The first thing she was conscious of was a pounding headache.
"Weiss?"
Why was it so hot? She groaned and flipped the blankets off herself.
"Weiss." A hand touched her shoulder. Probably to shake her awake—but an instant's contact was enough to make her shoot upright and scramble away. Ren stepped back, raising his hands. "I'm sorry to wake you, but I think you have a mission this morning."
Her heart jumped into her throat. "What time is it?!"
"It's only five," Ren assured her. "You have plenty of time."
She squinted at him—awake, alert, and fully dressed. "Why on Remnant aren't you asleep? I'm glad you woke me up, but..."
He glanced over at his partner's bed, where she was currently sprawled on her stomach with all four limbs outstretched. "Don't tell her this, but Nora kicks in her sleep."
Weiss stood up, hastily tidying the sheets and stepping away. "Well, by all means."
"I appreciate the thought, but I think I'll stay up. You should probably get ready."
She started to turn, then stopped when he added, "Oh, and Weiss?"
"Hm?"
"I'd like to apologize. We jumped to unfair conclusions last night. You're our friend, and if you ever need anything, you shouldn't hesitate to ask."
"Oh." All of a sudden Weiss had a horrible suspicion that he'd seen or heard something last night. That he knew about her ridiculous and disproportionate reaction to a few words from people she'd met less than a year ago. It made her skin crawl. "I... appreciate the sentiment," she said, which was true even though she wished he hadn't said anything.
She left JNPR's dorm and re-entered her own. It was, predictably, in total chaos. Blake was still under the covers, though there was quiet grumbling coming from her general vicinity, so she was probably awake. Ruby was pressed against the bathroom door, telling Yang to, "Wait! No, stop turning the water on! You're gonna take the whole hour in there please just let me brush my teeth first!"
Weiss squinted at the mess. Her mind felt slow and hazy—probably a byproduct of how little sleep she'd gotten. She sighed and rubbed her eyes. Right. She'd slept in her clothes, so she should start by getting changed.
Changed! Drat. She'd left the old bandages on all night.
And Yang was in the bathroom. Wonderful.
She marched over and pounded on the door. "Yang, get out. I need to change my bandages, I forgot to do it last night."
It opened a second later. "Okay, okay! I'll just go shower in the locker room."
Blake made to follow Weiss into the bathroom. "It's fine," she said shortly. "I can do it myself."
"But—"
Weiss shut the door on whatever Blake's response was going to be. And, after a quick shower, she sat down on the sink and opened the bag of medical supplies.
She'd gotten too used to having someone else do it for her. It hurt a lot more when she was trying to dab at her own side, leaning at an odd angle so that she could actually see what she was doing. She also wasn't nearly as practiced as Blake, but she kept at it, and eventually the whole thing was slathered in the antiseptic. Covering the wound, and the slight pink flush that surrounded it.
Once her wound was dressed and her wings bound, Weiss returned to the room. "Can we—" Blake started to say.
"You should get ready."
Weiss went right for the door, ignoring Blake's flinch and Ruby's worried stare. She went directly to the cafeteria, bolting down a quick breakfast and heading for the cliffs twenty minutes before it was time to be there.
A decision she regretted almost immediately—because their professor was also early.
"Miss Schnee." Professor Goodwitch didn't say anything, didn't give Weiss any sign as obvious as a frown or a raised eyebrow, but somehow her disapproval came through loud and clear.
"My team are on their way," Weiss said, a little defensively. "It's too early for their... everything."
"Well," their professor replied dryly, "perhaps that will motivate the four of you to select your final mission on time next year."
Weiss ducked her head and wished she'd thought to wait on the path to the cliffs instead. Her headache was only getting worse, and she'd forgotten to take anything for it, and she was still standing alone on a clifftop with Professor Goodwitch. Who looked as crisp and alert as ever despite the fact that she must also have been up before dawn.
If she'd hoped it would be less awkward when her team arrived, she'd been fantastically wrong. They were late, for one thing. Not very late, it was only a few minutes past six, but enough for Professor Goodwitch to make a pointed comment about the importance of punctuality and reliability in professional Huntresses. For another, well...
Blake glanced at Weiss. Then, when Weiss looked back, she turned away again. Her shoulders hunched. And Yang noticed, because of course she did, and couldn't seem to decide which one of them she wanted to aim her concerned frown at. Ruby, meanwhile, got that look that meant she was scheming something.
Goodwitch adjusted her glasses and muttered something that sounded suspiciously like, "Teenagers." Then she gestured to a small airship that rested at the edge of the cliffs. They climbed inside, with their professor up front in the pilot's seat. She twisted around to look back at them. "I presume you all received the brief?"
Nods all round.
"This will take three days. Have you packed appropriately?"
More nods.
"That's something, at least."
Weiss made an indignant noise that was drowned out by the sound of the engines starting up. She'd deliberately seated herself next to Ruby, so that Blake wouldn't be able to bring up what she'd let slip last night. Unfortunately, that plan had a rather obvious drawback.
"Are you okay?"
Ruby had to practically shout in her ear to make herself heard. Weiss turned her head to glare at her. "Fine," she yelled back.
"Good!" Ruby grinned at her. "Then you can talk later!"
"What? That is not at all what I said!"
"Sorry!" Ruby pointed to her ears. "Can't hear you! Engine's too loud!"
"You little—Ugh!"
They landed by the half-circle of mossy stone that had once housed the chess pieces they collected for initiation. It was, well... destroyed. Very destroyed.
"Your doing, if I recall," said Goodwitch. She sounded more exasperated than angry, and with a wave of her riding crop the ruins reassembled themselves.
Ruby jumped to change the subject. "This is to make sure there aren't too many Grimm for initiation, right? Are we supposed to leave the smaller ones alone?"
"An excellent question. No, your mission today is to eliminate any creatures of Grimm that cross your path. The other Professors and I will handle leaving an appropriate threat for first-year students the day before initiation."
Blake frowned. "Then why...?"
"Why are you here?"
"Yes."
"Grimm do not breed," said Professor Goodwitch. "At least, not as far as we know. But their numbers can still grow exponentially when left unchecked. Especially since the deeper forest is extremely dangerous, and Grimm from there are drawn towards the school."
"We're killing a bunch of them now so your job isn't awful later?" Yang guessed.
"Precisely." Goodwitch gestured to the northwest. "We'll start off in that direction, then make a spiral. I'll assist you in navigating if necessary, but I'd like you to do your best to manage on your own. This is an extremely common pattern to use for search and destroy missions, and you'll need to master it eventually." She produced a map and a compass, and handed them to Ruby.
"We'll do our best, Professor!" Ruby said, her eyes sliding over to Weiss as she grinned.
"Very well. You may begin. I will walk with you, though I won't intervene unless one of your auras drops to a dangerous level."
As soon as their professor dropped back behind them, Ruby whispered, "Can you, um...?"
Yes. Easily.
"I don't know," Weiss hummed, tapping her chin. "Doesn't our illustrious leader need the practice? What if you need to walk in a spiral when I'm not there?"
Ruby's eyes went wide with betrayal. "No!" Then she grabbed Weiss' arm and gave her that kicked puppy look. "Please...?"
Weiss rolled her eyes. "I'll let you know if we're getting off course."
"Yes!" Ruby pumped her fist and charged off into the woods. Weiss followed, fighting the urge to smile. Until she accidentally bumped into Blake. Then her grin disappeared all on its own, and she returned her gaze to the forest floor.
They walked. Weiss occasionally nudged Ruby one way or the other to keep them on course, and as they went they encountered more and more Grimm. All quite a bit less dangerous than they'd faced during initiation—though their encounter with both a Deathstalker and a Nevermore was probably an outlier. Weiss nursed her headache and tried to ignore what felt an awful lot like a buildup of cotton balls behind her eyes. Her aura declined steadily throughout the day, rather more quickly than usual. When Yang wouldn't stop acting concerned at her, she shrugged it off as the result of poor sleep.
Eventually, it came time to make camp. "Miss Rose," Goodwitch said. "Where do you think we should set up?"
Ruby squinted at the forest around them. "Well, we don't want to sit around where Grimm can attack us, right? So, maybe up there?" She pointed to a nearby hilltop that was sheer on three sides. "We can walk up the shallower side, and then we'll only have one direction to defend if we're attacked at night. Unless there are Nevermores, but those could get us anywhere we camp."
Professor Goodwitch nodded in approval.
"We should set up watches too, right? Maybe three shifts?" Ruby glanced down, then picked up four twigs and snapped one. "Short straw sleeps through the night."
Weiss narrowed her eyes. This seemed... suspect.
Sure enough, she watched as Yang studied Ruby's expression, her finger drifting over each of the four twigs before she picked one of the long ones. Blake did the exact same thing. And, when Weiss tried to take one, Ruby surreptitiously shifted them around so that she got the one she hadn't aimed for. Which, shockingly, turned out to be the short one.
"Lucky you," Ruby said, beaming innocently at her. Weiss scowled back, but didn't argue. She really wasn't feeling well, so maybe it would be best to rest and recuperate so that she could take a watch tomorrow night.
Professor Goodwitch left them to their own devices after that, pitching a tent with a wave of her riding crop and disappearing inside, leaving Weiss utterly bereft of excuses to delay the inevitable. Not that she wasn't going to try. She sat down to watch Yang cook sausages over the fire, pointedly ignoring the fact that all three of her teammates were staring at her.
She felt the log she was sitting on shift as someone else's weight settled on the other side.
"Just hear me out," Blake murmured.
"No."
"Weiss."
She made the mistake of turning. Of seeing Blake's face, her eyes welling up as she said, "Please."
Weiss turned away, but she made no move to leave. Didn't tell Blake to go away. Just kept on watching the fire.
"I want to tell you about Ilia."
That shocked her into looking right at Blake, both eyebrows raised.
"I don't know where she is now," Blake went on, "but I do know where she was before she joined the White Fang. A prep school in Atlas called Corinthian."
"What? But they don't take... oh."
"Yeah." Blake rested her elbows on her knees. "Ilia can pass for human. She doesn't even need a bow to do it. Her parents wanted a better life for her, so they sent her up to Atlas. They thought that going to school as a human child would give her opportunities they couldn't, and they were right."
"Then... how did she end up in the White Fang?" Ruby asked.
"Let's just say something happened that upset her, so much that she changed in front of people. She joined the White Fang not long after that. This was before Sienna took over. We were about the same age, and there weren't any other kids in the Fang then, so we wound up spending a lot of time together. And, one day, she asked me if I was jealous."
Weiss' stomach churned.
"I didn't understand what she meant. She told me... she told me about the other children at the mines, where she grew up. The kids that used to be her friends when she was too young to go to school. They stopped talking to her after she left for Corinthian. They were angry because she got to be the princess up in Atlas, she could pretend to be human, and they couldn't. And she was angry, too. She started to look down on them. And later, after she left Corinthian... she was jealous of them. Of me.
"Ilia didn't have people screaming insults at her while she was growing up. She wasn't turned away from stores and restaurants and libraries. She didn't have that hatred directed at her. But that didn't mean she avoided it. She was steeped in it, for years. Her parents weren't there to tell her those things her friends were saying weren't true. So... she believed them. She started repeating them. But no matter how much she felt like one of them, acted like one of them... deep down, she knew she wasn't."
Blake went quiet. She stared into the fire, her ears tilted back, looking at something far away. "It's hard to live with other people's hate, but sometimes it's not hate that does the most damage." She turned her head to look at Weiss. "Sometimes it's shame. And I'm sorry. I really, really am. But escaping the hate can't make that go away. Looking human won't make that go away. I... don't really know how to make that go away. I wish I did. What I do know is that giving in to that shame, cutting off a part of yourself like that, will only make it stronger. And in the end... you still won't be happy."
Weiss took a deep breath. "Are you done?"
Blake nodded.
"Good." She stood up and got the first aid supplies from her pack. "I need to redo the bandage before it gets dark."
"Weiss—"
"What do you want?" she snapped, turning on her heel to glare at Blake. "I heard you out, and you know what? No one's going to touch your ears. So mind your own business."
She stormed off into a clump of trees right at the edge of the hill. This was the side that was the most sheer—a straight drop some forty feet to the forest floor below. Weiss hardly noticed. She seated herself on a fallen log and clenched her hands on her knees.
Weiss wished she'd never met Blake Belladonna, with her stupid ears so whole and beautiful. Of course she'd fight for them. Of course she had no idea why anyone would do any less.
Her hands were rougher than they should have been as she ripped off her jacket and pulled her shirt over her head. Then she started to unwind the bindings. Her nose wrinkled. Slowly, her heart sinking with every layer that peeled away, she exposed the wound—and the smell of rot became unmistakable.
She swore under her breath. The cut was hot to the touch, and she flinched as her fingers brushed against it. It was difficult to see, with the sun already setting and shadows thickening beneath the trees... but she didn't really need to, at that point. Her aura hadn't managed to fight off infection.
Two days. If it had happened just two days later—or earlier, for that matter—she could have simply contacted Dr. Marigold and handled this discreetly. Now, if she said anything... they couldn't go back unless they explained the situation to Goodwitch. Not without failing the mission and possibly the whole year along with it. Or at the very least, getting a bad enough grade that it would draw Father's attention.
Not worth the risk—but her teammates wouldn't see it that way. Weiss steeled herself, and went about the business of redressing the wound. More antiseptic cream. More bandages. She could handle this for what, thirty-six hours? Then she could tell the others, and they could go back to Beacon and take care of it properly. In the meantime... well, they couldn't tell Goodwitch what they didn't know.
It was her business, after all. No one else's.