Blake Belladonna let out a silent, metered sigh as she lay smoothly against what would, for the next four years, be her pillow, on her bed. She had certainly anticipated the rapid pace of the proceedings on her first day at Beacon, though many of the… surprises had been on account of the members of her new team. Two in particular.

Ruby Rose, the fledgling team's leader, had Blake… concerned. The younger girl was a veritable wellspring of untapped potential, true, but her youth and exuberance had the potential to cause problems. For example, they had already suffered more than a couple bruises and noise complaints while assembling their (still decidedly precarious) bunk beds. For now Blake had resolved to remain cautiously optimistic.

Then there was Ruby's older sister, Yang Xiao Long. Blake had decide against pressing either sibling on the difference in surname. Yang had proven to be as capable as she was impulsive, and her reckless nature had proven to be as prominent off the battlefield as it was on it. Between Yang's recklessness and her own tendency to plan ahead, Blake knew there was room for either wonderful synergy or disastrous disharmony.

Her final teammate, Weiss Schnee, had her concerned for an entirely different reason. Despite possessing a much more… steady personality than the sisters, the fact of her last name remained. As the heiress to Schnee Dust Company, the girl doubtless held a great deal of carefully taught prejudice against faunus. Faunus like Blake. Weiss had been surreptitiously eyeing Blake's exposed ears and feline eyes constantly during their initiation in the forest, and looked positively distraught upon discovering they were to be on the same team, in the same room. The feeling was mutual. Schnee industries had more faunus blood on their hands than Blake liked to think about, and a disastrous retaliation had been only narrowly avoided. Sooner or later, there would have to be a Conversation, and one deserving of the misplaced capitalization.

Their coming together had been clumsy and chaotic, but with the setting sun a relative peace had descended on their room. Ruby sat on a pillow in the middle of the floor, clad in a red tank-top and a pair of loose black pants, amid a veritable forest of gleaming chrome. The past hour had been dedicated to servicing Crescent Rose, the hulking weapon painstakingly disassembled and meticulously cleaned. Ruby was different at times like this. Ordinarily, her eyes all but shone with barely contained energy. Here, though, there was a contented placidity to them. She simply sat, eyes half-lidded and with a mild smile, dexterously fiddling and cleaning, until each and every component all but glowed. Yang, who had locked herself in the bathroom for nearly an hour and a half, finally emerged in an outfit similar to Ruby's, though with a golden top. The two were nothing if not on brand. The boisterous blonde tiptoed through Ruby's sea of parts with uncharacteristic grace and flung herself bodily onto the unoccupied lower half of Blake's bed, earning herself a cocked eyebrow. She returned the look in kind, propping herself up on one elbow. "So." It was a question, of sorts, though there was only one real answer.

"So?"

"So, we're partners! You and me!" there was a palpable undercurrent of nervousness behind the words.

"That does seem to be the case, yes."

"I uh… I was hoping to get to know you a bit better? Y'know, since we're partners? I mean I don't really know anything about you other than like, your name. That and the uh…" She gestured vaguely at the top of her head. "Beacon's a pretty evenhanded place as far as faunus go, but I still only noticed one or two besides you." At this, the feline girl nodded after a lengthy pause.

"Beacon has been good, true." Her eyes shifted down, fixed on her hands. "For most faunus the trouble is in getting this far. The rest of the world isn't as kind as Beacon." Silence descended on the room as Yang considered her words, broken only by the faint whisper of oiled cloth as Ruby worked. Blake spared a sideways glance across the room at Weiss. Ostensibly, she was reading. Blake's hearing was better than most, though, and she noted that she hadn't heard the crinkle of a turning page since her conversation with Yang had begun. "… Some of us are working to make things better." This silence had a different texture altogether than the first, like a sheet of brittle glass had been laid over the room, primed to shatter at the slightest sound.

Blake rose silently, four eyes tracking her as she moved to her dresser, took an oversized black t-shirt from it, and removed her top. On her back, just between the shoulder blades, was the mark of a wolf's head in a circle, wrought in black ink. The fragile tension in the room finally broke with a metallic clang as Crescent Rose's barrel slipped from Ruby's grasp, clattering into a pile of glistening components.

"You were in the White Fang?" Yang seemed excited more than anything else.

"Close. I never left." Weiss, who had abandoned her book and was now typing something on her scroll, had by some miracle gone whiter than her usual.

"Then you probably know about all that… stuff that happened last winter, right? No one seems to really know much, other than that it was almost really bad." Blake ran a hand along the back of her neck, searching for the right words.

"Really bad is a gentle way to put what almost happened. It's a long story, and not a fun one. The short version is that a few…" she trailed off briefly, a faraway look in her eyes before she gathered herself. "… A few well-respected and long-standing members got sick of the 'peaceful' part of peaceful protest. They had plans I don't like to think about. The rest of us, the true Fang… we made sure it didn't happen." She pulled the loose top over her shoulders, covering the tattoo once more. Ruby cocked her head.

"I thought-" she paused to clear her throat, dry after her relatively lengthy silence. "I thought you said it was a long story?"

"It is. Maybe I'll give you all the long version some time. What matters for now is that the Fang hasn't changed, we haven't… gone bad." There was a scoff from Weiss's side of the room. Yang shot a brief glare across the room and Blake's ears flicked irritably. Ruby ‒ and Blake would never know if it was deliberate or not ‒ was kind enough to tear the tension hanging over the room cleanly in twain with the smooth mechanical noise of her spotless and newly-reassembled weapon transforming.

"All done!" gingerly setting her beloved aside, Ruby checked her scroll. "Wow it uh… sure got late, huh guys!" She glanced around the room. "Guys?"

Weeks had passed since the frictive first night, and if there had ever been hope of Blake and Weiss coexisting amicably, it had long since been dashed. Both girls had been removed from classes on more than one occasion due to the ferocity of their "debates" whenever the subject of faunus was broached. Weiss adamantly refused to train with Blake, and Blake tacitly agreed, no matter how Ruby or Yang might prod and cajole them both.

Mostly Ruby, Blake noted. The feud brewing between her monochromatic teammates seemed be the cause of no small amount of distress for their young leader. In truth, somewhere beneath years and years of ground-in bitterness, Blake had to acknowledge that she was right. Their refusal to do so much as train in the same room was actively harming their team, weakening the synergy they would need to be successful. She had spent all of breakfast musing over this, picking at her hash browns aimlessly, head cocked against her other hand. She hated hash browns.

A clatter and muted protest from a couple tables away drew her from her thoughts. Team CRDL was harassing Velvet again, as they so loved to do. They were common bullies, picking on whoever they considered a soft enough target. Once, the skinny twerp with the fauxhawk had made a "pussy" joke in passing, just close enough behind Blake's back to make sure she heard. The panic on his face when he found himself pinned to the nearest wall by an elbow and a merciless glare had been delicious. It had only happened once, and the entirety of CRDL now gave Blake a wide berth.

Instead, they had shifted their attentions to someone with duller claws. Blake's eyes slowly narrowed as the team closed in on the lone girl; invading her space, knocking aside her things, taunting her incessantly. It wasn't the first time it had happened, but they were steadily getting bolder. The proverbial camel finally gave out when the ringleader of the bunch, Cardin Winchester, gave one of the meek girl's long ears a rough tug, earning a pained yelp from her and raucous laughter from the rest of his team. The laughter died moments later when Blake materialized behind him, staring with eyes that only just belied a brewing fury.

"Hello, Winchester." The larger boy went stock-still.

"…Belladonna." An acknowledgement of her presence, carefully devoid of any hint of nervousness.

"I hope I don't need to remind you that bullying is vehemently discouraged. Both by Beacon and by..." She paused for effect. Though she would never admit it, Blake had begun to pick up an affinity for the dramatic, probably osmosed from Yang. "Certain other relevant organizations." Word of her affiliation with the White Fang had steadily disseminated throughout the school – likely due in no small part to the loose lips of a certain white-haired teammate. Trusting that Cardin's fear of the name would outweigh his stubborn pride was risky, and Blake guiltily recognized the harm inherent in her fear tactics. Still, with the four of them together it was her best bet.

A tense moment passed, prolonged and brittle enough for Blake to worry that she'd only invited more trouble. The tension broke, though, when Cardin huffed and jerked his head towards their usual table. The offending team stalked off, muttering racial insensitivity that made two sets of very sensitive ears twitch. Blake sighed, half in relief and half in frustration, and sat beside Velvet, who mumbled a vague thank you.

Velvet was difficult to gauge. She was friendly within her team, and courteous without it, but never more than that. Faunus all found their own ways of coping with the stress of being surrounded by humans, sure, but most allowed at least some insight as to who they were behind the mask. Trying to read Velvet was like tracking in a thunderstorm. If she left any tracks at all, anything to read into, they were long gone before they could ever lend insight. Cats and curiosity have a long history.

"Velvet…" Blake trailed off, searching for the right words.

"Hm?"

"Why do let them push you around?" Her tone was level, but there was an odd look in her eyes, something skirting curiosity, concern, and hurt. Once it was clear that Blake wasn't going to expound, Velvet sighed and shook her head gently.

"There's really no point in-"

"Velvet." Blake's voice dropped to a something just below a whisper; to human ears she would have been mouthing the words silently. "Please? One faunus to another, I'm worried about it. They're getting worse."

"You're right, I know." Her voice had dropped to the same subaudible murmur. "It's a bit of a story." When Blake only gave a slow, expectant nod, the older girl glanced away for a moment before raising her voice back to a conversational level. "I was just going to head to the gym; it's usually empty this early. Care to join me?" Blake nodded and replied in the affirmative, a bit more cheerfully than she felt. She mused that their conversation would have sounded profoundly odd to the casual eavesdropper.

The walk to the gym was silent. As they came to the door, Velvet fished a key from the pocket of her uniform and unlocked it. Blake cocked an eyebrow. "Usually empty?" Velvet shrugged and grinned back at her as she opened the door.

"Usually. I'm not the only one with a key." Small wonder her training routine was a mystery to everyone outside her team when she took such lengths to keep it so. The door closed behind them, and the lapine girl exhaled deeply. "A lot happened last year." Her uniform was discarded, tossed vaguely in the nearest corner, revealing a red sports bra and snug black shorts. She set about stretching, wincing occasionally as any lingering stiffness was pulled from her limbs. "Things weren't always… I wasn't always…" She trailed off, looking contemplative as she pulled an elbow behind her head.

"…Such a closed book?"

"Something like that, yeah." She grinned apologetically, then turned somber. "Then that business with the Fang that winter…" she shot a searching look at Blake, who nodded and folded her arms.

"It can't have been easy."

"It wasn't." She finished up her stretching and dropped into a loose sparring stance, bouncing lightly on the balls of her feet, occasionally feinting or throwing blows. "There were only a handful of other faunus around to begin with, and most of them dropped off the radar when things started getting tense. Any human friends I had managed to make started avoiding me or got outright hostile. If it weren't for my team I probably would have dropped out." With the next bounce she pushed her legs back and fell into pushup, her palms thumping loudly on the mat. She continued talking between each huffing breath. The motion was fluid, practiced; the long sleeves of her combat uniform hid a surprising amount of muscle. "The usual racist teasing turned into full-on harassment by spring. The staff did what they could to curb things… but they can't be everywhere." She paused her workout and sat cross-legged, tonguing her cheek and taking a not-quite-steady breath. A long moment passed, Velvet staring at her hands, before she spoke. When she did their eyes met, and the look on her face was a blade in Blake's heart. Years of hurt and betrayal forced down again and again and again, only to bubble to the surface in these rare vulnerable moments. "I found a pair of rabbit ears, nailed to the door of our room." She bit her lip, steadying herself. "Real ones, from the… smell. I still don't know if they came off an animal or…"

"Oh, Velvet…" Blake moved from her spot by a wall and sat gingerly on the mat beside her. She brought an arm to Velvet's tense shoulders. "Is it okay if I…?" Velvet nodded, and Blake set about gently running a hand across her back, steadily easing the tension until her breath steadied and her shoulders finally relaxed.

"A-anyway…" Velvet took a deep breath, collecting herself. "After that I just… withdrew. How could I not? Ozpin managed to find out who did it and was very public about expelling them. Still, the damage was done. If you're ever wondering why I don't stand up to Cardin and his crew, that's why." Her gaze dropped to the floor. "Two parts fear, one part trauma." They sat for the span of a few slow and steadying breaths, side by side in companionable silence, until Blake spoke, gentle as she knew how.

"Thank you for sharing all this with me Velvet. I know it wasn't easy." She smiled at her, the sad smile of those who have shared a common hardship, and survived it. Velvet shook her head, standing and offering a hand to Blake and lifting her to her feet with surprising ease.

"Thank you for listening. Talking about it, telling someone… It helps." She turned away from Blake and headed off towards the line of treadmills across the gym. "It also helps not being the only faunus on my team. But I'm sure you know all about that, right Blake?" She shot Blake a teasing grin over her shoulder and waved. "See you around!"

Bewilderment sat heavy on Blake's face as she slowly processed the parting words. "What?"

"Wait… What?"