the same as it had when she left. It had not been long enough, she supposed, for her father to convert it to some other use.
Blake didn’t say anything as she walked in, taking in all the blue and silver and white.
“It’s... so...”
“Cold?”
“I was going to say empty,” Blake said. “Even with all the books.”
Weiss sighed. “I could buy anything I wanted, but never put any posters up. Father laughed when I asked to have it repainted one year.”
“What color did you want?”
“Red and black. Grim colors. I went through a period of obsessive fascination. This was before my mother died.” Weiss looked almost nostalgic for a moment. “She would have let me do it, too, even though in retrospect that color scheme might not have been much better.”
“I’ve seen worse rooms,” Blake said. It was strange, feeling bad for someone who grew up in a mansion. Then again, Blake’s childhood hadn’t been exactly underprivileged, either.
They stood near the door. Blake looked at the bed. “Where am I going to sleep?” she asked.
“In here, I think,” Weiss said. “If you don’t mind. I don’t want you encountering my brother.”
“You make him sound like a grim or something.”
Weiss shrugged. “He’s never liked me much. He’s liked faunus less.”
Blake winced. “Yeah.” She said. “Right.”
She rubbed at her face. “Oh, gods, I need sleep.” She still wasn’t used to being inside.
“I need to go take a bath,” Weiss said. “There should be pajamas... somewhere. You can take them, and change, and go to sleep.” She pointed at her bed.
“Where will you sleep?”
“It’s big enough to fit the both of us,” Weiss said. “If... if you’re comfortable with that.”
Blake nodded.
“Thank you,” she said.
“Of course,” Weiss said, suddenly awkward.
She stepped through a door Blake hadn’t noticed which presumably led to the bathroom.
**
The next morning, Weiss woke up to Blake watching her. The faunus girl sat on the bed with her legs crossed, wearing one of Weiss’s few T-shirts and a pair of black underwear she must have found somewhere. “Hi,” she said, upon noticing Blake was awake. “I told your sister to fuck off.”
“What?” Still somewhat groggy, Weiss leaned into Blake’s side. “What’d you do that for?” The swear was surprising, even to Blake, remembering how she’d said it. Winter had glowered at her, but turned back around and gone. She hadn’t said anything, but she seemed like she had wanted to.
“You were sleeping,” Blake said. “Whatever she wanted can wait.”
“Did... was my father really arrested yesterday?” Weiss asked. It wasn’t a fully sincere question; she did not have that much of a tendency towards false memories, recent events being an obvious exception. She just didn’t know how to bring up, or even really discuss the concept.
“Yeah,” Blake said. “Well, arrest might a bit of a big word. What happened in there?”
“Father was genuinely shocked we were alive,” Weiss said. “He played it off as relief at first,” she continued, staring past Blake’s head and towards the ceiling. “I almost bought it.”
Blake put her hand flat on the bed next to Weiss’s, and felt her thread her fingers through hers.
“What happened when you were pushed out?”
“Winter demanded he give her the company--said he was unfit to run it, that he was letting his prejudices run it into the ground, or something like that. It got very technical, even more technical than I’m used to.” She gripped Blake’s hand harder. “Then he attacked her, and I got pushed out. I guess Winter must’ve summoned. I don’t know how she knocked him out.”
“I’m sorry,” Blake said. “I know how difficult it... how difficult it can be.” She saw Adam’s face again, for a moment, as it had been. Something lurched inside her at the memory.
“Are you okay?” Blake blinked to see Weiss peering at her. “You look sick.”
“I was thinking of Adam,” she said.
“He sucked,” Weiss said.
Blake sighed. “It’s... it’s a little more complicated than that, but yeah.”
“If you say so,” Weiss said.
She let go of Blake’s hand and stood up. “I’m going to go get dressed,” she said. “And talk to Winter.”
“Okay,” Blake said. “Do you want me to come with you?” She felt her ears flatten against her head. The idea of Weiss being out of her sight and alone with Winter put her back in the hallway with Qrow, waiting and pacing.
Weiss nodded.
It did not take them that long to get dressed. Weiss hid in the bathroom again, even though Blake had now seen her mostly naked, and that was alright. Blake appreciated the privacy of the locks on all the doors, too.
The meeting with Winter was short and oddly formal. She mostly wanted to apologize to Weiss again, and told them that Qrow would tell her when he had brought Jacques to Ozpin. Ironwood was apparently there, at Beacon.
Afterwards, they returned to Weiss’s room and were together in the quiet darkness for a while. The next few days passed like that, Winter hovering in apologetic concern, Whitley avoiding them both, his smugness sucked out of him. The two of them could almost have been alone in the vast, empty house.
“Ilia’s... she’s here,” Blake said suddenly one afternoon, breaking the quiet. They were in one of the dozens of window seats. Weiss had dragged pillows and a blanket in from somewhere. “She messaged me earlier today. She knows this place better than I do... have you heard of the Poison Apple?”
Weiss nodded. “It’s a cafe near the school district,” she said.
“Odd name for a cafe,” Blake answered.
“It used to be something else, I don’t remember what,” Weiss said. “Do you want to go by yourself?”
Blake shook her head. “I don’t know the city at all,” she said. They had not left the manor grounds, both exhausted and Blake not sure whether she was comfortable going out without her bow.
“Do you want me to find a bow for you?”
She, and her family in general, did not own that much black clothing, especially since it was not the Atlesian color of mourning, but she was sure she could scrounge up something.
“That would piss her off, I think,” Blake said. “She doesn’t much like faunus who hide, anymore.”
Weiss nodded. “Do you feel safe going out with your ears?” She said it awkwardly, not sure if it was entirely the right thing to ask. She remembered a conversation they’d had about the bow, and how Blake felt about it, but didn’t want to assume that was how the other girl still felt.
“I don’t know if I have much choice,” Blake said. “The bigger question is, it’s a city full of people who until recently, thought you were dead.” A conversation for another time, then.
Winter had only tried to suppress what had happened for about a day, long enough for sleep and quiet conversations with the servants. The board had learned first, and the news had spread in ever widening circles from there. Since then, Winter apparently spent most of her time convincing people that no, really, she ran the show now.
Weiss shrugged. “What’s the worse that can happen?”
“Don’t ask me that, or I’ll start thinking about it.” There were a lot of possibilities to think about, especially in this kingdom. And Weiss’s company would just as likely to hurt Blake as protect her, depending on whether the heiress were recognized, and who was the one to recognize her.
“You were close then?”
“Who?”
“You and Ilia.”
“Yes.” They’d already had this conversation. “I’ve said.”
Weiss sighed. “I feel kind of bad,” she said after a beat. This was not something she had admitted yet, though it had been sitting at the back of her mind since Blake had first told about Ilia and the notes.
Blake stared at her. “Is this about your dad?” she asked. “Because it’s not like he didn’t have it coming.”
Weiss shook her head. “No,” she said. “I meant you and Ilia.” She looked away for a moment. “If you were close like... like this.” She gestured to the both of them.
Blake’s ears drooped. “Nothing ever really happened,” she said. “I think whatever I felt was entirely one-sided, and Adam was such an overwhelming presence that I never gave it much thought.”
“Do you have any idea of what she’s going to say?” Weiss asked. Blake had finally shown Weiss the original letter; Weiss had pointed out that naming Qrow and then explicitly refusing to name him later was kind of a silly oversight, and had felt a mix of warmth and confusion at the professions of love and intimate details Blake had shared with Ilia.
Blake shook her head.
“Okay,” Weiss said. She stood up, smoothing imaginary creases out of her dress. “You still want me to guide you to the cafe?”
Blake nodded.
It was a quiet day, relatively speaking, and Blake got fewer stares than Weiss expected. A few times, Weiss had to tighten her arm protectively around Blake’s shoulders, but her death glare was something else she had picked up from Winter over the years.
The cafe was in a less affluent neighborhood, one where Weiss’s dress drew more glances than Blake’s ears. To Weiss’s eyes, calling it a cafe seemed generous, but she supposed Blake wouldn’t know any better.
“I don’t go here often, obviously,” Weiss said. The street the cafe was on was wide and flat, meaning she had spotted it a good ten minutes before they would actually reach it. “It’s not a nice part of town.”
“It looks fine?” Blake said. It could have been a nicer part of Menagerie, if not for the cold and the humans.
Weiss looked at her. “I guess?” she said. “I might be doing it again.”
“What?”
“Letting my prejudices get the better of me.” Weiss shrugged. “I don’t want to forget everything I figured out while we were in the woods.”
Considering they were slowly making their way towards a completely different emotionally fraught conversation, Blake decided to deflect the topic. “You’re doing better than Whitley, anyway,” she said.
Weiss winced. “That’s... not hard.” Her brother had barely spoken to her, and had spoken even less with Blake. He seemed to resent the loss of what Father would have told him was his true inheritance, and there wasn’t anything Weiss could do about that.
He hadn’t tried to attack her, or Blake, which was good.
They found themselves in front of the cafe.
Blake stopped abruptly. “Well,” she said. “Here goes.”
The Poison Apple was a clean, well lighted place. The kind of place where you couldn’t attack someone, or get attacked. The kind of place which, to Blake’s occasionally paranoid eyes, looked like it could serve very well as a neutral place for opposing gangs.
She recognized Ilia immediately. She was sitting at one of the tables nearer the door, her skin a human color. She recognized Blake almost as quickly, but pointedly did not stand up.
“Hi,” Blake said. She sat down across from Ilia before she could talk herself out of the whole interaction. It was strange, seeing her after everything that had happened. It drove home that the whole disaster had only taken about a week, but felt much longer.
Ilia smiled, and then her face just... broke. She didn’t quite start crying, but her skin flickered blue for just a moment. She put her hands over her face, exhaled, and it went back to normal.
No one in the cafe noticed, or if they did, they didn’t comment.
“Hi,” Ilia finally said. “This is... this is weird.”
“I know,” Blake said. “How is Sienna?” she asked.
“The day after the news of Adam’s death broke, a follower of his tried to kill her.” Ilia looked away for a moment. “I think she’s mostly relieved.”
“I am sorry,” Blake said. “I know you loved him.”
To Blake’s surprise, Ilia shook her head. “No,” she said. “You loved him. I...” She put her knuckles over her mouth for a moment. “I always loved you.” She ducked her head.
The cafe did not actually fall silent. “Oh, Ilia, I--”
“When you disappeared, Adam said that you’d been killed by one of the Schnees and that he was going to find her and kill her. I asked him if I could help and he said no, I would be more useful doing what I had already been doing.” Her skin pulsed red. “Did you really just... find her in the woods?”
“Yeah.”
Ilia looked over at Weiss for the first time. “This isn’t just... gratitude, to you, right?” she asked.
Weiss nodded. Blake realized she hadn’t seen her this serious looking since their talk about the fight in Jacques Schnee’s office. “She saved my life, and she... she stayed. And she listened.” She looked over at Blake, and smiled, small like the first ones she’d given back in the woods. “She also has excellent taste in fantasy.”
“Sounds about right,” Ilia said. Her voice was softer, now. “I haven’t been here in a long time,” she added, ruefully. “I thought I’d be more upset, being back and all, but mostly I’m just... glad you’re alive.” She looked back at Weiss. “You and your sister better fucking change your company, or Adam will have been proven right. You know?” She shook her head. “I still can’t believe Jacques Schnee is just... gone.”
“It’s not like we killed him,” Weiss muttered. “He’s just going away for a long time.” She stifled a giggle, all of a sudden. Both faunus girls stared at her. “Sorry, I just--they’re charging him with insurance fraud, primarily. Insurance fraud. How ridiculous is that?”
“I don’t--” Ilia looked as confused as Blake felt.
“It’s... the thing they’re arresting him for is faking my and Winter’s death,” she said. “As though that was the worst thing he’s ever done.” She put a hand over her mouth. “Sorry, this is supposed to be about the two of you.”
A look of surprise passed over Ilia’s face. It was gone almost as quickly as it appeared. “Thanks,” she said. “You can come back, you know,” she said.
Something clenched in Blake’s gut. “Are you sure? I can’t imagine Sienna--”
“She would accept you back, no question,” Ilia said.
“You said she didn’t know you were coming here.”
Ilia nodded. “She doesn’t. I just know her. Everyone loves you--” Her skin mottled green for a moment. “I can’t imagine you’re more at home here.”
Blake sighed. “I don’t know,” she said. “I fled the White Fang fearing for my life. That association is going to be hard to shake.” Adam’s anger at realizing that Blake didn’t want to kill Weiss outright had scared her more than the days in the wood. It felt like a culmination of something that had been boiling just under the surface that Blake hadn’t wanted to look at until that day.
“That was Adam,” Ilia said. She shook her head, almost laughing. “He’d told us you’d been killed for your kindness,” she added. “I wanted to put human heads on pikes myself, I was so angry--and then you wrote, and I--” She reached out across the table, before drawing her hand back in a sudden, abortive motion. “I was so relieved I cried.”
“Can you give me time to think about it?” Blake asked. “Just a few days? A week?”
Ilia nodded. “I can give you a week. After that, I won’t have the means to stay.”
“Alright,” Blake said.
Weiss looked away from them both, staring intently at a point on the floor. “You could stay with us,” she said.
That both surprised Blake and didn’t. “You think Winter would be okay with that?”
Weiss shrugged. “If all else failed, I could tell her it would help make up for her trying to kill me.” She looked back at Ilia, the hesitation gone from her voice. “Seriously. Blake cares about you, and I want you to be safe.”
Blake wished she could know what was going through Weiss’s head in that moment. She would just have to settle for asking later.
After a long moment, Ilia finally shook her head. “Thank you, but I just--I couldn’t. Not in a house like that.” She pushed her chair back and stood up. “It’s... it’s so good to see you Blake,” she said, before turning and walking away.
Blake almost followed her, but something made her sit back down in her seat.
Weiss didn’t say anything, but she did grab Blake’s hand as the two of them stood up.
The walk back seemed longer.
“Thank you for coming with me,” Blake whispered.
“Of course,” Weiss said.
They didn’t say anything else. Blake couldn’t speak through the noise of her thoughts, and Weiss seemed to be contemplating something.
Perhaps it was better than way.
**
“I’m staying here,” Blake said, three days later. With four more days to decide, she sounded a lot more certain than Weiss had expected.
“Are you sure?” Weiss asked. She desperately wanted Blake to stay, but the other girl had a family. A real one, not one that had to be yelled at out of trying to murder her.
Blake nodded. “I don’t want to leave you alone again.”
“I won’t be alone,” Weiss protested. She hoped it sounded more sincere than it felt. Sure, Winter didn’t want to kill her anymore, and was more like she had been when Weiss was younger, but everything was still too fresh. Blake was someone she could trust absolutely, but she didn’t want to trap the faunus girl in Atlas, of all kingdoms.
Blake smiled, and laced her fingers with Weiss’s. “I’d still like to stay with you,” she said. “We could travel, maybe?”
“Actually.” Weiss squeezed Blake’s fingers, returning her smile. “I was thinking of going to Beacon.”
Blake’s eyes widened, and her smile changed. Weiss didn’t know how else to describe it. “You know,” she said. “I think I could ace their entrance exams.” She rubbed the back of her head with her free hand. “I... I’d been thinking of going there. Adam would have never let me, but I... even before I met you, I wanted to do something different. Something more.”
“We did kick the asses of those grim in the forest,” Weiss said.
“Yeah!” Blake said. “And you were still recovering from being drugged the shit out of!”
Weiss sighed. “Do you think they’ll let me in? Since I’ve killed someone?”
Blake’s smiled dropped. “I don’t know,” she said. She pulled Weiss’s face up to kiss her. “You know that wasn’t your fault, right?” she asked.
Weiss’s memory of that day had come back a little more over time. Mostly she remembered fear and blood and feeling so, so cold. She never wanted to be in that kind of situation ever again. “Most of the time, yeah,” she said.
Blake pulled Weiss close against her chest. “It’d mean you weren’t stuck in Atlas.”
“Yeah,” Weiss said. “You’re right about that.” She felt lighter at the thought.
Chapter 18: And Home Before Dark
Or an epilogue, of sorts
“There’s something I need to talk about,” Blake said, putting her scroll down. She had been looking through the publicly available information on applying to Beacon. “Relating to me telling Ilia tomorrow that I’m staying here.”
“Yes?” Weiss asked.
“She... she said she loved me. That she loves me. I can’t ignore that. Even though I’m not going back with her I--” She stopped, the effort of trying to explain herself suddenly exhausting. “Look,” she said. “You know I love you, right?”
“Yes,” Weiss said. “You’re good at showing it.”
“Awesome.” Blake sighed with relief. Being in a situation where she wasn’t constantly trying to not die gave her a lot more time to think about her own feelings. It was like the conversations she’d had with Weiss in the woods, but in her own head. “I think... no, I don’t think, I know that there’s something mutual with Ilia.” This was way easier for the characters in her books. They just got together, and it was easy, and everyone kissed and lived happily ever after and fought giant robots. In the real world, it was messy and involved talking, probably. It involved so much talking.
“Does she know that?”
“I doubt it,” Blake said. “She’s seen me with you, and we aren’t exactly subtle.”
Weiss sighed. “When I was little--well, even before we met, I used to imagine that I was in a tower in the snow, and that someday a princess would come save me. That was the kind of books I read. There was one where...” Her pale skin reddened as she remembered how exactly that particular romance had gone. “Long story short, a human girl is rescued from an evil knight by two faunus girls, and they... do stuff.” She attempted to waggle her eyebrows suggestively, but that didn’t really work with how her facial features were arranged.
“That’s... very specific,” Blake said. The odds of a book like that existing were pretty high--romance authors could certainly get creative--but even if this was just a roundabout way for Weiss to say she was interested in the idea, she was happy, if that was what Weiss was doing; Blake needed to be sure.
“So if I, for example, kissed her, would you be okay with that?” Blake asked.
“Yeah,” Weiss answered. “Actually.” She covered her face with her hands for a moment. “It would be kinda hot.”
“Oh.” Blake kissed Weiss at that. “So,” she added, once she pulled away. “You’re really okay with it?”
“Yeah,” she said. “Did you not hear what I just said?”
“I was just checking.”
Weiss grinned. “I know.”
**
Ilia knew what Blake was going to say the moment she walked into the room where she was staying. The fact that the Schnee girl-- that Weiss was with her only helped to solidify the impression, but, like the idiot she was, let herself hope until--
“I’m sorry.” Blake sighed, and Ilia noticed her hand was tightly clasped with Weiss’s. “I’m staying here. At least for the moment.”
Even though she knew, the words still crushed something inside her. “I swear, no one is going to hurt you,” she said.
“You don’t know that,” Blake said quietly. “I can think of at least five people who prove you wrong.”
The Twins immediately came to Ilia’s mind. Shit. “What are you going to do here?” she asked. “I can...” She frowned. “I can pass just fine, but that bow can’t be fooling most people.”
“It fools more people than you think,” Blake said, her hand unconsciously going up to her second pair of ears, mostly hidden behind the black lace. “And we’re not... we’re not going to stay here for long.”
“What do you mean?” Where else could Blake could, if not back to the White Fang encampment. Perhaps she meant her parents home in Menagerie, but Weiss would be less welcome there than Blake was here. The faunus were, quite rightly, rather unforgiving. Anyway, Blake would not go back to her parents. That would mean she had changed drastically, and that was impossible in such a short time. Sure, she had changed a lot (Weiss was living proof of that) but not that much. This was still Blake. Ilia still knew her, could still predict her behavior, even when it hurt her.
Blake smiled. Ilia’s heart flipped, and she hoped nothing showed in her skin changes. Why did Blake have to be so beautiful. “We’re going to apply to Beacon,” she said.
“You want to be a huntress?” Ilia asked. That... that made a certain amount of sense.
“Weiss wants to be a huntress. I want to do something with what I’ve learned with the White Fang that can help people.”
Ilia clenched her fists. “The White Fang helps people,” she said quietly.
“I know,” Blake said, “but it’s been tainted for me.” She made an abrupt gesture with her free hand. “I’ve already explained--you know why I can’t come back. You have to. You know me.”
“I do,” Ilia said. Her heart sank, the feeling she had gotten when Blake smiled replaced by a numb sort of sadness. “You’d make a great huntress,” Ilia said.
“So would you,” Weiss blurted. Ilia noticed Blake’s look of surprised. This hadn’t been planned. (Had Weiss intended to speak at all, a small part of her wondered.) “I mean, I haven’t seen you fight but you’re White Fang, and Blake has talked a lot about how the two of you used to train together, and I think--” She trailed off. “I can’t do anything to help the people my family’s company hurt.” Huh, Ilia thought, she was somehow prettier like this, righteous and angry about something probably hugely conflicting (sympathy for a Schnee--that was what truly made this whole situation surreal) for her.
Well, shit, that was not something Ilia needed to feel in that moment but there she was.
“But I can help people with...this is what I trained for, when my dad thought I was just training for demonstrations.”
“Blake said,” Ilia answered, unsure of what else to say. This was getting complicated. Things were easier when Adam was alive, when she could just think in terms of faunus being good and humans being bad. But Adam was dead, and Blake wasn’t, and not only that but Blake didn’t want to come home. “Me, a huntress?” She scoffed. “I’m White Fang, no headmaster is every going to trust me.”
“What do you think I am?” Blake asked. “That week Weiss and I spent in the woods screwed everything up.” Her ears drooped. Ilia could see it happen behind the bow, since she knew what to look for. “You know, if we all got in, that would mean we’d still be able to see each other.”
“I’m important to the White Fang,” Ilia said. Adam, for all his madness, was one of the White Fang’s best warriors, and his loss would be felt.
“The White Fang is a guerilla army. Think of it as... extra training. Not everyone who graduates from academies become huntresses, according to Weiss, and I just--” Blake trailed off. “Look, you couldn’t convince me to leave, there’s no reason for me to expect you to go to Beacon on my pleading either.”
“Is this what you really want?” Ilia asked.
“What I really want... what I really want is for you to come to Beacon with me. You were my best friend in the White Fang. You know that.”
Emotional honesty from Blake? Shit.
“I’ll... I’ll think about it.”
“You have until the exams, I suppose,” Weiss said.
Looking at Blake, Ilia said, “Can you--can you send me the information?”
“Yeah,” she said. “I will.”
Ilia sighed. “I’m sorry, but I’d rather if you went away now.” She had a lot to think about, and it hurt to see Weiss and Blake holding hands. That should have been--that should have been her and Blake, in another, better world.
Blake’s nodded. “Okay,” she said. She sounded sad. That hurt Ilia exactly as much as she expected it to. “I get that. I’ll go. Good bye.”
“Good bye,” Ilia said. She would leave even sooner than she had intended, she thought. She would board the first ship that would take her back to the general area she needed to be in.
To her surprise, Blake let go of Weiss’s hand and, half-stumbling in her haste, pulled Ilia into a hug.
“You’re not--you’re not a very huggy person,” Ilia said. It was stupid, she knew that, but she had the feeling she would start to cry if she tried to say anything else.
“I don’t know when I’ll see you again,” Blake said. “That warrants a hug.”
“Oh,” Ilia said.
She was rendered even more speechless when Blake kissed her as she pulled away. “Don’t worry,” she said, “Weiss and I talked about this.”
“Just... just go please,” Ilia said, a little less insistently this time. “At least for the moment. But maybe--maybe we could meet up again before I go.” She looked at Weiss. “You’ve talked about this?”
“Huge, weird conversations about our feelings is kind of our thing,” Weiss said. “We have. I think Blake could have told you a little bit more diplomatically, and at the beginning of the conversation instead of... now, but yes. And this does mean she has feelings for you. If you have any doubts. Which I assume you do, if you are anything like me.”
“I... thank you?” Ilia said.
“We should go,” Blake said. “When are you leaving?”
“Tomorrow... tomorrow night,” she said. A day later than she intended, but her feelings about this entire conversation had changed very abruptly in the last few seconds.
“Can I come over again, then?” Blake asked.
“I can stay at the mansion,” Weiss added. “If that will make you feel better.”
“Yeah,” Ilia said. “I think so.”
They left soon after that, and Ilia sat heavily on the bed in the room. “Well,” she said aloud to no one. “Shit.”
**
“Did you plan that?” Blake asked on their way home.
“No,” Weiss said. “Are you upset with me?”
“No,” Blake answered.
“Good,” Weiss answered. “I have no regrets.”
**
“Weiss.” Winter nodded as she came in.
It was odd to see her older sister at Father’s desk. “You wished to speak to me?” Weiss asked her, unsure what to do with herself. Most of the dread she felt whenever she came to this office hadn’t faded.
“Yes.” Winter sighed, closing her eyes for a long second. She stretched. “Do you remember when you told me you wanted to be a huntress?”
“Yes,” Weiss said. “You nurtured that, once.” She clasped her hands awkwardly in front of her. “Blake wants to sit for the exams as well.”
Winter nodded. “I see,” she said. “I can understand why. There is even less here than there is for you.”
To Weiss’s surprise, Winter’s shoulders slumped. “This is everything I thought I wanted,” she said, gesturing to her scroll and the pile of physical paperwork on the desk. “You don’t belong here.”
“I...” Weiss wasn’t sure what to say. As much as Atlas and the Schnee Dust Company no longer felt like home, to have it so bluntly put stung a little. “I’m sorry?”
At first, Winter’s only reply was a tiny smile. “I understand, now, as I did not quite recently, why Father believed you to be a more suitable heir. He assumed you would be easier to manipulate than I had been.” She sighed. “You were not meant for these kinds of politics. You have skills you need to hone, and there is no better place for that than Beacon.”
“Atlas is still a good academy,” Weiss said, some remnant of national pride making itself felt in that moment.
“I want you out of here,” Winter admitted. “It might not be safe. And you and Blake can be more openly... together in Vale. They seem to be less awful about the faunus.”
“What you mean, it might not be safe?”
“I heard about your outing.”
Weiss stood, suddenly outraged. “Have you been spying on us?”
Winter shook her head. “A former board member’s daughter saw you, and called me, worried you had been ‘kidnapped again’.”
One of the many versions of events going around was that Weiss had been kidnapped by the White Fang, and then either rescued by her sister, a mysterious stranger in black, a faunus (deemed unlikely) or, sometimes, herself. Weiss had mostly avoided those kinds of message boards or comments sections, because the urge to correct these people was too strong. Apparently even “I am the person that happened to, and you are wrong,” was not enough for some people.
It was probably an easier story to swallow than “well-respected man attempts to have own children murdered, then tries to murder own children directly;” the reason Vale had for holding him was still officially insurance fraud.
“Ah,” Weiss said.
“There’s another reason I want you out of Atlas,” Winter continued. “There are people on the board who think Father ought to be reinstated. Apparently, psychological abuse and conspiracy to commit murder are not enough to warrant being fired.”
“I think only one of those is illegal in Atlas,” Weiss said. “And only if you’re a faunus.”
Winter smiled before Weiss could apologize for what she had just said, unthinkingly.
“Go talk to your girlfriend,”
**
“So, Winter approves,” Weiss said, opening the door to the room she and Blake shared. Blake could see she was amused, which definitely a positive outcome from talking to her sister, relatively speaking.
“Approves of what?” Blake didn’t stand up from where she was curled up in one of the large pillow nests (the Schnees had so many pillows, is this what being human-rich was like?) reading Ninjas of Loves: Red vs. Blue Part XVI.
“Us going to Beacon.” She smiled, and sat next to Blake in her nest.
They were both more expressive. Blake had gotten used to the big house and Weiss had gotten used to affection that wasn’t carefully ladled out one microdose at a time. All this to say, as she sat down, Weiss kissed Blake on the mouth, and it went on about as long as some of the kisses in Blake’s book.
“Did you tell her we’d already talk about it?” Blake asked, when they’d broken apart.
Weiss shrugged. “She was too busy telling me how much I don’t belong in Atlas.”
“She is kind of right, you know,” Blake said, before realizing how that could sound.
“Don’t worry, I had my identity crisis in her office,” Weiss said. “This Kingdom has a weirdly high number of people who’ve tried to kill me.”
“Only one.”
“That’s still more than Vale.”
Blake flopped on top of her girlfriend. “So, you really want to do this? The practicals are coming up soon, so we should start training.”
“You say that like we ever stopped,” Weiss answered.
Blake sighed. “Trying our best not to get murdered in the woods doesn’t count as training.”
“We’ve sparred,” Weiss said. The two of them had also taken turns battling Klein on occasion (he was multimodal, as Blake had learned, and his red-eyed mode was interesting, to say the least), and Winter had offered, but Weiss always refused her. For some reason, the idea brought back flashes of Echo falling in the snow.
“I think fights that always end in makeouts don’t count,” Blake said.
“They sometimes don’t end in makouts,” Weiss said. “But I concede your point.”
Blake grinned. “So, Beacon then?”
“Beacon,” Weiss answered, returning her smile. “And hey, Ilia’s going to be there.” She nudged Blake in the side, who blushed.
“Thanks for being so cool about it,” she said. “It’s... nice. And unexpected.”
“What can I say?” Weiss said. “Ilia’s cool, for someone who probably wanted to kill me for a long time.”
That made Blake laugh.
Things would be okay, she thought. Well, not okay. It wasn’t as though the faunus’s situation was better, or grim had stopped walking Remnant, and Adam was still dead, but things would be more bearable. And the future Blake envisioned for herself, while quite possibly just as short as that of the average White Fang foot soldier, no longer seemed quite so lonely.
THE END