A Common Criminal or Something

Disclaimer: I don't own RWBY. It belongs to RoosterTeeth, and the memory of the master of computer animation. May your brainchild keep moving forward, Monty.

"When a man is denied the right to live the life he believes in, he has no choice but to become an outlaw."

-Nelson Mandela

Working with terrorists, it turned out, wasn't so different from working with any other sort of criminals. You had to stay low, pay black market mark-up for everything, and struggled to avoid the authorities or anyone who might recognize you mostly by staying inside with the blinds closed.

It was also surprisingly non-violent most of the time. It was a cycle of long periods of planning and preparation, with brief moments of tension with the possibility of violence if he was unlucky or didn't plan things out well enough.

Jaune's job was to work as a liaison between Roman and the White Fang- more because Roman simply disliked working with Faunus than because he actually needed help. The White Fang paid its money, followed orders, and had a discipline instilled with hatred (and a bit of fear) that made the common cause work. Even if they hated his guts on general principle.

Well, that might be going a bit too far. He couldn't claim a single one of them as friends, but they were people who expected for racism to leak through from him, and kept being surprised when it didn't. It hadn't, wouldn't, but these Faunus had seen the worst of humanity. An ex-thug like himself wasn't about to wow them with character and principle, but the fact that he wasn't an ass to faunus went a long way.

Compared to Romans' thinly veiled contempt, relations were almost cordial with him. Sometimes. A few even smiled at him from time to time. Shared stories, shot the breeze, shared the boredom and passed the time rather than ignore him outright. Enough that, even though they were terrorists and not just criminals, they were people as well- people with hopes and dreams (and a whole lot of anger issues) as well. It was… tolerable.

And so time passed. A criminal's immoral deeds are never done- more stores were robbed, shipments of dust hijacked at gunpoint. Unlike the menacing blustering of the goons, the White Fang didn't mess around with idle threats. You gave them what they wanted when they wanted it, or else they took it. Even though they liked him enough to humor his requests to ask first- to give their victims a choice to give up the goods and keep their teeth- people still ended up getting hurt. Pity whoever was brave and good enough to try and stop them.

Jaune wasn't. But at least he wasn't the one doing the hurting, and trying to give them a chance to escape unharmed. Even if he was aiding and abetting terrorists, he was still just a common criminal… right?

Author Notes:

(Replaced the chapter with updated version with minor edits).

You know, something odd happened yesterday- for just a little while the number of reviews outnumbered the number of favorites and follows. That's pretty rare in fanfics- especially since many people who 'favorite' a work never actually review, and 'favorite' and 'follow' subscribers are often different people. (Which I've never understood- why follow and not favorite? Why do both but not review? Oh well.)

Anyways, that's a cool milestone for this fic. Next one will be if/when someone puts it in a C2 community. And you'll know you've really made it as a fanfic writer if someone adds it to the fanfic recommendation list at tvtropes. But the pinnacle? The pinnacle would be when someone makes a TVtropes page for your fanfic, and you even get someone to blog on it and people make threads on forums on it. That's only happened twice for me, but stumbling across a tvtropes page for your own fic years afterwards is cool, no lie.

We'll see how far it goes- after all, all of that depends on you readers.