Standing with her back to the window, Weiss caught the brunt of the glass thrown into the air by the shockwave. She screamed, more in surprise than pain, and fell to the floor. Blake threw herself clear on reflex, while Yang and Ruby were both peppered with shards as they lifted their arms to protect their faces.
Ears ringing, Yang stumbled towards her sister. Ruby flailed weakly as Yang helped her sit up, carefully checking her over for injury. Her cloak had shielded her, little chunks of glass tumbling off the cloth as she stood on wobbling feet.
Weiss was flat on the floor, blindly pawing at her neck. Spots of red were becoming red smears, and Blake went to her side as quickly as she could, grabbing Weiss' hands to keep her from making her injuries any worse in the confusion. Several small shards of glass were embedded in her neck, Weiss' collar having blocked some flying shards and trapped others. Blake did her best to calm Weiss down, moving her hands and hair away from her neck so she could see her injuries clearly. Blood was trickling from a few long cuts, but the chance that there might be shards lodged and lost in the cuts was the real danger and Blake began gently brushing away what glass she could see.
"Weiss? Weiss! Blake, how is she?"
Yang and Ruby were on their feet, looking worried but otherwise fine.
"I can't tell. Find something I can use to clean this up."
Yang and Ruby both turned to search just as shots rang out from somewhere outside. Yang ran to the window and saw streams of people running in random direction, some were going towards to fire, others fleeing in panic. She could see a dozen small flashes as dust-charges were primed and thrown, and the burning building suffered a string of smaller detonation that sent flaming debris raining down on nearby buildings and workers.
"Someone's starting a war down there!"
Yang ran for the door, but froze and looked back at Weiss and Blake, still on the floor and smeared with blood.
"Here!"
Ruby returned with a water bottle, and Blake took it, torn between wanting to stay for her teammate and going outside to help her species.
"Go." Blake hated herself for saying it. "I've got this. Go!"
Ruby and Yang were gone in a moment, barreling past employees without stopping to explain.
Blake opened the bottle and pulled at the collar of a quiet and unresisting Weiss. Water washed away the blood and took a few glittering grains with it, and Blake scrutinized each cut before quickly moving to the next. Experience in patching up her own wounds during her service to the White Fang made the impromptu treatment go quickly.
"…Blake?"
Weiss' voice was quiet and filled with fear.
"You're going to be fine, Weiss. It's not that bad."
Blake helped Weiss to sit up, and saw that she was paler than usual, eyes wide and breathing hard. She was staring at the blood on her hands, and Blake splashed the last of the water over them. Weiss began wiping them on her dress absentmindedly as she looked up at Blake, then around the room.
"Where…are Ruby and Yang…"
"They've gone to help with the fire."
"Oh…"
Weiss was too quiet. Blake brushed loose hair away from her face and pressed a hand against her cheek, turning Weiss to face her.
"Weiss, look at me."
Blake gave her a hard slap. Weiss' eyes widened and she jerked back to awareness.
"Ow! What was that for?"
"You looked like you were about to go into shock."
"And you thought slapping me was supposed to help?"
Blake matched Weiss' stare…for about three seconds.
"Well, it certainly made me feel better."
"Oh you little…!"
Weiss continued to sputter as Blake helped her up and into a chair. Blake had nothing to bandage the cuts with, and had to settle for clamping a hand tight over Weiss' neck with only the lace of her high collar to staunch the blood flow. The pressure made Weiss hiss in pain, screwing her eyes shut.
"Can you walk?"
Weiss began to nod, and her body went rigid as the motion caused a fresh jolt of pain. She unscrewed her eyes and answered with a look, putting a hand on Blake's shoulder for support.
Carefully, Blake moved her teammate out the door to search for a doctor.
Outside, it was anarchy.
The roads were unpaved, rutted and uneven. Shadows danced in the firelight, making footing even more difficult, and just as they seemed to be making progress, the girls ran straight into a crowd of workers fleeing the fire. They could hear gunfire above the din, and the runners forced the two girls to slow down or risk stumbling into the mass and getting trampled. Several bodies already lay motionless in the road, half-pressed into the mud.
Whenever Yang considered stopping to check on them, a gunshot or explosion was heard, urging her to keep moving. She could see Ruby hesitate, and waved her on ahead, bending down to examine one of the fallen workers.
The impossible angle his neck was bent at told her there was nothing she could do, and she moved to the next body.
Ruby had a hand on her scythe, ready to draw. The burning building gave her plenty of light to see by. She just didn't have the slightest idea of what to do.
It was chaos. Fauna were hunkered down wherever they could find cover, after being caught in the melee during the shift change. The security forces had been overwhelmed, and had withdrawn into small pockets of flailing batons among the rioters. Someone had climbed a forklift, waving a Molotov cocktail.
A quick leap, grab and backhanded swing disarmed and knocked him out. Trying to focus past the screams and trouble below, Ruby began picking out and picking off anyone else that was armed. She sliced through a stolen rifle, kicked off the head of a fauna wielding a chainsaw, broke a trio of picks, and checked her swing when she saw her last target had only grabbed a fallen riot shield to protect the workers covering behind him.
A slash through the fence behind them opened a way out, and she caught a momentary look of gratitude from him before going to find more trouble. A familiar-sounding explosion told her Yang had caught up, watching a group of ragged workers flee through the hole she'd made in a warehouse wall.
Ruby turned and looked for the next objective…but there was only a sea of bodies, a flailing, screaming, chaotic mess with no clear identity or purpose. Seeing it left her hesitant…she knew she had to do something, that there were people to help and troublemakers to stop. She just couldn't pick one or the other out from the mayhem, and she wavered, lost, in a spot of calm away from the brawling.
Dull cracks, hissing, and a fresh wave of outcries were the only warning she had before the crowd split and broke apart, and she had to jump to higher ground to avoid being overrun. The stinging in her eyes made Ruby realize that security had brought out the tear gas, and the crowd was routed by an advancing line of guards in heavy armor, and Ruby winced with each crunch of baton-on-bone she heard.
The crowd could offer no real resistance beyond sheer mass, and it was slowly broken up and penned in behind lines of tinted visors and riot shields. Ruby didn't like it one bit, not the bruises or the blood or the fear in their eyes, but felt Yang's hand on her shoulder when she started moving towards a brewing fight when the guards began putting restraints on people.
The crash of burning masonry falling to the ground reminded the two girls that there was still a building on fire to deal with, and they resentfully left the security forces to do their work. The barren landscape and spread-out buildings meant the fire had little chance of spreading, but the risk of dust, fuel or stockpiled chemicals being ignited couldn't be ignored, and dealing with the riot meant there was less manpower to go around.
It was a reassuring sight when a window spewing smoke was frozen over. There was a thick bandage around Weiss' neck when she rejoined the sisters, and she seemed to be fine, though moving a little stiffly. Blake was a different story, utterly failing to hide her fury at what she was seeing.
It took hours, but the fire was slowly brought under control. The firebombs were chemical-based and resistant to a simple dowsing. While the people inside had more than enough time to get out, the burnt-out shell of the building was left smouldering and thick with toxic fumes.
The team's gear was recovered and moved to another building, and Chief Donahue wouldn't get over the fact that the bombers had targeted the building that the huntresses had been assigned to bunk in. Though that bit of information was hardly a secret, their debriefing, as if quelling the riot was somehow a mission, often veered into one-sided speculation about how far the White Fang had infiltrated the mine's communication systems or if there were sympathizers among the administration.
Having spent most of the incident tending to Weiss' injuries, Blake had little to say and spent most of the time staring out the window and doing her very best to not kill the babbling man.
Blake's tension was obvious to everyone but him, it seemed. Her hands curled into fists as he began going over how he'd be converting an unused shaft into a holding area, and Weiss interrupted him as she saw Blake's hands creeping towards her weapon.
"No!"
"-and the beauty of it…Ms. Schnee?"
"I said no. Mass imprisonment is out of the question."
The chief's mouth hanged open, and he stared at Weiss in confusion for a few moments before continuing.
"But there's no way we can isolate the ringleaders from the general rabble, and-"
"As I understand it, the incident occurred during a shift change. No doubt the vast majority of faunas present were not involved in planning the attack, and were only caught up in the confusion of it. Imprisoning all of the fauna involved would only encourage further rebelliousness, to say nothing of the drop in productivity. Lock up those fauna that were subdued by my teammates or that were directly involved in the attack. One of them is likely to be the organizer. Without the guidance of an alpha, any accomplices won't be able to accomplish anything."
Weiss' voice and expression were perfectly calm, tinged with just a hint of distain. Her words reminded Yang of the kind of speeches human supremacists made. Faunas didn't have 'alphas'…oh, now she was reminding the chief about faunas and enclosed spaces. She'd heard that bit of psycho-bunk tossed around quite a bit, which was traditionally followed by a tasteless joke. Given the crowd she'd grown up around, Yang imagined Weiss had plenty of material to draw on to play the fauna-hating corporate executive.
One of these days, she'd have to find out how Weiss managed to avoid turning out like the rest of her family.
She glanced over at Blake. With Weiss holding her position over him to dictate how the aftermath should be handled, Blake was…not exactly calm, but at least not still giving her the impression she was about to jump across the room and take his head off. Ruby left her seat to join Blake at the window and try to distract her as the conversation wound down.
Once the security chief was out of the room with his marching orders, Blake punched the wall. Hard. A rising hiss escaped her lips, and Ruby took a step away from the furious girl.
"Blake, I-"
"Don't. Please."
Blake's eyes were red and rimmed with tears.
"I know what you're going to say. 'It's going to be all right.' But it's never going to be all right! Nothing I do, nothing anyone does will ever matter as long as people like that keeps the fighting going for…for whatever stupid, twisted reasons…"
Blake buried her face in her arms, and Ruby reached out for her, holding on despite the half-hearted attempt to push her away.
"Ms. Yang?"
Yang put down her glass and the food she'd been picking at, stuck between being hungry and having no appetite. She'd been approached by an incredibly generic-looking secretary holding a tablet and looking about as nervous as every other employee was right now.
"Just Yang is fine. Did something happen?"
"Err…"
"I mean besides the bombing and the riot."
"Oh, no. I just came by to tell you that new rooms have been set aside for your team in a different building. I'm afraid due to all the people we've had to move around, you'll have to double up. This key is for you and your sister, and I've already delivered the other to Ms. Schnee and her friend."
"Weiss and…Blake…"
"Is something wrong?"
"Oh no, I'm sure they'll be fine together. Really."
Yang had never had much of a poker face.
After a moment of mutual awkwardness, Blake and Weiss crawled into the room's single bed. It wasn't much larger than the beds at Beacon and made settling in that much more difficult for the two girls. Weiss turned off the lights and carefully lay down, wanting nothing but to just sleep, but the day's events were making it impossible to clear her mind.
"Blake?"
"Yes?"
"I'm sorry…for what I had to say before."
"It's all right."
"No, it's-"
"You said what you had to, to keep people from being hurt for something they didn't deserve. I understand. Because I've had to do it too."
"I hate having to do it. I don't want to be like that. I don't understand why anyone would want to. But if I didn't, then…"
"Some people just won't listen to you unless they think you're the same as them. And you never forget the sound of your own voice trying to make such insane things sound…reasonable."
Weiss reached for Blake's hand in the dark and squeezed, gently. Blake turned to face the girl lying next to her, and even with the curtains drawn, the moonlight that filtered through made her eyes shine in the dark, allowing Weiss to see that some of the pain in them was draining away.
Blake let her head fall down into the pillow, Weiss' hand still around hers…which let the other girl feel a faint vibration.
"Did you just…purr?"
"A little? …I haven't slept in a bed this nice since I stole one."
Blake felt, more than heard, Weiss' quiet laughter through their contact.
"It was a huge four-poster bed, and the mattress was so soft I sank right into it." With her free hand, Blake gestured in the air to illustrate her thoughts. "The headboard was one big piece of carved crystal, and the curtains had these snowflake patterns-"
"With little blue crystals, and white spiral posts that looked like icicles?!"
"Yes. How did-"
"That was mine! I had it custom-ordered for my 12th birthday! I was having cake right when someone came in and told me the White Fang had stolen my birthday presents!"
"Oh. Sorry. But I remember that most of it was junk anyways."
Weiss muttered something under her breath and harrumphed dramatically.
"But the bed was really nice. I liked it a lot."
"…"
"But then that hideout was discovered, so we had to burn it down."
Blake, like all faunas, had excellent night vision. The pillow that was swung at her head was easy to catch. It too was very soft and Blake kept it for herself, earning another grumble from Weiss.
"Blake...before. You were wrong. It will be alright some day."
"I want to believe that. I do, but-"
"But nothing. Look at us. I'm the heiress to the Schnee Dust Company, something hated by faunas the world over, and I have a former member of the white fang as a teammate…and as a friend. I'd…call that a start?"
Blake didn't answer, and Weiss sighed inwardly as she laid back. There was nothing else to say, but Weiss kept Blake's hand in hers. It remained there until she finally drifted off to sleep.
It would still be there when she awoke.
