The drooping sun dappled Team RWBY's dorm with golden light, casting the quiet room as if in amber. Blake lay on her bunk, head propped up on one hand, curled up with a new novel borrowed from the library's somewhat limited selection of fiction. Ruby and Yang sat at the foldout table the team stashed under Ruby's bunk, murmuring occasionally as they compared notes. Ruby's diligence had surprised the whole team; none of them had expected her to take her position as leader so seriously. She had thrown herself into her work with all the enthusiasm she demonstrated on the battlefield, and with all the dedication she showed to Crescent Rose. Whatever she lost to youth and inexperience she more than made up with sheer, unrelenting effort.
The evening had been peaceful, due in no small part to Weiss's absence. She and Blake had far from settled accounts, and recently Weiss had taken to studying in the library when dusk came around. For what it was worth, Ruby and Yang seemed to mostly take Blake's side in their conflict; the sisters hadn't had Weiss's meticulously insular – and deeply racist – upbringing, and while they hated to see their teammates fight, they were understanding of Blake's inability to simply live and let live. The hell of it was knowing that things couldn't stay like this. Something had to give sooner or later, whether it was a change in attitudes or a change in teams. Actually speaking to Weiss about the matter had proved impossible, though. Blake had tried – three damn times – and every time it was the same; Weiss would mutter something deprecatory and whisk away before Blake could get another word in, and if she tried she'd be staunchly ignored.
A soft buzz from her scroll dragged Blake from her thoughts; she had been on the same page for a good 20 minutes.
hey blake, you busy?
It was Velvet. Blake cocked her head slightly and tapped out a reply.
no, just reading
The response was almost instantaneous.
if you dont mind i was hoping i could come over and talk for a bit
last time we talked it was all about me, i want to hear your side of the story
about last winter, i mean
Blake hesitated and bit her lip briefly. She had planned to tell them the whole story at some point anyway.
ruby and yang are here, but if you dont mind that feel free to come by
This time Velvet's reply was much slower.
is weiss there?
Blake couldn't quite suppress the grin that danced across her features.
shes studying at the library, shouldnt be back for another couple hours at least
It didn't take much thought to figure out why she had asked.
ill be over in 15!
Blake set her scroll aside and cleared her throat gently to catch her teammates' attention. "Velvet's coming over for a bit, just so you two know. She should be here in 15 minutes or so."
Yang cocked an eyebrow. "Velvet? I didn't realize you two were friends. She... pretty much keeps to herself."
Blake shrugged vaguely with a slight smile. "We've talked a few times. She wants to hear about what happened with the Fang last winter."
Yang nodded. "I can hardly blame her. Even at Beacon, that must have made things tough. I'd want the whole story too." Yang began to close up her notes, motioning for Ruby to do the same. In time there was a gentle knock at their door, and Blake rose to answer it. Once inside, the lapine girl waved to Ruby and Yang with a small smile.
"Hey Velvet! Good to see you." Ruby stood from where she'd been sliding the table back under her bunk and smiled amicably. "Feel free to crash anywhere." She scratched the back of her head idly. "I get the feeling Blake wasn't kidding when she said it was a long story." Blake and Velvet sat beside each other on Blake's bunk, while Yang climbed up to take Weiss's and Ruby crashed on her own.
Blake took a long, silent moment to gather her thoughts, biting down gently on her lower lip. "The whole story is as much about me as it is about the Fang. There's… a lot of context you all should know. You two especially." The last sentence was accompanied by a glance across the room at the human part of her audience. "Velvet, you probably already know a bit about the Fang; how we operate, what we do."
Velvet nodded. "The academy I attended before I came here didn't allow Faunus. They didn't have an official rule or anything, but no Faunus had ever been accepted. It was easy enough to see why. The White Fang caught wind of it after they denied my application, and two months of striking and picketing later I got a letter saying that they had 'reviewed my application' and changed their minds."
"That's a lot of what we do. I'll start at the beginning."
Blake's memories of a time before she was with the White Fang were foggy and uncertain; leafy canopies, the smell of seawater, no two nights sharing the same sky or ceiling. She had been five, or somewhere thereabouts, when Adam Taurus had first found her. He had discovered her in an alley, peering out with wide eyes at a Faunus rights march in progress. He had offered her a hand, concern painting his features when she shied away. When the first round of tear gas canisters landed among the protesters, one ricocheted into Blake's alley, and between her heightened senses and young body it was only seconds before she lost consciousness. Adam, as she later learned, had torn a strip from his sleeve to cover his mouth and nose before wading through the worst of the gas to drag her to safety.
From that day on the Fang became her home and her family. It wasn't as though she had had many options; whatever had led to her hiding in a filthy alley behind a dollar store on the wrong side of town, no family had ever come to claim her. As time passed and she grew older, she began to take on an active role in the Fang's operations, at Adam's encouragement.
A lot of humans have a skewed idea of what exactly it is that the White Fang does, Blake explained. A lot of that stems from news corporations backed by people and businesses that don't like the idea of Faunus getting 'uppity.' If the news is all you go by, you're going to hear a lot of stories about small businesses closing their doors after pressure from the Fang, humans attacked while walking through Faunus neighborhoods, that sort of thing. Two summers ago there was even a story about the Fang blowing up a dust shipment. When the police actually investigated, it turned out the SDC was just cutting corners on storage regulations to save on shipping costs, but there was never a retraction of the original story.
Most of what the Fang actually does is community outreach. Faunus-heavy districts in large cities tend to turn into food deserts, so we set up food shares, teach people how to set up subsistence farms in empty lots, that sort of thing. Everyone knows about the protests, and a couple members are lawyers who do Faunus rights cases pro bono. When things get tense we'll have members patrol the riskier places in groups, in case anyone gets it in their head to go firebomb a Faunus-run business or apartment complex. I pitched in whenever there was a sit-in or a march, of course, but mostly I did courier work, making sure messages and deliveries got where they needed to be when they needed to be there.
Blake had been 15, or somewhere thereabouts. There was nothing particularly risky about what she was doing; riding shotgun with another member – a grizzled, middle-aged man with several of the points cracked off of his antlers. They were driving a pickup loaded heavy with food destined for a small Faunus settlement on the outskirts. The old buck accompanying her was a stickler for caution, however, and always insisted on bringing a machete (for himself) and a pistol (for whoever might be with him). They were still 20 miles from the settlement when a Beowolf darted into the truck's path. Blake had lurched forward with the impact and bashed her head on the dashboard of the truck, and was already unconscious when they swerved off the road and into a tree.
A team of huntresses working to clear the area of Grimm found her a week later, huddled in the wrecked cab of the truck – alone – with an empty pistol and a bloodstained machete. From them she learned about the hunters and huntresses who defended the civilized races of remnant, how they trained, their weapons, their lifestyle, and most importantly why they so willingly threw themselves into harm's way. The words sparked a hunger in Blake's young heart, and shortly after her return to the Fang she enrolled in the first academy that would accept her.
The rest would have been history, but for last December. Nothing could have prepared Blake for what she found when she returned to the Fang on winter break. Adam, as he explained, had grown weary of the inching progress and tedious pace of peaceful resistance, and urged to replace it with militant opposition. He and an inner circle of conspirators had outlined plans to transform the Fang from its current state into a veritable militia. Adam's eyes, the same eyes that had once been so full of empathy, held naught but fire and blood as he eagerly explained to Blake his scheme to hijack a large shipment of red dust, redirect it to SDC headquarters and, as he hissed between clenched teeth, "go for the throat, like we should have done years ago." He had probably expected Blake to jump at the chance to strike back at a source of much of the hardship in their lives, rather than to firmly apply five fingers and a palm to the side of his face.
Blake paused for a time, eyes on her steadily whitening knuckles. The worst part wasn't even that he wanted to militarize, she finally continued. It was how easy it would have been to support him. If I'm being honest with myself, it was a good plan. Changing laws, changing minds… those things happen at a snail's pace if they happen at all. Decades of clawing along on the bottom rung of society, relying on one another just to survive… it's exhausting, plain and simple. The SDC has been exploiting Faunus workers and throwing its weight around to keep us exploitable for ages, and Adam's plan would have been a bullet to their collective kneecaps. The only thing that stopped me going along with it was the thought of who would pay the price for our militancy. Not us, not once we took up arms. It would be the kids on the street, the shop owners, the families we were doing all this for in the first place. I could never go through with it knowing that I'd be putting someone else in the line of fire.
So she'd rounded up everyone she trusted and relayed Adam's plan. They had done the same, disseminating the news until Adam had woken up one day to a very large group of very upset Faunus outside his bedroom. He and his conspirators were ousted from the White Fang as publicly as possible, and with enough urging they had convinced several news organizations to publicize the affair. Tensions between the Fang and law enforcement, which had been steadily growing over the course of the plot, eased greatly when Adam's group was evicted; the act was taken as confirmation that the Fang could self-police. The White Fang had never had any sort of formal leadership or hierarchy – members adopted roles they were comfortable in and respected enough to fulfill – but Adam and many of his compatriots had been vital to the organization's day-to-day functioning. Blake stayed with the Fang throughout the spring and summer, stealing just enough time away to graduate from her academy in time to apply at Beacon.
"…And you all know the rest." The sun had set fully by the time Blake finished, and the room was quiet for a long moment.
Yang gave a low whistle. "Hell of a life you've had, Blake." Ruby nodded slowly in agreement, and Velvet brought a hand up to rest on Blake's shoulder.
"Thank you for sharing all of that Blake. I know how hard revisiting that sort of thing can be."
"Like you said the other day," Blake's weary smile drifted back to her face. "Talking about it helps."
Just then, and it would be just then, the door clicked open. Velvet winced and stood hastily. "I-I should probably get going. Talk to you later, Blake." She left the room just as Weiss entered, carefully avoiding the other girl's venomous stare. Weiss kicked the door shut behind her and huffed, striding into the room haughtily. "One of them was bad enough. If this keeps up I'm really going to ha- what are you all staring at?"
"Weiss." Blake's voice was steel and frostbite. When the shorter girl turned Blake was there, standing just close enough that Weiss had to tilt her head slightly to make eye contact. "I think it's time we did some sparring. Don't you?" There was nothing in her expression but cold fury. Weiss's constant belittling of her was bad enough, but targeting Velvet was another matter entirely.
Anxiety sat heavy on Ruby's features. Much as she had encouraged the two to practice together, there was no way this could end well. "Guys, I do-"
"Yes, Blake. I do. Tomorrow, before lunch?"
"Perfect."