Disclaimer: RWBY belongs to Monty Oum and Rooster Teeth. I own nothing of it and am only playing in this wonderful world Monty gave us.

Another little fic idea that came to me as I was wrapping up Wilt The Rose.

Frostbitten

She supposed that this was what was meant by the saying 'out of the frying pan and into the fire', and if Weiss Schnee believed in karma she supposed that her capture by bandits would be some form of payback for how she used to conduct herself around others she believed to be beneath her station. If that was the case she had matured enough to realize that she hadn't been very nice to people along the way in her life, but she would have preferred the punishment to come in some way other than just waking up from an airship crash only to get a boot in the face to knock her back out.

It was ironic, she escaped from one prison, a lush one but a prison all the same where she would have still had all of the creature comforts she was used to, only to end up in another one in the middle of nowhere made of logs and dirt and it may actually be the more preferable of the two. At least her father wasn't the warden of this one. Not exactly the escape she had been hoping for but at least she was still alive. She was filthy, still achy from the crash...and the stomp to the face, and they had fed her and she had water. All in all it could be worse.

It was rather disheartening to learn that her sister had already left Mistral. If she had her freedom at the moment she had no idea what she would do now, since her whole plan had revolved around finding Winter. The only thing she could think of would be to go to Haven and see if she could get in when they resumed classes since she certainly wouldn't be trying to go back home. Of course, that was all irrelevant right now given her current accommodations.

At least her captors hadn't taken to ridiculing the little rich girl in the cage. The only instance of anything that approached gloating that she had experienced thus far had been when that girl, Vernal, had told her that not just her sister but all of the Atlesian forces in Mistral had been recalled home. At least if they were still here the bandits might have gone to them and made their demands rather than sending someone to get word to her father, and there would have been a good chance that Winter would have come for her. But with them gone the bandits would have to deal directly with him. He would already be furious that she had defied him and made it out of Atlas and he would be seeing it as another black mark of her making against the family name.

But to then have been captured by bandits and held for ransom...she wasn't sure what would anger him more, that or the amount of money they would ask him for. Things had been unpleasant enough when she left and she shuddered to think what would happen if she got dragged back there again. That simply couldn't happen, she couldn't stand the thought of being under the same roof as that man again.

So, her only other option was escape. She had at least a half an idea in that regard. Using a smaller version of her summoned Knight she should be able to cut her way out and escape her cell. The tougher part would be sneaking away and getting out of the camp without being seen. The guards sitting outside her cell weren't exactly the most attentive, but they weren't totally ignoring her either. They were bored and had drank a significant amount of alcohol during the night, and with dawn approaching soon they were probably at their least attentive as they anticipated being relieved within an hour or two and getting some sleep.

She needed them to be ignoring her entirely or for there to be some sort of distraction to draw them away. The best chance would be at night when they were in danger of falling asleep but that also left her at a disadvantage. She didn't know anything about the layout of the camp since she had been unconscious when they brought her in and dumped her in her cell. She would be stumbling around in the dark and would have no idea where the entrance was and it was probably guarded anyway.

She supposed she could use a bigger version of the Knight and just simply bust her way out of the cell and right through the log walls that made up the camp boundaries, but that also meant she would have every bandit in the camp hot on her heels. If that was going to be the case she would prefer to have Myrtenaster in her hands to better be able to defend herself. She certainly could use the Knight, but it would be better if she could have some other options besides just that to work with. The Dust chambers were all full so she would have a full range of her different attacks to choose from. However Vernal had it and she doubted the woman would just leave it laying around somewhere.

She doubted that any chances to escape would present themselves during the day so she would have to wait for nightfall again, which also meant that she would have to try and get some sleep during the day since she had gotten virtually none on this night. Despite that she didn't feel like sleep would come anytime soon and she was having way too much time to think about other things. Things like how painfully lonely she was and had been ever since her father forced her home. If it hadn't been for Klein she was sure she really would have gone insane. He was the only one in the family home who was actually like family to her.

Her father had never felt to her like what she imagined a father should. He was obsessed with business and money and his ongoing war with the White Fang. He was a driven, angry man who cared nothing for the opinions of others and expected obedience from everyone around him. There was no warmth or familial love to be found coming from him. He had driven her mother to the point where she was little more than a recluse who spent her days in the garden fogging her mind with wine, and her little brother had become a total creep and loyal lapdog to his scheming. Winter herself had defied him and left because she couldn't stand him or what he, Jacques Gele, not Schnee was doing to the name and legacy left by their grandfather.

He would even manipulate his own children and use them to his own advantage. That had been no more evident than with his idea for the charity concert. She was given no choice but to sing for a bunch of rich snobs under the thin veil that the concert was to benefit the people of Vale, when the only benefit was to be for the name and reputation of the Schnee Dust Company and her father himself. It was an exercise in public relations and nothing more.

It was that night at the reception that she truly realized just how much she had changed in the time that she'd been away at Beacon. When she left she was just like everyone else at the reception that night, consumed with arrogance, concerned with nothing that really mattered, and acting every bit the role of a rich man's daughter. From the moment she landed at Beacon she had expected recognition and respect but had showed anything but respect to the very first person who had, quite literally, stumbled upon her. It wasn't until her disgraceful power play against her team leader, whose name she didn't dare even think at the moment for fear that she would break down in tears, and subsequent chastising by Professor Port that she finally stopped and looked at her own behaviour.

She was no longer in Atlas and no one here was going to be impressed by who she was and no one was going to find her attitude favourable. The attitude she was projecting was the exact opposite of what a Huntress should show. She was anything but helpful and concerned with only her own status and position. She had even been looking to use the fame and notoriety of another, Pyrrha Nikos, to advance her own standing. She did truly want to be a Huntress for all the right reasons. She wanted to help people and keep them safe from the Grimm and whatever other unsavoury elements that looked to prey upon them. But the way she was starting out at what may well be the most prestigious of the Huntsman schools was nothing short of disgraceful.

From that point on she rededicated herself to her true goals and did her utmost to try and be the best team mate that she could be and to try and actually get along with the other members of her team. There were rough spots, mostly the whole incident with their Faunus team member but they overcame that and became closer as a group. They all worked well together and the situations they involved themselves in bonded them together through combat as well. Before she knew it, even though she wouldn't admit to it, they were her friends and she felt a part of something unlike she ever had in her life before. They were a large part of the changes she had discovered in herself.

They were one of the reasons why she was so lonely, she missed them all so much. Her life had always been a lonely one and quiet frankly was a large factor in why she used to act the way she did. Loneliness, a father to whom nothing you ever did was good enough and who wanted to control everything you did...it made her lash out and push her name and status in order to hide how lonely she was and how little she truly believed in herself despite how it looked on the outside. Her team, her friends, they believed in her and valued her presence and made her start to believe in herself. She missed them so much, missed them more every day as things seemed to get more and more dismal at home.

That night at the reception as she stood and looked at the painting of Beacon Academy, all she could think about were those friends she had been forced to leave behind. Two had been wounded and one was unconscious and she hadn't even been allowed to check on them before she was forced to leave. She just wanted to be left alone to think as she looked at the painting but then there was the creep who wanted to hit on her and who didn't even know what the whole event was about. Then came the ranting of that stupid, drunken trophy wife. It made her see red and she couldn't contain her disgust any longer. She didn't care how her tirade made the family look and she certainly didn't care how it made her look. She had been there. She fought, she had to see the sight of one team mate and friend with a stab wound in her gut and another with an arm missing. Her own partner ended up unconscious and she didn't know why and another friend was killed.

And this...parasite...had the gall to suggest that the people of Vale somehow deserved what they got? It would figure that her father would care more about her yelling at the woman than about what the woman had said. While he may not have struck her, he did grab her arm rather painfully. She hadn't meant to summon that Boarbatusk when she hit the floor after pulling away from him, she hadn't even thought a single thing about it. The best reasoning that she could think of was that it was a self defence mechanism borne of the stress of the moment but it also gave her father something to use against her.

After slapping her for daring to stand up to him and then stripping her of her interest in the SDC, he was going to keep her confined to the estate with the story that she clearly wasn't well after witnessing the fall of Beacon. Maybe there was some truth there. How could she not have been affected by what she had been right in the middle of? What she did know for sure though was that she could no longer stand the arrogance and ignorance that seemed to permeate Atlesian society and she would not be a prisoner in her own home and would no longer be subject to the whims of a man who had stolen the Schnee name and tarnished it the that way he had.

Escaping Atlas meant finding her sister and eventually her team and friends, but that plan was pretty much in tatters at the moment. The intense loneliness she had endured over the last several months had been almost more than she could take and it had made her realize just how much all of those people really meant to her. She even missed the insanity that could only come from Nora, and Ren's stoic and calm ability to put up with it and somewhat keep the hammer wielder in check, and she even missed Jaune's clumsy and well meaning nature. Most of all though it was the other members of Team RWBY that she missed the most and wanted to be close to once again.

Despite how awful of a start she got off to with Blake she had grown to value the Faunus girl's company. It had become a common thing for them to get together over coffee, or tea in Blake's case, and have intellectual discussions. Other times they would simply observe the people moving around them and exchange views on how they saw them. It was an interesting exercise between two people of such different backgrounds and upbringings and surprisingly it never caused any arguments over their differences of opinion. Unlike their fight early on when Blake revealed herself to be a Faunus, they both now understood each other and could see the world a little more clearly from each other's unique perspectives.

She was grateful for that. Blake had opened her eyes to the reality that not all Faunus were like the White Fang, a prejudice she had blindly absorbed from her father and her rather sheltered existence where she really experienced little outside of the sphere of family influence. Her father would be livid if he knew that one of her team mates and friends was ex-White Fang, and not much happier to know that she had Faunus friends in Velvet Scarlatina and Sun Wukong. She wished that she knew more about Blake, not so much about her time in the White Fang, but other things like where she was from and what her family was like. She never spoke about anything like that and she wondered if she had had a bad family life too. There could certainly be other reasons, but that was the one she was most familiar with and hoped that that wasn't the case for her friend.

Then there was the bright ray of sunshine that was Yang Xiao Long. It had taken her a while to get used to the energetic blonde, seeing her at first as someone who couldn't be serious and who was likely as flighty as a flock of birds. It didn't take long though to discover that she could indeed be serious and she could apply herself when she chose to. She also discovered that she was a very warm and caring person unless you did something to make her angry, like messing with her sister. Or her hair. Either one was guaranteed to have you on the wrong end of a red eyed stare and a flaming fist.

Yang also liked to tease and she did so because she liked and cared for the people she tormented. It was how she bonded with them and she wanted everyone to be happy. If you weren't, she wanted to try and help make things better for you. Once you became Yang's friend she would go through the wall for you. That was something that had been a shock for her. Despite her early attitude and difficulties with Blake and her sister, Yang had still given her the benefit of the doubt. At first she thought it was for the sake of her sister and the team, but the more she got to know her the more she realized that that was just how Yang was. Unless you did something really awful right off the bat she was willing to give you a chance to prove yourself and show what kind of a person you really were. If she liked what she saw then you had a friend for life and who would treat you like she had known you forever. She had a warmth that you couldn't help but want to be near.

But those puns...they were truly awful but she couldn't say that she wouldn't give just about anything to hear one of them right now.

As much as she missed them, the one she probably missed the most was Ruby, which was somewhat ironic considering how she had treated her when they first met. She had treated her like dirt, treated her like she was unworthy of both being in her presence or being at Beacon. Somehow though, even without a wholesale apology for her actions, Ruby had forgiven her and they began to get along and while she still wouldn't give the younger girl the satisfaction of hearing her say so, she did consider them to be friends and probably best friends at that. She had never really had any friends before, not real friends anyway, so the whole experience was pretty new to her.

At times Ruby's immaturity and dorkiness could be a bit trying, but that aggravation faded as they moved through their first semester and she found that she had begun to miss it when she was brought home. As she sat in self isolation within her rooms she thought a lot about her partner. She had to admit that her honest innocence and naivete had a certain charm to it and was miles apart from anything she and anyone she knew in Atlas, and she did seem to have an undeniable adorableness to her that was only accented by her silver eyes, an eye colour she had never seen before.

Those were the traits that made her worry so much about her over the months since the attack. She knew how she felt about losing friends and seeing the other members of their team hurt, but how had Ruby handled it? And what kind of shape was Ruby in herself? The last time she had seen her she was unconscious and she didn't know why. It hadn't been hard to hide it from anyone at home but on some of her worst days when she was feeling the effects of the attack on Beacon she would think of things in the worst case scenario, that Yang and Blake were suffering from their wounds and that Ruby had never awakened or had suffered a debilitating injury...or even worse, that she had died.

The times when she felt that bad and that down would take a few days to recover from and she would try to think of all of the weird and fun and more positive things that had happened with Ruby and the team. It made her miss Ruby and the others even more but even that was better than nightmares and dark thoughts clouding her days. In large part Ruby was responsible for the changes she saw within herself. She always wanted everyone to get along and wanted them to have fun together. No matter how many times she tried to shrug off Ruby's attempts to get her to loosen up and have fun and no matter how prickly she might get about it, Ruby was never deterred and kept trying. Ruby wouldn't give up on her even if she wanted her to.

If she didn't agree or go along with whatever it was she would usually have to get rather cross to make her stop and that only earned her that hurt, kicked puppy look that made her feel oh so guilty even if she didn't let on that it did. But when she did agree to go along with whatever the Little Red Reaper was cooking up it resulted in an explosion of happiness that even she couldn't help but smile at and it usually gave her a warm feeling that she was unused to, especially when Ruby would drape an arm around her in her excitement or suddenly hug her in gratitude, all while talking a mile a minute.

She really hadn't even attempted to quantify it before but now she knew it to be the feeling of acceptance, of someone wanting to be in your company for no other reason than because they were your friend. They didn't care about your name and what it could do for them or how much money you had. To Ruby and to the others she wasn't Weiss Schnee, she was just Weiss and she had become so grateful for that. They had allowed her to begin finding her heart and her true self.

She had seen Ruby grow too since they first met. Sure, personality wise she hadn't changed a lot, but she did see the signs of her growing as a leader. At the start, she thought leadership was something that should always be given to those of the greatest skill and intellect and status and she had never believed in the unquantifyable things previous teachers had labelled as intangibles. That was why she had felt that she should have been the obvious choice to lead Team RWBY. However, over time she had learned that the intangibles mattered a great deal and Ruby had an intangible quality that she came to discover that she lacked.

Ruby had a quality, a way about her than made you want to follow her. She may be naive but she was honest and always wanted to do what was right and firmly believed that any obstacle they might face could be overcome simply because it had to be. She was also the type to lead the charge and go it alone if she had to, which was one of her traits that scared her the most. Ruby would jump into a fight with both feet but was also likely to have not considered the consequences of doing so. As her partner...as her friend, if she couldn't dissuade her then she at least needed to make sure she wasn't alone when she did jump into something. If Ruby was okay she knew she wouldn't be content to just sit at home and she could only wonder what kind of crazy adventure the girl had gotten herself into and she worried that she wasn't there so stand beside her.

Her eyes burned and tears threatened to fall but she held them back. She missed Ruby, missed them all so much. Why did her father have to tear her away from them? She should have been back in Vale with them this whole time. It hurt not to be with them. It hurt to not know if she would ever see any of them again. She dared not involve herself in the little fantasy of Ruby and the others blasting their way into the camp and rescuing her, it was a foolish notion that might give her a false hope that she didn't need to delude herself with.

Leaning against the bars of her cell, she dozed off, coming in and out of a light sleep several times during the morning. The camp wasn't overly loud but every so often something would jolt her awake. It wasn't the most useful rest she could have hoped for but it was better than none at all. At some point in the afternoon there was a bit of a commotion. She really didn't know what it was but the disjointed bits of conversation she heard suggested that there may have been a fight and someone was being escorted into the camp.

There were tents erected all around her cell and she couldn't really see any other part of the camp so she couldn't see what was going on. She could hear voices being raised but couldn't really make out what they were saying. However, since even her guards had gone to see what was going on that meant she was no longer under watch and it was the perfect time to try and escape her cell. When the tent in front of her cell suddenly collapsed with a bandit plowing through it, her heart nearly leapt out of her chest when she saw Yang standing in the open area beyond.

Everything just sort of blurred together then as she summoned her Knight to full size, escaped her cell and joined her team mate. Needless to say she was very surprised to find out that her kidnapper was Yang's mother, and she was nearly as surprised when the woman ordered Vernal to give Myrtenaster back to her. Things didn't clear and slow back down again until the woman had summoned them to her tent and everyone else just wandered away and back to whatever they were doing.

It was greatly out of character for her but she didn't care as she pretty much leapt at Yang and wrapped her arms around her neck, her feet barely touching the ground. She was crying now and her heart was beating a mile a minute as she told the blonde, 'I missed you so much!' She was so happy and so relieved when Yang wrapped her arms around her and told her, 'I missed you too.'

While Yang's mother, Raven she now knew was her name, hadn't told them a lot, she had certainly told them and shown them enough to leave her head spinning. It wasn't until they passed through the portal Raven had opened for them that she finally got a chance to ask Yang why she was there in the first place. Go figure it was to find Ruby who had left home month's before with the remainder of Team JNPR to come to Mistral and Haven Academy, looking for information on Cinder Fall.

When they entered the house a tremor of nervousness and anticipation went through her as she heard Ruby's voice for the first time in months as she answered the call of her Uncle from the kitchen. The instant she appeared carrying a teapot and cups on a tray she noticed the difference in her outfit and that she looked like she had grown a bit. She sort of expected the tray to hit the floor but did not expect to see Ruby look so stricken or like she was deciding whether or not to run when her eyes landed on Yang. The words that frantically spilled from her let her know that her dork of a partner was terrified that Yang would be angry with her for leaving and feeling that Ruby had abandoned her. The result however was entirely what she expected. Yang wrapping her arms around her little sister and telling her that she loved her.

It was heart warming but it also reminded her of just how lonely she had been feeling. Her life before Beacon had been lonely enough, but once she was brought home she realized that that pain had been nothing compared to how it felt now after having made real friends. She envied how close Yang and Ruby were and as much as she loved Winter their relationship wasn't nearly as close as that. She wished it was. She was feeling a little out of place at the moment and was feeling that cold loneliness slithering around her once again.

"Weiss?" she heard Ruby's soft, teary voice call to her.

She looked up to see the sisters arm in arm and holding their arms open for her to join them. That cold loneliness suddenly left her like it had been chased by flames and it only took a second for a smile to come to her lips and for her to rush into their warm and welcoming embrace. It felt so good, so right to hold onto them and be held by them and she let the tears of relief and gratitude and just pure joy rush from her eyes. This was what Atlas and the residence of her father could never be. This was home and she was overjoyed to return to it.